Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 167 (Patreon)

Lucas

Once the Pallbearers had updated me on their situation and Nora had given me all the information she had to give, I settled in to start dismantling the dorman Dungeon Cores she’d harvested.

I thought on the state of the world as I did. I’d figured that the Cataclysm had killed a lot of people, since we definitely hadn’t been the only targets, but I had failed to understand the true scale up until now.

The king—or the goddess, but did that distinction really matter anymore?—one of them had triggered an extinction-level event.

That was unforgivable. I didn’t know how the goddess went from helping me into a form that could help so many more people to either choosing to allow the apocalypse or causing it herself for shits and giggles.

Once we took down the king, we were going to have to contend with her. I could feel it in my bones.

For every new otherworlder that survived, there were ten dead ones and twenty dead natives. It was getting to the point where even Iris was unsure on whether or not there were still more natives than otherworlders. Normally, the ratio was somewhere around one otherworlder for every ten natives.

After the Cataclysm, those numbers were looking a lot more like one to one.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. We could grieve for those we had lost after we ensured the survival of the rest of humanity.

For now, that meant getting stronger. Strong to the point where I could rise to the next plane. Strong enough to take a world with me.

That meant core absorption. It had been quite some time since I had last even attempted it, and it had damn near overwhelmed me last time, but I was a different dungeon now.

At level 13, I was much better equipped to handle the [Dungeon Core] than I was before, but I had nowhere near enough capacity for everything. I was stretched thin as it was, and the problem was only going to get worse.

The problem wasn’t mana regeneration—after all, since I got mana back for every hit a monster or trap inflicted on an adventurer, I was constantly refilling my reserves to full. No, it was that the sheer amount of dungeon I had influence over was enough that I was using literally every last drop of my mana within the span of ten seconds, just to have it fill up again from the hundred thousand otherworlders delving the dungeon within.

I was rapidly approaching the point where I wasn’t going to have enough mana to do everything at once.

Absurdly, it reminded me of a computer, which I hadn’t thought about in quite some time.

I need to download more RAM, I thought. I snorted. Anton would like that joke, I was sure.

Unlike in the real world—no, that was the wrong way to think. This world was every bit as real as the one I’d left had been.

Unlike on Earth, I could actually do that. These Dungeon Cores had the key.

1,243 of them glistened in their new home, buried a hundred feet underground in a vault constructed of adamantine titanium.

They weren’t as potent as fully active Dungeon Cores were, I discovered soon enough. I drained the first one dry in moments, and it cracked like a raw egg as soon as I was done with it.

It was, however, a boost to my capacity. This boost gave me far more than anything else in the last few weeks had.

There were still 1,242 of them left.

I got to work.

[ARI - message received!]

#

To everyone: it’s Rose. The goddess just spoke to me for the first time in a while, and it’s not looking good.

I think we figured out out what the king’s towers are doing.

#

Rose

“Shit!” Rose swore, stumbling back. She’d seen her fair share of horrors. All of them had, thanks to their time in the Omen’s underbelly.

This, though, was something else. The maw-mouths, at least, had been wholly inhuman. Though they had been built of human corpses, they were nothing more than dumb beasts animated by necromantic magic that broke the bounds of the interface and who wanted nothing more than to devour everything in their path.

On the other hand, this—this structure, this not-a-tower, this whatever it was—it was human. Had been human, maybe.

“Kill,” the eerie screeching sound came again, “me.”

The crystalline structure spiraled open, revealing an entrance into its insides. Blood-red light from the “veins” Rose had noticed earlier illuminated the interior of the igloo-like living building. Just looking inside set the hairs on her arms on edge.

The next sound that the structure made was less human. Its scream was a harsh cacophony of glass violins, each of them venturing towards ruining her hearing. Rose plugged her ears and played a [Song of Calming], balancing out the ear-piercing noise that wouldn’t stop.

“What in the goddess’ name is that?” Ryan hissed, drawing his sword instinctively. It crackeld with electricity. Rose wondered if he saw that.

“My observation spells are failing on it,” Troy said gravely. “I can hazard a guess.”

“That looks like a dungeon,” Rose said, interrupting her own song.

As if to prove her point, shimmering horrors with too many legs and too many edges spilled forth from within, trying to crawl their way out from the screaming structure, but they hit an invisible wall just beyond the edge of the crystals.

“Shit,” Ryan said. “You’re right. Didn’t Nora and Anderson say there were Dungeon Cores near the towers they found? We must be close to one.”

Troy shook his head. “This is the only source of magic in the area. I would be able to feel something that was producing aberrations like this if it was anywhere close. I’m sure of it.”

“What even is this?” Rose asked. “This isn’t a normal dungeon. Normal dungeons don’t have human parts sticking out the end. They don’t scream for help.”

“If we want to find out, we may have to grant it its wish,” Troy said. “Are you prepared to do that?”

Rose swallowed. “Whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes,” Ryan echoed. “We can’t let this dungeon break out. A knight protects the people.”

Odd time for you to bring that up, Rose thought. His order was, as far as they knew, completely gone. Maybe that was why he was thinking about them, come to think of it.

Everyone Rose was close to was in the periphery of Centerpoint Dungeon, but the fates of people like Troy’s [Elder Archmage] and Ryan’s knights were in limbo, unknown unless they somehow got confirmation.

That had to be rough.

“Then let’s move,” Rose said.

She sang her [Symphony of Annihilation], and the impossibly twisted insects flattened, splattering the white crystal with more red.

Rose winced, but they advanced.

And then stopped.

Though the monsters had been obliterated by her song, they weren’t done yet. They unflattened themselves, stretching themselves into different edges from before.

“Clear me a path,” Ryan said. “I’ll get them.”

That was the cue for her to make him practically invincible, so she swapped to [Symphony of Durability] (Hopes and Dreams from Undertale, a personal favorite) while Troy prepared an attack of devastating proportions. His attacks morphed to fit the shape of their enemies, these days, so it always varied.

“[Adapt]: depth,” Troy said. “[Stabilize].”

Rose recalled a course she’d taken ages ago in the last semester of college she’d managed before her death. It seemed faintly relevant. Non-euclidean geometry, or something?

It wasn’t terribly important. The part that mattered was that the crystal monsters weren’t anchored to reality properly, and Troy’s new temporary spell presumably glued them down for long enough that a hit would properly kill them.

“Here I go,” Ryan said, and then the world flashed with his lightning.

Rose didn’t know exactly what spell combo he used to do it, but every time they did this combo Ryan became the fastest wrecking ball to have ever existed.

When he ran through the crystal beasts, they shattered, splattering blood and gore everywhere—and this time, they didn’t get up.

It was trivially easy for them to clean up from there. Thanks to their special skills, Minus One had been formidable from the start, and after dozens, if not hundreds, of hours spent in Centerpoint Dungeon and the Omen, almost nothing this world had to offer could even threaten them anymore.

“Half a year ago, that would’ve been a level-up,” Ryan complained. “That didn’t even get me a quarter of the way to seventeen.”

“Is everything dead?” Rose asked quietly. She didn’t have the heart to banter with him right now.

“As far as I could tell, yeah.”

“Let’s see what this place has to offer, then,” Troy said. He led the way in, carrying their light and a load of hair-trigger [Forcefield] protection spells in case something jumped out at them.

Nothing did. The crystalline dungeon resembled Centerpoint in its early stages, though of course Centerpoint had been composed of dirt and stone, not these strange, glowing gems.

The dungeon’s structure was fairly linear, it seemed, so they were able to navigate their way through it pretty easily. Ryan checked every nook and cranny, confirming that there weren’t any more hidden enemies that he’d somehow missed.

His expression was grim when he returned out of his [Flashdrive].

“You’re not going to like this,” Ryan said.

“Exciting,” Rose muttered.

They made their way through the dungeon, one gore-filled room after another.

Rose was sure that they were going to come upon some gruesome scene of murder at the end—maybe a sacrificial circle with whatever poor souls had fuelled the creation of what she was sure was a Dungeon Core.

But Ryan wouldn’t say that kind of thing without reason, and he wasn’t wrong.

They walked into the last room.

The only reason Rose didn’t vomit was that she didn’t have anything in her stomach to throw up.

In Centerpoint, the final room had been a rewards room. Presumably, there had been one more room to store the Dungeon Core itself in.

The only reward here was abject horror.

Rose had been right in the worst possible way.

The room was a perfect half-dome. In the very center sat a Dungeon Core that looked like it had been golden once but was muddy with blood-red crimson clouds now. The red within it pulsed outward, then contracted. Like it’s a heart.

Apart from that, the room looked like a study in anatomy.

Her mind had been on class already, and now Rose remembered a line from her introduction to physiology class.

The human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessesls in it, she remembered her professor saying.

All of that seemed to be on display right here, right now. An entire map of blood vessels, nerves, and bones decorated the walls in a macabre display.

She imagined it as a piece of art. Abstract artwork number who knows how many. Medium: the human body.

The entire room seemed to contract and shudder at the same rhythm as the Dungeon Core. Rose didn’t want to look around, but she suspected that they wouldn’t find this poor soul’s heart anywhere in the room.

“End it,” the dungeon screeched. It was getting less coherent with each passing second.

Rose obliged it. She picked a gentler song, this time—[Song of Eternal Sleep], a powerful but slow single-target spell.

The body of whoever this dungeon had once been was mutilated too badly for her to even tell their gender, let alone who it might have been. Rose didn’t know who this had been. By all rights, she should have been able to grant this person peace and move on with her life, a little angrier at the goddess.

But so much loss broke a person, and though that meant numbness for some, it was the exact opposite for Rose.

She put her heart and soul into her song. The [Soloist] was grateful that both Troy and Ryan pretended not to see her tears.

As she sang, the dungeon’s screaming began to abate. Rose wasn’t sure if it was wishful thinking, but she thought she saw the room start to calm. It seemed to shudder less, at least. She didn’t know how this spell felt on the receiving end, but she hoped it knew peace.

“Goodnight, and goodbye,” she sang quietly. “Rest well, rest easy.”

The red in the Dungeon Core faded away, melting into the gold of the item itself. Rose destroyed the remnant of the core with a [Symphony of Annihilation]. The person attached to it had deserved better. The dungeon didn’t.

“We know what he’s doing now,” Thorn said.

“We do?” Ryan asked.

“Yes,” Rose said shakily. She took a deep breath, gathering herself. “The king is trying to mass-produce Centerpoint Dungeon.”

#

We encountered a dungeon hybrid. Not a dungeonbound, like you might see in more pleasant times.

A hybrid. A human inextricably attached to a dungeon, kept alive by it.

We didn’t see a tower, but from your descriptions of it, the Dungeon Core is identical to the ones you’ve found.

If you have >1,000 just from one small shipment, then we have a theory.

Minus One thinks that the king wants to turn every otherworlder into a hybrid.

We’re accelerating our timeline.

Rose and Minus One, signing off.