Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 168 (Patreon)

Lucas

I read through Rose’s message, then the next. And the next.

This was rather concerning, to put it lightly. I could see where they had drawn their conclusion from—the description of the dungeon they’d encountered was all too vivid. A degloved body torn out and splayed out across a Dungeon Core’s innards? I shuddered, imagining myself in that position.

The goddess had been kind when she let me stay human after merging my existence with the dungeon I’d died in. She didn’t seem to be the same being now that she had been before, though. In all honesty, I was pretty certain that something like this could’ve happened to me if the scenario repeated itself.

There wasn’t anything I could do about it. Not yet.

[Level up!]

I got the first notification when I was a couple dozen Dungeon Cores in. It was a tedious process, made worse by the fact that I had to physically touch each of them to properly absorb them.

A better dungeon would likely have been able to just absorb them on contact with the ground, but I needed my human half to be in close proximity with them to take their power. The exact reason why was unclear to me, but I had finally set up the ex-Kingsguard healing groups, complete with a moderately advanced network of hidden tunnels to go through.

“No, your other right,” I told a squad of four [Healer]s ranging between levels 2 and 5 through [Guide]. “You have a map, don’t you?”

The results so far had been mixed, but nobody was dead yet, so I counted that as a win. The Pallbearers had decided to partake, too, and they were the most effective group so far despite not having a healer. Their mobility, experience, and the unending supply of [Healing Potion]s I provided them made them the best-equipped squad to handle emergency situations.

[Level up!]

The level of my [Tour Guide] class wasn’t moving one bit from the absorption. That made sense—core absorption affected the dungeon part of me, after all. It wasn’t like I was sucking up the energy into my human stomach.

The combination of that and what Rose had said about the hybrid dungeon they’d found had interesting implications, to say the least.

It implied a greater separation of human and dungeon than I had previously thought there was. Perhaps because I had used my unique [Divine Resurrection] boon three entire times within the dungeon, I had assumed that most beings like me would be the same—bound to the existence of the dungeon, not that of the flesh.

Once Rose had put the poor sap stuck in what we were calling the Crystal Dungeon, the Dungeon Core had seemed to lose the influence that the man’s body had been having on it. She’d destroyed it separately afterwards.

Did that mean that if the human part of me died, the dungeon would operate without my human influence on it afterwards?

And, more importantly, did it mean I could survive without this Dungeon Core holding me down?

[Level up!]

I brought Anton and Thorn over to talk about it, dragging the latter away from his healing duty. None of the other surviving adventurers here had a particular interest in magic theory.

Anton was an outside perspective, and Thorn was an expert. I didn’t know if that combination would lead us anywhere productive, but I definitely hoped it would.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Anton asked, watching as I sucked the life out of yet another dormant Dungeon Core before condemning it to dust.

“I’m grinding,” I said. “You know how you all used to ask if you could just spend the next eight hours in a dungeon killing slimes?”

“Yep,” he said cheerily. “Then your fun-hating ass told us we were running on milestone leveling.”

“Looks like you got the last laugh after all,” I said, moving on to my next hapless victim. “I plan to spend the next eight hours in this part of the dungeon absorbing other Dungeon Cores.”

Anton stared, then shrugged. “Alright. It’s not the weirdest thing I’ve seen, to be honest. This place is sick, though. It looks like you’d fight a Dark Souls boss here.”

I hadn’t put that much effort into the surroundings when I had been making this storage area, but with visitors coming, I’d figured I could remodel a little.

“You think so?” I asked, quietly pleased with my architecture abilities. Sure, it was being held together by mana and prayers, but that had worked for everything else so far.

“You summoned us for a purpose,” Thorn said. “Would you care to state it?”

“Right,” I said. “Have you kept up with what Minus One has reported on the ARI?”

“I have,” Thorn replied.

“I haven’t,” Anton said. At my sidelong glance, he said, “What? I’ve been learning magic from your locals.”

He had leveled up to level 4 now, which was an impressive amount of progress for such a short period of time. That was a fair explanation, I supposed, though the fact that he was still stuck with the [Fire Novice] class was a bit of a problem if he planned on fighting.

“Oh, Jesus,” Anton said when I was done. “That’s messed up. Hold on, and you’re saying that this is what the king wants to do to me?”

“Our working theory is that he wants to to do it to all the otherworlders,” I said.

[Level up!]

I pushed the notification away. We were still mid-conversation.

“Iris estimates there to be in the realm of forty towers, based on her blind spots,” Thorn said. “I created a ritual circle myself to analyze which parts of the kingdom. I don’t agree with her on the exact numbers, but I would also set the bare minimum number at two dozen of them.”

“Which, yeah, means that he probably has enough to do it to all of you,” I said. “There’s—how many of you are there now?”

Inside the dungeon, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand of them. The rate at which they were arriving was letting up at all.

“In excess of a million, by our latest estimate,” Thorn said. “We don’t know how many survived, but every otherworlder we see is headed towards Centerpoint.”

I winced. “Yeah. What you see here was packaged in twelve crates. From the description given to us by the adventurer who was inside a tower, there were thousands. With a hundred Dungeon Cores per crate, give or take, thousands in a tower, and twenty-four towers at a minimum…”

“Yeah, I see it,” Anton said. “Yikes. So what are we here for, then?”

I explained my current dilemma to them.

“If I can separate myself from the dungeon and kill Centerpoint,” I concluded, “Then we can focus on breaking the towers and stop playing into the king’s hands.”

“This is the largest safe place for humans in the entire kingdom,” Thorn said. “Possibly the entire world. Do you understand that?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “Destroying the dungeon would leave them without consistent food or water, but I should also remind you that without doing it, their lifespan is measured in days. Eighteen, to be exact.”

“A fair point,” he conceded.

“I feel like this is some kind of bullshit you’d let us pull,” Anton said. “I don’t want to get too hopeful about it, but I think that there might be a way to remove yourself from the dungeon.”

[Level up!]

“Speaking of bullshit,” I said, reducing another core to dust. “I’ve eaten about a hundred Dungeon Cores now, and the dungeon went from level 13 to 18.”

When I’d done this this before, the power that surged through me was so overwhelming that I had been forced to vent it into a high-power [Assimilate]. Right now, the sensation was nowhere near that level. The sheer number of people I was managing was siphoning away the extra power I got even as I absorbed it.

That wasn’t to say that I didn’t have that extra power, though. I still had a sizable mana boost from the absorption—it just wasn’t overflowing.

“You should expand,” Anton said immediately. “You’re able to do that, right?”

I nodded. “My radius has octupled since this whole thing started.”

“I concur with your otherworlder friend here,” Thorn said. “We can experiment with what works with the Dungeon Cores at any time over the course of the next two weeks, but every instant we spend not accepting new otherworlders in is an instant where thousands die.”

“Believe me, I’m fully aware,” I said. It had been weighing on me for a while. “[Assimilate] is on a cooldown, though, so I’d like to get as powerful as I can before I burn all my extra mana up in a single go.”

“Makes sense,” Anton said, nodding.

I continued absorbing Dungeon Core after Dungeon Core. As I did, I turned the wording of the quest in my head again, just as I had a thousand times already, and for the first time in a while, as heady power rushed through my veins, I had an idea.

“Hey, Thorn,” I said. “I have an experiment for you to run. Can you find Minus One and pass the word along?”

#

Thorn was surprisingly open to the suggestion I made, though he said it might take some time for him to get results. He used an [Enlarge/Reduce] spell to shrink ten Dungeon Cores to a size that he could carry in a [Bag of Holding], and then he went to go tell the Pallbearers that he was leaving.

Anton, on the other hand, seemed a little more concerned than I thought he’d be.

Okay, he had every right to be concerned, given that it was his life on the line here, but he hadn’t been that worried before.

“You all right, Anton?” I asked. “Can I help you?”

“Lucas, can we talk?”

“We are talking. Right now, in fact. Go ahead.”

Anton inhaled deeply, then sighed. “This, uh, this whole situation. It doesn’t feel like you.”

“I’m not the same person I was a year ago,” I said. “I died. Twice. You died, too. I don’t think you’re the same Anton I remember, and I’m not the same guy you remember.”

I wanted to say that I didn’t have time for philosophy right now, but I absolutely did. All I was doing was absorbing dungeon after dungeon, after all. There was time for conversation right now, no matter how inane.

“Sorry, that was the wrong way to phrase it,” Anton said. “It’s that, right now, it reminds me of… I don’t know how to put this. When you hit rock bottom?”

“Yeah?” I asked idly. I hadn’t thought about my Earth life in… quite some time now. Even with Anton returning, I had enough emotional capacity to acknowledge that it was a significant event, but not to engage with it further. “How so?”

“Frankly speaking, you fucked yourself up by never taking a break,” Anton said. “School, your job, the games you ran. Every day was work, work, work, and it was obvious to literally everyone except you that you were breaking.”

“It’s obvious to me in retrospect,” I said. “I got better, though. I think. Then I got sent here.”

“You did get better,” he said. “Then I came here, too, and now you’re doing the exact same thing you were then. Lucas, when was the last time you slept?”

I had to think about that one. Being dungeonbound meant different things for my physiology, not the least of which was a complete lack of need to sleep. For the last while, I hadn’t had the time to do so. It was inefficient to sleep.

Even when I’d spent a night resting with Rose, I hadn’t slept.

“Maybe a few months?” I said, unsure. “It could be a little longer. It’s fine, though. I quite literally don’t need sleep.”

Anton made a pained sound. “You need to—”

“No, I don’t need to rest,” I said, interrupting him. “I know you probably have a well-reasoned argument about why you’re worried for me. Do you know what you should be worried about? You should worry about the countdown timer marking the amount of time left until you fucking die.”

“I am plenty worried,” Anton said evenly. “That doesn’t mean that you should kill yourself trying to save us.”

[Level up!]

That marked level 19. I was getting somewhere with my leveling, now. The extra mana I was gaining was actually sticking.

I could wait, though. I wasn’t going to [Assimilate] until I was sure I could get an absolutely massive usage out of it.

“I’m not killing myself,” I said, exasperated. “There’s a time for self-care, and there’s a time to get things done. Right now, it’s the latter. In an ideal world, I could take it easy. In an ideal world, nobody would have to fight if they didn’t want to, and everyone could do whatever they wanted to.

“That’s not the world we live in, most especially not right now. In order to even take a step towards that world, we need to save your lives first. Once that’s done, I’ll take a break.”

Or I’ll break, I thought. I didn’t say it, but it was a possibility. The cards were lined up against us. I was getting close to trying [Assimilate] again, and I was nearing the threshold where I was pretty sure ascension started being offered.

Part of Thorn’s task was to get more Dungeon Cores. With the power of [Intertwine], I knew I would be able to bring the power to the people, but I needed a lot more if I wanted to do it for everyone.

I needed to expand to cover every single otherworlder in this world. I needed to be able to take us all away. And I needed to do all of that while under the watchful eye of the goddess and the calculating gaze of the king.

There was every chance I didn’t end up in one piece at the end of this.

“Whatever you say, Lucas,” Anton said. He sounded unconvinced. “Good luck.”

I nodded at him sharply, and he took that for the dismissal it was.

[Level up!]

And I continued on.

[Level up!]

And on.

[Level up!]

And on.