Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 169 (Patreon)

Rose

She wasn’t going to be able to see Lucas for at least another week.

At this point, she wondered if the goddess herself had stepped in to interfere. With how much kept on happening, she hadn’t seen him for weeks now. Rose was no naive teenager—this wasn’t her first relationship, and she could be realistic about what was happening. She wouldn’t literally die without his attention.

But it really sucked that the world kept on ending around them, and she didn’t even have him to hold on to.

A million lives mattered much more than her feelings, though, so she trucked on.

“How long until Thorn gets here?” Troy asked.

“Teleportation still doesn’t work,” Rose said, skimming through the ARI messages they had exchanged. “He has extremely high-speed flight, but it’s going to take him a while to find us first. Maybe a few hours?”

“Then we have that long to find a dungeon,” Troy said. “Ryan. Let’s move.”

The details of their current assignment were sparse, but Thorn—and Lucas, who’d chimed in a few times—had made it clear that this was of the utmost importance. It could mean life or death for everyone.

That threat had been hanging above Rose’s head for long enough that she was almost tempted to say screw it, let them die, but that was just a fantasy. She could never be that callous in real life.

Troy and Thorn had a bit of a running friendly rivalry going on. Rose imagined that was part of the reason why he was so anxious to find the next dungeon as soon as possible.

“According to Anderson, the king’s towers are kidnapping natives,” Rose said. “You’d think there would be more of them by now, given how few living natives we’ve come across.”

“The survivors aren’t trying to go to Centerpoint,” Troy pointed out as Ryan took them into his [Flashdrive], vastly enhancing their collective speed. “A few of them have joined the larger otherworlder groups, but the ARI was not distributed to the entire kingdom.”

That was a fair point. If Rose had undergone that Cataclysm and not had a place to return to, she wouldn’t have gone searching around randomly. Staying in one place and setting up camp was the play if your only priority was survival and you didn’t know where Centerpoint was.

“Also, a lot of them died,” Ryan pointed out. His voice came through weird when he was in this mode. Rose knew he experienced time faster, but he tried to talk at the same rate as them, so he slowed his voice down from his point of view. It ended up making him sound like a really scratchy record player.

“That is also true,” she acknowledged. “Still, to only see one so far?”

“Kingdom’s a big place,” Ryan said. “I think there’s plenty of place to hide a few dungeons.”

“If he is still in the testing phase, it’s entirely possible that he simply has not activated that many,” Troy said. “That, or we just aren’t looking in the right place.”

Rose nodded silently, thinking. Her mind returned to the words the goddess had delivered for her just before they’d stepped into the Crystal Dungeon.

You are not favored, she’d said. Not anymore.

Rose hadn’t wanted the goddess’ attention to begin with, but now she was left with none of the perks and all of the downsides.

She really didn’t like that bitch. What had Rose even done to the goddess? Think a few mean words? Participate in murder a little less enthusastically than the one who controlled the world might’ve liked? Dated Lucas? The goddess seemed to have an unhealthy interest in her boyfriend, so that last one might actually be true.

Did divinity get jealous? She’d have to ask the goddess that if they ever got on speaking terms again.

Rose was pleasantly surprised to find that the streak of uncanny luck that the goddess had granted to her wasn’t as entirely gone as she thought it was.

They found their next dungeon within an hour.

Maybe the goddess had been lying about removing her favor, or maybe Rose had been demoted from “favorite child” to “kid I pay child support for,” or maybe she was just plain lucky.

Scratch that last one. There was no such thing as “just plain lucky” in a world like this.

Whatever the case, Minus One found themselves in front of a new dungeon before the sun had even noticeably shifted in the sky.

This one was, just like the last one, rather unique. While the previous had been placed in a crystal forest that Rose had never visited before, this one wasn’t even on the ground. They found it in a desert. It looked as if there had recently been an oasis directly under it, but the water had all disappeared and the palm trees and grasses around it left to die.

The reason quickly became clear when they found where the dungeon itself was. The Dungeon Core was visible through a massive, completely transparent sphere of water, hovering half a hundred feet above the dried-up oasis.

No impurities dirtied the watery dungeon, which made the pulsing red veins of a dissected human body all the more clear.

“Well then,” Rose said. “Looks like we have our dungeon.”

Coming here early had been a mistake. Maybe that was why the goddess had granted her luck once more—because she knew it would make Rose miserable.

Since their experiment relied on having a living Dungeon Core-human hybrid not named Lucas at their disposal, they weren’t going to be able to put this soul out of their misery until Thorn got here.

Minus One sat and waited in silence, each of them pretending they couldn’t hear the watery screams of the ex-human above them.

#

Carly

The [Omniscient Librarian] was in a mood tonight.

Her insights had proved useful for Centerpoint Dungeon, and even now, she could [See] the efforts the boy had drawn upon as inspiration for his next moves. Carly estimated them at a fifty-five percent chance of working, which was better than almost everything else they’d suggested so far.

The thing about her class that most people got wrong was that they assumed she could see the future. That was not so. As she had explained to the young [Tour Guide], [Omniscient Librarian] was an imperfect sightseer. It guessed at what would happen should the same status quo continue, uninterrupted.

With the current state of the world—revolving around the two surviving bastions of civilization, Centerpoint and the capital upon which the king had absolute rule—there were vanishingly books in this future. Carly had faith that the [Tour Guide] would be able to turn that around, but she had to admit that it scared her.

More importantly, she lacked the information to further assist with this situation.

Though Carly made sure to memorize every single word of every book she’d ever read, there were many lost texts in futures that had never come to pass that she would never be able to read again.

How was she supposed to help with the process of stopping a million people from losing their lives to a quest when the literature she could access on quests was so limited? Her primary spell, [See], enabled her to tell that yes, those unfortunate otherworlders truly did have a limited amount of time to live, but it did not tell her how to fix it.

And now, neither did her [Library].

She couldn’t see if the mass ascension tactic would work. She couldn’t tell if there was external influence from the goddess coloring the situation. She couldn’t even tell if the bold transference plot had the faintest chance at working.

Carly Iru had eyes that could see the whole world, yet in this moment, she was blind.

Her inability to assist ate away at her. She had spent time in prison as penance for her own actions, and here she was presented with an opportunity to repay her crimes back in spades.

Yet she could do nothing but watch, advise, and pray.

Not that prayer seemed to assist. The goddess cycled between loving and despising her world, it seemed, and if Carly had to guess based on her observation, she was in the latter phase.

There was just so little for her to work with. It was, in all honesty, the most useless she had ever felt. Even when her construct had torn apart an entire village of innocents, she had at least had the minute consolation that she was advancing the science of what a dungeon could do.

Here, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She wished she coul do something, anything, but there was only one choice, which meant she had no choice at all.

The offer to ascend was still on the table.

It was brutally risky. Ascending meant leaving all of this behind, and while that meant that Carly might be able to survive, it would leave her with the weight of the world on her conscience.

Furthermore, odds were good that she would struggle upon ascension. Level 20 was the absolute bottom of the food chain in the second plane—with some exceptions, of course—and that plane ran nothing like this one.

Of the few texts she’d read about returnees from the higher dimensions or observations made through complex rituals, Carly knew that even her power might be different. There was no guarantee that she would even have her sight one plane up.

Wait. Her mind returned to the sentences she had just thought. She seized on one particular word—returnee.

The fact that Carly knew it meant that she had read about it, and if she had read about it, she could find it.

She located the volume quickly enough. Diary of an Ascended, by a level 35 who had somehow weaseled his way into returning to the first plane to live a quiet life.

In it, he listed the exact method by which he had returned, supposedly so that others could come back if they ever regretted their choice.

Carly could not verify the accuracy of those instructions, especially since so few ascended returned that it was entirely possible they would never work again.

But it was a chance. One layer up, if she maintained her spells and unique skill, she could find the knowledge she needed. There, the world wouldn’t have ended like this.

She spoke her intentions out loud, knowing the heart of Centerpoint Dungeon would be able to hear her.

“I intend to ascend,” she said, staring at the night sky. “Would you care to talk to me?”

Lucas was by her side in an instant, and she explained her plan.

Carly had wandered to the surface. Knowing that few otherworlders were still active at this time, she had trusted her basic [Stealth] spell to serve her well enough to have an unrestricted view of the stars.

“They’re too symmetrical,” she said. “The stars.”

“What?” Lucas asked. He was brimming with mana now, his plan to empower himself a grand success. Given a few more days, he could easily outclass her in raw strength.

“The goddess must not have put as much thought into creating them as the ones who created your homeworld did,” Carly said, ignoring the change in his presence. “I never noticed until, by chance, I met an otherworlder who was fascinated by the study of the heavens. These stars… they’re ordered. Patterned. Your stars are scattered across the sky, disordered but beautiful.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. “So they are. I have no idea how that relates to wanting to… ascend and return? Did I hear your explanation correctly?”

“Yes,” Carly nodded. “I wonder if the goddess handles the next plane with a more careful hand than this one. I wish to see, and to return with my findings.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s blasphemy,” Lucas joked.

“If she is this careless with the stars, I find it difficult to believe that she was not the same with our otherworlders. If to blaspheme is to find where the divine has erred, then I will do so until the last star has burned out.”

“You do that,” Lucas said with a shrug. He must have thought she didn’t realize he was joking. That thought made Carly smile.

“I will,” she said. Perhaps on the next plane, they knew how to bring a goddess to her knees. It was a feeble ambition, but Carly held it tight anyway. She had played with fire and killed a thousand, then imprisoned herself for her failure; the goddess played with millions of lives, and nobody challenged her.

Unacceptable.

“You can ascend? Right here, right now?” Lucas asked, changing the subject back to the topic of her plan. “Maybe if you do it here, I can pick up some data so we’ll know what we’re doing when it comes to bringing the others to the next plane."

“Yes,” Carly said, reaching into the back of her soul, where the offer rested.

[You have been found worthy by the goddess. Due to your actions, your spells, and your experiences, you may choose to ascend beyond this plane. You may choose to accept this offer at any time.]

She showed the text to the otherworlder king, and his eyes opened wide.

“Shit, I thought she just booted you off or something,” he said. “Then you’ll do it now?”

“This is goodbye,” she confirmed, looking up once more. “I will miss this sky, disordered or ordered.”

“If fortune swings our way, you’ll be right back and won’t need to,” Lucas said. “Good luck. We all need it.”

Carly simply nodded, and she accepted the Will of the Goddess.

#

And it failed.

#

[DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD RUN?]