Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 172 (Patreon)

Iris

The king’s efforts were increasing.

That much was transparently clear to her. Thanks to her class, which was perfectly suited to handling large-scale combat like every engagement was, her army had not been entirely whiped out.

That didn’t meant they were doing well, though. Since the first tower-rise incident three days ago, she’d lost just under fifty percent of her otherworlders, alongside ten of her remaining employees.

An unacceptable attrition rate. Iris was ashamed of herself, but there was time for self-flagellation after they were out of danger. Now, she had to stay the leader.

“Shielders A and B, swap,” she called.

A hundred otherworlders cast the basic [Shield] spell underneath them as another hundred canceled theirs, recovering their mana now that they had less than half of it remaining. Iris’ spells allowed her to amplify the spells that each of those under her cast, expanding those [Shield]s to cover the groups she’d split the surviving otherworlders into.

Each group had redundancies. Two shielders, two healers, two movers—and of course, everyone could fight. The idea, grim as it was, was to cycle them while they were alive and have backups in case one of them died.

It had proven to work so far, and casualty rates had plummeted.

That didn’t mean that nobody was dying—far from it. After the initial burst had taken over a thousand lives, her group had averaged a hundred deaths per day, even with Starfall guarding. They were powerful, but they were only human.

The towers were a dime a dozen, now. It was rare that they stayed for long. Iris had a predictive model for their behavior, now. They would locate large populations, kill as many as they could, take the bodies for processing, and sink back into the earth.

Even with Starfall’s magic working to prevent them from moving, all of the towers had successfully escaped.

They had, however, managed to harvest over a hundred crates of Dungeon Cores, which Iris was currently handling. She was grateful that at least these cores were not active. There was enough to worry about already.

“Eyes sharp,” she projected. Her people were running off of less than four hours of sleep. It impacted their performance, but Iris couldn’t spare a single second more of delays.

If they didn’t solve this debacle with Centerpoint in the next twenty-three hours, the otherworlders would sleep forever.

They were less than a day out, at least. By her estimations, they were within ten miles of the dungeon. If it had just been Starfall, or even just her, that would have been doable within an hour at most.

But moving large groups of people took time, especially when they were tired.

And taking time meant opening themselves up to attack.

Off in the distance, Iris felt the beginning of another tower rumble.

“Incoming to the northeast,” she said, successfully masking just how tired she was. “Get ready for impact in one minute or less!”

This was not going to go well. They hadn’t had enough time to cycle their mana. The shielders were tired, and nobody was fighting at their full capacity.

Iris wondered how many she was going to lose this time. There was a critical mass of losses at which point her units would simply disband and try their luck alone. It was quite possible that it would happen this time.

[ARI - new message received!]

#

Help is on the way.

- 1

#

Iris considered herself a very serious person, not prone to laughing at jokes, but she smiled wide at the message. Her daughter had a peculiar sense of humor—drawn from her otherworld memories, no doubt—but she never failed to make Iris smile.

True to their word, they were, in fact, on the way.

Minus One arrived just as the tower did, riding in on a terribly fast lightning bolt that Iris knew must be Rose.

It still didn’t look good. There were seven powerful adventurers instead of four, now, but the problems with the bulk of her people being underprepared and overworked remained.

Then Rose started singing, and it all went away.

[Melody of Rest], she sang. Energy infused Iris’ tired bones, wiping her exhaustion away. The rate of her mana regeneration increased perceptibly.

“I hear you’ve got Dungeon Cores to throw around,” Ryan said, suddenly appearing by her ear. “Let’s see what you’ve got. After we kill whatever’s coming, that is.”

He flashed with lightning, and Iris reset her mind even as the ground began to shatter and erupt once more.

This fight was starting to seem almost salvageable.

#

The King

The final stage of his plan was nearing completion. The towers, created as a combination of distractions and harvesting tools, were proving to be exactly as effective as he thought they would be.

He examined his ritual circle once more, then the position of his final conduits.

This was critical to get correct. Up until this point, his plan had not been without its setbacks. The otherworlders had proven to be hardier than expected, especially with the guidance of the few survivors of the Cataclysm.

The goddess, too, had proved to be unpredictable. The king’s previous plan—to continue using the corpses of the Crown Breakers to bring in otherworlders until time was almost completely up on the quest he’d made—was no longer possible.

That was… acceptable, and though it had not been optimal, it had forced the king onto another path—an even more ambitious one than the trail he had chosen to blaze initially.

Even as he plotted, he constructed more towers. His [King’s Domain] allowed him to borrow the properties of a dungeon, albeit not to the godlike extent that Centerpoint apparently had.

Piece by piece, he built his ritual.

The modified, hacked-together plan was simple but would prove effective.

Step one: the quest would lure the surviving otherworlders to Centerpoint Dungeon. It had already bunched many of them there.

Location was the one aspect the king couldn’t control when bringing otherworlders in. The quest had been intended to fix that, but he hadn’t counted on it losing time so quickly.

At this very moment, there were 217,928 otherworlders within the ten-mile bounds of Centerpoint. That number almost tripled if the king doubled the bounds, but this ritual was a resource-hungry one. He simply did not have the resources to make more.

But he could.

Step two: activate his towers, fusing the otherworlders with the Dungeon Cores. Though individually, they may have been weak, they were strong collectively. The king could control them all, leading him to—

Step three: activate the ritual circle he had inscribed in the capital by teleporting it into Centerpoint. If everything went right, every living being within the dungeon would die in instants.

Step four: by creating them, the hybrids forcibly became his subjects, raising them to the next level of [King’s Domain]—the kind that allowed him to call upon the dead for their power.

Once they died, he would collect the released mana and information. After extensive observation of Centerpoint Dungeon, the king had come to realize that a human and a dungeon coming together created a being that was more than the sum of its parts. The power gained from their deaths would be an order of magnitude more than the power required to fuse them.

Step five: do it again. He had run the calculations. With the strength he could accumulate from the deaths of two hundred thousand hybrids, he would be able to chain otherworld events until, by the sixth iteration, he would be able to cause an extinction-level event on the otherworlder’s home planet.

All of that led to step six: the unspoken. The one that he had not even voiced aloud, knowing she would hear.

Dethrone divinity.

The king saw that one of its towers was taking heavy fire. Seven adventurers were assailing it, protecting over a thousand otherworlders. There were supposed to have been four. This tower was unsuited to the task.

He frowned, then let it be. One tower was not much of a loss, and this far into his plan, he could not afford to take a single second off of his final preparations.

Soon, this world—no, not just this world.

Soon, all the worlds would be his.

#

Lucas

Iris’ group made it back to Centerpoint with twenty hours to spare.

I hadn’t expected them to be so fast, but I realized why they’d managed the pace that they had when they were all here.

Before the goddess had pulled me out of time, Iris had laid claim to over three thousand otherworlders.

There were less than a thousand of them remaining. From the harried, exhausted looks on their faces, alongside the I assumed that they had abandoned preserving their mana in favor of speed and raw power.

I opened a tunnel for Minus One to get to me, and they made it to me within a minute, pushed by Ryan’s increasingly ridiculous [Flashdrive].

He blitzed to a stop in front of me, carrying Rose and Troy with him.

“It’s been a bloodbath,” Rose said without preamble, confirming my concerns. “We did a full march, and I think we lost a lot more people than we would have otherwise.”

I bit my lip. “That’s… I’m sorry for their losses, but…”

“Yeah, we need to be decisive,” Rose said, nodding.

“We fought a few towers on our way in,” Ryan said. “Most of them were doing, uh, gorilla tactics? That’s what you call them, right?”

“Guerrilla,” Rose corrected.

“I didn’t think the towers had intelligence,” Troy said. “Or, at least, I assumed the king’s control over them was not so minute. As it is, they appear to be living entities in their own right.”

“We destroyed one,” Rose added. “I don’t think it was expecting us to group up with Starfall. It had countermeasures for them, but not us. We might’ve broken it a bit too much—”

“You might’ve broken it a bit too much,” Ryan interjected. “I wasn’t the one who decided to annihilate half a square mile.”

“Tomato, tomahto,” Rose said, waving her hand. “The point is, we—or I, I guess—destroyed the shit out of it, but we still have a load of Dungeon Cores to use.”

“I can see that,” I said.

It took me a moment to find the cores. Even after the days I’d been gone, my dungeon had been full to the brim with the mana from the cores I’d absorbed. Since our plan had shifted away from forcibly ascending everyone, I had used that power to [Assimilate] as much land as I could.

Centerpoint had a fifteen mile radius, now, and as it turned out, there was a certain scale at which my partial omniscience started to falter.

Still, it was trivially easy to find the cores in question. They were dormant, sure, but there was still power in them.

“Do we have enough for the transference ritual?” I asked. I wasn’t clear on how many Dungeon Cores worth of fuel we actually needed for Thorn and Troy to do their thing. Hell, I wasn’t clear on what the mechanic of said ritual even was. Or if it would work.

“I am unsure,” Troy said. “By my calculations, we should have at least ten thousand dormant Dungeon Cores. We were able to do a small dungeon with five. We just don’t have enough data to tell. If the amount of power scales exponentially rather than linearly, we certainly do not have enough.”

“I’d much rather not die and leave the rest of you all to fend against the king alone,” I said.

“I would much rather you not die, too,” Rose said. “We have a little time left, but not much. There are a lot more towers out there, now. Mom estimated them at forty a few days ago, but there has to be at least ten times that. The kingdom is thick with wards now, too. It’s hard to get any communication through when we’re out there.”

“If there are more towers, there’s more Dungeon Cores, right?” I asked. “They were production facilities, weren’t they?”

“There should be,” Rose said in a tone that said she already understood the implication. “After maybe an hour of rest, we should be able to turn around and see if we can bring any of them in.”

“You should mobilize everyone you can,” Troy said. “There are still a couple dozen powerful adventurers here. Together, we can almost certainly destroy and loot a spire.”

I winced. It had taken so long just to get everyone in the same place again, and here we were, about to split the parties. It was our choice this time, not the goddess’, but it still felt shitty.

“Let’s get some rest first,” I said. “Then we’ll talk.”

#

Rose couldn’t get her hands off of me from the moment I made some privacy for us.

When we were done, I gave her a warm bath and a meal before we started talking seriously again.

“This could be the last day of our lives,” Rose said.

“Last day of mine, maybe,” I replied drily. “I’m feel like I’m less worried than I should be.”

“You’ve died a few times already, right? Maybe you got used to it.” She poked me in the chest. “Don’t go dying on me.”

“Trying not to,” I said, running my fingers through her freshly-dried hair. “I do wonder how many of the adventurers I’m going to be able to mobilize.”

“All of them, I figure,” Rose replied. “All of them were crazy enough to join you going into the Omen. I doubt they’re going to shy away now.”

“Who knows?” I said. “That feels like a different world, now. There were millions more alive back then. Civilization was still intact, if not functional.”

“A lot has changed,” Rose agreed. “I think you can get them to fight. You’re our last hope to heal from everything.”

“I guess so.”

We sat there in silence for a while, enjoying the warmth of each others’ bodies.

“Hey, Lucas,” Rose said quietly.

“Hm?”

“Have you thought about using the ex-Kingsguard?”

“Not really,” I said. “They’re with me because they didn’t have a better choice, and they’re not all that powerful.”

“Are you sure?” Rose asked. “I’ve been exchanging messages with the Duelists and the Land Pirates. They’ve been working with the ex-Kingsguard basically this whole time.”

Had they? I’d barely noticed. I hadn’t paid attention to them or the civilians unless they were in active danger.

“Are they strong enough to survive out there?”

“There’s a thousand of them at or above level 10, now,” Rose said. “You should be proud. Your adventurers are learning from you.”

Huh. I’d barely even been [Guide]ing them. That was a pleasant surprise.

That didn’t mean it would work, though. “Even if they’re strong enough to fight, I don’t think they’ll fight for me.”

Rose stared at me like I was an idiot. “You spared them. You gave them a home. You trained them up. And, more importantly, I don’t think you have a choice.”

“All fair points,” I sighed. “Alright. Let me see if I can get them to move.”

That was going to be tough. Motivating people wasn’t really my strong suit, but it had to be me telling them. It wouldn’t sit right with me otherwise.

From the stories I was hearing, the constantly shifting dungeon-towers were incredibly dangerous, and that was when they’d been fighting to survive. People were going to die if I sent them out to try to capture one.

“That’s my Lucas,” Rose said. “Y’know, maybe the otherworlders—”

“No. Absolutely not. They still have the quest to kill me, remember? They listen to me now, but they’re definitely going to stop if I tell them to abandon their objective.”

“…Fair enough.”

[Time remaining: 18 hours, 56 minutes, 17 seconds.]