Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 176 (Patreon)

Lucas

The king’s towers looked like they weren’t budging. [Truesight] didn’t cover enough distance for me to tell whether the army of monsters I sent hurtling at them were having an actual effect on the influence-cancelling structures.

They were preventing the monsters they produced from venturing further into my territory, at least. The king’s forces were an order of magnitude more numerous than the Omen’s had been, but dealing with a physical threat to the dungeon was easy mode.

It was the threat within that I had to deal with.

Time was still ticking down. We were cutting this a little too close. If Thorn and Troy finished their ritual in the half an hour they had estimated, we would only have about an hour remaining; after that, there still remained the matter of the king.

His attacks didn’t just involve monsters. I got my first taste of the dungeon hybrids that the others had been talking about when a few of his dragons dropped the cores when they died.

They felt wrong. It was like staring into a funhouse mirror specifically designed to mess with your head, except amplified a dozen times over and I couldn’t close my eyes to them.

Theoretically, I could trap them and save them, preserving them for rituals down the line that could realign them with their human bodies.

Except this wasn’t like the fight against the Omen. While the Kingsguard had been largely ineffective on their own, thanks to their low average power, each Dungeon Core-human hybrid was a threat in its own right.

They tried to [Assimilate] my land, and though my will was stronger than theirs and my mana reserves far greater, they were able to get enough of a foothold to control the ground around them and shit out monsters like a perversion of a golden goose.

Each one of them presented a very real threat to the otherworlders and adventurers I’d sent hurtling at them, and even if there were innocent people driving them, I couldn’t justify letting others die to potentially save them.

I crushed the hybrids.

The first was the hardest to kill. Every physics-based attack I sent towards it disintegrated, because the king’s dungeons also had [Reshape], and it could create its own monsters to match mine. I could overwhelm it, but every drop of mana counted.

Thankfully, I figured out how to get past its defenses pretty quickly.

All I had to think about was how I would go about fighting myself.

I [Magical Replicate]d [Void Sphere]s hundreds of feet above them, sending a [Different Dimension Beast] into their terrain to distract them. With their focus lasered in on the monster I sent at it, it either wasn’t able to or simply didn’t have the mana to prevent the [Void Sphere] from dropping straight into its center, rendering its defenses useless.

Moments later, my monster found its core and ate it.

Better that my beasts take the core than the king, I supposed. Ideally, I would absorb the dead cores, but I was too far away. I needed to be in close proximity, and I was juggling too many chainsaws to do that.

The king made his move as I destroyed my hundredth dungeon hybrid.

It was subtle at first, but I had a very close eye on the ongoing ritual.

I would have offered to help them inscribe it, but I was no professional at magic circles, and Troy had explained that there was something to do with using a shaping tool that infused mana into the ley lines they were producing—it was a whole deal, and the long and the short of it was that I wasn’t going to be able to speed it up.

So instead, I watched.

That meant that when the Dungeon Cores started moving, I noticed. When Iris practically turned into a human mana torch, I noticed.

When they started flying upwards, hunting for people to attach themselves to, I definitely noticed.

I spat out a curse, then drew on [Guide].

“Attention. Attention. The king’s Dungeon Cores, which had been stored on the fifteenth floor for a ritual to eliminate Centerpoint Dungeon, have become active. All adventurers, be wary of the ground beneath you. If the floors and ceiling begin to change abruptly, run.”

That was the best I could offer. If there had been fewer people, I could have micromanaged. I could have told individual adventurers when there was a Dungeon Core coming for them.

But I wasn’t a god. There was only one being who could manage this many people at once, and she was decidedly not on my side.

“Don’t you dare screw me over any further,” I muttered, knowing the goddess could hear me.

I sent myself hurtling down to the ritual, wishing I had something faster. Even with all the level-ups, the goddess hadn’t seen fit to grant me a [Teleport] skill within the dungeon. I knew that she wasn’t a corporeal, human entity in the same way I was, but I felt like if I listened closely enough, I could hear her laugh as I simply fell roughly two miles.

Just like the hybrids, these cores fought my authority. Unlike the ones with humans attached to them, though, they weren’t quite as effective at it. Without someone to pilot them, they were significantly lesser. Us hybrids were more than the sum of our parts, and I was far greater than these dungeons were.

That said, there were a lot of them, and their sheer volume meant that I couldn’t reclaim all the space at once. I would have to burn the built-up energy in my [Assimilate] for that to work, and no way in hell was I giving that up now.

For every five cores I held in place, overriding their domain with my own, there was one that managed to get away, propelling itself upwards and digging through layers of my dungeon. One in ten of the cores that made it out of the initial burst were abnormally powerful, able to resist my pull entirely.

With over 1.5 million Dungeon Cores, that made for a lot of escapees.

I couldn’t stop them all. To sustain my control over the tens of thousands of monsters I’d unleashed, maintain [Guide], and hold down the Dungeon Cores I’d already taken hold of, I had to use basically all of the reserves that I hadn’t already assigned to a future spell.

All I could do was warn them.

“Status,” I demanded.

“Not looking good, but not unsalvageable,” Troy said absentmindedly, focusing on the ritual circle. To his credit, he’d barely flinched when the fuel for said ritual had gained a mind of its own. “We’re just going to have to hope the reduced number is enough.”

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes, maybe,” he said.

Troy was the only one even capable of giving me a response, it seemed. Thorn was equally as engrossed in carving out the ritual, and any spare attention he had went to creating a shield around them, preventing the errant cores from inflicting harm upon them and, more importantly, from affecting the ritual.

Iris was… not doing well. I sent a [Healing Stream] her way, but the bulk of her affliction seemed to be coming from her total mana burnout, not anything physical. Her effort to prevent the Dungeon Cores from rolling over the ritual and annihilating them was taking the entirety of her power. She was barely lucid.

We had to hold out twenty minutes. That was doable. Right?

Casualties were already rolling in. I couldn’t save everyone. Hell, I couldn’t save any of them if I wanted this ritual to work.

They were holding the fort down, thankfully. Their trial through fire—a week in the hellscape outside the dungeon, then days training within the dungeon—had given them strength. How applicable said strength was to protecting themselves from an oncoming rush of dungeons, I had no idea, but they were surviving. Mostly.

I realized why ten minutes in.

Though there were new hybrids entering the borders of my dungeon, plowing through otherworlders until group efforts took them down, there weren’t any new ones popping up within the bounds.

The errant Dungeon Cores weren’t fusing with humans.

They were distributing themselves throughout Centerpoint. I couldn’t tell what their end goal was, but the very existence of a pattern told me they were up to something.

The king’s plan hadn’t finished laying itself out.

That was to be expected. For someone who had been a step ahead of us this entire time, a plan that boiled down to “attack Centerpoint with lots and lots of monsters” had been a little too obviously simple.

I didn’t know what his game plan was now, though, and I didn’t have the mana to spare to find out.

All I could do was defend.

Heal. Summon. Kill.

Do it again.

#

The King

As the final battle took shape, the king considered the field once more.

Though his level of fine control was nowhere near that of a dungeon’s, his raw power was great, and his domain stretched across the entire kingdom of man. Every last surviving human was within his reach.

It was more difficult to use his [King’s Domain] when there was another controlling it, but it was simple enough to bypass the dungeon’s authority to witness what was occurring.

A ritual. One of immense ambition.

Hmm.

This may warrant my attention, he thought.

He borrowed a [Wizard]’s [Teleport].

Though he might not have been able to control the dungeon itself, there was nothing preventing him from entering.

#

Rose

The fight was going well up until the king arrived.

Sure, there were a bunch of powerful monsters on the enemy side, and sure, there were a lot of towers, but Rose was optimistic that they’d win.

They had more adventurers. They had their own army of monsters. Most importantly, everyone on their side was a survivor. Nobody went down without taking a mass of enemies with them. It was a numbers game, and they were winning it.

Winning it, that is, until a presence like the goddess herself descended.

Time slowed.

Rose grit her teeth and sang.

She couldn’t bear the unfairness of it all. After everything they’d fought for—after all the friends they’d lost, the things they’d been through—after all the punishments the goddess had thrown their way for doing too well, she just let the king do whatever he pleased?

There was no way they were going to be able to stop him from ending the ritual. Maybe they could stop him, if a ton of them pulled out the most bullshit of their bullshit skills, but the otherworlders were going to die.

This is unacceptable, she thought. Did you want entertainment, or did you want the king to slaughter everyone in his path?

Five notes into her song, she stopped.

“I know you’re listening to this, you heartless bastard,” she said. “Tell me. Is this what you find fun? Setting up a contrived series of events all so the king can knock over the sandcastle we’ve been forced to make? This is the best you can do?”

Time slowed for Rose even further, then crawled to a stop.

[What would you have me do?]

She had to resist screaming at the goddess. It was maddeningly difficult to do so.

“Enforce your rules fairly,” Rose hissed. “You took one victory from us. You piled on the layers of our defeat. Do the same for the king!”

For a long second that stretched into eternity, the weight of the goddess’ eye laid on Rose.

The otherworlder stood there defiantly and refused to budge.

She knew how the goddess played her games. On some level, Rose had been like her before she’d been sent hurtling into this world. The goddess wanted not to interfere, but she also wanted a very specific set of results—a set that she didn’t know the details of.

And, on some level, she did think she was a fair being. Rose had never got the impression that the goddess thought the massacres she’d directly or indirectly caused had been unfair, no matter how many millions died.

But this was an asymmetry, and it was Rose’s only hope. It was Centerpoint’s only hope.

[…]

“Do it, coward,” Rose snarled. “Is it really a satisfying victory if the strongest being on this planet is coddled by you to victory? Is it really?”

[…]

[Very well.]

When time returned to its usual state, a massive weight lifted from Rose’s shoulders.

And the king was—not gone, but elsewhere.

She shuddered, exhaling deeply.

Rose wondered if anyone else would even remember what she had done.

Whether they knew it or not, she had just saved them all.

#

Lucas

Thirty-six minutes after Thorn and Troy started crafting their ritual circle, I felt a massive blip of power. One on the scale of the Cataclysm—and it was familiar.

Less than a second later, it disappeared.

I frowned at that, but I couldn’t dwell on it. If it wasn’t an immediate threat, I didn’t have the time to deal with it.

Forty-one minutes in, they finished the circle.

“Cast it,” I said. “Cast it, now.”

“On it,” Troy said. “Lend us your mana, will you?”

I [Intertwine]d them with my power, surging with the mana of two hundred thousand otherworlders and twice that in monsters, and they filled the ritual circle.

“Send the Dungeon Cores into it!” Thorn shouted. “They must fulfill the material component!”

With the strength I had remaining, I did.

I couldn’t get all of them in. Far from it. Of the 1.5 million that had arrived, maybe half of them were still under my control.

One by one, dozen by dozen, thousand by thousand, I sent them into the glowing ritual, and they evaporated.

With every passing second, the luminosity of the circle increased, until by the ten thousandth Dungeon Core, it was a radiant pillar of pure white light.

More and more and more and more. I threw Dungeon Cores into the spell like kindling onto flame, and it ignited beautifully. I could feel the dedicated, twisted power that their hail Mary ritual had created, and I welcomed it into my dungeon.

My senses began to grow blurry. I shouted a warning.

“That means it’s working!” Troy shouted back. “I think!”

And on that promising note, I allowed the ritual to take hold.

#

The King

In one moment, he was in the dungeon.

In the next, he had returned to the capital.

“How curious,” he said aloud.

It was the goddess’ work, of course. He wondered what, exactly, had prompted that, but it mattered little.

The dungeon’s ritual began, but enough of the king’s cores had escaped.

If he could not interrupt their ritual with his presence, he could do it with his own.

The king executed the final step of his first step towards godhood.

Hundreds of miles away, eight hundred thousand Dungeon Cores ignited.

#

Lucas

As I whited out, I felt every single Dungeon Core we hadn’t burned for our last-chance plan align. I sensed magic pass through them. They connected, and in their collective might, they began to expand.

The last thing I thought before my senses faded entirely was simple:

This better fucking work.