Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 177 (Patreon)

My senses were all broken, my body gripped by a sensation unlike any other. When I’d gained a class evolution via a direct meeting with the goddess—hell, even when I’d been stranded on an empty plane for the crime of trying to save people with Carly Iru’s knowledge—I had at least retained my human senses.

Now, my sight fractured into a trillion fragments. Sound meant less than nothing; I perceived light, and I perceived darkness, and none of it made any sense.

Time stretched. I didn’t know if I was experiencing time faster—like the inverse of what the goddess had inflicted upon me—or if I was missing out on the events going on outside my perception.

I gave up trying to understand it a few subjective minutes in. I was (presumably) still alive, unless this was hell, but I sort of doubted the goddess would go with something so inexplicable for a realm of punishment.

Some time passed, or maybe none at all. I was the last person to judge.

The goddess, notably, was absent. In times of crisis before, she’d dropped in to give me advice, or one final push, or anything. Today, here and now, she offered me nothing.

I wondered if she had left me entirely, or if she was more preoccupied with someone else.

Maybe she was just watching. That seemed the most believable to me. The goddess was one who wanted to be entertained, and I supposed that once she’d set everything into motion, she wanted to sit back with her metaphorical popcorn and watch.

I had no influence in this space between reality and the emptiness. I couldn’t even process it. As far as I could tell, I didn’t even have a body here—I was just perceiving.

Is this what LSD feels like? My thought was loud, which I hadn’t known they could be.

It hurt, kind of, but I didn’t know if that was pain or another sensation entirely. Without a body, I had no nerves, which meant I couldn’t experience pain, and yet I felt something wrong nonetheless.

More time passed. It might have been eternity, or it might have been the blink of an eye. My addled mind couldn’t tell the difference.

And then, eventually, I was falling. Falling, falling, falling—I slammed back into my body with a jolt.

#

The world looked different to my eyes now. After however long I’d spent in that dream state, everything felt… realer. The colors were more vivid, the scents and sounds more grounding. Every object I could perceive had a defined beginning and an end. Time passed at one second per second.

It was a welcome change, but that wasn’t all.

Beyond the whiplash of going from nothing making sense to the consistent rules of reality, my dungeon was different. I didn’t mean that in the sense that things had changed within, though they had—just a little. From the positions that everyone was in, I was reasonably sure that only a few seconds had passed in real time.

No, it was something else. It was the sensation of going from a worn-out pair of my favorite boots to a newer set that had been broken in all wrong. My senses were just a little bit off, my spells just a tad different.

The ritual had worked.

In the mile-wide cavern I’d created to initiate it, hundreds of thousands of Dungeon Cores lay shattered and broken, painting a spiraling pattern of burnt-out spheres that accentuated what lay in the center.

Two separate Dungeon Cores stood side by side, both incandescent with the power that lay within.

One of them was me.

One of them had been me.

A tremor jolted through the entirety of the dungeon—not Centerpoint, not anymore—and I remembered that the king had begun to execute his plan when we’d activated the ritual.

“Lucas!” Troy shouted. He was bent double, hands on his knees. The ritual must have taken a lot out of him. “Did it work?”

In lieu of an answer, I [Reshape]d the land under me, launching me upwards at an angle that sent me flying towards the twinned cores.

I really hoped this worked. If the goddess pulled something stupid like “Centerpoint Dungeon is an idea, not an object,” we were in deep shit.

In the process of creating my new core body, Thorn and Troy had used every single Dungeon Core I had managed to keep still deep down within the dungeon. A lot of that power had been expended on creating my new body and transferring me to it, along with whatever that odd dream space had been, but that couldn’t account for all of it.

We had used over seven hundred thousand Dungeon Cores to move me, and that power added up.

And it hadn’t removed the power in the old core, either. Nobody was piloting it right now, so it was as dormant as the cores Nora stole had been. It just sat there, practically a nuke in terms of the potential it held. I had used it to run the entire dungeon, and now?

Now, it was just unused fuel, waiting to be burned.

I landed in a heap. It was awkward—with this new body, my spells were a degree or two different. Not enough to ruin my castings, but [Reshape] came less naturally. All the tricks I’d learned to expedite my travel and summonings weren’t as applicable anymore.

That was a concern for later, though.

The king’s dungeons erupted with power, and in the moments after activation, they were already reaching for adventurers. They weren’t all succeeding, but by virtue of sheer numbers, thousands had perished.

Unacceptable.

I picked myself off the ground, using the self-healing benefit of [Divine Healer] to piece together any broken bones by throwing [Healing Stream]s at the tired, burnt-out wizards and [Tactician] down here with me, and I stumbled my way to the Centerpoint Dungeon Core.

Both cores glowed equally bright, but as a dungeon, I had an innate sense of who I was and what I needed to protect. One of these was me, and the other wasn’t.

I laid my hand on my old self and began to absorb it.

There was a moment of resistance, and I worried that it might fight back. I had grappled with the will of dormant Dungeon Cores—something as powerful and wide-spanning as I was now would present a much larger problem if it put up a fight. I was sure I could win, but that would mean tens of thousands of deaths in the meantime. It could mean the king’s victory.

But this dungeon had been mine for the past year, and it recognized its rightful owner.

Centerpoint Dungeon shattered the moment I passed my will into it.

#

[World Quest: Dungeon Dive]

[The Centerpoint Dungeon Core has, by technicality, been eliminated.]

[Reward: Due to the nature of its accomplishment, the reward has been reduced. The dungeon’s killer has gained 5 levels.]

#

I didn’t care that my level only jumped from 22 to 27. I didn’t care that the goddess had chosen to get smarmy with me.

What mattered to me was the collective sigh of relief that passed through my people. What mattered was that they were—not safe, not yet, but not doomed.

Just like that, the quest was gone. The constant threat of the deaths of damn near the entirety of what remained of the human population was gone.

And besides, who needed the goddess to give me levels when I had just absorbed a dungeon with my exact powers?

[Interface messages compressed for brevity.]

[You have leveled up 22 times!]

Power surged through me. The level jump from 22 to 49 was, to put it frankly, absurd. All things considered, doubling my power shouldn’t have doubled my level—but the king had created enough Dungeon Cores for me to ascend to level 100, should I devour them all.

If I had thought the excess strength from the initial core absorptions I’d done had been a wildfire in comparison to the spark of my regular level-ups, this was the entire sun.

It hurt, but real, proper pain was startlingly grounding. This was right. Even if I wasn’t in the same body anymore, this was what I needed.

I’d been saving up all the excess power I’d gathered for a single spell, and that extra bit of power was turbocharged by the tsunami of mana I had just received.

With the force of seven hundred thousand Dungeon Cores—with the power of Centerpoint, the passion of my adventurers, and the will of two hundred and fifty thousand people to survive—I spoke a single word.

“[Assimilate].”

And the world heard me.

The sheer amount of raw power I had to offer was staggering. The human mind wasn’t capable of processing numbers past a certain point, I knew. Logically, a hundred thousand was vastly greater than three thousand—and yet, somehow, I had never emotionally processed that. It hadn’t felt real, even with my constant perception of everyone within my borders.

This [Assimilate] made it real. For the duration of the spell, I was a star, shining bright with boundless, infinite power. I wondered if this was what the goddess felt like.

This power was far too great for this plane, I knew. For nearly an entire minute, I wielded more mana than a kingdom. It should have sent me ascending immediately.

But the goddess had told me that I wasn’t allowed to run, and so I didn’t.

I stood my ground and expanded it.

The Dungeon Cores within me had activated an expansive ritual, I now saw. Though I couldn’t identify the exact purpose of it, the pattern they had formed themselves into was surprisingly similar to the one Thorn and Troy had drawn.

They pulsed with their own power, but in the face of everything I had charged up, they didn’t stand a chance.

I retook the land they controlled, stopping them from progressing their tricks any further. My will was unrelenting, and it was backed by far too much power for them to fight back, even collectively.

The king had been in the process of linking them together, but he didn’t have an army to draw upon. His actions had killed the majority of the humans in his domain, and he’d driven a massive amount of the remainder to me.

Together, the constraints the goddess and the king had thrown upon me worked against them.

My [Assimilate] didn’t stop at the dungeons within me, though. My borders exploded outwards. The towers, previously so capable of countering my influence, barely made a single expression of resistance before my overwhelming might smashed through theirs.

The king had reduced the size of my dungeon from twelve miles down to a ten-mile radius. I reversed that in the first second.

In the second, my dungeon covered fifty miles.

My influence expanded faster and faster, screaming out across the land. I conquered vast stretches of empty land, inhabited only by the survivors of the Cataclysm and the monsters that still pursued them.

There were more people still alive than I thought there would be. Within the first five seconds, the number of people within my dungeon went from around 250,000 to over twice that.

I took wet marshes and dry deserts, deep canyons and absurdly tall, sharp peaks. Nothing resisted me; all the dungeons that might have been able to manage it had been destroyed by the king’s preparation step in his plot to summon a million Earth inhabitants to this world.

In the grand scheme to achieve victory, he had engineered his own defeat.

I perceived, I conquered, and I expanded.

I saw the world like I had never seen it before. As an adventurer, I had been limited by the places the Guild sent me. As a dungeon, I had been confined within a prison of my own making.

Now, I became the kingdom. I witnessed everything. I saw people fighting, loving, surviving.

To my surprise, everywhere I looked, I found hope.

From the descriptions I’d heard of the outside world, I’d expected a burnt-out hellscape where the few survivors fought amongst themselves and against monsters.

The first part of that was, in part, true. The Cataclysm had ruined all semblance of civilization, upending it—and yet, people had survived. Otherworlders and natives alike were not only surviving but thriving. They had banded together. They had defied the end.

I hit the capital of the kingdom before long, and I ran into a wall.

The king, specifically.

His spell was [King’s Domain]. I could detect that long before I felt him use it the first time.

The claim he laid was to the magic of the people who he ruled over, so I spoke to them, magic still pulsing through my veins.

“To those who do not yet know me, my name is Lucas, and I’m the [Tour Guide] for Centerpoint Dungeon. Now that I have ended the quest to destroy it, I will tell you the truth. The full truth.

“I am Centerpoint Dungeon. Or, at least, I was. During a freak accident two years back, the goddess fused me with a Dungeon Core. Just about three weeks ago, the king conspired to get the goddess to drag millions of you—people from Earth, just like me—from your homes to here. In the process, he used her power to kill nearly ninety percent of the population of his kingdom.

“The quest, similarly, was by his design. It was him that decided that you would die if you didn’t come to kill me, his last remaining enemy. Now, I and the wonderful people I have found along the way have found a way to break his quest and end his plot to enslave you all.

“With all that, tell me: is he still your king? Has he ever been?”

I didn’t need to wait long for an answer.

They didn’t need to speak it, but they did anyway. Throughout hundreds of miles of barren wasteland that the king had created, in every language under Earth’s sun, in dozens of different phrasings, the sentiment was the same.

We have no king.

And who was the king if he had nobody to rule over?

His power waned—not a disappearance, not entirely—and that was the opportunity I needed. I stormed the capital, bereft of anyone except for the hollow shells that he had manipulated onto his side, and I took it for myself.

I took the lands around us, empty but for the ongoing catastrophes that the king had refused to address to control his people.

I took, and I took, and I took, and as I did, I assigned quests. Hundreds of thousands of people received them. Over a million people—over two million, I realized.

Though the king and the goddess combined may have decimated the population, there were still plenty of us left, and I gave them all tasks. Simple ones, mostly—defeat the monster in front of you, make it to safety, escape—and they completed them, allowing me to [Intertwine] with their power and continue my infinite [Assimilate].

The magic of a world fuelled me as the king’s faded away, his authority undermined. He had no subjects, no kingdom to back him up.

He vanished from his capital, and my spell swept through it with ease.

The king reappeared next to me with a [Teleport], his presence a storm.

But what was a storm to a star?

“You will not succeed,” the king said neutrally, as if everything was still going to plan. “I will—”

“Doesn’t feel so good when it’s your plans getting messed up, does it?” I interrupted. “Let me tell you this, nameless king.

“You are a fire without fuel. You are a sky without stars. You are a king without a kingdom.

“And, most importantly, you are one step behind.”

His presence flashed with his rage. Mana exploded out from his body, but I contained it easily. I was on his level, now, and I had the power of his kingdom to back me up.

“You’re done, crownless king,” I said. “Give it up.”

“You have not seen the last of me.”

“I think I have.”

[New spell [Reposition Animate Being] unlocked!]

I sent the king back to his capital.

[New spell [Reposition Inanimate Object] unlocked!]

Half a second later, I sent every single tower he had ever used at him.

They were mine, now.

The king’s own weapons spewed a flood of Dungeon Cores at him, each of them producing a horde of their own monsters.

I didn’t watch the rest. I didn’t need to.

Whether or not he survived, he would no longer have the power to hurt us. Even as he struggled under the weight of his life’s work, I could sense his power diminishing.

My influence continued to expand, but it slowed as I hit oceans. I… hadn’t realized our world had oceans.

The world was mine. The part of it I could observe, at least.

I felt a presence at my shoulder.

[Let’s have a discussion, Lucas. A real one.]

“Yes,” I told the goddess. “I think we’re long overdue.”