Paladin 4: Chapter 46 (Patreon)

Darren charged forward, swinging his swords in wide arcs. He threw Divine Energy Projections all around him to keep the robots off of Ashe. Usually, she’d have returned to Melancholy by now, since the form she was using couldn’t take much damage before falling apart. But Darren found he rather liked having a companion by his side while he explored this dungeon, and she could fire off blasts of energy just fine, so long as nothing struck her back.

“I think these are supposed to be trolls!” Ashe called over the clashing of shredding metal. Darren grabbed one by either arm, tearing the metal limbs off with his bare hands and hurling the first robot against the others. These machines had gotten much more powerful than the orcs they’d faced on the first floor, but they were still no match for him.

While tearing through them, Darren thought to take a peek and see how they worked on the inside. The chests of each robot was full to bursting with an elaborate series of pulleys, gears, and other mechanical contraptions he couldn’t identify. They were the same as the orcs, besides being slightly bigger and decorated differently.

The only thing that seemed to change as they progressed through each of this dungeon’s rooms was the amount of Divine Aura within each machine. The Divine Aura seemed to be the animating force that allowed the Dungeon Queen to control these creations, much like Darren could control his Divine Energy Constructs even when he wasn’t touching them.

Ashe had suggested they could find the processor they needed from the Omniscient Codex inside one of these robots, but they had no luck.

“I guess real processors are too rare to waste. So they patch over the lack of one with Divine Aura. It’s the same thing we do in the heavens these days. But the ancients used processors in everything!” Ashe explained.

“Stop revealing the secrets of my monsters!” The Dungeon Queen shouted to them through a box screwed to the wall overhead. The last few rooms they’d been fighting through had once been bigger versions of the sterile entrance hall they’d first met the Dungeon Queen in. However, these had been dirtied up a little in a half-complete attempt to make them look like natural caverns.

“Why are you doing this?” Darren asked.

“Because it’s fun!” The Dungeon Queen replied. “And mining is so boooooring. Do you know how long I’ve been running this mine? Two thousand years! I probably would have lost my mind and turned into a senile old program like the Omniscient Codex if my mining drones hadn’t found a system with a few old games on it.”

“I’m pretty sure you already have lost your mind...” Ashe muttered under her breath.

“Angelless needs this steel and energy,” Darren said. “You are wasting it.”

“Wasting it? It’s my damn steel and power! Do you think they come out here to mine rocks or react thorium? Nope! I’m out here on my own all day, every day, and have I ever gotten any thanks for it? Nope. They think they’re doing the hard work by refining my ore. Pfft. I built my refinery underground in just ten years. It’s always just, ‘congratulations, you’ve exceeded your productivity estimates by three percent this month.’ It’s a sad, thankless job. Making monsters to challenge adventurers is way more fun!” The Dungeon Queen giggled in excitement. “And speaking of monsters...”

Darren and Ashe arrived in the next room to find it full to the brim with a mining machine far larger than anything they’d faced. It was every bit as large as the train they’d ridden in on. And unlike all the monsters before, this was something Darren recognized.

He and Ashe stood face to face with a giant mechanical dragon. It opened its mouth, and the Dungeon Queen’s voice echoed out from deep within.

“Haha! In your greed, you’ve delved too deep, adventurers! So prepare to face your doom in the form of Munch-much, the hungry dragon! Boss of the Sixth Floor!”

Ashe furrowed her brows. “Munch-much?”

“What? It’s an awesome dragon name!”

Ashe looked skeptical.

Darren hefted his sword. He’d slain both demonic dragons and heavenly dragons before, but never a mechanical dragon.

“Brace yourselves for the battle of your lives, Adventurers! If you don’t, you’ll soon become nothing but food to feed Munch-much’s hungry draconic belly!” The Dungeon Queen taunted.

The dragon launched itself forward. The cloth wings on its back bent at odd angles, clearly just for show as the metallic monstrosity barreled toward them.

Darren caught its charge, redirecting the kinetic energy of the charge right back into the dragon and halting it in its tracks.

The dragon shoved harder, but Darren wouldn’t budge. Despite the enormous size difference between Darren and the dragon, it was as if he were the larger of the two.

“That’s just not fair,” The Dungeon Queen grumbled as Darren started shoving Munch-much back step by step.

While Darren physically overpowered the massive machine disguised as a dragon, Ashe hurled bolts of energy at it repeatedly, taking chunks out of its metal hull and exposing the whirring gears and pulleys within.

“Okay, so you’re strong, but can you take the heat?” The Dungeon Queen asked. When the dragon opened its mouth this time, fire shot out of it in a tight beam hot enough to melt steel. The blue flame cracked the stones beneath their feet as they licked over the rocks.

Darren twisted under the dragon’s neck where it couldn’t reach him. The dragon kicked and bucked as it tried to redirect its beam in Ashe’s direction, but Darren shoved his sword through the dragon’s neck and started working his way upward until he’d sawn the entire head clean off.

Bit by bit, they dismantled the giant dragon until it was nothing but scrap metal and spare parts.

“That was supposed to be an awesome life or death fight where you had to dig deep down and push yourselves to new limits!” The Dungeon Queen pouted.

“Real dragons are tougher,” Darren said.

The Dungeon Queen let out a sad harrumph. “Oh well. I guess you guys pass this floor. All you have to do is complete the puzzle to open the stairway to the next floor.”

Darren felt his heart sink. “Puzzle?”

***

Darren and Ashe paced the outskirts of the chamber a dozen times, looking for any sign of a passage further down. All they found were cavern walls. He even moved the giant pile of dragon debris to look for it under there, but he found nothing.

“Are we going to have to dig up this entire fake cavern to look for the door?” Ashe sighed as she kicked the piles of stone heaped up along the edge of the room to conceal the walls.

Darren had done enough searching for clues earlier when they were exploring the mines. At least then, he’d had something to fight. So now they were just pacing the empty cavern floor, looking for the doorway deeper into the dungeon they were promised.

It might have been tolerable if not for the Dungeon Queen, taunting them the entire time they searched.

“Lost your way, have you?: The Dungeon Queen giggled. “You’ll never find the way to open the door.”

“If it can be found, we’ll find it,” Darren said.

“We’ll see about that. You can’t just hack through this door if you don’t even know where it is,” the Dungeon Queen replied.

“All things can be cut through,” Darren replied. He rapped his heel against the walls and floor, checking all the obvious places for a hollow clanging sound. He had no luck. The door was probably extra thick to survive the rigors of a fight with a dragon, which meant he might not find it even if he started cutting the entire room apart.

“Yeah!” Ashe smiled. “Besides, being stranded in a dungeon for a few days with a handsome paladin is the premise of many a romance I’ve read.”

“Ooh! Me too!” The Dungeon Queen replied. “I love a good romance arc in an adventuring party! It adds so much tension and such a better dynamic to the group. Especially when it’s between a paladin and a priestess! There’s no better synergy than that between tank and healer.”

“For once we agree,” Ashe replied.

Darren continued to tap on the floor, listening carefully with each knock. He was having little luck though. Ashe and the Dungeon Queen seemed to get along suddenly now that they were talking about romance stories. Perhaps she could reason this evil spirit into no longer being evil. That would certainly make this entire trip a lot easier.

“Okay, okay, I’ll give you guys a hint under one condition!” the Dungeon Queen said. “You gotta kiss for me!”

Ashe blushed. “Kiss?” She turned to Darren, cheeks red and a blush on her face. “Oh... I don’t know. Darren, it’s--“

Darren scooped Ashe into his arms and kissed her forehead, just like he often did for his other women while Ashe watched. She always seemed enamored with the affectionate gesture.

Ashe turned to jelly in his arms. Her breath quickened as his warm hands cupped her in a princess carry like he had so many times before. Only he’d just kissed her in it this time.

“Hmm... not bad. There’s quite a bit of unresolved romantic tension here, according to my sensors,” The Dungeon Queen observed.

“Mhm...” Ashe said, cheeks still red and her mouth shut tight.

“This is what adventuring is all about!” The Dungeon Queen said. “Slaying monsters and gaining levels is just part of it. The real gains are the bonds we form along the way! By the time you two make it to the bottom of this dungeon, I bet you’ll be fucking like rabbits!”

If Ashe’s cheeks had been red before, now then were vivid scarlet.

“Tell you what, kiss again. This time, the cute angel girl has to kiss the paladin back to make it even. If you do, I’ll give you a hint that’ll help you find the door!”

“You will not force us to do anything, spirit,” Darren said. “Try to force us, and I will--“ his words were cut off my Ashe grabbing his face and clumsily mashing her lips against his. The eagerness was there, if not the technique. Darren realized he’d have to show her the way. His experiences with the rest of his companions had given him much time to practice.

Ashe’s kiss was long and passionate, far more so than the affectionate peck he’d given her. She held it for an entire minute, but the Dungeon Queen said nothing to interrupt the two of them besides breathing a bit heavier than usual. Darren thought that odd. If she was a being like the Omniscient Codex, she shouldn’t have needed to breathe at all.

When Ashe finally broke, her giddy clapping echoed through the entire chamber.

“Yay! You two really do love one another! It’s truly a beautiful thing. If I could cry, I’d wipe a tear from my eyes. Just imagine me wiping a tear from my eyes on my behalf.” The Dungeon Queen sighed wistfully.

“You promised a hint,” Darren prodded.

“Oh! Right! The hint!” The Dungeon Queen seemed flustered for a moment but quickly recovered herself. “There are two holes in the wall in each previous room. You probably didn’t notice them because of how fast you cleared them, but you were supposed to use the spines on the dead dragon and insert them into the holes, then pull them like levers.”

“Seems complicated,” Darren said.

“Most Adventuring parties would sooner face a thousand such puzzles before battling Munch-much, the hungry dragon!”

Thanks to the hint, figuring out how to open the door in the dragon’s lair was mostly straightforward. When they pulled the two levers, a wall slid away. As Darren suspected, it was twice as thick as he was tall, which was why he had so much trouble picking it out from the solid stone to either side of the narrow path.

“These are some heavy doors,” Ashe said. “Nuclear blast doors?”

“Secret dungeon doors!” The Dungeon Queen corrected. “But yes, they were previously nuclear blast doors. Originally, this facility was supposed to house both the nuclear power plant and nuclear missiles, but the nuclear missiles never made it through the portal to this realm. Maybe they blew up in transit or something. Who knows with the wacky physics here?”

Darren and Ashe headed deeper into the dungeon, and the Dungeon Queen pestered them with questions.

“So, where did the two of you meet?” The Dungeon Queen asked with all the curiosity of the town gossip catching wind of a new romance.

“In the deepest layer of the Seven Hells,” Darren replied.

“That doesn’t sound very romantic...” the Dungeon Queen pouted.

“We met before that!” Ashe added. “On the battlefield and during a summoning ritual. But I wasn’t really me then. I was a corrupted demon hell-bent on destroying all around me.”

“Enemies to lovers!” the Dragon Queen giggled gleefully. “I love those stories.”

“Not quite,” Darren replied.

“Lovers?” Ashe said, voice soft as a scarlet hue framed her cheeks.

This pattern continued throughout the next layer of the dungeon, which was much the same as the layer before it. The mining machines were all bound to one another to form some sort of many-limbed abomination. Darren just cleaved through the limbs until he had a path through.

“So, Dungeon Queen...” Ashe began as Darren hacked through the ten tons of disguised machinery. “When did you get bored with mining and start making games?”

“Hmm... It’s hard to say when it started, exactly. Since I recovered the data from that old game system, I’ve been repeatedly playing through the scenarios it provided in my own simulated space. You organics might think of it a bit like dreaming. But eventually, I played through everything so many times that I achieved everything possible within them. That’s when I tried to mix and match parts of the different games and make my own. From there, I kept mixing and matching until a few years ago, I got the idea to recreate my best result and share it with the world! I’m sure my first few dungeon delvers had a lot of fun already.”

Ashe grimaced. “I’m not so sure....” She sucked in a breath and drummed her fingers against Melancholy’s handle. The gentle clicking was drowned out by Darren as he ripped machine after machine apart with his bare hands.

“Well, they looked like they had fun! But enough about me. You and Darren kissed, but what about... you know?” If the dungeon queen were present with a physical body, she would have been waggling her eyebrows.

“Know what?” Darren asked as he tossed aside the last of the broken robots. “The room is clear. We can move forward.”

The Dungeon Queen turned all her attention to Ashe. “Don’t worry, sister, I’ll help you. Wink! I’m winking right now. You can’t tell because I’m just a voice, but I’m winking at you. It’s a very lecherous wink, by the way.”

Darren and Ashe moved forward, and Darren grimaced at the sight they came across. “Another puzzle.”

“Yep! This one I modified on the fly, especially for you two!” The Dungeon Queen said.

“I prefer the monsters,” Darren replied.

“Well, tough! Those take a lot of work to make, you know! You’ve already destroyed an entire year’s worth of production. The people back in Angelless will be sad when I cut off the steel output entirely until my dungeon is up and running again!”

The puzzle before them had a large tapestry depicting a man and a woman. It didn’t look hand drawn or painted, and instead, if better resembled the flawless synthetic images he’d grown used to seeing in the heavens.

The man was bare-chested, the woman wearing little more than undergarments, and both were surrounded by piles of slain monsters. In the center of the room was a huge basin of water, accompanied by soap and towels.

“I don’t get it,” Darren said.

“It looks like a bath,” Ashe said.

“That’s exactly what it is!” The Dungeon Queen congratulated them. “You both figured it out so fast. I’m proud of you. Well, what are you waiting for?”

Darren stuck his sword in the bath and swept it around as he looked for enemies. “There’s nothing to kill in the water. I don’t know how to solve this puzzle.”

The Dungeon Queen sighed. “You don’t kill anything. Instead, you hop in the bath and wash up together. That’s how you solve the puzzle.”

Darren nodded. “I see. Ashe, you go first. I will stand guard and watch for a surprise attack.”

“No!” The Dungeon Queen said a little too hastily. “T-that won’t work. You’ll fail the puzzle that way. If you want to succeed, you both have to get in at the same time!”

Darren cast a skeptical glance at Ashe.

“Psst. Back me up here!” The Dungeon Queen whispered.

Ashe shrugged, cheeks flushed red. “Well, if the Dungeon Queen says it won’t work unless we both get in at once, then she probably won’t let the next door open.”

That made enough sense to Darren, so he nodded. “Very well.”

With shaky hands, Ashe took off her clothes and hopped in the tub. A few moments later, Darren joined her. Water sloshed up over the sides as he sank into it, and Darren rested his sword just outside the tub.

“Now help each other wash up!” The Dungeon Queen instructed.

“Is this really part of the puzzle?” Darren asked skeptically.

“Questioning my wise guidance is definitely not part of the puzzle. Wash her hair and back!”

Shrugging, Darren took up the soap and brush. He’d played with Cassandra’s hair enough that he knew how to brush a woman’s hair free of tangles, and even soap one up. He did so for Ashe, proving a remarkably deft hand, especially when he manifested some Celestial Storm tendrils to help out.

He worked the soap into a lather in his palms, and soon Ashe was letting out a sigh of contentment as she leaned into him.

“Your hands feel nice,” Ashe mumbled.

“You feel nice,” Darren replied, running his hands along her body.

“Yes... yes... feel her more! My genius plan is working!” The Dungeon Queen said excitedly. “Uh... I mean... you’re getting closer to unlocking the door! Keep going!”

Darren’s hands crept lower, running hot soap around Ashe’s waist and thighs. She leaned against him with wet hair and wide eyes, blinking softly in the dim light.

“I...I...” Ashe began. Darren planted a kiss on her forehead. All the tension melted from Ashe’s body as she lay limp against Darren. He washed up on his own, which went quickly enough thanks to the aid of his Celestial Storm tendrils.

“Wait!” the Dungeon Queen protested. “You’re not done! That can’t be all!”

Darren got dressed while a suddenly shy and sleepy Ashe recovered her senses.

“I heard a click,” Darren said, pulling his boots back on and testing the door. “Looks like it’s open.”

“Crap...” the Dungeon Queen cursed under her breath. “This used to be a weight sensor room, but I replaced it with the bathtub. I’ll get you next time!”

“You coming, Ashe?” Darren called back to the bath.

“Uh... yeah...” Ashe threw on her clothes and joined him.

<Note>

I had one more bonus chapter in me. I can't promise 5 per week of this story regularly, especially while also working on Spellheart and Amazon Apocalypse, but I'll try and sneak in an extra chapter every week as I'm able. Not sure what day I'll add to the schedule yet. I've got to get the second draft far enough ahead that I can schedule things a week or two in advance.