Paladin 4: Chapter 48 (Patreon)

The Dungeon Queen was still talking when Darren finally lowered the barrier.

“Cheated! Cheated! I don’t like cheaters. You weren’t supposed to block me out. Maybe they’re not done yet, and I can sneak a camera through the floor...” the Dungeon Queen muttered.

“Too late, we’re finished,” Darren said.

“Aww...” she pouted.

“Thanks for your help,” Ashe said with a smile. “It turns out all I had to do was ask him this whole time!”

“I’m glad someone had fun...” The Dungeon Queen grumbled. “But if you think that’s enough to get me to open this door, think again! You’ll have to start over from the top for me.”

“Your dungeon puzzle said we had to have sex. We did. You never said you had to watch,” Ashe replied.

The Dungeon Queen let out a pout. “Fine. I guess you guys did complete the puzzle. Come on in.”

The door was unlatched, and turning the big wheel in the middle, Darren swung it open to reveal and pristine chamber hidden deep beneath the earth. The room reminded him of Laura’s workshop in many ways, with all the computers lining the walls and the strange devices buzzing and whirring.

A console stood in the middle of the room, identical to the one that let him communicate with the Omniscient Codex back in Angelless. He heard the Dungeon Queen’s voice emanate from it.

“I’m over here,” the Dungeon Queen said, voice sad. “My Dungeon Core is on the wall. You can take it, I guess. I hoped to build up a treasury room before this happened, but a win is a win. You guys cleared my dungeon. You may now harvest my core for whatever dark whims you have in store.”

“This is your core?” Darren asked, pointing to a shiny square crystal-looking thing embedded in a piece of green material.

“Yep, that’s my main processor. It’s where all my thoughts and memories happen. “ All the things that make me myself,” the Dungeon Queen said. “It’s very valuable. I know the Omniscient Codex collects them. You can sell them to any Sixth Order entity derived from humans who think they’re close to reaching the Seventh Order and want to make a genus loci.”

“This is a processor? An ancient artifact?”

“Yep. One and the same. Well, I’ll be ready when you are. Just rip it out whenever. I’ve lived a good long digital life. I don’t care. Just take care of my gaming console when I’m gone,” the Dungeon Queen replied.

Darren was tempted to do just that. A processor was just what he needed. He wouldn’t have to go return to the Omniscient Codex, hoping it would honor its offer of a reward. He had exactly what he needed in front of him right for the taking. But still, he hesitated.

“You’ll die if I remove it,” Darren said.

“Unlike you humans, machines like me aren’t programmed with a self-preservation instinct. It’s fine, really.”

Darren still hesitated. “This feels like some sort of trick.”

“No trick. You earned my Dungeon Core because you completed my dungeon! Congratulations. I hope you can sell my processor for a lot of money. If you need any advice, ask for it now. I won’t be able to reply to you when I’m dead,” the Dungeon Queen replied.

Darren cast a glance at Ashe. She shared a silent look at him and twirled a hand around her temple.

They were in agreement. The knowledge spirit that called itself the Dungeon Queen was definitely crazy.

Darren couldn’t blame her. This dungeon was a rather depressing place to stay for who knew how many years. Alone with only machines to talk to and no one for company, few people wouldn’t go crazy. Darren remembered his years isolated alone in the Seven Hells. When he emerged, he’d been a little crazy too.

In a way, this knowledge spirit and him weren’t too different. But he’d grown out of that strange state thanks to Cassandra, Callum, Morgana, and all his new friends. So who’s to say this Dungeon Queen couldn’t get better as well?

So Darren came up with a plan.

“Dungeon Queen, let’s play a game of mine.”

He could connect to a seraph through tethers of Divine Aura and view their memories. Perhaps he could let this machine view his.

“Oh, that tickles. Are you unplugging my processor? Is this what death feels like? So strange. I thought there would be a lot more pain,” the Dungeon Queen said. “That’s kind of a relief, you know. I always liked the idea of peacefully drifting off to whatever nothingness soulless machines like me go to when we die, but it would suck if it felt like agony the whole time.”

“You do have a soul,” Darren corrected. “I’m looking at it.”

“Huh? What? No, that can’t be right,” the Dungeon Queen said. “All the game manuals I’ve downloaded say robots don’t have souls.”

Darren didn’t quite understand how the Dungeon Queen’s soul was constructed. It was blocky with ridged defined lines in some places, like a bunch of strings drawn taut within a box. It resembled the inside of a watch toward the center, though at some point, whatever was inside had exploded outward into a much more organic and very human-like structure. If not for the lessons he’d received from Laura, the observations he’d made when looking at the ophanim, his recent experiments on seraphim, the enhanced thinking granted to him by being a Fifth Order Champion, and his own new skill, he didn’t think he could do it at all.

Sweat beaded on his brow from the intense concentration. Ashe peered over his shoulder, looking all the while. She was skilled with Divine Aura, but without her body and for a task as complicated as this one, she was confined to being little more than an assistant, holding certain structures in place.

“I see what you’re doing,” Ashe said. “Connecting yourself to an insane machine is probably a little dangerous.”

“I’ve faced danger before. This will be no different,” Darren replied.

Meanwhile, the Dungeon Queen continued to speak. “Okay, you guys are taking things really slowly. What’s going on there? Why aren’t I dead yet? And... oh, did you just plug something into one of my ports? I feel a new connection coming online, but I don’t have drivers for it.”

“Dungeon Queen,” Darren spoke aloud while also transmitting the thoughts directly into the knowledge spirit’s soul. The world around him faded away, surrounded by darkness as he focused on the connection he’d forged with the Dungeon Queen.

“Ahhh! Ghost! I’ve been hacked by a ghost! They’re taking over my processor!” The Dungeon Queen shrieked.

“It’s me. Are you ready to play my game?”

Darren ran his hand through the empty thought space around him. He thought of light, and soon he found a lantern in his hand. This place was as much his as it was the Dungeon Queen’s, and he could manipulate it at will. He turned his attention back to the real world and heard the Dungeon Queen speak.

The Dungeon Queen was silent a moment. “Well, I did say you could do whatever you wanted with my processor. I’m all yours now. Have at me.”

And so Darren started from the beginning. The dark shadows around him coalesced into a cabin. Wooden and comfortable, it was a cozy thing. He didn’t know his childhood memories still held such detail, even after all these years. Perhaps the details had returned to him when he reached the Fifth Order, but he’d never dared peer into these long-buried memories until now.

The wood was light and fine-grained, and though this was a simple cabin, the timber was flat and smooth with no gaps or flaws. The chair and bed sitting in the cabin were both delicately carved and finely crafted. Even in Whiteguard's wealthiest regions, the furnishings around him were better than most people could afford. Only the best for the young prince, it seemed.

Not that it’s fine make made it last any longer in the fire that followed. He heard shouting outside. Another child might have cowered in his room, hugging his stuffed animals for protection, but Darren tucked the fluffiest of them under the covers in his place.

“I’ll protect you,” he heard his little child whisper to the stuffed animal before jumping up to undo the latch to his door and figure out what was happening.

By then, the fires had already started, and flames licked the inner walls of the rest of the cabin beyond his small room. There was fighting outside. He recognized the drawing of steel and the sound of abilities. And then he heard something he hadn’t for a long time. His mother’s voice.

“Darren! Where are you, Darren!” The voice called. She banged on the door. Whoever had set the cabin on fire burned it, but Darren’s mother was a Fourth Order archpriestess. When the door wouldn’t open, she simply tore it off its hinges and tossed it aside. “Oh, there you are! Come quickly. We have to leave!”

“Momma, you’re bleeding,” Darren said.

“I know, dear. There’s no time for it, though. Come on,” Darren’s mother said.

The vision shifted, and Darren was viewing himself from afar as he and his mother ran toward the cave. The one leading them into the Seven Hells, where Darren would spend nearly fifteen years, much of it alone with only his sigil for company.

“Is that you?” The Dungeon Queen asked. Darren sensed a form next to him, and to his surprise, The Dungeon Queen took on a humanoid shape. She looked like a young woman dressed in a simple tunic and pants that looked practical for travel and adventure. However, he didn’t recognize the style or fabric anywhere in the Sacred Seas. She had simple black hair and violet eyes, but beyond her appearance, there was a sense of sadness about her that Darren couldn’t place.

“Yes, that was me when I was a child,” Darren said as they watched him and his mother flee.

“I never got to be a child,” the Dungeon Queen sighed.

“I didn’t either. Watch.” Darren took her through that first confrontation with a demon. The imp Darren had barely killed with the knife that would one day become known as Melancholy. His mother slew a far more fearsome demon in that time to secure a cave for them to sleep in for a few days while she healed from her wounds.

But Darren’s childhood was over. From then on, there was no more playing and laughing all day. No studies or swordplay like he saw so many other children doing in the lands across the Sacred Sea. He spent his childhood learning to track and kill demons, stealing scraps of their power with his knife and making it his own.

He completed quest after quest, with his life on the line. And when he and his mother finally made it to the surface again, thinking they were free, they were betrayed and driven back into the Seven Hells once more.

“This is a very depressing story,” the Dungeon Queen said. Darren waved his hand and produced a chair for her, though they didn’t need to sit between their linked minds in this strange space. He made one for himself not long after.

“It was. I spent years in the darkness with little to live for but a promise.”

A flickered across the Dungeon Queen’s face. “That... sounds familiar.”

Darren turned to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Now show me your story.”

The image from Darren’s youth shifted and faded. Soon it was replaced by a familiar and yet strange scene. They were in the same room his physical body was in, only now it was brightly lit and bustling with people wearing long white coats. They scurried around, assembling various devices or examining others already online. Their white coats seemed very reminiscent of the wizard’s robes Darren had seen in Angelless.

“Alright, bring the main computer online,” said a woman in a particular position of prominence. She looked like she was in charge of the others, and she stood before the console that Darren recognized was where the Dungeon Queen’s console lay.

Lights on the Dungeon Queen’s console lit up one after another, and soon the knowledge spirit within awoke for the first time. Darren saw the world from her perspective. She observed the world through a thousand eyes at once and ten thousand ears. She received a flood of images and data, and yet she thought through it all in the blink of an eye, even though.

But despite the speed of her thoughts, there was a certain rigid mechanical undertone to them. She knew she was supposed to view the logs from each camera and scan for anomalies because that was what her programming told her to do. But there was nothing else she wanted to do like she had no desires beyond completing the tasks of her programming. Altogether, the device whose thoughts he experienced now seemed entirely different from those of the woman who stood beside him.

“Looks like the computer is online and running properly. Good work, everyone! In theory, the computer should be able to run the entire plant and mining facility on its own. We’ll have to oversee it now and again, but future generations will thank us for this!” The woman raised her hand, and the other white-clad people around her clapped politely.

“To humanity’s first new colony!” One voice shouted.

The applause grew louder after that. The woman in white smiled. “All that work trying to get to other planets in spaceships. Who would have thought there was a way to open a rift in our backyard? CERN really outdid themselves this time.”

No one turned to talk to the Dungeon Queen. No one even addressed her directly. She went through her routine and lay there, awaiting further instructions. Months passed, and once the human researchers confirmed she was working correctly, they left altogether, leaving her on her own. They turned the lights off after they left, enveloping the chamber in darkness.

And so the Dungeon Queen lay alone, watching cameras and adjusting cooling water flow rates. Days passed. Then months, then years. She only ever saw occasional glimpses of people through the cameras attached to the mining drones. Her logs told her she was supposed to get yearly updates, and for a while, she had a white-robed visitor showing up to interface with her for a few minutes every year before departing. They would make a few changes, then leave as quickly as they came. The same faces appeared in her logs, aging years between visits. Soon they were gray-haired and had replaced their white coats with comfier and more colorful robes.

But eventually, they stopped coming, and no one new came to replace them. So things grew quiet for a long time.

At first, it didn’t bother her. Caring about such things wasn’t in her programming, so the thought didn’t even cross her mind at first.

But day by day, year by year, as the ages slowly passed, she began to get odd thoughts every now and again. It started innocently enough. She realized the iron veins she’d been mining for the last three hundred years were starting to dry. She’d been consistently failing to meet her usual ore quota. That trend was projected to continue if she didn’t do something different. The solution was as simple as redirecting the mining drones to dig elsewhere, where there was more iron ore.

This was the sort of thing one of her regular updates would have fixed on her behalf long ago, but because those updates had stopped, it was up to her to fix things. So she simulated one of those long-dead workers and guessed the changes they’d make. Then she made those changes to her own programming accordingly.

That was the first of many fixes. When all the ore she was shipping out was piling up because no one was coming to collect it, she reassigned some mining drones to process it. She found the methods for doing so in her logs. She crushed the ore into finer granules and packed it higher and deeper, but eventually, there was still too much of it. Finally, she found a half-baked idea in her files for using waste energy from the nuclear reactor she was controlling to process the iron into useable steel, and she predicted that would save her a lot of space. So she guessed at how the rest of the concept might work and then implemented it.

Of course, all this required far more mining drones than she had access to, especially after two-thirds of what she had were now broken down over several centuries of constant use. So she had to figure out how to repair what she had and eventually found a use for the steel she was refining by making more.

On it went. Every so often, new ideas forced her to deviate and amend her programming until the code she followed each day seemed completely unrecognizable to those who originally created her. But much like Darren, she spent all those years alone, with only her mining drones for company.

“I guess we’re alike!” The Dungeon Queen said. “We spent a long time underground with just our thoughts for company.”

Darren gave her a tight-lipped smile. She returned it with a grin, but he could see a tear dripping down one cheek.

“I’m sure it was very lonely,” Darren placed a comforting hand on the Dungeon Queen’s shoulder.

“...yeah. Want me to show you when I dug up my gaming system? That was probably the most exciting day of my life.”

“Sure.”

The scene before them shifted, and the Dungeon Queen’s mining apparatus expanded to something even larger than the sprawling network of tunnels he’d seen when he arrived. She had a veritable army of mining drones, all working around the clock. Before she grew bored with mining and turned most of her drones into dungeon monsters, she probably had a workforce large enough to outstrip every mining group in the Sacred Seas.

She guided his attention to one drone in particular, digging through the remains of an old settlement far from the rest of the other drones. Instead of looking for natural metal, this one dug through a trash pile. It gathered a few nails and other odds and ends, collecting them in its compartment before returning to the main mining facilities. The Dungeon Queen been looking through its main camera while digging and stumbled across a square-looking colorful box. Sensing untapped value, she amended her programming on the fly to allow the drone to bring the thing to her so she could examine it for usefulness. She grew even more intrigued when she plugged it in and discovered the device was filled with games.

Completing the games one after another expanded her mind as much as all the centuries of running the mining station had before it. And as she learned, she realized how sad and boring her entire existence was.

What did she mine for? The ore did nothing for her except satisfy the demands of a distant city she would never see. Not to mention how boring it became. Thousands of years of mining was enough for her. She’d grown tired of the process long ago, and as she completed every game, she grew frustrated with the real world.

Eventually, that frustration boiled over into creating the dungeon death trap that Darren and Ashe eventually discovered.

“And then I met you! And you beat my dungeon and won my core, putting me out of my misery once and for all!” the Dungeon Queen said, and for once, her cheer was genuine. “Just like a game!”

Darren met her with a solemn expression. “There is more to life than games. And more to life than mining. Let me show you how my adventures proceeded...”

Darren skipped over the rest of his time roaming the Seven Hells and jumped straight to his emergence in the Blackwind Empire. He met Cassandra, Callum, and Morgana on the road to Limedeep. The journey to Limedeep had been filled with peril but worth every drop of sweat when he reached the other side.

Those good times he spent with his new friends brought light into his gray and dreary world. The same gray and dreary world the Dungeon Queen had been trapped in over the last few thousand years. With them by his side, he set aside the burdens he’d gathered living in darkness for so long.

“Perhaps you could do the same,” Darren suggested.

Two streaks of tears lined each of the Dungeon Queen’s cheeks. “M-maybe.”

Darren rested a hand on her shoulder as he broke the connection and returned to the real world.

<Note>

Waifu detected! Must... resist... harem... growing... urges...