Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 337 (Patreon)

Chapter 337 – Considerations

I chuckled as I looked on, watching Bargulg and his pets as they reacted to the gift I left them in the treasure chest. Sure, they’d taken the safest, least-interesting way to defeat the boss, but I couldn’t really fault them for that. The Lewd Uranium Slime Lord was dangerous enough that I’d left it at the peak of Tier 2, rather than bumping it to Tier 3.

And it wasn’t like they just blasted it in one go. They used up a lot of resources to deal with the slime. Resources that they were not going to be getting back anytime soon. Not until they got to a System Shop, at least. Getting ammunition and potions that were suitable for high Tier 2 people on Earth was not exactly easy, since the number of people in Tier 2 was maybe 10% of the population. That number would rise, eventually, but it wasn’t something that would happen quickly.

So, without a population of high Tier 2s or low Tier 3s to go into dungeons and hunt monsters of those kinds of levels, there wasn’t the supply chain to easily produce those kinds of materials, locally. Especially since most of the Tier 2s in the world were combat-focused individuals, rather than crafters. That made sense, since the easiest way to level up was to kill things, and crafters generally weren’t the types who wanted to go out risking life and limb. And they usually didn’t have the kind of skills you’d need to be effective in a fight.

Plus, it wasn’t like I didn’t gain anything from their fight. They were the first group to actually bring down one of the Lewd Uranium Slime Lords, after all. Back on Bluemountain, the Vinastran army tried attacking them, but succumbed to radiation poisoning before they could damage them enough to matter. A couple had perished during the dungeon wars with Iahab, but those didn’t count as a group of adventurers killing them. Seeing Bargulg and his pets go up against them gave me some solid combat data on just how resilient they were.

That said, I really ought to figure out something to do about that fight. If a group survived on the harder difficulty to get to this point, they deserved more of a challenge than just panic-shooting it until it stops moving. However, the problem was that the radiation would definitely kill anyone who got too close, and I didn’t want to just go straight to full on murdering people who weren’t on the Nightmare difficulty.

So, there were different options on how I could go about fixing that fight. The first option would be to include some kind of gimmick. Lure the boss into a certain position, pull the switch, and boom, either the boss dies, or its radiation gets sealed temporarily, or something like that. The problem was that a solution like that worked best in a defined boss room, where you could properly telegraph the gimmick, and be sure people actually had a chance of finding it. In the open desert, that was a lot harder to pull off.

I could fix that by having a defined arena for the boss encounter, of course. However, that would mean I would be putting a landmark in the middle of the desert. That was a problem, since half the challenge of the floor was that there was little in the way of landmarks, which meant it was possible to get lost in here.

The other option was to have some kind of item that would give people a fighting chance against the boss. A potion to temporarily make them immune to radiation would work, but then I’d need to advance the Lewd Uranium Slime Lord to Tier 3 to keep up with higher-leveled delvers, since much of the threat from the boss was due to its radioactive body. In terms of actual stats, it wasn’t that much more powerful than Captain Hentai or the Slime Emperor from the first couple floors.

Still, that sounded like it was on the right track. Something to reduce the threat. Maybe not full immunity, but reducing the damage and effects of radiation for, say, ten minutes? That would give a group time to drink the potion, fight the boss, and hopefully recover before the resistance went away. Yes, that would work.

Actually, it would do even better than just ‘work’. Most people didn’t know it, unless they did some high-level divinations, or knew where to look in the System Shop, but there was an interesting ability that ‘breeder’ type slimes had, once they got into the higher levels of Tier 1 and beyond. Hell, I hadn’t even known about it until I noticed one party who had a woman get singularly unlucky enough to get taken by Captain Hentai, one of the Slime Lords on Floor 2, and the Slime Emperor, all in the same run. She hadn’t gotten cleansed, since their medic didn’t have that kind of magic, and they knew they had twenty-four hours to try and push a bit further in the dungeon before escaping to the surface.

However, in the encounters with the normal Slime Lord and the Slime Emperor, I noticed that the woman was not affected by the paralysis effect of the slimes’ oozy bodies. That prompted me to do a bit of research, and I found an interesting fact. Once a breeder slime bred a target, that target got certain temporary immunities, at least until the spawn either was born, or was cleansed by healing magic. The type of immunity changed based on the type of slime, naturally, but generally the immunity made it so that the individual was unbothered by the slime’s ‘contact’ effects.

It made sense, when you thought about it. While slimes primarily existed because of magic, they were still living creatures, and living creatures try to reproduce, and survive. So, a Poison Slime that bred someone, only for them to die from poison before their progeny were born? That was a waste, and those slimes would likely die out. Having the host be immune to poison temporarily was a good way to ensure that they lived long enough to give birth.

Of course, there wasn’t much I could do to use that, with radiation. I wasn’t planning on having radiation slimes being a common part of the dungeon. That would be a nightmare to deal with.

I decided to set things up so that, on this difficulty mode, a pedestal would spawn in next to the entry portal when people came to the floor, with a set of radiation resistance potions, one for each creature. That way, melee would not be completely helpless, and the party could actually get more of a proper boss fight. And if they still just kept shooting it from a distance, well, the rewards they got would reflect that. A single copper piece as loot after a boss fight would show my displeasure quite effectively.

That was all the tinkering with the floor I wanted to do right now. Sure, I could meddle to my heart’s content, but if I got too caught up in working out every possible flaw, then I’d probably end up either going mad, or getting a vengeful streak against my ‘visitors’ when they did things I didn’t expect. That was how running a dungeon became less entertainment, and more work.

No, it was best to leave things lie, for now. Troubleshooting actual problems, now that I was getting some good combat data on the higher difficulty level, was one thing. Trying for perfection was something else, entirely. Actual perfection was impossible, especially when you had people involved in the process. This was a dungeon, not a stage play or a painting. They were fighting for their lives, not playing out the plot of a book. If I didn’t respect that, then, eventually, people would stop coming to my halls, and I’d be left with nothing.

Looking back to my pilgrims, I saw that they were carefully making their way across the desert. They were all working to avoid stepping in any kind of regular rhythm, which would attract the boss’s attention. I still wasn’t sure how they planned to fight my Shai-hulud, but I had no doubt that they were working on a plan, based on everything they’d heard about the beast so far.

Suddenly, one of my alerts went off. Not the critical ones, which let me know that something dire was happening, but the ones that were just there to get my attention. This one indicated I had a message request coming in through the GodNet. Since good things never happened when other gods reached out to talk to me, I was obviously a little concerned.

Private Chat between Pleasurable Domination and Murphy open.

Murphy: Thank you for your quick response to my message request, Kuronoth.

Pleasurable Domination: Well, you were polite enough about it, and I haven’t ever had problems with you, so I saw no reason to disrespect you by ignoring the request. I am curious about why you’d reach out to me all of a sudden, though. Our domains only touch in the more symbolic sense, after all.

Murphy: Yes, since I am the God of Unforeseen Consequences and Random Misfortune, and both can strike down individuals in a heartbeat when they are in the midst of a dangerous situation, like a dungeon.

Pleasurable Domination: Exactly. So, did something happen?

Murphy: Not yet, but one of my followers is about to set up and consecrate a shrine to me in that dungeon town you call Swamptown. Since that is within your influence, and that of the dungeon, I didn’t want you to get a nasty surprise, or think that I was trying to cause trouble.

Pleasurable Domination: Ah, thank you for the heads up. Fortunately, shrines put outside the dungeon entrance but within the dungeon’s sphere of influence do not force the dungeon to incorporate that god into the dungeon, as it would if the shrine were made inside the dungeon.

Murphy: Putting a shrine in a dungeon forces a connection between that dungeon and the god it is dedicated to?

Pleasurable Domination: Yeah, reasons for it go way back, to some long-forgotten war elsewhere in the galaxy. The dungeon contract used in the Forbidden Chambers of Exotic Pleasures dungeon will prevent anyone but the dungeon from putting shrines to any gods in there, so that isn’t a big worry. However, dungeons that don’t have a contract helping to protect them would take anyone trying to make a shrine in the dungeon as an extreme hostile, to be driven out or destroyed by whatever means necessary.

Murphy: So, such retribution falls out of the realm of Unforeseen Consequences, and more along the lines of Justice Done.

Pleasurable Domination: Exactly. Frankly, most people aren’t stupid enough to go trying to pull stuff like that, but cultists are cultists for a reason. The only time they’d ever have a chance of really pulling it off is with a dungeon that is not yet old enough to properly be awake. And that would likely have them get in trouble with a lot of people, both mortals and otherwise.

Murphy: Understood. I’ll be sure to pass that along to my people. Though, I have to say, you’re a lot more understanding about these kinds of things than people on GodNet led me to believe that you’d be.

Pleasurable Domination: Well, the people on GodNet are mostly just used to me causing a bit of chaos with the way humans are upsetting the established order of things. I’m the one at the center of a lot of it, since my worship is spreading out in the galaxy faster than some of the others, and incorporating dungeons, which were mostly left alone by gods up until this point. I don’t typically cause trouble for anyone who doesn’t come looking for it.

Murphy: Even with the Bluemountain stuff?

Pleasurable Domination: The stuff on Bluemountain started because Pofmis lost the plot, and started letting her followers go power mad on their righteous crusade. I didn’t get involved until some of my followers on the planet decided that they had had enough, and looked into how they could unseat the Theocracy that was running things. As for the resolution of things, well, Pofmis brought that on herself.

Murphy: I understand that, but you have a reputation for causing almost as much chaos as I do. Maybe more.

Pleasurable Domination: I’ll keep that in mind for the future. Anything else?

Murphy: No, I’m good. I’ll just go and remind my follower not to act out in the dungeon.

Pleasurable Domination: Sounds good.