Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 347 (Patreon)

The words did not word easily enough, so it is about late.

Chapter 347 – Khav-Srokzas

For the eighteenth floor, I created a huge, city-sized cavern. Well, not quite city-sized. It certainly looked that large, from the landing where the portal set you, but part of that was just magic making things look bigger than they were. I mean, the space was about a kilometer high and four across, so it was a bit smaller than Manhattan, and Manhattan was a mere fraction of New York City, especially when you added the metropolitan area and urban sprawl in.

However, for a space built underground? It was fucking huge. The centerpiece of the cavern was a giant floor-to-ceiling column of stone. For those who could see in the infrared spectrum, a band of heat could be seen slowly rising and falling along the column. This served the same role as clock-tower like Big Ben, showing off the time to anyone who could see it. The band of heat reached the roof at noon, and returned to the ground at midnight, enchantments ensuring that it kept a normal pace.

From the ledge the ‘entrance’ portal was on, it was easy to see that there was little, if any, free space on the ground in the city, as one might expect. The part that would have many people questioning things was how there were many buildings descending from the cavern ceiling, as well. At some points, the buildings almost touched those below. In others, it looked like the two buildings had almost grown into each other, like a stalagmite and stalactite becoming a solid piece of stone. Everything was done in the same style of architecture as Khav-Szarol, obviously.

This was the underground city of Khav-Srokzas, inhabited by the Dogik and their slaves. I decided to set up a series of noble houses that controlled the city. Most of it was just set dressing for different groups, but it would help continue the faction war from before, and lay the groundwork for what I had planned next.

The main goal of this floor was to work your way from this portal to the one that would let you advance further into the dungeon. However, this was a city, and you couldn’t just go murdering your way through it, or you’d get overwhelmed. No, to get through the city, you had to at least try to be stealthy, or you needed connections.

This floor wasn’t one that you could just complete in a few hours of work. I fully intended this floor to be an experience that would have teams actually staying on this floor for a while, as they worked their way through the Lower City, the part on the ground. Of course, with an entire city to work through, there would be opportunities beyond simple combat, which could give people all kinds of options.

Hmm. Another potential problem. Just getting through the first fifteen floors was already the work of two to three days, even for the groups that were experienced, and knew what they were doing. If they had to devote that kind of time each trip through the dungeon, then that would seriously hamper how many people were going to try and advance in my halls. But I still wanted to force people to experience the early floors more than once, before just jumping to the ‘new content’.

I could set up a limited-access ‘checkpoint’, that could bring someone directly to the 18th floor entrance. Have a set of things that needed to happen to use it. But what criteria did I use that wouldn’t seem overly punititive?

No, wait. Working through the factions and intrigues of the Lower City would give me an opportunity. I had the [Dungeon Quests] skill, after all. I could have the different mobs give hunting or gathering quests which would require going through the early floors again. Make it so that the individual with the quest had to obtain the materials or kill the creatures themselves, and it would force them to go through the early dungeon again, instead of skipping to the checkpoint.

Now, for the checkpoint itself, obviously the first restriction would be that everyone in your party had to have reached the checkpoint. One new person, and you needed to go through the whole thing again. No using someone who already had the key to skip the first levels.

The second requirement, I decided, would be a Tier lock. The key needed to use the skip would only be available to those who were in Tier 2 or higher when they reached the floor. Now, you didn’t need to be Tier 2 to reach the eighteenth floor, but until you were Tier 2, you’d be going through every floor to return there. That would encourage people to focus on levelling up, and would encourage those who planned to make their way to the floor to already be in Tier 2, or close to it, when they entered the dungeon.

That ought to make the adventurers self-select into ‘rookie’ and ‘seasoned’ groups. It also meant that I could keep the early floors mostly the same, since they were for ‘rookies’, and focus my attention on improving the experience for the floors past the skip. The early floors would let the new adventurers grow, while the later ones would challenge veterans. And, considering my later plans, I wanted more veterans in my dungeon.

With that set in my mind, I went back to considering the floor, and its plans. The Lower City, where the adventurers were going to be focused right now, needed to have some reason why people couldn’t just get to the exit. The simple way of doing that was to have the exit be in a fort, since it led into an area with ‘hostile monsters’ or some such. But the fort was as much to restrict access as protect the city, so people couldn’t get in so easily. Which is why the escaped slaves all went to the other portal, back to the previous floors.

There were three main ways into the fort. The first was obviously stealth. If your team had the stealth skills to manage breaking into a secured fortress and avoid detection while finding the portal and securing the key to open it? You deserved to be able to do that. Of course, if you messed up, then you’d probably be using escape charms, or getting thrown in prison, if you were lucky.

The second way into the fort was through seduction, or some other way of talking your way through the gate. That, naturally, was not something you could easily do, and the penalties for failure would be just as severe as the ones for trying to stealth your way in, though with more risk of enslavement than outright death, instead of the other way around.

The safest, easiest way to get into the fort was to legitimately be allowed in. However, doing that required that you spend the time building your rep with one of the factions of the city to convince them to give you a token that would allow you to pass by the guards, and enter the portal heading onwards. Which was where the factions from the previous floor would come into play.

For those who sided with Shatterchain, they would be able to get introductions to one of a few subversive factions in the city. The easiest to contact would be Freedom Trail, an underground railroad that helped get escaped slaves out of the city. This faction wouldn’t be able to get you into the fort, obviously, but working with them was necessary to make contact with one of the two factions that might be able to help you out.

First of these were the Shadow Guilds, so called because they controlled the shadowy trades, even if they were open secrets in the city. The Thieves Guild and the Assassins Guild were both two of the major players in the city. Sure, not all pickpockets were associated with the guild, just like all hired murderers weren’t with the assassins. They were, however, where the best of either profession could be found. They also had resources, training, and access to special shops, just for their kind of business, and served as a kind of neutral ground to meet with different gangs. Either one of them had the contacts to either forge a pass to the fort, or wrangle a legit one. However, neither were willing to go through the risk (or expense) for a stranger, which meant you needed to earn their respect.

For groups that didn’t have the subtlety required for the Guilds, there was still the option of the Adventurer’s Guild. Like the Guild they were familiar with, they could find jobs that would pay decent rewards here. Eventually, once they proved themselves, they might qualify for jobs that would take them out, through the fort. There was also a chance that they could earn an introduction to one of the noble houses, and get a foot in the door that way. However, the City Guard kept a sharp watch on the guild, to keep its members from adding to the crime in the city, and anyone openly supporting the Freedom Trail was likely to get thrown in prison.

On the other side of the faction divide, those who joined with Khav-Szarol and the Slavers would find that they had an easier time of things, initially. Anyone who made it through would have an introduction to the Slavers Guild and the Merchants Guild, naturally, as well as being able to join the Adventurers Guild, but they also got other benefits. Depending on the talents they showed, or how much they impressed the people in Khav-Szarol, they might get introductions to the City Guard, or the different Academies, such as the one for Mages, or the one for Warriors, to say nothing of the Crafter Academy. All of these groups, if impressed, would offer the adventurers a way through the fort.

Of course, they also had other benefits. Joining the City Guard gave you steady work, and reasonably steady XP. The Academies could teach you spells, make new skills available to you, and even allow you to change or alter your class, possibly even your race! And, of course, the Slavers and Merchants Guilds offered you access to exclusive shops, the ability to peruse the ‘secret’ lists at normal shops, and possibly even discounts on purchases. And there was always the chance of earning an introduction to one of the noble houses, as well.

However, all of those benefits only allowed the adventurers to make their way around the Lower City, on the floor of the cavern, where even the people in charge were from minor houses, or commoners. Of them, only the Academies offered an easy ‘official’ route to the Upper City. You just had to perform well enough in the classes or occasional competitions to get scouted by one of the noble houses. Easy, right?

Sure, in theory, anyone could go from the Lower City to the Upper City. It wasn’t like there were invisible walls stopping people, after all. Six great elevators connected the upper and lower halves of the city, allowing people to move back and forth between them. However, guards at both ends of the elevator checked identification carefully, to ensure that anyone who came to the Upper City had reason to be there. If you wanted to avoid that, then you had to climb one of the towers that met (or almost met) the descending towers from the Upper City. Naturally, those towers were all the property of important people and groups, who did not allow interlopers to pass freely. Thus, the most common way someone from the Lower City got to the Upper City was by pledging themselves to one of the Great Houses, and moving to their section of the Upper City.

Of course, it wasn’t necessary to get to the Upper City to secure a means of leaving the floor. While the Upper City did have its own portal to the next floor (also with controlled access), its main appeal was that the nobles of the Great Houses liked to play noble games, which often needed people who were either expendable, or had a deniable relationship, to do the shadowy work behind the scenes. All the guilds, both the open ones and the Shadow Guilds, had separate branches in the Upper City, and the highest ratings in the Lower City allowed you to barely qualify as a new recruit for the guilds of the Upper City. However, they pay the Great Houses offered for their jobs was equivalent to their stature, though the difficulty ran from the simple to horrifically deadly.

The pay offered was higher, but so were the costs of living. However, you could find more skilled crafters and better quality items in the shops of the Upper City, as they focused their attention on well-made pieces, often custom-made to fit their wielder, rather than mass production of goods that were better known for sturdiness than anything else. Finding the shops in the Upper City and availing oneself of the gear options there was key in readying oneself for the threats they would eventually face on the nineteenth floor.

Or for the Raid that I was planning.