Lewd Dungeon Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Chapter 3 – First Contact

When I had my monsters placed, and had recovered the MP I’d spent on them, I gathered my thoughts and pushed up from my ‘entry hall’. I didn’t want to tip people off to the nature of my dungeon too soon, so I left the path up as a steep ramp switching back twice as it went to the surface. It was something even animals would be able to handle without too much trouble, but the loose soil on the switchbacks could cause someone to slip and fall if they weren’t careful. Above the entrance I formed a simple hut made of clay, and reinforced to the same degree as my dungeon walls. I had no idea how far I was from civilization, a landmark would help draw people to me, I thought.

Opening my dungeon for the first time was a strange experience. It was like opening up a room that had a big air pressure difference, but it wasn’t air, it was mana. My base MP regen improved from WIS * .1 per hour to WIS * 1.5 per hour, which meant for me it was WIS * 3 per hour. Just from mixing in the MP I got from that of the outside world. Crazy, but I wasn’t complaining.

I was immediately confronted by a problem. While I could see anything that happened inside my dungeon, I had no way of gathering information on what was going on outside my borders. That was unacceptable. I needed to know what my prey was thinking so I could properly prepare for it! Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I was forced to wait, kill anyone that came in, and see if that gave me any options.

<Adventurer POV>

“Come on, Dana! It can’t be much further now. Everyone within two miles felt the mana pulse. It has to be a dungeon that just opened!”

The adventurer was in his early thirties. Average height, brown hair, and in general not bad looking, if he did say so himself. Used to be, you would see him wearing a suit and tie, with dress shoes. But then the apocalypse happened. Well, maybe not the apocalypse, since life went on, but it sure felt like it. These last three months were basically hell on earth.

It had started with the blue screens, telling them that the SYSTEM was coming online. He had been an agent at the FBI at the time, relegated into a little office in the basement that was in charge of running down reports on the ‘things that went bump in the night’. The fact that the screens all but told him that Roswell was real, and it really was aliens, had caused him to celebrate the fact for a week straight, even with the changes going on.

The population had dropped from 7.6 billion to somewhere like 4.5 billion worldwide, almost overnight. Some of it was due to rapid environmental changes (Los Angeles had been sunk into the sea when the a Magnitude 9.8 quake sent the whole city sliding into the Pacific), and there had been a fair share of looting and rioting as people freaked out, but the biggest problem was the monsters. An outbreak of zombies had started in Amarillo, Texas, and though it had been contained eventually, the panhandle in Texas was essentially devoid of human life now. And that was only one such incident. And that’s to say nothing of the Dragon that made Beijing its home.

Making the situation more difficult is that there was a clear difference between SYSTEM weapons and armor and the stuff they had had before. A simple iron sword with some leather armor might work better, especially against some monsters, than SWAT armor with a non-SYSTEM assault rifle. Of course, people in the SYSTEM could make weapons, but to be worth anything they had to be hand-assembled. Mass-produced weapons were little better than wall hangers, but a 1911 machined by someone with the Weaponsmith skill, or one ‘reconditioned’ by someone with the Armorer skill, would be far more effective than a modern handgun made pre-SYSTEM. Ammunition fared OK with the transition, but if someone with the appropriate skill made the ammunition, it always did more damage, and sometimes had extra effects depending on what type it was.

All of that was expensive, since people were still working out what the new ‘normal’ was, while trying not to die. The major world governments were struggling to keep things together. Outside of the first world and some Asian countries, though, the world was in chaos. Africa was, well, Africa. Not much had changed there, it just got worse. Australia, already used to being hostile to all life, barely noticed the change, except to say that SYSTEM-enhanced beer was much better than it was before. That the Irish and Germans all agreed with the Australians on something related to beer was little short of amazing.

At any rate, he was here, now, on the outskirts of Miami, wearing leather armor and boots, with a sword at his side, because there had been a disturbance a couple days ago, with people feeling a pulse of mana. This usually meant that a new dungeon had opened, if what information they’d been able to get from the SYSTEM was correct, but there were very few dungeons in the US, and none of them had opened so close to a city. He had jumped at the chance to be the first to explore a dungeon. His partner was less enthused. The Ranger class he had taken was well-suited to tracking down mysteries.

“Fox, slow down! I know you’re excited that you’ve been right about aliens and all the ‘bump in the night’ stuff you’ve investigated over the years at the Bureau, but dungeons are supposed to be dangerous.”

His partner was dressed in cloth robes, hiked up around her waist. No one knew why the cloth robes worked better for certain classes than normal clothes, but they did. His partner was a Wizard, and approached this new field of magic like a science. Brushing her red hair out of her face, she trudged along after him, leaning on her staff to help her through the marshy terrain, since she didn’t have a ranger’s ability to reduce the effect of rough terrain on her speed.

Up ahead, Fox called out with a “Woot!” and charged ahead, ignoring her in his excitement. They’d been walking through the marsh instead of taking a helicopter because they were all getting serviced, either repairing damage from flying monsters, or getting reconditioned so they could actually stand up to the SYSTEM equivalent of angry pigeons without taking damage. So far, Air Force One was the only passenger jet fully reconditioned to be SYSTEM compatible. They’d used a reconditioned jeep to get as close as they could, but didn’t want to risk the vehicle in the middle of the swamps.

When Dana found her partner again, he was standing in front of what was… a clay hut of some kind? Not very imaginative, but it had a deceptive simplicity to it, being a perfect circle and having a domed roof, without any sign of a seam or break except for the single doorway leading into the hut. It was possible something like this had been made by human hands, especially with the SYSTEM, but this was more like someone had ‘willed’ the clay to take this shape, like she’d seen some Earth-element mages doing.

With Dana at his side, Fox entered the hut, and was surprised by what he saw. There were benches along the side of the hut, formed out of the wall itself, but otherwise the room was empty. But what was surprising was that the room was dry. Given that they were in the middle of the Everglades (his GPS said they were near Whitewater Bay), this room should be damp, at least from the humidity outside, to say nothing of swamp creatures venturing inside. And he could smell wetness below, as well. But in here it was dry, and comfortable. Inviting, even.

Dana looked at the ramp leading down into a hole in the center of the room. “Well, you were right, Fox. There’s a dungeon down there. I can sense the mana flows clearly now. This shelter is clearly the entrance to the dungeon. Probably designed so that adventurers can rest and recover after their journey, or after finishing the dungeon. But why? The other dungeons in the US are not like this.”

“Well, the Avignon dungeon in France is supposed to have something like this. And the Mount Cetatea dungeon…”

“Was probably influenced by local folklore, since it has taken over Poenari Citadel. And the Avignon dungeon is in a city, so the people there probably helped shape the dungeon.”

“So you’re saying people made this? Out in the middle of the Everglades?”

“What, don’t tell me you think a newly formed dungeon could make something like this!”

“Well, we may as well have a look, yeah?”

“Fine. But be careful. We don’t have any backup here.”

“Don’t worry. I left directions on where we were going at the FBI office, so if we’re missing for more than a day or two they’ll know where to look.”

Still grumbling, the redheaded adventurer followed her partner down the ramp into the dungeon.

<Dungeon POV>

Since opening my dungeon, I’d found several local creatures had made their way inside, drawn by my mana, no doubt. My vines and slimes had killed the snakes, rats, and a few birds, and one alligator. Being basic creatures, they didn’t give me much in the way of XP or Anima, but quantity has a quality all its own, as they say. I had already earned 10 Anima and 30 XP from the twenty or so animals I’d ‘eaten’. The alligator was 5 Anima and 10 XP all on its own, so clearly killing bigger and stronger things gave me better rewards. I honored the alligator by spawning a special version of it in the middle of the swamp area to serve as an additional challenge.

Now, I sensed two people entering my entrance hut. Their conversation amused me, since it seemed they were honest to goodness feds, despite being dressed like they were something out of a fantasy story. But then again, I was a dungeon core, making slimes and plants do my bidding, so I couldn’t really complain too much.

They were a pretty standard pair. One melee, one magic. Could have a bit better balance, if they had a couple more people, but for a two-person party, that wasn’t bad. Whether it would help them in my dungeon was another question entirely. The ranger led the way once they got to the bottom of the entrance stairs, and looked around at the swamp. The two clearly had thoughts about my dungeon, that much I could see just from the way their eyes looked at eachother, but I was only slightly disappointed that their training kept them from saying it out loud. Trained people would provide a better test for my dungeon, but I really wanted some feedback on my hard work, damnit!

The melee type clearly was some kind of woodsman or ranger, since he was able to start picking a path out of the marshy land, keeping them from falling into any of the deeper water. When he saw the first slime, he called out to his partner, who uttered an incantation, after which the man’s sword was covered in a soft light. My magic knowledge was enough that I recognized it as a spell which provided a magic coating to weapons, allowing blades to attack slimes normally, and keeping them from dissolving as quickly. My estimation of these two went up. This was going to be a decent test, it seemed.