Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 205 (Patreon)

Chapter 205 – Meanwhile

(Bridge, Pure Light of Freedom’s Blessing, Lunar Orbit)

By Captain Arculf Goold’s assessment, the attitude aboard the Pure Light of Freedom’s Blessing was… not good.

That was something of an understatement, of course. The entire Golden Host had departed the Temple Fleet, and descended upon the little primitive world. It was supposed to be a simple mission. Just go and purge the heretics and infidels who had desecrated the image of their goddess.

The Golden Host had cleared out an area of the swamp outside the dungeon hosting the heresy. That much was fine. It was something they had done any number of times, on worlds without adequate starport facilities. Unfortunately, everything had gone downhill from there.

Shortly after the Golden Host had moved into the dungeon town, the entire fleet had received word that they had been declared Anathema to a whole suite of gods. Gods that none of them had even heard of before. The only word they had from the ground before they entered the Dungeon was that the Demon of the Dungeon had created a Dungeon Law that meant the Host was breaking into squads.

They hadn’t heard anything since then, at least not from their people. That was to be expected, since dungeons blocking long-range communications was a fairly common thing. But it should not have taken so long to clear out a dungeon that had only been in existence for less than a galactic standard year, not with the strength of the members of the Golden Host!

Of course, they had not been able to fully concentrate on their warriors and whatever challenges they were facing, because the local godless barbarians were angered about the Host clearing a landing space! They were trying to claim damages due to the destruction of a miserable piece of swamp! Claiming damages from a Temple, much less a Temple Fleet? Absurd!

But the barbarians were not content to merely insult the Church with their demands. They actually sent soldiers into the shuttles on the ground! Their crews were all captured or slain, and these ‘humans’ even had the gall to claim that the shuttles were going to be held as ‘collateral’, and would be forfeited if the Temple Fleet did not pay for doing them the favor of ridding the country of a piece of worthless swamp!

To add further insult to injury, the Ambassadors sent by the Federation were backing the locals, as the shuttles had clearly fired on what was property of the government. Apparently, the locals believed that any land that didn’t expressly belong to an individual or corporation belonged to the government as a whole, no matter what the System might say. And the Ambassadors were backing them up on such nonsense! They were even helping the country draft formal injunctions against the Church!

The very idea of something like that was infuriating. No government could bind the Church of Pofmis, Goddess of Freedom! Her devout went wherever their duty took them, and anyone who tried to hinder them had better get out of the way, or be prepared to fall as a sacrifice to liberty. It was their divine duty to bring freedom to all people, by force, if necessary.

Captain Goold was not worried about his fleet being in any danger, of course. There were only a handful of ships in the system that even had military grade weapons, and they were all single Shrine ships of other gods. Even if the primitives managed to turn on the shuttles, there was no way they could pose a danger to his ships.

However, one did not get to be a captain of a Temple ship of the Holy Fleet of Pofmis by being a fool. There were no forces here that could stop him, this much was true. But there were plenty of other powers in the galaxy, ones that would love for an excuse to band together and snuff out the force that had brought down those who would bring freedom to the people. Even some of the people they had freed had been convinced to hate them, because of the fact that some collateral damage was necessary in spreading freedom and civilization to barbarians.

No, he could not simply lay waste to this world and be done with it, much as he wanted to.

But keeping that line of thought going was… depressing, at best. So, he had focused his crew’s attention on other things. That was both good and bad. Good, because it allowed them to distract themselves with more mundane tasks, like learning about the planet below them, and its peoples. Bad, because several members of the crew were watching when a transmission came through the System, showing a streaming video of the Crusader-Champion and her squad.

It was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. The Demon of the Dungeon had used the Dungeon Laws to create a scenario deliberately designed to denigrate and humiliate the Pofmisians as much as possible, with the only alternative being to commit heresy and throw aside their allegiances. No member of the Golden Host would ever consider such a thing, of course, no matter what hell they were forced to endure, and so they had to watch as the Champion faced trial after trial, and her squad lost more members in the service of the Goddess.

Finally, they had witnessed in rapt attention as the Crusader-Champion had won her way into the Arena on the final floor of the Dungeon. They had seen as she dispatched former sisters in the faith who had been chained and corrupted by the Demon. And they saw when the Champion had approached the fallen heretic, only for the Demon himself to intervene.

When Champion Belkis used the Ultimate Sanction upon the Demon, the entire bridge had cheered, for no demon could survive such a spell. The System itself would not allow it. And then horror struck. The Demon still stood!

“How?” That was the question on their lips. The words the Demon spoke to the Champion were hushed, as the Demon’s voice overrode it in commentary, explaining to those watching about the spell’s intended effects. Such a thing was impossible for most, but a Dungeon Master would be used to splitting their attention between different instances, different copies of themselves. So, they did not know what the Demon said when he spoke to the dying Champion.

Then, there was one last insult. With the camera focused to show a statue of the Goddess in chains clearly in the background. the Demon ripped the soul from the Champion, and enslaved her, before their very eyes. He did not even give her the dignity of a martyr’s death!

The Temple fleet was in disarray. The Golden Host was gone, and now the Champion had been worse than slain. And according to his magitechnicians, the signal had not just been put on the human Internet for all to see, but it had been transmitted through the System, freely placed on every communications network within the System’s reach, and shown directly to any member of the Church of Pofmis who wasn’t in the Dungeon. The potential damage from this was impossible to calculate.

“Captain?”

Captain Goold looked over to his first officer, a stouthearted Kril male by the name of Rustrim Frostshield, and sighed. “Let me guess. More bad news, Vice-Captain?”

Frostshield shook his head. “Normally, I would say no, but given how everything else has gone in this Pofmis-damned system, I can’t say for certain. The Diviners sensed the presence of a strong concentration of mana on the nearby moon. A scan of the area found that there was some kind of dome on the moon’s surface.”

Goold took a breath. This could be a chance to distract the crew from the disastrous events they’d just witnessed. “Tell me more.”

(US Military Recruitment Station, Swamptown)

The recruitment office in Swamptown had been set up in the first days of the impromptu town’s establishment, serving as both an unofficial liaison office to the Adventurer’s Guild next door and a barracks where troops who were on specialized training, either doing land nav through the swamps or entering the dungeon, could be billeted temporarily. Thankfully, what would normally have been a pretty shit posting (being in the swamp, and all) had become much more bearable once the portals went in. It allowed for both weekend liberties in Miami, and for more creature comforts that might be troublesome to obtain in the swamp to more easily be brought out. Morale amongst the small staff was the highest it had been in months.

And then some damn alien church types went and burned out a section of the swamp. Didn’t even bother asking, just went and did it, so they could park their ships there, and march a fucking army across US soil. Uncle Sam was none too pleased, and Lieutenant Grant, the man in charge of this station, was right there with him. There are things that just plain aren’t done!

So, Barry Grant wasn’t surprised when he heard that some troops from the base in Miami were going out into the swamp to have a ‘discussion’ with the aliens about why you shouldn’t fuck around with the US. He was slightly surprised when he heard that the pilots and techs that had been left with their craft tried to attack the soldiers, though. Fortunately, the Marines were all equipped with the ‘System-approved’ firearms.

If there was one thing that they had learned from those poor bastards who had gone through the Dungeon a couple times, it was that the typical shield spell was no match for semi-automatic fire. The aliens got to learn that fact real quick when they decided to lob a spell at the Marines. Marines didn’t take kindly to people trying to kill them, after all.

Now, the Marine Corps had possession of a bunch of shuttles and no idea what to do with them. Any trucks big enough to haul the things back to someplace where they could be properly studied were NOT going to make it that far into the swamp. And there was no way you were getting a helicopter to be able to lift those heavy ass things.

Sure, the ideal thing would be to fly them all to Area 51, or some other such place. But there was the slight issue of no one knowing how to turn the damn things on, much less fly them. And no one wanted to accidentally hit a self-destruct or suicide device that the religious nuts might have built into the things.

The Colonel in the field was about to order them to make camp and set up a perimeter defense, so that they could defend their captures against both the monsters in the swamp, and any attempt to retake them by their fellows, while they called back to base to have some white coats and engineers come out to study them in place. That’s when one of the grunts went and had a brain wave, and, in an effort to skip the wonders of sleeping in the swamp, shared his bright idea with his sergeant. “Why not ask the Demon for help?”

Since no one wanted to sleep in the swamp, that idea got passed up the chain REAL fast, and then got booted over to the Recruiting Office in Swamptown, as they were literally right outside the dungeon. Which meant that it had eventually wound up in his lap. Because of course it did.

With that thought in mind, Lieutenant Barry Grant walked down the road, which had recently been paved in concrete, to the dungeon. He’d never actually gone into the dungeon before. He didn’t have a team, after all, and he sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to try it solo. No, he’d wait until he had a team of honest to god warfighters with him before he went and played around in a hole in the ground that was dead set on fucking and killing you, maybe not in that order.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to go in past the ‘reception hall’. Walking up to a desk manned by a human woman that he was told was actually a dungeon recreation of someone who died in the dungeon over a year ago, he took a breath. “Missy, maybe you can get your boss on the line. Uncle Sam would like to make a bargain with him.”