Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 231 (Patreon)

Chapter 231 – Plea

I was minding my own business, just putting a few people through the Breeding Halls. Nothing major, just a party out of New York that cut a deal to get out of a nasty situation they’d found themselves in on the eleventh floor. They got too close to some of the curse slimes, and managed to get one of the nastier curses. Namely, the one that disabled magic items.

They realized that they weren’t going to be able to fight the boss in that state, but crossing back to the floor’s entrance without their gear wasn’t going to be easy, either. And with magic items not working for them, that meant that their escape tokens weren’t going to work. Realizing that they were screwed, they called out to me, asking for a deal.

I happily obliged, of course. I’m always willing to make a deal, everyone knew that. And, since these people had been playing by the rules, and hadn’t done anything to annoy me, I didn’t make the price too high. They just each needed to spend an hour in the breeding halls, and I’d drop them at the dungeon’s entrance. Simple, really.

The party was only too eager to accept. After all, an hour getting fucked by monsters was a lot better than death, or some of the worse fates that could happen in the dungeon. Seemed that their dungeons up in NYC weren’t as forgiving as I was, so they were pleased for the change.

That was something I’d been seeing more of, since the portals went in. A lot of parties from other parts of the country (and now around the world), had started coming to Swamptown to test my dungeon. But they weren’t coming to try and clear my dungeon, or anything. No, it was something a bit baser.

They were sex tourists. Like those businessmen who, before the Apocalypse, would take trips to East Asian countries like Thailand to go on a whirlwind tour of the gogo bars and find out how many girls they could fuck for $100 a day, they came to my dungeon not because of the materials they could get or the magic items I could provide, but because they wanted the thrill of kinky dungeon monster sex. They came to my dungeon because they heard it was some of the hottest sex available.

And it wasn’t just men. The ratio of men to women in Swamptown had always been an issue before. Most of the local adventurers were men. Part of that was due to the fact that men were more likely to fall into the role of people who went out and hunted monsters for a living. Oh, sure, the women who did it were just as skilled as the men, and both Magic and the System bridged the gap between genders, but the desire to go out and kill monsters for sport and resources wasn’t really something that most Miami ladies were up for.

Then, you had the nature of my dungeon. Now, Miami might not be the most repressed part of Florida, when it comes to sex, but there was definitely a strong Catholic presence there, and they tended to frown upon wanton acts of perversity. And the type of local women who were likely to become adventurers were also the type that hated being objectified, or treated like sex dolls, so my dungeon was galling, to say the least, for them.

However, that didn’t mean that all women were opposed. Some were quite open to the idea. Admittedly, the overlap of women excited by the idea of being treated like a sex slave and those with the skills and drive to become an adventurer was fairly small, but it was there.

That had caused a shift in the population of Swamptown. Before, the female adventurers had basically numbered one for every ten men, which made forming stable parties difficult, especially when some women banded together in all-female parties, like the Valkyries did before they fell into my clutches. Now, however, the ratio was moving closer to one in three. Men still outnumbered the women, sure, but there were far more women in Swamptown than there used to be.

This party had been one of three men and two women, out of Texas. They were one of the parties that came less for clearing floors and more for freaky dungeon sex. Having willing ‘victims’ changed several of the fights in the dungeon, which made it fun for me to track their progress. Seeing the two women offer themselves to the Slime Emperor while the men took it down was a fun fight to watch. And, by the women’s expressions, they were pretty much in heaven the whole time.

That was just one of dozens of teams that rotated through Swamptown. Some became regulars, and others did not. A couple teams I noticed had one or two core members, and the rest of the team would be different each time.

I knew my dungeon wasn’t universally loved. The adventurers of Miami and Swamptown were basically getting corrupted by my influence, but those outside my area weren’t always keen to come and pay a visit. A dungeon where you might get violently raped to death by a monster didn’t exactly have universal appeal.

However, I didn’t need universal appeal. It was just like this author I read, before the Apocalypse. He wrote stories about supervillains. Not antiheroes, vigilantes, or ‘misunderstood’ villains, but actual bad guys who did bad things for fun and profit. They were all over the top and gloriously overpowered, in their own ways. Pure power fantasy stuff.

Now, that isn’t the kind of thing that was going to show up on any top 100 lists. Most people want the happy story, with the good hero who rides in with shining armor and rescues the girl, and is just generally a role model for everyone. But the author got himself a following, and apparently made pretty good money, because ‘most people’ is not ‘everyone’. There’s always going to people who want to dabble in the darker side of things.

It was the same thing with my dungeon. Sure, monsters and tentacles and all of that might only tickle the urges of 1% of the population, but when the whole world could get to you? Even 1% of the roughly five billion people left alive, worldwide, was still about fifty million people who would be interested in what I had to offer.

Plenty to sustain me, and my growth.

And that was only considering the dungeon side of things. I was more than ‘just’ a dungeon, after all. I was walking the path of divinity, and the System recognized me as a minor god already. Very minor, sure. Just barely bigger than a demigod, but it still recognized me as a god.

Being a god came with a bunch of perks. I got powers that a dungeon or mortal couldn’t have, for one thing, and my followers enhanced those powers in ways that were a little hard to quantify, but I could definitely see their effects. The more followers I had, and the more fervently they believed, the more power I gained.

I was also able to grant some of my power to my followers. Contrary to popular belief, my followers, even those who were priests or paladins in my name, didn’t actually draw upon my personal MP or anything. It was more like that I was the, well, gateway for them to draw their powers through, and the powers they got were flavored by my own divine abilities.

For instance, my original ‘portfolio’, by the time I started becoming a god, was primarily about pleasure and domination. And it still was. However, humans and other humanlike species got included, as I started having them as both followers and targets of my domination. Slavery was added in for the same reason. Undead became part of it, too.

Strangely enough, plants and slimes weren’t really that big a part of my ‘domain’. Probably because the ones I had were mostly nonsentient, if not completely mindless. The ones that did have minds of their own, however, did have some effect, offering my priests access to some spells regarding those creature types. For instance, one of my priests was able to conjure the juice of a Passionslime, to use for various means, and a Dark Paladin of mine learned to create slime tentacles that sprouted from his body, like those sported by Captain Hentai. However, I hadn’t seen anyone able to actively conjure and control the mindless plants and slimes themselves, meaning that was probably something that needed either a druid, or someone following a deity more closely associated with actively controlling those types, or nature in general.

The process was two-way, as well. Thanks to the numbers of undead following me, I had been able to create an undead creature out of the annoying champion that had tried to destroy me, despite me not being an actual necromancer, or having ‘death’ or ‘undead’ as part of my domain, or my ‘explicit’ portfolio. And, just recently, I’d felt a new little tug on my consciousness, as something else was added into my ‘expanded’ portfolio.

Dungeons were added to my portfolio.

I had a presence in several dungeons, of course. Several dungeons had shrines to me, and more had my Tome of Kuronoth available to be found as loot. But that wasn’t enough to get dungeons as part of my portfolio. There were a couple gods and goddesses of dungeons, but they actually had it as part of their domain, for one reason or another. I did not.

To have gotten dungeons added to my portfolio like that must mean that I had… actual dungeons as followers? Couldn’t be just ‘dungeon creatures’, even bosses, or I would have had that before now. Somewhere, out there, an actual dungeon was now following me.

A quick check showed that it was nowhere local. Dark Necropolis and Mooney Harbor weren’t worshipping me. All the other dungeons within five hundred miles were too young and feral to pick up the worship of a god.

Expanding outward, I didn’t find anywhere in the United States. Even when I looked all around the globe, even in the dungeons where I had a shrine, I didn’t find anything. Even my pet on the moon didn’t worship me!

Finally, I sensed a prayer. I was hearing them more and more now, and tried to answer them, when I could. But this was different. It was not near Earth at all. I had some followers outside the solar system, but I never thought that I’d get a dungeon follower there.

I focused on the prayer. Sure enough, it was coming from the mind of a dungeon. And it sounded panicked.

“Oh, Lord Kuronoth, Forger of Chains and Destroyer of Hopes, hear my plea! The forces of Binja and Idos are here, and they want to purge me!”

I checked the System. Binja was a goddess of Purity, while Idos was a god of Chivalry. If a dungeon was following me, then it made sense that they would be pissy about it. After all, dungeons promoting promiscuity and monster sex on the one hand, and the domination of people’s wills on the other, would be an affront to both of their churches, as far as I could tell.

As I considered it, I searched out the dungeon in question. It was the Labyrinth of the Dishonored Knight dungeon, on a planet called Atara. There was a solid mix of people on the world, according to the System.

Going back through my DEN logs, I saw that the dungeon had purchased the Tome of Kuronoth, and then built a shrine. Apparently, it had shaped itself to fit within the theme of his dungeon automatically, so I hadn’t noticed when it was put in. The floor it was on was the start of the dungeon finding new ways to try and tempt and break the people who came into its halls. Not a Slayer dungeon, for sure.

Well, I wasn’t going to let this chance go to waste. Reaching out with my divinity, I pushed in the direction of the prayer, forming a connection between my nascent divinity, and the core, all the while trying to shield my dungeon-ness from the core. I felt it form. It took a bit more effort than when I wanted to talk to one of my mortal followers, but it formed, and then I answered the plea for help.

“Speak, and I shall listen. For I am with you.”