Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 175

The King

The dungeon was attempting a ritual.

The king knew not what it would achieve, but it would be futile.

He would not give them time to execute their plans.

[The time is now.]

The goddess had not failed him yet, and so the king began his final step when she bid him. She remained ignorant of the king’s true ambition, so well had he hidden it. In time, she would learn to regret that.

At this moment, he accepted her aid.

One by one, he activated his towers. His own ritual would take time to fully activate, but once it began, there was nothing his victims could do to stop it.

He had been building power for a long, long time.

Despite the losses of nearly a dozen of them—most of them lost at the hands of the armies Centerpoint Dungeon had sent sallying out, though two or three had been taken down by otherworlder collectives—the king had over five hundred remaining.

Not that he even needed them all. This ritual could be performed with as few as ten towers, and the fools had brought them right to their doorstep.

He had already won.

#

Lucas

[Time remaining: 2 hours, 7 minutes, 3 seconds]

“Ah, shit,” I muttered. “Of course the goddess gets involved now.”

“What’s happening?” Anton asked. He’d taken to pacing back and forth in the meeting room. The otherworlder was lucky that I had better things to focus on, because I definitely would have yelled at him to stop if I weren’t so busy.

“Endgame,” I said simply.

At the edge of my boundaries, I sensed a patch of my influence go dark. One of my newer spells, [Truesight], enabled me to treat my entire dungeon as my eyes, so I was able to bring my senses up to the edge of the blank space and get a glimpse of what was happening.

They were towers. Of course they were. Four rose at once, one for each cardinal direction. I was tempted to immediately try an [Assimilate], but I suspected this wasn’t all the king had to offer.

Monsters and magic poured out of the towers, but I had a monstrous army of my own to counter them with.

“Iris, Thorn, Troy,” I said again. “Hurry it up. I’ll bring the cores over; just get to me ASAP.”

As I worked on creating a wide enough tunnel to drag the broken, captured towers through, Thorn appeared behind me, holding Troy and Iris by the elbow.

“How many Dungeon Cores do we have?” I asked. “Scratch that. Do we have enough?”

“We can’t know until we try,” Troy and Thorn said simultaneously.

“I can sense the king approaching,” Iris said grimly. “I fear that this is all we will have to work with.”

To be fair, there was already a lot to work with. Minus One had captured three towers. Starfall had gotten four. Homefront had managed two, though it looked like Austin, the [Steelbrand], hadn’t made it back. The Heretics and Inquisition had each obtained one, though their towers looked to be a bit larger than the others.

All in all, that was eleven towers. None of them were fully intact—notably, all four of Starfall’s looked like a wrecking ball had gone at them for a few hours—but they were still overflowing with Dungeon Cores.

I couldn’t even count how many there were, though my dungeon senses did the job for me.

1,598,902 Dungeon Cores. Each of the towers had over a thousand intact crates, each of which carried at least a hundred cores, and that meant a lot of power.

Yet we still didn’t know if that was enough. They’d said that it had taken five Dungeon Cores to empower one of the weakest dungeons they’d ever encountered. Power scaled exponentially by level; as a level 22 dungeon, I likely had hundreds of thousands times more power than a level 1.

Hopefully, we could actually use this.

“We’re on a time limit,” I told the three of them. “Are you prepared to start the ritual?”

“It’s going to be messy,” Thorn said. “We need time to draw out the circle.”

“We didn’t draw it out before?” Anton asked in disbelief.

“Magic,” Troy said. “It’s a fickle thing. Wouldn’t have worked.”

“How much time?” I asked.

Thorn and Troy looked at each other, then winced in unison.

“Half an hour, maybe?” Thorn made it a question.

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Alright. I can try to protect you for that long. The towers are a couple minutes out. The ritual room is prepared on the fifteenth basement floor already. I’ll send you there.”

“Understood,” Troy said. “Good luck.”

“To you as well,” I replied. “To you especially, really.”

Then I opened a pit under their feet, dropping them into a thousand-foot hole.

To their credit, none of them screamed, though Troy was a bit taken off guard. All three of them had mobility spells of some kind. They were going to be fine.

“What should I do?” Anton asked.

“Don’t bother me unless you have an insight,” I replied,. “And stay alive.”

The king’s arrival hadn’t come without incident. The presences of his towers were devastatingly powerful, and quite literally everyone noticed it.

That meant my adventurers, the surviving ex-Kingsguard—down to six thousand of the original nine, which was better than I had feared but worse than I had hoped—and, crucially, all 250,000 otherworlders within the dungeon.

Conversation propagated throughout the labyrinth I’d constructed for them. Most people had the same few questions—what was that, what do we do, are we going to die—and almost universally, they reacted the same way.

People as individuals were reasonable, logical, and intelligent.

People as a group were not.

250,000 people stampeded through the dungeon.

None of them had the context that we did. They didn’t know that the king was working against them; hell, I bet most of them didn’t even know they were in a kingdom. To them, the shudder of the towers breaking through the ground must have felt like the beginning of the event that would cause their deaths in two hours.

So they ran for their lives, throwing caution to the wind. Every last otherworlder tried to steamroll their way down, and I began to wall up, funneling them through specific tunnels.

I didn’t want to use a powerful monster to block them because I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage them microscopically, and there was every chance some idiot would engage in a fight with a monster way above their weight level and die instantly.

I sucked in a breath. This was going to be difficult to manage, but Anton and I had worked out something that might work to handle the otherworlders. It was a plan that I was still dubious on, but it had good bones.

For now, I let the otherworlders think they were making progress. I needed to get the towers moving before I dealt with them.

The towers were heavy and hefty and all around a pain to manage, but thankfully, no divine judgment came to smite them from within my dungeon. The king didn’t pull out any eleventh-hour bullshit to break them.

I got the million-plus Dungeon Cores to the fifteenth floor without incident.

There awaited my own Dungeon Core, alongside the three people who knew how to transfer me from this.

I hope this works. That went for a lot of things. Getting the otherworlders off my ass, potentially redirecting them towards our enemy, the ritual, defeating the king—there were a lot of iffy-at-best plans that our futures hinged on.

The king didn’t let up with his assault. Less than three minutes after the first towers popped up, another set of four joined them at the ordinal directions. They remained equidistant from each other—and then I lost sight in the area around them.

In an instant, a mile of my radius vanished.

Shit.

I was glad that basically nobody was in those areas, because not only was I not going to be able to help them—the very monsters I had created to combat the king’s assault were likely to turn violent on anyone now that I was no longer controlling them.

Still, I held off on using [Assimilate]. That was my trump card, and I only wanted to use it either as a finishing move or a saving grace.

Beneath me, otherworlders continued to surge towards the finish line on the fifteenth floor. I started blocking them with real obstacles, now, and in the cases where they were getting dangerously close, I simply walled off the exit.

That wasn’t enough. These otherworlders were people, just like me—especially like me, really, since we were from the same planet—and they refused to give up. When the floors closed up, they started to break them.

I wasn’t going to be able to manage them and fight the king at the same time. This had eerie parallels to the Omen fight, where there were also a large number of people trying to get to my core that I couldn’t kill, but at the same time, it felt so different.

Back then, I had been managing a one-mile radius. Even after the abrupt reduction in size the towers had given me, I was dealing with a dungeon that spanned over a thousand times the space.

There was no way I could deal with both the hundreds of thousands of otherworlders and the king at the same time. I let out a long-suffering sigh.

“Anton,” I said. “Looks like we’re going with your plan.”

He pumped a fist, then stopped. “Wait. For real?”

“For real.”

“Oh, no.”

#

Troy

In over twenty years of magical experience, training under one of the most powerful wizards to walk this plane, Troy had never before dealt with a ritual as large as this one. He hadn’t even heard of them, let alone tried to create one.

They were going to use every single Dungeon Core here as fuel, all of them targeting the same Dungeon Core at the center. The center point, if you will.

Troy chuckled a bit at his joke, then got back to inscribing the circle. Iris’ vastly boosted [Tactician] class now allowed her to summon force constructs, which had proven invaluable in unloading the Dungeon Cores.

There were a truly mind-boggling amount. For them to fit all of them in a single ritual circle, they were going to need to draw it a mile wide.

As far as he knew, he was breaking entirely new ground with this.

He wished the old man could be here to see him now. Iris had mentioned to Troy at some point that the [Elder Archmage] had chosen to ascend while he’d been stuck in a moment in the Omen’s underbelly. Troy found that a little sad, but he supposed his time had been coming anyway.

“All adventurers not currently assisting with the dungeon ritual, please prepare for battle,” Lucas’ voice said in Troy’s ear.

He must be real busy, Troy thought. Normally, he wouldn’t have made the mistake of projecting his voice to people when he didn’t need to.

A thrill of urgency ran through Troy’s spine, and he sped up as best as he could.

They were going to make history tonight, one way or another. Troy planned on being alive to see the end of it.

#

Lucas

“Attention, all otherworlders. You may recognize me as Lucas, your [Tour Guide]. As you may have noticed, your trip to this dungeon has not exactly been a tour.

“Under better conditions, it would be. However, this dungeon is currently under attack, and so is everyone inside it.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to protect yourself from the oncoming assault and fight back. The king who brought the apocalypse upon our world wants to demolish this dungeon with everyone in it. You felt the impact his weapons had upon Centerpoint. His monsters already roam free across the dungeon.

“I wish I could tell you that you had a choice. But one way or another, what you need to do is the same. Fight. Survive. Win.

“When it is done, you will be alive. So long as I stand, whether or not Centerpoint Dungeon falls, you will live. That is all.”

It was a barebones message. Though everything in it was, strictly speaking, true, I hadn’t given them the whole truth. I hadn’t spoon-fed them a carefully selected series of omissions, either, but it wasn’t a very motivating message.

It didn’t need to be.

From the start, Anton and I had known that we weren’t going to convince all of the otherworlders to turn back now. They were too entrenched into their mission, and the goddess still had a giant flashing warning of their oncoming deaths burnt into their retinas.

But she wasn’t the only one who could assign quests.

When anyone completes a run in the dungeon, you may utilize the entire capacity of their mana. That was what my class description said.

What, exactly, defined a “run” in the dungeon? I had thought I’d known, at first, but the definition seemed to be looser than I thought. [Intertwine] was eligible to be used on practically anyone that had even finished a segment of the dungeon, so long as I designated a checkpoint or a task for them to do.

There were a few conclusions to draw from that, but the most obvious one had been hidden in plain sight.

I assigned quests.

It hadn’t come up during our discussions about it because my quests never had a proper reward associated with them—all that was promised at the end was whatever I could provide to the adventurers in exchange for them sharing their power with me.

But in this moment, here and now, all I needed to do was buy time. I needed to keep them all from putting their 150% into trying to break their way to my core.

Right now, I knew, 250,000 people had just received a new notification. I couldn’t control the text, but I could control the direction of it.

They didn’t all buy into it—not even most of them did—but enough stopped in their tracks and turned around. My quest didn’t promise to cancel out the other one, but I had demonstrated that I was capable of stopping everyone from breaking deeper into my dungeon.

For every person that decided to abandon the quest to destroy me, a handful hesitated. They didn’t turn around to return to the surface to fight the king, like my quest must have specified, but they didn’t continue delving, either.

It was a stopgap measure, but it would buy half an hour. I hoped.

At the edge of my territory, the king’s monsters closed in.

#

Iris

They were two-thirds done with their ritual when it went awry.

She didn’t know the specifics about the magical components of the transference ritual, but she did know that it was complex. Any plan that required on too many things to go right was doomed to fail.

Thorn and Troy were both incredibly talented mages, so she had been more confident in the spellwork going correctly, but they were essentially dealing with over a million tiny bombs in the midst of enemy action.

It was the latter that did them in.

She felt the pulse of the king’s power. After so long dealing with him, she knew the taste of his magic.

What she couldn’t tell was what, exactly, he was doing.

“Troy! Thorn! The king is taking action!” Iris shouted.

“We see it,” Troy said. “Just keep an eye out, will you?”

Iris stretched her [Threads of Fate] out. Her Unique Skill was far weaker than it had been before—she’d sacrificed most of it to gain her levels. It was still capable of short-range precognition, though.

Her eyes widened.

“The dungeons!” she cried. “It’s the cores!”

But there was nothing they could do about it. Neither Troy nor Thorn had the resources to invest in wide-scale destructive spells, and there were simply far too many Dungeon Cores for them to destroy them all.

And they needed them.

So when the gathered mass of Dungeon Cores began to ignite and move, Iris was powerless to stop them.

Troy and Thorn needed to survive and take them on the path to victory. She couldn’t let them die.

Iris drew on everything she had.

[Subjugate], she ordered. Her entire body bucked with the effort, nearly sending her to her knees, but she stood steady.

To assert her authority over a million Dungeon Cores was nigh impossible, no matter how much mana she poured into it.

Goddess, she thought. I offer the rest of what makes me special. Take my Unique Skill, and grant me strength.

Iris coughed blood, but she felt the long-standing contract take effect.

Power surged through her, enough for her to temporarily treat the Dungeon Cores as her minions.

[Redirect], she told them, and their power shifted upwards and away.

Towards people who couldn’t resist them.

She heard someone laughing, but it was so muffled she couldn’t tell if it was the goddess, the king, or herself.

Inch by inch, their ritual progressed.