Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 408

Chapter 408 – Pyramid

There was no time for rest as they jumped through the portal from the fourteenth floor. The skills they had meant that Shai-halud was not a problem for them, but the strain of trying to keep an arrhythmic pace through sand drained their stamina. Still, they couldn’t take a break, because the horde of undead they’d been told to expect was already upon them.

Individually, the undead were weak, at least for his team’s level. They were Level 28 in Tier 2, and the undead facing them were all Level 40 in Tier 1. That meant the undead were not much of a threat to them. However, an endless horde of undead did not tire, and they would, especially after haven gone from the blistering heat of the thirteenth floor, through the open desert of the fourteenth floor, and now here, all without a chance to stop and rest. Their stamina was not endless, and if they tired enough, even these weak undead could bring them down.

Thankfully, the information from the guild told them exactly what they had to do. They pushed forward through the undead, moving quickly to prevent themselves from getting properly encircled. As soon as they got close enough to the pyramid, and the altar before the sealed door, the undead disappeared into sand, just as they’d been told.

Six hundred gold pieces went onto the altar, and the coins disappeared into smoke, as if they had been illusions all along. But the sacrifice was not in vain, as the stone slab that was the door smoothly descended into the ground, opening the path for them. Only a one-time pass, but despite this being the home of his Lord, Rhys was not planning on coming back to this dungeon anytime soon. The money they got from this job, not to mention selling art and other items that were cheap on Earth when they returned to Bluemountain, where they would be exotic imports, would likely be enough that they had enough money to buy some land, and settle down for a while. At least until the children were born. Maybe longer.

The traps were just as nasty as had been described. Obvious triggers caused traps to go off in ways that defied common sense. Obvious traps were set off with hidden triggers. Some traps were so well-hidden that even Danyll had trouble finding them. Even with having some idea of where the traps were, and how they worked, the pyramid floor had earned a reputation that demanded respect from the locals, and any successful adventurer knew to take the local Guild’s warnings to heart when they were traveling away from home, especially when it came to dungeons.

The miniboss fight challenged them. Even knowing that the initial teleport trap would invariably capture the party leader, if there was a defined leader, it still threw their formation out of balance. Not catastrophically so, since they were expecting it, but it was a concern all the same. Danyll jumped out of his shadow, cutting the bindings keeping him to the stone altar, before using [Shadow Step] to bring them back to the group.

Once they were back in formation, the fight went about as expected. They couldn’t relax, and it certainly wasn’t easy, but the fight had been beaten enough times by people in their level range that the fight was well understood. Sure, someone who didn’t bother doing their research would have had a very bad time, and he was sure that the first group to come through here on this difficulty setting hadn’t had things easy, either. But if you’re going through already cleared sections of dungeon and you’re surprised by something, then that means either the dungeon changed, or you were careless. Dungeons tended to remain the same, with conquered floors only changing if something big changes with the dungeon itself, or it looks like Adventurers are having too light a time of it.

Still, conquered floor or not, the miniboss fight had challenged them. Inside the temple, they could take things slower, and they didn’t have to deal with the heat, or an unending tide of the undead, but that did not mean there were no dangers. Monsters did spawn in the halls at times. You couldn’t just sit and rest for more than a few minutes unless you were in a safe zone, or bad things would happen. And while those brief stops helped, they did little to get rid of the cumulative fatigue. Eventually, they would start making mistakes, and making mistakes in a dungeon was fatal, unless you were very lucky.

That was why they had intended to make their way to the safe zone, and rest. Unfortunately, that was not what they were currently doing. What they were currently doing was running, because they had made one of those mistakes from fatigue, and stepped in the wrong spot. No clue which of them it was, but it didn’t matter, because the giant boulder rolling through the halls after them was not looking to be in a mood to discuss other plans.

If it was just a stone rolling along, that would have been fine. However, things were not that simple. The stone was not bound by normal physics. It made right angle turns as sharply as any of them did, and while there was a minimum speed, they quickly found that if they sped up too much, the boulder did, too.

The boulder trap was another of Lord Kuronoth’s ‘attrition’ traps, in the same vein as the Enflaming Gas, but more deadly. The boulder was not designed to crush Adventurers, though it certainly could and would, if they slowed too much, or made a mistake like tripping and were unable to recover. However, that was just a side effect. The real design of the trap was to further wear down individuals, and entice them into making mistakes, or force them to use resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Even when you knew it was there, and what it did, the boulder trap was still a deadly threat, as they just showed. Rhys would have been the first to congratulate someone on the design, both in its elegant simplicity and devastating effectiveness, if it wasn’t currently trying to crush him and his team!

Danyll, who had been running ahead of them to make sure they didn’t kill themselves with traps as they fled, suddenly stopped, turned back to them, and said, “Go past me, either side! Pit trap here, opens on that side! The guild said this is one of the ways to beat the boulder!”

Rhys remembered that part of the briefing, so he didn’t slow, just split left as he got to Danyll, Emblema splitting right, and so on. As the last one (Merewen, who had little in the way of speed-boosting abilities) passed by him, Danyll stomped on the tile he had been standing next to. The ground opened up in front of them, just as the boulder fell into the pit with a deafening crash.

They all paused there, panting, for a moment, before Rhys said, “And that is why we always ask the locals what they know about things whenever we’re going into a new dungeon. If we had gone into that blind?” He didn’t have to say more. They all knew that at least one of them would have been dead if that happened.

The rock had sent them running, of course, but they knew the trap was present, so while they were surprised, they didn’t panic, especially when it turned corners to chase them. Even a mid-rank team like theirs could recover from that. But coming at a trap like that cold, without knowing about it ahead of time? If the rolling boulder itself didn’t cause panic, then the thing turning corners definitely would have. And panic turns deadly fast.

That was why the people that set out to be the first to explore new floors in a dungeon were a special breed, and those who sought to be the first to explore a wholly new dungeon were all one of a kind. They were people who not only had the normal array of Adventurer skills and abilities, but had experience that wasn’t quantified in XP. They were the ones who you could count on to go into any situation, no matter how bad or how weird, and keep a cool head. They knew their limits, and when to pull back. More importantly, they always kept an escape plan ready, just in case.

Teffany stood next to Rhys, breathing heavily as she looked at the pit where the rock had fallen. Turning to face him, she asked, “Where to now, Master? We could push for the boss room, if you wish?”

“No,” Rhys said, without even needing to think about it. He didn’t need the Wise One title like Elia or Merewen to know that trying to continue on to the boss, especially with everything they had heard about it from the locals, would be foolhardy to the extreme. More like, it would just be an elaborate way of committing suicide. No, he did not have any desire to see the Fields of the Dead so soon.

He took a breath, and shook his head. “No,” he said again. “We’re too tired. According to the Guild, that fight requires a lot of movement and coordination with the entire group in order to keep from having the random curses affect us. The curses shouldn’t be instantly fatal, but they will be a horror to deal with. Even if there aren’t curses, there will still be the boss and their guards, along with the minions that come in intervals. That fight is too complex and too intensive for us to risk it like we are, now.”

“Safe room, then, Master?” Merewen asked. “That would be the logical place for us to rest, and recover. We could also check the news on the human information networks, see if anything else has transpired while we’ve been in here. I doubt they will have a section for news from Bluemountain, but you never know.”

“Even if they don’t,” Elia chimed in, “they will have listings of commodities and other such things. You mentioned gathering items that are cheap here on Earth, but rare on Bluemountain, and selling them for a premium, so we could settle down somewhere. The information networks sound like a faster version of the information trade that the Adventurers Guild and different crafter guilds ply back home. Might be a good idea to see what we can find out.”

“In that case, Master,” Teffany said, “if you want a crafter’s take on things, we should get instruction manuals. Even though this world’s technology has gone far beyond anything Bluemountain has, as far as technology, I’ve seen that they still have the old ways preserved, and new ways of doing old things. The ‘brigandine’ armor I saw someone wearing was inspired for situations where you needed armor heavier than leather but not as restrictive as plate, even just a breastplate. Far easier to move about in, so long as it is fitted right, supposedly. And that’s just one example. We spend some time finding examples of armor and weapons and the techniques to make them, and guilds will gladly pay for that.”

Merewen chuckled. “Don’t forget food. If we get a sampling of different ingredients, then I can use my skills as a Master Chef to find parallels that can be found on Bluemountain. That would allow us to bring over recipes from this world, and use them back home. Even if we’re all in one place for a while because our Master wanted us with swelling bellies, good food is one of those things you can turn into reliable money, especially if I can add the right bonuses to it.”

Rhys nodded. “We’ll go to the safe room, do some research, and rest. Tomorrow, we tackle the boss, and try to get to the next floor.”