Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 367

Chapter 367 – Dinner

Catalina’s team made good time through the dungeon. Of course, even experienced teams couldn’t get to the start of the new floors in a single day. Not with how the dungeon monsters scaled in strength, or some of the puzzles that acted as hard stops to speedrunners. Of the fifteen floors people had explored, seven had mechanics in place specifically designed to keep people from just charging through them to the bottom.

The Misty Swamp of floor two had people stumbling around in the fog until they encountered enough enemies. If they weren’t careful, they’d get separated, and that was practically a death sentence, given some of the creatures on the floor. I’d seen one or two gutsy solo players try to use movement effects to try and blitz the floor, but all of them just ended up running straight into monsters, or trees. They got to go to the Breeding Halls to think about what they’d done.

The fourth floor’s Goblin Town was another roadblock to speedrunners. The layout was never the same twice, and could change while you were on the floor if you waited too long. And the goblins laid a bunch of nasty traps, that you had to pay attention to. They weren’t all terribly dangerous, on the face of them, but they were designed to maim, making adventurers waste resources healing or leaving them vulnerable to follow-up attacks.

The fifth and sixth floors were a different kind of pain to people who wanted to blitz the dungeon. The Lizardfolk Swamp required you to find three idols in a swamp, while being hunted by lizardfolk, before you could unlock the door to the boss. The Water Temple also required you to either swim around finding keys, or paying a penalty to unlock the temple. Then, you had to work your way through the flooded insides solving puzzles to drain the temple. Not something you could do quickly.

The eighth floor had the Ranger’s Mansion, and trying to blitz through there was going to give you a bad time. Not just the traps, including actual bear traps in the woods outside the mansion, but there were plenty of monsters on the floor that weren’t all that dangerous, if you saw them and were ready for them. However, if you didn’t spot them because you were hustling, then one of the ghouls scratching you could leave you paralyzed temporarily. Or a shadow could start draining your life without you realizing it.

And then, there was the Black Temple on the ninth floor. I had barely changed it since I first made it, but everyone knew that you couldn’t rush through the temple. The doors to the bottom of the temple required different acts to unlock, and that not only took time, but it was physically (and sometimes emotionally) draining to the lock and key. Of course, that didn’t count the ‘optional’ challenge rooms, but the number of additional foes in the boss fight went up for every optional room you didn’t complete. And to open the optional rooms, you needed either a follower of mine, or tokens from the different shrines, each of which had their own challenges that were just as trying.

The final barrier to speed runs was, of course, the Open Desert of floor fourteen, and Shai-hulud. You couldn’t leave the floor until the boss was summoned, and if you didn’t take a moment to stop, and think, you were almost certain to make enough noise that he decided to come up, right beneath you. Which was a literal death sentence if you didn’t have an escape charm.

Lucia didn’t care about any of that. She was too busy playing with her new ‘Aunties’. Apparently, Catalina had taught her daughter to call all the adults in her inner circle ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’. She knew they weren’t actually related, since she was a clever girl, but the names stuck, and I didn’t see a reason not to continue the trend.

The little girl knew that dungeons were dangerous, and that people fought, and sometimes died, in them. She also knew her mother was strong, as were her team, so she wasn’t too worried. I had one screen up in the ‘lounge’ area, so she could watch her mother progress through the dungeon, if she wanted, with another screen that she could turn to different TV shows. Because I knew four-year-olds got bored easily.

Currently, Catalina and company were making their way through Goblin Town, so I had Mezlith and Zellora come up to the lounge, along with a properly scaled down Bitchtaker, to play. The two succubi instantly gushed over ‘cuteness overload’ as Lucia introduced herself, and were quickly telling her all about how incubi and succubi lived in the wider galaxy. They didn’t hide anything, but they kept their descriptions PG, or at least PG-13, instead of being something out of a Penthouse Forum letter.

Of course, the real star of the show was Bitchtaker. The Abyssal Terrorbeast (scaled down to a normal hellhound, for the moment) was more than happy to be addressed as “Puppy” and have a squealing succubus kid hugging him and stroking his fur. And Lucia giggled as the big goofball licked her face, bringing smiles to everyone. Dogs and kids were always a winning combination, it seemed. Actually, there were a couple hellhound pups that had been born recently in the Breeding Halls, thanks to an adventurer getting shafted (literally) by Bitchtaker during an unsuccessful dungeon delve. I’d have to check with Catalina, first, but one of them would make for a good companion for Lucia.

While I set about getting something together for dinner (a job that was made much easier by being both a dungeon and a god), I turned my attention to Catalina, and her group. She’d done a good job building her team. The Dominatrix class, which she’d started off with, was a solid leader/supporter class, but did not have the offensive or defensive ability to stand on its own, usually. Like most supporters, they needed a team to succeed, but once they got more powerful, they acted like a force multiplier for their companions.

Catalina’s party were all Thralls, of course, slavishly devoted to her with an almost religious fervor. They covered a nice range of classes and professions, as well. More importantly, at least for this dungeon, she was not the only woman on the team. The success rate for teams with only a token member of the other gender in my dungeon was not great. The Black Temple tended to be a hard stop for those groups. A single ‘lock’ or lone ‘key’ would get worn out by the time they got to the bottom, and would be useless for the fight. Well, unless they were a succubus, or some kind of undead, or had some other way of enhancing their endurance.

However, even groups with outliers like that still faced trouble. The way the floor was set up would usually end up twisting anyone who was the focus of all those bouts. A lot of people ended up getting the Sadist or Masochist titles on that floor, and if you had someone like a Dominatrix trying to be the lone ‘lock’ for the Black Temple, that could really undermine her powers. On the other hand, a solitary ‘key’ tended to get twisted by the experience, if they made it through. They tended to end up controlling their groups, after a while. Sometimes literally, if they managed to get their hands on Slave Collars.

Of course, that wasn’t the only way things broke down. There were times where a woman, deciding that if she was going to be the only ‘lock’ then she’d better be getting compensated in some way, turned the tables, and forced the group to submit to her. And there were times that the lone guy was too whipped to raise their head and try to get some revenge. They were rare, but they did happen.

For the most part, though, anyone who came to my halls tended to have at least a 2:1 gender ratio. Usually two men to every woman, though there were some the other way around. Just a simple fact that most of the adventurers in the area were men. Or, rather, fewer women willingly signed on to teams, knowing what the dungeon was like.

Catalina’s team followed the 2:1 ratio, with four guys and one other woman besides her. The other woman was actually their main tank, who started as a Barbarian, but was now a Demonthrall Berzerker with a ‘Red Sonja’ look. She was impressive to see as she fought, and even more impressive when Captain Hentai gave it to her in all three holes.

As for the guys on her team? High Priest of Kuronoth was the basic advancement of the Priest class, so nothing special, but a good healer. Eldritch Trickster was a Rogue advancement that actually gave them some magical abilities, as well as their stealth and stabbing. Less ‘dive into shadows’ and more ‘illusions hide me’. Their main magic damager, though, was their Hellfire Warlock, which was a self-explanatory advancement of the warlock class. And rounding out the group was their Hellblessed Ranger, with his Dire Hellhound companion. All in all, a very nice group.

“Daddy, I’m hungry!”

Lucia’s voice brought me out of my contemplation on her mother’s party. “Don’t worry, Lucia,” I said, as I finished conjuring a tray with food and drink for the lot of us, “I’ve got some food right here.”

“Ooh, you’re letting us eat, too, Master?” Mezlith asked, excitedly.

“Of course,” I chuckled. “Regardless of whether or not Lucia ends up becoming an adventurer like her mother, having a broad education is always a good thing. I’d like her to learn as much as possible about succubi, so that, when she is old enough, she is in control of her nature, rather than letting it control her. Catalina was a full-grown woman already, when the System changed her, so her perspective is different from someone who grew up with abilities like yours. A simple meal is a small price to pay for such an opportunity. Especially since I literally willed it into being.”

As for the meal itself, well, being able to skip to the end, rather than go through the entire process was a boon. The meal was gloriously unhealthy, starting with a cheese-stuffed burger patty, wrapped in a maple bacon weave, cooked to perfection, with cheese melted on top, and sitting on a bun eight inches across, with a bit of barbecue sauce, along with nice, crispy fries with nacho cheese and bacon crumbles mixed in. All that, with the individual’s soft drink of choice to boot. I even made an extra burger without the bun for Bitchtaker.

“Oh, dear,” Zellora muttered. “If I didn’t know that I could easily work off all of this, thanks to magic, I would swear that you were trying to fatten us up, Master! This is positively decadent. Where did you get the idea for such a meal?”

“I might have less time for such things these days, but back when the dungeon first started, and I didn’t yet have divine abilities, I spent a great deal of time on the internet. Watching food shows gave me quite a few ideas, though I like to save some of the more impressive ones for when company is over. I don’t need to eat, myself, though the act is pleasurable, so I indulge myself, from time to time.”

“Wow, it’s so big, Daddy!” Lucia exclaimed as she picked up her burger. Naturally, her portion was smaller, fitting on a five-inch bun. She managed to get her hands around the burger, and eagerly bit in. From the look on her face, I could tell we were dealing with an absolute hit. Well, I didn’t want to know anyone who didn’t like a meal that was almost entirely meat and cheese, so that was good.

“Woof!” Bitchtaker offered another note of approval, as he began wolfing his meal down, quite literally.

Smiling as I began eating my own meal, I said, “That’s good. Oh, and after dinner, how about we use the computer so that you can give your mother a message, the next time she stops by a Safe Room.”

“Yay!”