The Fallen World : A Dungeon's Story

Chapter 86

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

City of Rebirth.

“Pull back! Everyone, pull back!” Allya shouted as her men flowed around her, trying to disengage. They needed to pull back into the town, using the buildings to slow down the enemy’s advance and nullify their numerical superiority, and regroup. Otherwise, they were history.

She smiled slightly as the sky lit up with lightning and flames, as the Alberta flew overhead and fired a broadside directly into the enemy’s lines, making them pause and buying more time for her people to escape.

Captain Calder was one hell of a daredevil, and—

CRACK

She looked up, horrified, as a gigantic bolt of lightning shot from the enemy’s mages and struck the ship’s propeller. The ship listed briefly…and began crashing down.

Straight on top of her.

Allya sat up abruptly, panting, and managed to stop herself in extremis before she threw herself out of bed. She took a deep breath to steady herself, and sighed. She already had enough nightmares at night without adding new fuel to the fire.

“One of those again?” Pyn quietly said as she sat up herself.

“Yeah.” Allya held her head in her hands. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“Nonsense, I’m your girlfriend.” The elf hugged the baroness from behind. “It’s my job to help you when you have bad dreams. Now come on, let’s get back to sleep.”

“Sure…and thank you.”

Pyn simply chuckled softly as she guided her girlfriend back down, laying the ex-assassin on top of her. Allya smiled, and closed her eyes as she drifted back to sleep.

*****

“Alright, so, what did you think of Crystal’s proposal?” Allya asked, as she nursed her cup of hot cocoa in her office, looking at Starvak, who was seated on the other side of her desk.

“You mean besides the lunatic proposition of allying with you?”

Allya smiled at the dwarf. It was not a nice smile, at all.

“First, the United Dungeon Council decided not to intervene. Second, it’s her fucking decision, not the guild’s. Third, wasn’t the adventurers guild supposed to be neutral in geopolitical matters? I fairly think this falls under that, to say the least.”

The guildmaster frowned, and opened his mouth for a sharp response, before sighing.

“Apologies, that was…uncouth of me. Regardless, it isn’t like that, and you know it. A military alliance, and all of it entails makes things…complicated.”

“You’re afraid we’ll smuggle materials for her, or that she’ll acquire things she really shouldn’t have by salvaging it off of enemy forces.”

“Well…yes. And get stronger exponentially more quickly than she should.”

“I mean no offense Guildmaster, but that has already happened. Like it or not, the repeated attempts to kidnap her have resulted in her developing some serious hardware, on top of giving her a small mountain of essence. While I can understand why you would be afraid of her getting too powerful too fast, and her dungeon becoming inaccessible to beginners, so far Crystal has shown a remarkable sense of balance in the difficulty and reward from her dungeon. And even if she somehow stopped properly balancing it, she has never been shy about cooperating with us. I’m fairly sure you could ask her politely and she’d make changes.” Not to mention bribe her, if necessary, but she wasn’t about to bring that up! Everyone knew it happened, but she’d rather not draw attention to it…or be crass enough to bring it to the guildmaster’s attention that some of her sentries had seen him enter the dungeon with Eismi in tow.

“That isn’t the point. Not here at least.” Starvak sighed and rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses. “As you have said, Crystal doesn’t seem to be the type of dungeon to leave the low ranks to rot, and her rewards have been balanced, but…for a multiplicity of reasons, it is never a good idea for a dungeon to gain too powerful materials, or too much essence, too fast. You think what you have going on here with the occasional adventurer idiot is bad? Imagine the same, but with hundreds of silver-, gold-, or even a handful of mythril-ranks doing the same!”

That gave Allya pause.

“Does that…happen a lot?”

“Rarely, especially for the mythril-ranks. But when a new town, without a great number of inhabitants or guards, has high-ranking adventurers demand something, especially if there’s many of them, it becomes very hard to say ‘no.’ Once that happens…let’s just say things go downhill for everyone, even the guild.” He chuckled. “Unrest is bad for business in general, and adventurer-led unrest is one of the worst around.”

“I can believe that.”

“Of course you can; you have to deal with them. There are other issues with a dungeon growing too quickly as well, and I’ll openly admit some of them are purely selfish concerns from the guild’s standpoint, but the others are no less valid. Regardless, I would be much more at ease, and have far less pressure from my own superiors—I do have bosses, and even my fellow guildmasters can turn into a nuisance if they feel like it—if I could get tangible guarantees that such issues won’t be a problem.”

Allya nodded. Sometimes it was hard to remember that despite Starvak’s ridiculously high adamantium-rank, he was hardly the most powerful member of the adventurers guild…and those that led it were more or less demigods.

“Well, Crystal has foreseen one issue, and brought up the idea of having guild observers overseeing everything. As long as they can keep their mouths shut and no information leaks out, everything should go smoothly, and it would do much to allay your and your colleagues’ issues with it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Observers cannot see everything and be everywhere at once, in a partnership of such scale, but…you are correct, it would do much to allay our concerns. I will, however, have to use guild attendants for this.” He smiled. “Their discretion is beyond question, and so is their loyalty to the guild. Furthermore, contrary to adventurers, they will not seek to enrich themselves by either selling information, or accepting monetary accommodations in exchange for temporary blindness.”

Allya chuckled.

“The issue of adventurers being here mostly for the money is that they are eminently bribable? Alright, that should work nicely.”

Starvak blinked, surprised, before quickly recovering, and Allya smiled internally. The guildmaster clearly hadn’t expected her to simply roll with the suggestion that she might straight up bribe the observers, but he should know better by now. She really wasn’t above doing that, and she wouldn’t bring it up unless necessary. She wasn’t going to deny it was on the table though.

“Right, excellent then.”

“Now that we have agreed on that, let’s move on to the actual part of the proposal I wanted to discuss,” Allya said. The dwarf had the good grace to blush slightly. “The small, separated dungeon floors Crystal has thought up, what do you think?”

Starvak winced.

“In many ways, I don’t like it. It would require a great number of entrances to guard for tax purposes and create that many more possible loopholes. And, not to put too fine a point on it, in terms of guild attendants I can either have them look over these entrances, or observe your alliance, but I won’t have enough to do both.”

Allya frowned but nodded. She’d expected that. The guild only had so many people that worked for it directly after all—hell, at the entrances the attendants were always backed up by adventurers hired through a recurring guild quest—and although she was fairly sure Starvak hadn’t worded it that way to get better terms on either the alliance or the new floors, it was still something to keep in mind. For that matter, guarding and ensuring order to that many entrances would put a significant strain on her badly depleted forces.

“Alright, I think I have the beginning of an idea that could help with this.”

“How so?”

“Well, the mesa is roughly circular, correct?” Starvak nodded. “Then we could just…have a single entrance leading into a centralized hub of some kind and have the different ‘mini dungeons’ branch out from there, like spokes of a wheel. Preventing a single group from just doing them all in a single delve and thus nullifying the higher throughput might get a bit tricky, but Crystal already knows how to handle unruly adventurers, and since those mini-dungeons are intended for the lower ranks, she should be able to handle them without too many problems, correct?”

“That…” Starvak leaned back, stroking his mustache. “Just might work. It would still increase our workload, as there would still be two entrances, with all of the issues coming with that. But if Crystal agrees to take on some of the policing burden, it will simplify things greatly and keep most, if not all of the advantages of that particular model.” He nodded, slowly at first, then faster and faster. “Yes, yes, that would work quite nicely indeed! Provided of course, that Crystal accepts.”

“I’ll contact her and arrange a meeting. And while she doesn’t like handling unruly adventurers,” to say the least, given their last conversation, “I’m fairly sure that some of her mines would do the trick. She hasn’t been shy about using them to punish adventurers breaking the rules after all!”

Starvak winced slightly. The first instances of people running into the mines falling from the ceiling when adventurers attempted to steal the second floor’s treasure chest had been…interesting. But it had gotten the point across quite effectively, and when word got around that trying to force the elevators had similar results, the message had gotten through to the adventurers: mess with the dungeon, and the only thing you’ll get is a painful death.

Not to mention the dungeon’s little self-destruct trick had more or less engraved that in adamantium in the adventurers’ minds.

Of course, the problem was that while this had been hammered quite thoroughly into their present adventurers, it wouldn’t be in the vast masses incoming from the large land caravans making their way towards the town. That promised to be a…less than pleasant experience.

“True, true. Let us just hope that the message gets across quickly, as you know as well as I do that some fools will try it.”

Allya shrugged.

“Pushing the boundaries is what adventurers do. No one said it would be only in terms of exploration.”

“I suppose that’s one way to see it,” Starvak said with a smile. “Still, I’d rather they kept from pushing that particular boundary too hard, if that’s all the same to you. Crystal has more than amply demonstrated, I believe, that she isn’t to be taken lightly, and that her patience has its limits. I would like to avoid seeing that threshold crossed again.”

“Oh believe me so do I guild master, so do I.”

*****

“That’s…not a bad idea,” Alexandra said through her golem as she looked at Allya. “It would force me to put some security systems in place, but it would also enable a central elevator, which would greatly simplify things if I had to add more floors to my dungeon. And I believe I will eventually. Plus, having a central area will enable me to replicate the entrance hall, and have a quest board everyone will see as well!”

“So, you’ll put it in place?”

“It seems to be for the best. But.” Alexandra held up one of the hands of the golem she was possessing. “And let me make this exceedingly clear. If I get too many accidents from idiots there, I might decide to simply stop resurrecting those that break the rules, to…drive the point home more forcefully, am I clear?”

“Crystal.” Allya chuckled. “Sorry, I mean ‘clear.’ I suppose that saying doesn’t really work when talking with you, huh?”

Alexandra smiled, realized her body didn’t have a face, and simply chuckled, the metallic sound reverberating oddly in her empty entrance hall. Despite its damage, it remained the best place to have meetings, especially as there was no way in hell she was allowing anyone outside of her advisor or her maids to get near her new core room!

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Oh, and if you could at least attempt to pass the word around to the adventurers, particularly the new ones when they arrive, I’d be most grateful. A fair number of them might not listen, but some might, and at least it’d be something.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but as you said some of these idiots won’t listen, no matter how much we warn them.”

“Then I’ll be doing you a favor by removing them from the gene pool.” Alexandra mentally blinked—since her golem didn't even have eyes, let alone eyelids—as the baroness looked at her oddly. “What?”

“I’m…surprised you know what genes are, much less a gene pool.”

Alexandra winced internally and forced herself to laugh.

“My advisor is a scholar first and foremost, Allya. And scientific knowledge is hardly exclusive to the Eris Empire!”

“Fair enough I suppose.” The baroness smiled. “I’m just too used to being in more backward countries, where the light of science is so often dim.” And the people uneducated barbarians. “I’m glad to see that it isn’t the case for you.”

Far more than you could possibly know.

“My, the light of science is positively beaming here! I think you saw examples of that with my golems and contraptions.”

“Yeah, I have heard. Well, in that case, I’ll leave you to it. Have a nice day, Crystal!”

“The same to you, Allya!”