Runitos' PoV:
"WHY IS THIS HAPPENING!?!?" - Runitos
I clutched my head in anguish as I watched the demon girl's invasion party managing my Dungeon's 4th floor while humming to themselves. The screens cannot produce sounds, but their visibly cheery attitude makes it easy for such auditory hallucinations to start appearing. And that is when they're forced to fight a literal uphill battle! Adding those hills to the floor cost me some more DP than usual when redesigning floors, so I wanted to get my money's worth at the very least, but nooo. These guys are monsters!!
Yet, I have to agree that the Ruby Coffer has one fatal weakness that I didn't realize when I was building it. And that weakness is that it might have a few too many Treasure Chest-type facilities. The theme I chose for the Ruby Coffer provided facilities that granted 20% more DP compared to those from other themes, but I might have splurged too much on the chests. Upgrading the Dungeon's stats seemed like the obvious choice at that time! Now I see it severely harmed each floor's infrastructure.
Each of the first three floors has most of their facility slots bloated with Treasure Chests, leaving close to no room for anything that could hinder the demon girl's invasion party from reaching the Coffer's depths. Even the 4th floor, which only has 2 Treasure Chests, is getting defeated quite easily.
Argh, I should have used some of the higher DP to purchase some more advanced traps instead of using them all to increase the Dungeon's stats! Had I done so AFTER I had armed the floors I might not have ended up in this mess! Good game, past me...
Stewing in self-misery did not cause the two knights leading the invasion army to pause. The blue-haired female bisected one of my centipedes with her strange, glowing sword that I cannot make heads or tails of. Is she making them on the spot? It doesn't seem likely, she is certainly missing the aura of an excellent craftswoman able to create such fine blades. However, it does not look like she is producing them from a storage skill either. In short, she is weird. And her swordsmanship is straight-out perverted! Who cuts the heads of three beetles at the same time?!
The full-armored knight is equally strange, albeit for different reasons. Who walks past flamethrowers without being...burned to death or something? His armor is glowing red from the heat, literally! Hmph. If you're fine with such heat, how about we add a little extra force? The 4th floor has exactly the kind of trap I need here, and it can even be activated manually instead of waiting for the adventurers to go and trigger it. And push the button!
*Click*
On the screen, the invasion party and the army of Fire maggots paused almost simultaneously. The sound of the trap activating must have been louder than I expected. A small drawback, but it won't hamper its destruction power! Rolling down from the top of the hill, aimed at the invasion party, was a giant. Rolling. BOULDER!! It's even on fire~.
The invaders paused in shock over the sudden appearance of their rolling doom. Their current location has been specially constructed to give them no room to escape the boulder coming from above. Soon, there will only be some ugly burned marks on the floor of them~. I should remember to have someone clean that up later.
*DOOOON!*
What the-!? Right when I was wondering who among the loser monsters to put on cleaning duties, an incomprehensible sight appeared on the screen! One outlandish enough to make me hear auditory illusions again! The full-armored knight managed to fend off my giant boulder! No, did he manage to knock it back? Ahh! Now it's falling apart from the impact!
Grr, this is not the end of it! Be prepared for an onslaught of rocks enough to create a new mountain! I might not have a lot of DP, but there is nothing else I can spend DP on during this fight anyway!
...No, let's save some points to summon a few extra troops. The floor of darkness is draining too much of my combat forces. Not that there's a great need for them, but just to be sure. Even if they get past the 4th floor, the 5th one will stop them, no matter what.
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Garami's PoV:
"Rock 'n roll! Do you think those things come in Darkness?" - Garami
I watched as Iron smashed giant flaming boulders with his meteor-metal shield! Now that's quality worth every penny!
"Someone call Flint and say he did a stellar job making that metal slab! It's amazing!" - Garami
"The same can be said about Flint himself. At this rate, the 3rd floor's score will surpass the 1st one's 'Electric Pool' strategy." - Bloom
"Phth! He has help from that Miasma-stuff." - Noire
Fair enough. The demon-type floor's special gimmick, "Miasma", reduces the stats of invaders who stay on the floor for too long. Handy when you can discourage the invaders from moving forward and stay right there on their lazy butts. Like setting up Dark Zones and nasty, sadistic monsters that love scaring people with nasty noises.
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Thanks to the invaders' procrastination, their overall status grew much weaker than it was when they first arrived here. Some of the lizards started developing a bit of backbone, but by then, they were helpless to evade the "Daggers of the Dark", a little nickname I gave to my specialized assassination team. They're just a good ten-or-so Stygian Jesters and Evil Djinns that I've equipped with some Anti-Dark Goggles that I managed to alchemize.
Honestly, I wanted a few more "Daggers" on the 3rd floor, but those Goggles are difficult to process, and their materials are hard to get by. I managed to obtain some material from a new Facility I added to the 4th floor, but it costs DP to "restock" the shelves, so to speak.
Flint, especially, is doing an awesome work. He's got a katana strapped to his hips, though he seems to rather fancy using that large smithing hammer to smash the skulls of the lizards to pulp. Buddy, are you fine with that? You're all fellow reptiles, right?
Except for that worry in my mind, the defensive operation on the 3rd floor is almost foolproof. "Almost" is the keyword here. First is the problem of having too few "Daggers" available. Second is that some of the reptile monsters are snakes. You know, the abominations that have heat-detecting organs. They're suuuuuuch a bad match for my Dark Zones.
Thanks to those freaks, the "Daggers" have been forced to let more groups of monsters pass through the Dark Zones than we'd want to. They could duke it out with the invaders, but that would risk destroying the Goggles, preventing us from thinning out future invader forces. And we still managed to "filter" out 40%-ish of the hostile army without any losses!
Oh, and by "-ish" I'm talking about the quality of the enemy troops, not the quantity. That queen bee that shish-kebab-ed Noire wasn't the only named monster that Runitos-guy had prepared for today's battle. We've seen one of these "leader units" for all the different types of monsters except for those from the common-line monsters. Then again, they might have been zapped till oblivion on the 1st floor.
I had Bloom assist Flint by locating which of these stronger monsters his unit should focus on assassinating while also preventing them from being destroyed by a too-strong group or individual. Snake groups are a prime example of this.
Despite some minor hiccups, they managed to defeat three of the remaining four "leader" bugs, only allowing a centipede to escape thanks to it bringing along a new group of snakes with it. From the Reptiles, the surviving "leaders" were the snake leader (duh) and what I can only describe being a "macho bodybuilder turtle with muscles squeezing themselves out of its shell". It made me have flashbacks to those macho cockroaches that were living in the Water-Knot. *Brr*, nasty memory...
"Leave Flint alone. He's doing good venting some frustration for his horrible time thanks to big ol' scaley." - Garami
"You do know that the name 'scaley' is sort of confusing when both sides have them." - Noire
"Yeah, yeah. And Iron's survived the boulder buffet." - Garami
Returning my attention to the raid team's screen, I saw the first and second parties celebrating Iron's victory over the burning rocks. A good dozen must have ended up on the floor around them, broken to pieces. Are they going to be alright? Those stones are still on fire, so the heat should be unbearable for any living beings. Oh, some of the Dark Elves have access to Water and Ice spells. No problems.
"Is Iron going to be alright? His shield..." - Bloom
The fairy voiced her concern for our undead knight, a thought I can't blame her for having. The "Meteorite Bangarang" shield Flint forged came with a special counter ability, sort of a skill attached to the shield itself that its user could activate. In return for depleting some of its Durability value, the shield could return any kinetic force it would normally receive back to the sender. The rocks getting crushed was thanks to this and they had lower durability compared to their "rolling power".
"Right. Mira, switch places with Iron. And Iron, save the shield for an emergency. Revi, try to speed up your group so you can meet up with the others ASAP." - Garami
Meteor metal doesn't grow on trees, even if it can be replicated with the "Cave Mine" facility on the 4th floor. Too bad rarer metals take DAMN long time to replicate.
*Sigh*. In any case, the job of a non-combatant Dungeon Master ain't as graceful as it sounds. This feels more like deskwork where you have to worry about resources, both human- and material ones, than anything. And with how well things are going, maybe I should just take a nap...
"Master, we have reached the 5th...WHAT THE-!?" - Bloom
So much for that nap. What is triggering the fairy-shaped alarm clock?
Oho? The 5th floor is looking quite different from the ones we've passed. The "normal" floors looked like underground passages while the Fire-types ones had openings in the walls with flames escaping from the gaps. This one, however, looks like a large, bottomless cave, with stalactites, stalagmites, and other rock formations made out of black stones.
There are no floors, bridges, not even floating platforms to jump on that allow one to advance further. Instead, large metal rails are spread all across the entire floor. Carts that could hold groups of 6, a classic party's size, were on standby, ready to accept new passengers to take them to the depths of the floor. Thinking about it, this whole setup is making me think of a certain wizard bank...
"AHA! So that's why there were so many treasure chests!" - Garami
"What's wrong now?" - Noire
"This Dungeon, I've figured out its theme! It's an underground bank!" - Garami
"A bank?" - Noire
"Yup. The floors we have visited would be the entry or the visitor areas or whatever they're called. Now we've finally reached the vault-sections!" - Garami
"So that is what those doors in the distance are for..." said Noire while squinting her eyes trying to look at the small details shown on the screen.
"That's probably the gimmick. The vaults might be even better 'treasure chests' than those above. Heck, I'd even wage there being a bonus for the floors with more Chests added to them!" - Garami
"Ehm, Master? Should I mention this to Mira or...?" - Bloom
"Huh? Wait, no! Don't even think about it! Stop! Push the breaks! Reverse! SERIOUSLY, don't do it!" - Garami
"Ahahaha... Sorry. When you started to speak about having solved the mystery, I sort of...put you on speaker for all the raid parties to hear..." - Bloom
Ooooohhhh craaaaap... Looking at the screen, I could see a bunch of goblins, elves, and bats riding on several carts, the front-most one being led by a certain blue-haired female knight swinging a sword made of silvery light...
Aw, whatever. Who was I trying to kid, expecting Mira of all people to stay calm when it turned out the Dungeon we were fighting was one big bank? Let's hope she's not developing an urge for bank robberies after this. Visiting cities with her would become one big ordeal if that happens.