Just like always, I woke up in bed with Sophia and Rose. It was a bit odd to think about how I was now infinitely more used to waking up with them than without them; it would actually feel much, much stranger to wake up without Sophia's arms wrapped around the left side of my torso and Rose nuzzling against my neck. For all the times I complained about lewdness, I really was fond of them. I just needed a bit more time to open up the walls that slut elf city had built up.

I decided to have a mature, adult discussion with Rose about sex as soon as we conquered the dungeon and saved the queen. We would talk things over, then maybe plan out a future date to have gentle sex in the missionary position for the sole purpose of procreation a single time in order to break the ice. Who knew? But it would happen. Me and her. I just had to finish this fuckin' dungeon first.

Anyway, I kissed Sophia and Rose awake as per routine and got dressed. There wasn't much new to do today; we just had to crawl back to Floor 4 and start ploughing away at the water floor. I went through my usual routine with an extra stop; I asked Duran if he knew anything about Floor 4 (nothing new really), dropped by the church to warn Medea about her book thing, grabbed breakfast with the team, and away we went. Medea seemed confused at the book thing, but she thanked me anyway. Hopefully she wouldn't burn it by accident anyway.

Floors one through two were uneventful. The obligatory eighteen encounters basically weighed me down like an anchor. I had gotten almost no skill ups in recent memory, and my main level had all but frozen. Grinding to max back in the border skirmish had never even been an option, I realized; I was stuck there by Sauron and time, and the orc EXP would have capped pretty low. If this dungeon was any indication, that is. Maybe the giant troll could have been grinded since it was a boss enemy.

Floor 3 had the first meaningful moment. I strutted through the silver gates and showed off my philosophy brain while all the girls oohed and aahed, by which I mean specifically Hilda oohed and aahed while Rose rolled her eyes. After the last silver gate, I turned and lifted my hands into the air.

"Behold. I am... the philosopher."

"You copied all my answers from a previous loop," Rose said flatly.

"........"

I wasn't even allowed one moment of joy. This dungeon sucked. There was nothing I wanted more than to get the hell out of this place. Every time I forgot how bad it was, I ended up miserable again within minutes of stepping foot into it.

We moved onto the golden gate. I stepped ahead of the others and watched as the plate at the top morphed into a riddle.

What is Medea's secret?

I glanced back. Just like last time, the three girls were confused. Perfect. I walked forward and whispered "She loves me more than she loves the Goddess." The gate began to open.

"I have enhanced senses, idiot," came Sophia's call. She turned to Rose and Hilda. "He said she loves him more than she loves the Goddess."

"Traitor!"

"Hmph." She sniffed.

Rose and Hilda gave me pointed looks, but weren't too aggressive about it. They didn't know in this loop that it was the Gate of True Happiness, which really dulled their knives. Whew.

We passed through, climbed down the stairs, and threw open the door to the next floor. Finally, the day could really begin.

The door led directly to a small square of dry, raised land. Raging rivers ran up the left and right, pouring through holes in the wall, with a horizontal river covering the front. I wasn't even sure how the rivers mixing like that was possible, but magic seemed to be involved. There was a switch on both the left and right side of the entrance door.

Naturally, the first thing I did was flip the left switch. A gate began to slowly descend to block off the river, while a magic barrier slowly lifted right where the vertical river met the horizontal river. It seemed to absorb any water that touched it, and stopped the horizontal river's water from flowing into the vertical river.

Now, let me reemphasize that the gate descended slowly. Slooowly. It felt like a sick joke, and it probably was. It took ten minutes for it to shut, then a few more for all the water to drain away, revealing ladders down to the ground. We could now reach the island to our right.

"This seems... cheeseable?" I said. Jumping over the rivers, freezing the rivers, blocking the entrances with rocks, etc. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all. Maybe dwarves or other fighter classes would have a terrible time, but magic seemed like it could cuck this floor with the right application. That was the danger of not simply using pure mathematical chance to fuck the intruders over. The more creative you got, the more ways you could be exploited through the power of a rationalist gigabrain.

Rose nodded. "Can you freeze the rivers?"

"Let me try making one of those water-eating Magic Barriers first," I replied.

I sat at the edge of one of the platforms and started experimenting. What felt like hours passed with me attempting to modify Magic Barrier to eat water somehow, attempting to freeze the water, etc. Meanwhile, the girls tried solving the puzzle legitimately, mainly for lack of anything else to do. I was just getting the knack for fucking with water when the message popped up.

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

I looked up from the river. Eeeeh?

This was my third time seeing that message here. The first time, it felt like it was later in the day. The second time, it felt like it was the afternoon. And now, it felt like it was late morning or something.

The problem here was that I had spent so long on Floor 2 that I barely even remembered the message popping up the first time. It may very well have happened in the morning or afternoon and I just forgot how long we were trudging around Floor 1. The bulk of my time in this loop was spent in the first hour or two while going through the teleporter maze. Everything past that point was largely unknown territory to me, since really, I had been extremely determined to let absolutely nothing special happen in any of the dead loops. Point being, I didn't have much of a basis for how weird this message popping up now was.

I looked around. This was our first time reaching Floor 4. Maybe the demons noticed as we got closer, and worked harder to kill Queen Daiya before we saved her. My understanding was that Floor 5 was the boss room, so maybe they had a scout on the other end of the room that bolted back to the legendary hole of Other Realm evil as soon as we popped in. That gave us a few hours from entering Floor 4 to getting to the hole, if so. Hmmm.

I decided not to worry about it too much. It was, at most, a slight time inconvenience, and I had a lot of fucking experience wasting time in this dungeon. Better to just focus on getting through this god forsaken floor.

I created two Magic Barriers in the middle of a river. It created a dry space in the middle, and blocked any more water from entering. Perfect.

"I got it," I called. The girls were about halfway through the floor it seemed. I stepped back from the edge and did some running, then leapt over river after river. They were pretty wide, but my chad legs did all the work for me. Honestly, I was feeling a lot better than I had been not too long ago. Floor 3 had been a breeze, all things considered, and it looked like Floor 4 would be too. Maybe it existed to punish people who didn't think of alternative solutions, with one of those alternative solutions being to have ungodly high physical stats.

Upon reaching the middle platform where everyone else was, I gave the bad news. The queen was dead, yadda yadda.

Rose frowned. She was always the one most displeased with dead loops. "Can we at least clear the floor first?"

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I squinted in the distance. I couldn't even see an exit. Actually, was it just underwater?

"I don't think so. I can't tell where the exit is. I might need to just sweep the whole room with magic barriers."

And so I did. I started at the back and moved towards the entrance, checking all the ground. It was slow going since I had to wait for the water to drain in order to look at the ground for a trap door or whatever, but I was making progress.

Unfortunately, one high-pitched shriek of fear from Hilda signaled it was time to quickload away.

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I was really pushing my luck, huh?

Anyway. Wake up. Inhale. Try not to think exclusively about the upcoming sex talk with Rose. Awake bed companions. Get dressed. Visit church. Eat. Elevator. Floor 1. Floor 2. Floor 3. Back to Floor 4.

If it sounded tedious, it's because it was. But I could feel it. We were almost done. I was so overleveled, the boss would melt before my feet. Floor 4 was about to capitulate.

I resumed my scanning from before. It was tedious, but I felt great. Now it was the dungeon weeping beneath my feet. This was my payback for the teleporter floor. Huh? Huh? You wanna make a mathematically unsolvable challenge that inflicts great psychological damage on me? Huh? Well how about I ruin one of your puzzle floors with some magic! Eat shit. I ain't waiting for no rivers to drain.

I was 1/4th of the way through the floor when the message popped up.

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

Eeeeeeeeh. That was really fast. I had spent so much time fiddling with Magic Barrier last loop I didn't realize how fast it actually was. This was... two hours after the start? Something definitely noticed we were down this far and sped their plans up. I was, to be honest, getting a bit suspicious of Medea, but demons noticing us getting to Floor 4 seemed more plausible, and I was so close to conquering this dungeon I could taste it. I would interrogate her after we found the hole and got Queen Daiya. Whatever we found in that hole, it would tell us a lot more than whatever Medea would spit out, surely.

I found the exit at the halfway point of the room, near one wall. As expected, it was a trapdoor under the river. I looked around the massive, massive room. Yeah, this would have been hellish without some cheese. Maybe the dungeon really, really wanted to have some classic water puzzles, but there was just no way to do them without opening up cheese for powerful mages. I could empathize with that. No compromises on your evil vision, even if it resulted in imperfect torture.

----------------------------------------

Wake up. Inhale. Awake bed companions. Get dressed. Skip church experimentally (RIP book). Eat. Elevator. Floor 1. Floor 2. Floor 3. Skip to exit of Floor 4.

I was shaking with excitement. The end was so close, and Floor 4 hadn't even been that bad. The hell dungeon was almost over.

Everyone slid down the trap door. I shut it behind us, which ended the Magic Barriers. I wasn't really sure how we would be getting out after this, but surely there was a way that didn't involve drowning.

The double door before us was grander than any door prior. It was ornately crafted metal, and had images of fire-spitting dragons carved on both doors, facing each other. Here be dragons, in other words. I readied my blade and spirit. The epic final boss to finish an epic dungeon. I remembered distant embers of the passion I felt in my youth; the enthusiasm I had felt at the prospect of entering my first dungeon. Oh, how young and naïve I had been. But now I was a battle-hardened warrior. I was ready for my challenge.

I pushed the door open. Sophia readied her bow. Rose drew her sword. Hilda held up the epic necromancer staff. Inside we went. Immediately, we were greeted by a giant, terrifying...

Empty room.

Whaaat.

I looked around. It was a truly massive room made of tanned bricks. Each had a ridge between them from whatever material had been used to stick the bricks together. It felt almost like an endless expanse, but in the far distance I could see a door. The door to, presumably, the Dungeon Core room, where the hole was. We just had to beat the boss first.

Supposedly, the boss of a dungeon changed each time you killed the current boss, so we wouldn't be fighting what the initial Excavators had fought on the doomed trip that started this mess. But... There had to be something, right?

I looked back at the others. Everyone shrugged. Sophia's super senses told us nothing.

"What do we do now...?" Hilda asked.

"Let's go to the door and see what happens."

So we did. It was a surprisingly long room. The floor was truly massive. It took like, five, ten minutes of walking just to get to the door.

It was locked, of course. It was a smaller metal door, still ornately carved, still completely shut. Supposedly the magic of the Dungeon Core kept it locked against all possible force until the boss was dead. Thank you for the in-universe explanation for video game mechanics. Truly immersive. It's easy to forget I was sucked into a video game world.

I sat down and leaned against the wall to think. I thought, and thought, and thought. Hilda and the others milled about, also thinking, but mainly just seeming kind of bemused. This dungeon never failed to disappoint.

Eventually, though, it hit me.

Maybe it was just because I was in tune with the dungeon's evil wavelength after suffering for so long. Maybe I was evil myself now. But either way, I understood.

"Suppose you don't want a challenging boss," I said aloud. The girls turned to look at me. "Suppose you want the most annoying boss possible. What do you do?"

Rose gave a thoughtful look. "Are you suggesting it's invisible and non-hostile?"

"That's one part of it. Consider the design space. What else could you do?"

Sophia looked around. "Make it undetectable? Like from smells and stuff?"

I nodded. "And finally...?"

Hilda balked. "Make it super tiny, so it fits into one of the crevices..."

"That's my guess," I said, standing up. "A tiny monster hidden in the cracks. Honestly, it might even be like, a platinum golem or some other super tough to kill monster that's just invisible and undetectable. I could not imagine a worse final boss. Crawl on your hands and knees while running your fingers through the cracks, hoping it isn't running around to stay undetected. In a room this massive, it could evade detection for basically forever without some super strong detection magic or something."

"Are we screwed, then...?" Hilda asked.

"Maybe. But I kind of want to try out a new spell technique here. It might make things go faster. Everyone, behind me."

Rose, Sophia, and Hilda crowded behind me where the door was. I took a half-step forward to give them space, then stuck out a hand. Presumably, any such invisible creature would move to be as far away from us as possible, to minimize chance of detection. But that behavioral pattern, at the very least, made it less likely for it to be hiding out nearby. Which meant all one had to do was hit everywhere else at once.

I formed the fireball in my hand, and then started pouring mana into it. It felt like forever since I had actually bothered to think about MP. My MP regen was one of the most absurdly powerful parts of my skillset, I had observed; mages in this world had to regen their mana by pressing their hands against mana crystals that got ambient energy from the earth, but mine just recharged automatically. An interesting quirk of this was that I could pour MP into spells to strengthen them... while my MP was regenning. At first, this hadn't been too impressive, since my regen was literally 1 MP a second. But now? Try 34, on top of 6800 base MP. I could now cast a max-power fireball from my early days every 3 seconds, or in other words, boost the power of an existing fireball by that much every 3 seconds, on top of having it be 680x stronger to begin with due to my high base MP.

I had never tested this at anything higher than my base MP, somewhat out of apathy. It had a theoretically infinite limit, and I never really felt like waiting for the passive regen to keep boosting it, since it involved nothing more than just standing around and waiting.

But now I had plenty of time, and plenty of reason to do it. So I stood there and waited, and waited, and waited.

The fireball started off reasonably sized, then started growing and never stopped. It turned from a baseball to a basketball, a basketball to a volleyball, and that was when it stopped really being a ball. It turned into something like a seething storm of fire that was barely holding itself together in front of my hand. But I kept holding. There was some law of Elemental magic that stopped your own elements from hurting you, or more accurately, doing any "backwards" damage in a little cone behind the activation point. So I had nothing to fear. I just let the storm grow and grow and grow until it felt like we were staring directly at the surface of the sun, sprawling out in every direction.

I honestly have no idea how long I kept charging it. Maybe just a number of minutes, maybe hours. But I let it get massive, and then I unleashed it.

The attack that left my hand could not be called a fireball. Any resemblance to a ball or even normal fire had long since faded. It was more like a massive beam of pure seething fire that shot forth, expanding rapidly to fill every inch of the room. The only thing spared was the aforementioned cone, which was honestly the only reason why Rose and co didn't melt instantly. Or me. The devastation was unreal. It was like God himself shitting pure hate after eating too many peppers. The floor itself boiled and turned to magma. The air became superhot. All life died. Jesus wept. We are become death, destroyer of worlds.

The door behind us opened. We slipped through it and shut it behind us before we joined the ending of the world.

Once we were safe, Hilda hugged me in a tight embrace, pushing her boobs against my chest. "Fuck me," she whispered. As a fellow mage, it seemed she was impressed by my skill.

"When you master Soul Suck," I replied.

She let go of me with a frown. Sorry, but I wasn't about to risk my life for some impromptu necromancer fucking. Casting the spell had been fun and all, but I really didn't feel like getting soul sucked into next week and having to stand for hours (?) just to charge it up again.

"We have a problem," Rose said.

"Yeah, Hilda trying to get in my pants while she still has a killer vagina."

"No. Look."

"Huh?" I looked around. It seemed like a normal room. Nice stone walls, some cool pillars in the corner, a Dungeon Core shimmering on a pedestal... "I don't see anything weird."

"Exactly. There's nothing here."

"..............................Oh."

It wasn't here.

There was no hole.

But... There had been no hole outside in the boss room, either. Or on Floor 4. Or anywhere.

............There was no hole?

............................................................

Had there ever been a hole...?