Chapter 17

Sal waited quietly in the darkness of the dungeon for the combat to begin. No, not quietly. Silently. Her level twenty stealth completely obliterated her presence, and the undead of the lower floors of the Caseville dungeon ignored her completely, even as they wandered by her. She clutched the two short swords she’d been trained with tightly, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

The moment came as Lorn issued a bellowing challenge, drawing the attention of the zombies. With his warhammer, he was a mighty force all on his own. Or at least he was now. Once he had been a mild-mannered laborer, and Sal had been a shopkeeper. But now, here he was on floor fifteen with the rest of them, serving as their front lines and distractions.

The zombies came charging for him, and he swung his massive weapon, crushing one zombie and then another. Sal Dashed forward with Stealth still active and used Ambush on a third enemy that was about to attack his flank. Her Stamina infused blades obliterated the monster’s heart. She vanished back into the shadows before the other zombies even realized what had happened to their companion.

Twang!

Shirls, the third member of their team, put an arrow in one zombie’s eye. The undead monster fell into true death a moment later.

Twang! Twang! Twang!

Annoyed, Sal ambushed the final zombie before Shirls could tag it with her arrows. While they’d agreed not to engage into a competition to see who would kill the most, they were totally competing. And frustratingly Shirls was winning.

They had all entered the dungeon together after it had been opened to the public. They had nervously fought as Commoners for two hours before returning, certain that they had made a terrible mistake and pledging to never engage in such foolishness again.

But their gambit had worked, and they’d each unlocked a class. Lorn was a Warrior, and the two women Rogues. Their subsequent delves had been less terrifying and more exhilarating as they learned to work together.

They were risking their lives, fighting way above their levels as they pushed to the bottom floor of the dungeon. They’d heard rumors of a great treasure in the depths, and were determined to find out the truth of the matter. While they’d be forced to retreat should the zombies start swarming them, they were able to handle small groups like the one they had just faced despite only being in the early level twenties.

“Lorn, you need to keep a lid on that Battle Shout of yours,” Shirls said. “I know that it increases your strength for whatever weird reason that skills do things like that, but it also lures enemies in. We do not want to get overrun. Not after getting so far.”

“Yeah,” Sal agreed. “What would you do if we lured in the minotaur by mistake?”

“There is no minotaur,” Lorn said. “Just a rumor.”

“They say that the dungeon architect specifically said there is a minotaur,” Shirls said. “I think that if anyone knew for certain, it would be him, wouldn’t it?”

“You mean the guy who built that weird tower outside of town?” Lorn asked. “As I heard it, he specifically spent the entire time he was in the city denying that he was responsible for the dungeon.”

“Yeah, well, he also told anyone who asked what to expect inside it,” Shirls said.

“His entire party did,” Sal reminded them. “Weirdest group to ever visit the town. If they are responsible for the dungeon though, then we owe them. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to being a Commoner.”

“Aye, same here,” Lorn agreed. “Even with the cut we have to pay for entering the dungeon, the bounty is far more than I was making lugging boxes around for shopkeepers like you lot.”

“And I’m making more than I was selling my pottery,” Sal agreed. “I always knew there was a reason I couldn’t unlock Potter no matter what I did. Turns out it’s because I was always meant to be a Rogue. Although the Dexterity I have now will help if I ever decide to go back to shaping clay.”

“Shh,” Lorn said, tilting his head. “Do you hear that?”

Sal cocked her head and listened. There it was, a huffing breathing sound. She frowned, because it was too deep. And zombies didn’t breath.

A thudding step, and then another, and from the shadows a hulking figure. The party watched in wonderment as a nine-foot-tall minotaur stepped out of the shadow. On the beast’s chest was the mark they had been told about. A blue Core Stone with a black circle around it. The supposed final boss of the dungeon was real!

Sal was about to order the retreat, but before the words escaped her lips Lorn charged forward, bellowing a Battle Shout and raising his warhammer high.

The beast caught it in a palm. The level twenty warrior gulped as, with its other hand, the monster grabbed him by the scalp and lifted him into the air.

“Attack me?” Cassius the minotaur said. “Master said no attack first.”

He threw the warrior through the air, whipping the man with such force that the impact broke the Warriors neck.

“You attack me first. I fight back.”

Seeing her friend die filled Sal with fear. She turned and ran.

Twang! Twang! Twang!

Shirls was braver than she, but it came to naught. The arrows, even infused with Stamina and therefore far more dangerous than those fired by a Commoner, barely pierced the minotaur’s hide. When Cassius charged her, he crushed her into the wall and she coughed up blood.

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Sal did not stay to watch the fate of her best friend. She ran, returning through the labyrinth of the fifteenth floor to the stairwell. Running blind with tears of terror in her eyes, she ran straight into a group of zombies that they had missed.

The dungeon of Caseville claimed its first fatalities.

The core in the city above hummed at the sudden, massive influx of experience and miasma. It paused only briefly as it tried to remember what to do with the two energies. Most of the experience was absorbed by the monsters which were responsible for the deaths. As for the Miasma, Caseville spun that into a Skill.

Cassius glowed brightly as he was Evolved by the dungeon, his reward for the battle. He had already gained seven levels since his Spawning, reaching the height of level forty-seven. Now, as his body grew a second set of arms, he became more than he had been before.

As a circle formed around the glowing crystal in the center of Caseville, speculation began to erupt as to what the light meant.

Nobody suspected the truth. Caseville’s light was one part dealing with errant energies, and one part honoring the sacrifice of fallen warriors.

On the fifteenth floor, Cassius picked up the warhammer that the Warrior had dropped, testing its weight in his top two arms. He was a Minotaur Champion now, like Brutus, with four powerful arms.

Heading toward the way that the second rogue had vanished, Cassius quickly put an end to those Zombie Lords which had Evolved from her death. The experience he gained from the encounter with the humans, and the subsequent encounter with the Zombie Lords, pushed him to level forty eight.

The final boss of Caseville dungeon had just become much more dangerous.

~~~~~~

Tom’s party, plus Sue and Norman, traveled to the west next. They continue to travel overland, with Tom using the power of Alpha Core to create a flowing road of stone. They were heading for Irshen, and while there was a road already connecting that city to Nashak, Emil suggested that they avoid replacing it until the characteristics of the roads that Tom could Customize were explored a little better.

While Emil was normally all for improving such things, he wanted to make one hundred percent certain that Tom’s roads were an improvement before replacing the existing ones entirely. Not that traveling parallel to the existing infrastructure was too much of a bother for the party.

Irshen was a river city, named after the Irshen river which it straddled. While to outsiders it might be confusing to have a river and a city named the same thing, the locals never got confused over which Irshen they were talking about. There was a slight inflection that they used to distinguish the two in conversation, although for the most part the locals simply referred to the city as “the city” and the river as “the river.”

The road reached the river and traveled parallel to it for fifty miles or so, but at Emil’s suggestion Tom built a bridge out of dungeon stone. This delayed them some time, as building a bridge isn’t as simple as building a road, and Emil wanted to make certain that it was done right. He spent hours instructing Tom on how to build the structure and the supports to keep the bridge safe and, at the same time, elevated above the river enough that it wouldn’t obstruct the traffic that flowed up and down the waterway.

The final structure was much grander than Tom anticipated when he began the project. He raised the earth on both sides of the river twenty yards above the water line and connected them with a massive edifice of dungeon stone. Tom was worried that the arch supporting it would topple, but Emil assured him that it was the strongest part of the structure.

The resulting bridge was, when Tom finished following Emil’s instructions, quite literally the best bridge in Welsius.

Once they had crossed to the other side, the party resumed traveling along the river, creating a second road on the south bank in addition to the one that had been in existence for centuries along the north bank.

When they arrived in Irshen city, Tom leveled the core, then the party dispersed to investigate the city and try to help Tom determine the resources that it would benefit from the most. Tom, for his part, was grateful for the presence of his family, and accompanied them as they explored the city and attempted to establish buyers for Norman’s textiles.

“Have you thought any more about joining the knighthood?” Norman asked his son as they were strolling through the streets.

“I don’t think I will,” Tom admitted. “I respect Madame Silva, and Antoine, but I have enough responsibilities simply because of my Class. I mean, I haven’t sworn any oaths, but I feel obligated to use my abilities to make the world a better place if I can. And with how strong my Progenitor subclass seems to be, the difference I can make is pretty big. I would rather focus on that on my own than swear an oath to obey King Fenard.”

“Sevin is going to join, you know,” Sue reminded him. “Do you think that will put the two of you at odds? You’ve been friends since you could walk, after all.”

Tom frowned. “I don’t know, to be honest. I hope that Sevin and I stay friends. Even if I’m not a knight, I’m going to be doing a lot of work for the kingdom. I’m hoping that we can stay together and I can count on him to help me conquer dungeons and keep me safe like he has been doing. The same for the others, although to be honest there’s nothing holding us all together except for the fact that I Summoned most of the party, and they have been accompanying me to try to gain experience in the dungeons we’re conquering.”

“What would you do if the Heroes in your party abruptly quit?” Norman asked.

“I don’t know. Probably ask the king for some knights to protect me as I finish this quest,” Tom admitted. “Although I guess even that might not be necessary. In King Fenard’s last letter, he said that the other kingdoms are sending me a lot of command cores to link into my network. Once I do that, I might be ready to complete the entire quest, and then I really don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Even if you no longer need to conquer dungeons, you’ll still need to manage the network, won’t you?” Sue asked.

“I suppose,” Tom admitted. “I don’t know. I’m worried, because of the visions that Alpha has been giving me, that something really bad is going to happen if I don’t complete the quest. I think that maybe, even once I complete it, the system won’t be done with me. Establishing a Network might just be step one in a long process, for all I know.”

“It’s strange to think that very soon you’ll be higher level than us,” Norman commented. “I mean, what are you again, level twenty-seven? Twenty eight?”

“Actually, twenty-nine now.” Tom agreed. He was silent for a moment, then he said “Ma, Pa, three adventurers have died in one of my dungeons. I got a system notification about it last night. It’s … the first time that’s happened. I haven’t been setting my dungeons up to be dangerous. The opposite in fact. I don’t know how it happened, only that three people are dead.”

“That’s terrible,” Sue said. “But it’s not your fault, Tom. Delver beware. Everyone knows that when you go into a dungeon you’re risking your life.”

“I know,” He said. He sighed. “I just think that I wish I didn’t get so much experience from it.”