Alex felt that maybe his project needed a bit more tweaking. In good dungeon design, the first floor or level was meant to be relatively easy and boring. Sure, if you weren’t careful, there were ways to get yourself killed. However, being so close to the surface meant that a dead person could be resurrected with magic, causing their souls to be ripped back before the dungeon core could consume them. The distance caused the souls to take longer to get to the core too.

The best way to keep an adventurer dead was for them to die in a much more dangerous place, but having the first floor be too dangerous was a good way to scare away any adventurers. He had been testing ways to improve the usefulness of his creatures. He created a few rats to have a mild neurotoxin venom, but it was clear that he went a little overboard. Paralyzing venom was a lot more dangerous than he expected.

He wasn’t too worried about scaring too many people away, even the most lethal of poisons can be cured in the game. Because of the fright, most of the people in this incursion fled from his domain. There were a few people left behind - he used his rats and other small animals to attack before too many escaped the dungeon.

Many people fell down from their injuries and he was able to get a few more, but arrows started flying and his animals fled to cover. The amount of attacks and injuries he did was lacking, and few of those injuries were fatal enough to die quickly. His mind was still stuck in the game when it came to tactics, causing him to miss this important opportunity for soul points.

There were a couple that were paralyzed and deep enough in the dungeon. Seizing the opportunity, he quickly ended their lives and waited for the much needed influx of soul points.

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Hasil understood the mental distress of Stor. That cave was like a nightmare made real. He turned back to the cave but all he saw was the tempting maw of some ungodly creature. There were little doubts that this wasn’t a dungeon or something similar to a dungeon. That meant that he had enough advantage to take the gamble and announce the presence of the dungeon.

A few of the men tried to go back and retrieve the bodies of the injured before they were killed. Arrows, a weapon that he didn’t think would have any use in a cave, were sent out and scared away the animals, no, monsters that attacked them. The ones he saw were familiar, whatever sat behind their eyes was unholy.

They managed to recover a few, some that were poisoned with paralysis. They brought a few elders from the village, those skilled in medicine and healing, and Hasil thanked the gods that they did. However, he wasn’t sure what they could do with paralysis venom - these sorts of poisons were hard to recover from without rare herbs and they didn’t have enough.

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He looked over the people that survived and spotted Stor. His eyes failed to hide the horror in his mind. He didn’t know what was going on within Stor’s mind, he only hoped that it wouldn’t cause him to regress back into madness.

Hasil tried to walk back to the village to begin writing a letter, but his joints and bones were too worn from the sudden flight. He was too old to be doing this, a fact that his age kept beating into him and he kept ignoring. He failed to make the right steps and fell, his body rebelling against him.

He wasn’t in a state to write a letter, and now that he remembered, writing a letter might not be the best path forward. He took great pride in his ability to read and write, that didn’t mean a letter from a distant village would get read.

Then the second best course of action was to send out some people to the nearest city and inform the noble there. There was a good chance that this would complicate his plans; the low ranking nobles and the rulers of small cities were traitorous back when he was in the army. However, that might not be a bad thing.

He needed to think about this carefully. The village was at a severe disadvantage, he needed to think about the best way to make sure as many people survive. They needed immediate support from the nearest city, but they also needed the support of the ruling noble family. However, the low rank nobles or governors might try to use the dungeon for their own benefit.

Hasil recovered enough of his breath and, with the help of much younger hunters, got back on his feet. He slowly walked back to the village, being careful to not push his body too much. The plan he needed required someone young, someone smart, yet someone that wouldn’t question him too much.

There was only one person he thought of that matched that description. Stor’s youngest son was more pampered than his other sons and Hasil personally taught him to read and write. The boy trusted him a lot and was smarter than most in the village. He was rather cunning, a troublemaker when he was young.

He was perfect. Now, on to the distraction. There was a cache of food deep within the forest, something he made a few years ago while hunting. It wasn’t a lot but it was something that only he and a few others knew about, meaning that it was probably untouched. There were several other caches like it too, though where they were was a closely kept secret.

Hasil continued to think and plan until the best strategy was selected. He didn’t need to use the caches as a strategy but as motivation. He walked back to the village and brewed himself some herbal tea, the last of his stock. The flavor helped calm him down as he sat in his chair in front of his hut.

“Hey, call the village to me,” he said to one of the passing children. The child’s eyes seemed to grow to twice their size before the kid rushed off to tell the adults. He was going to have to break a slight taboo of the village, but what did it matter. He was old, it was about time that he started to go senile.

Besides, their village was falling apart. There was no need to keep old traditions.