Unable to modify floor while an invader is present

Apparently the invader wasn’t dead yet somehow. This was a problem easily solved though. Spending the twenty mana to create a new room, Avery starts work on the fourth floor. A single room, which would hold a puzzle and act as a locking mechanism to keep anything from going up or down without the solved puzzle allowing access. Ideally, she would be able to set the doors to open one at a time, with both doors locking while the puzzle was in effect. That would be a forced transition, and if an invader managed to get past that puzzle, the door upward would be sealed shut to disallow any further intrusion into the lower reaches. Unfortunately, she needed to have a puzzle completed before attempting to get the doors to work properly, and Avery did not have the mana to spare for that at the moment. Granted, a point of mana regeneration was nice, but even optimal allocation of resources would leave her deep in the negatives after spending all she had on hallways.

As it was, Avery starts spending all her mana on a hallway leading down. Now that there was a live invader on the second floor, she had the potential of the slimes dying from murder, or from what she could unearth. There were constant stories about adventurers or random delvers who go into an unexplored dungeon and discover some sort of incredibly powerful artifact that was buried ages ago to be forgotten by all. Acting as such a dungeon herself, Avery was inclined to believe, or if she were being honest with herself inclined to hope, that she might be able to locate something similar herself by delving too deep and be able to take advantage of its presumably fathomable power by using her spell to temporarily take up arms. Her own arms, that was.

With a rate of ten meters per ten mana, Avery would be able to get well below the plateau before running out of digging ability. Well, considering her angle of descent, she was getting something more akin to seven meters of depth per ten mana spent, but that was fine. Now that she thought of it, if she made this more like a spiral staircase it could serve as a staging ground for multiple levels of puzzles, all of which she could seal off until said level was completed, allowing for further descent into the deeps. Even these forty-five degree angles of the floor would serve her well, once she had the time and mana to demolish cuts of the stone into proper stairs. There was always the option of leaving it smooth like that, but that would disincentivize leaving. If possible, she would prefer having a platform to transport straight to the top floor, though where she’d have it emerge from… Right, the fake door. So, when the whole thing was set up, the keys would be necessary both for getting below the second floor and also for getting into the elevator room. It wouldn’t be obvious that was what it was for until after they got past floor three at the very least though, so that would keep the annoyance factor at having to work so hard to get to a completely useless room.

Apparently there were no useless rooms when it came to dungeon design, assuming one could actually do all the things one wanted to.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There was actually a lot of empty space in the first hallway. It basically went downward in one direction, unlike what Avery was doing below the third floor with her ‘down one flight, turn ninety degrees, down another flight, repeat’ spiral staircase idea. At the very least she could use the space between floors two and three to slope the shaft gently from within the spiral over to where the empty boss room was. Hmm. Maybe she would have to look into putting an optional boss in there. Something that invaders would only fight if they tried to use the escape tunnel to go down, perhaps.

Room four of the path onward to down would have the tunnel go straight through it to reach the top. A secret puzzle in that room to unlock the exit early wouldn’t be amiss, to be honest. Since she would want them to get out as soon as possible, that one would need to be a gimme. If she could squeeze out those sweet, sweet secret bonuses out of it though, that would be great. Probably just a simple word puzzle on a pillar surrounding the gap in the floor and ceiling, where you just press a couple buttons to open up the hidden door.

Somehow, losing a point of mana every twenty seconds on top of spending ten every four seconds to dig ever deeper was leading to Avery rapidly reaching the point of no mana, and no mana regeneration. If she didn’t come across something soon, she’d have to resort to not being able to do anything at all, and simply hope that the invader wakes up and demolishes all the slimes for her. That was an idea most unpalatable to her. A wizard shouldn’t need to rely on the unbound monster. Conjuration specialists would use their bound creatures readily, and most wizards would eventually get themselves a familiar they could talk out the problems with their spells with, but relying on a creature outside of ones control to solve your issues was the first step toward being unable to self-determine. When dealing with an adventuring party, that issue is typically sidestepped through the justification that said wizard is helping the rubes with their problems, not vice-versa, or that the remainder of the group is under the wizard’s control, or in the rare cases extending the sense of self-determination to be the fate of the group rather than the individual, whereby the actions of any member unit can be attributed to all participants as a whole, but this case was not as rigorously defined as that.

So far, Avery had a hostile relationship with an unknown variety of monster, which was for some reason following a few of her orders, specifically the ones made to coincide with a general monster operating procedure; that of petty theft and murder. Theft from her family, of her own family’s items, but not of any relation to the monster in question, and murder of monsters, but the point still stood.

It had been over two hundred meters downward at this point, and there hadn’t even been a notable increase in ambient temperature yet. Idly, Avery wonders if she would even be able to tell there had been a change, given her lack of sensation through the mapping function, but is distracted by a sudden message box.

Uncovering an abandoned cave structure adds its effects to your own dungeon!

Room: +130 mana regeneration Creatures: -400 mana regeneration

...

And everything got worse.