The dungeon entrance was a ridiculously long battered-earth corridor illuminated by a glowing green and blue moss on the ceiling and walls. Seconds turned into minutes, marked by the cadenced sound of Graham's armored steps.
Then, he suddenly said, "We're in."
Nothing had changed that Arthur could tell. "What?" Then, he recalled the man was his new instructor and a knight and added a "Sir."
"Please, don't call me sir, Your Highness," the man replied. "You are no longer a squire, and I'm here as your knight, not your superior. Except when your orders go against the king's, I'm yours to command."
The official revocation of his squire status was relatively unimportant news, but the other part was big. Arthur wasn't supposed to have anything like a personal knight until he got a commission in the army. As for a personal grand knight? That was unheard of. Only kings had that privilege.
"Oh," he regally reacted to the news. "I... Thank you."
"It's my honor, Your Highness."
"So... What was that about we being in?"
"I am a shaper, Your Highness—"
"Stop," Arthur interrupted. "If we're going to stay here for years, I would rather you don't call me Your Highness in your every sentence. This request doesn't go against my father's orders, does it?"
"No, milord, it doesn't. But it goes against the country's laws. The best I can do is call you sire, milord, or my prince."
"Whatever you'd like."
"So be it, milord." He nodded. "I'm a shaper. I can tell we just entered a different dimension. In addition, space is closely related to time, which allows me to detect how this portal soothes the transition into an area with considerable time dilation. We're not far from the dungeon's first room."
"Shaper?" Arthur repeated the word he had never heard. It even sounded different somehow. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but it rolled differently on the tongue.
"Milord, most humans speak Carnan, popularly known as the human tongue. In the Central Plains, we use the Hucatoi idiom, and the Golden Kingdom accent is almost a sub-expression of that idiom. However, neither of them contains a specific word for spatial awakeners, those who pick the space element. The League dialect contains such a word: shaper. I was ordered to also teach you this dialect, and adding some words here and there will help you familiarize yourself with it."
The prince was actually a bit overwhelmed by how much information Graham delivered, how detailed it was, and how efficient he was in sharing it. Moreover, the man was so straightforward that Arthur felt he wasn't trying to restrict the information the prince had access to.
Back in the cruiser carriage, Arthur constantly felt like he was drip-fed information with a lot left out. Even the topics he could learn about had been limited. Actually, forget the carriage; ever since he awakened, it always felt like everyone was hiding things from him. Except for Sophie, he guessed, but only because she knew even less than him.
Now, in a single explanation, he felt like invisible shackles had been removed from his intellectual life.
He decided to test his new boundaries, "How long have you known we would come?" he asked.
"I was contacted by the king after I took my wife from your room, milord."
Arthur missed a step. That soon? His father had been very insensitive. "I apologize."
"Thank you, milord."
They went silent for about a minute before Arthur complained, "How long is this corridor?"
"A few dozen yards longer at most, milord."
Arthur raised an eyebrow as he looked ahead. It looked like the corridor would go on forever. "Are you sure?"
"This is a magic portal, milord—"
"Diversify it," Arthur interjected.
"Sorry, milord?"
"The way you refer to me. Diversify it. I can't take another milord in a row like this."
"Very well, my prince. This corridor is a physical construct intertwined into a magic portal between dimensions. If you had looked behind when we entered it, you would only see the corridor extend into infinity, not the exit. As I said, I'm a shaper, not an entropomancer—the word for time awakeners—but the time dilation I can barely feel is as powerful as I expect it to become inside this—"
He was still talking when the corridor suddenly disappeared.
Out of nowhere, Arthur found himself in a small square battered-earth chamber with an opening to another room on the opposite wall. The place was completely empty. The glowing green and blue moss on the ceiling and walls illuminated things better here than in the corridor.
When he looked back, he saw a stone archway just like the one he had gone through in the damp room and the endless corridor.
Graham didn't stop walking after getting into the dungeon. He moved toward the next room.
Arthur and his maids followed.
That's when he saw a living monster for the first time in his life.
He had seen pictures of monsters that were so lifelike they felt like they would come out of the painting. Nothing could compare to actually seeing the three short green bare-fisted creatures with a loincloth at the waist. Their heads were too big, and their thick nails were as sharp and yellow as their teeth.
"Goblins," he muttered under his breath.
"Yes, Your Highness. Wait here while I clear the room. We must head deeper into the dungeon to ensure you get the S-tier Peaceful Observer achievement."
The knight stepped into the room and became a blur. The next instant, three goblins with twisted heads had fallen to the ground, and their bodies were turning into light. Whenever a monster died, a dungeon reabsorbed the mana it had used to generate it.
"Come into this room and wait here, sire," Graham said before the goblins had dissipated entirely and moved forward.
"What if a monster spawns here?" Arthur asked as he moved into the now clear room.
The man stopped to answer. "That's impossible, milord. Moreover, no monster will change rooms unless one of two things happens. One, a monster gets attacked by someone in another room. That is referred to as 'luring.' Two, a delver starts setting up traps to later lure a monster. If the dungeon detects it, it can let monsters attack another room." Then, he went ahead to kill the five goblins in the next room. "Come into this room and wait here, Your Highness," he repeated soon after.
"Why do the monsters behave like this?" Arthur asked as he obeyed.
"Scholars believe it is thanks to Fate's interference, my prince. The rewards prove Fate has some power over dungeons. The great question is how much power. Could Fate remove all dungeons from the world? Or is Fate's power limited? No one knows."
The prince had never expected to hear something like that. Fate... What if Fate could remove the dungeons? Why wouldn't it?
He looked at the knight's back. The man had promised to rip reality apart if Fate wasn't fair to Charlotte in the afterlife. Could Fate... actually be evil?
No, that didn't make sense. Without Fate, the Fated Races would've gone extinct. Unless Fate had sent the dungeons in the first place?
"Don't overthink it, Your Highness," Graham said after killing eleven goblins in the adjacent room. "Leave such grand considerations for after you reach level 100. Until then, you can only accept the world's rules and do your best to thrive. Come, wait here now."
Arthur saw the wisdom in the counsel and did as told. There were too many what-ifs and no answer to be found. Not while he was level 1, at least.
Graham moved to the next room, and like this, they went. The knight cleared a room, Arthur and his maids entered it, and the man went ahead.
The first floor had hundreds of consecutive rooms with nothing but goblins, though their numbers kept increasing until they reached thousands. They also started wearing armor and wielding weapons. At first, it was only linen clothes and daggers. As the humans progressed, the objects were replaced with leather and padded armor paired with staves, short swords, wooden shields, and spears. The quality also improved, from rusty and tattered to pristine.
Unfortunately, anything a monster was holding was also absorbed upon their death. Imagine having a dungeon that freely and endlessly created things one could take outside?!
Graham eventually started using his flaming fists, which was awesome. Awakeners could only have a single element, and his was space. The fire had to come from a magic item, maybe the gauntlets he wore.
Things became really impressive when his grand knight cloak also turned into flames that surrounded him as he pushed himself into the midst of the goblins and punched and kicked them to death. Arthur thought he imagined it at first, but it soon became evident that the man's wide swings reached the space beyond his fists. The prince could only feel he was witnessing one of those glorious battle scenes from the stories.
Sophia fainted the first time a goblin's head exploded.
Arthur didn't feel similarly sickened. It was one thing to see people die, but those were monsters. They wanted to destroy his world, so they had it coming—
Wait, vampires were monsters too.
What— How—
He had never thought about it, but what in Fate's name did that mean?! How was it even possible for a Fated Race to mate with monsters and have offspring? Worse, was it possible that killing half-monsters also let one level up? And the implications!
He would ask about it—later. When Sophie's ears were out of reach.
Eventually, they reached the boss room, the last one on any dungeon floor. It had a hobgoblin and a few hundred goblins.
The former was a stronger variant of goblins, taller than Sophie and buffier than Arthur. It wore padded armor, like the goblins protecting it, and held a scimitar. The goblins' weaponry was more diversified, and it was even the first time Arthur saw them wielding crossbows. There were even a dozen goblins with dirty gray robes and staves with a shining stone on one end! Those should be mages!
Graham entered it without hesitation and brought flaming judgment upon those monsters.
"Firebeast," Arthur heard Tamara whisper while the massacre was undergoing.
"What?" he asked, turning to his maid.
She sounded surprised at being heard but sighed and replied, "The Firebeast and the Bloodwitch became famous in the war recently. Not famous enough to be heard in your circles, Your Highness, but even a few palace servants were beginning to whisper about them. The Firebeast is a knight clad in flames and a beast on the battlefield. The Bloodwitch is a mage that will kill you with a blade made of your own blood before you know it." She paused and smiled slightly. "There's even a supposed genius Shadowmind behind them, but it's just silly. It sounds like scholar envy to me."
Arthur frowned and didn't reply. For Charlotte to be called a witch after dying by a witch's curse! He would quench those rumors as soon as he left the dungeon.
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William didn't take long to finish. He left the hobgoblin for last. The monster exploded with a punch, and the knight stopped looking like a burning man.
And then, Fate rewarded the knight.
A white light that seemed to come from the much above pierced the ceiling of the vast cave chamber and illuminated the ground in front of the man in a circle. A small wooden chest that didn't even reach Graham's knees faded into existence.
He crouched to open it and took a small green smooth, glass-looking ball from the inside: a skill crystal. The chest disappeared, and he stored the crystal away.
"Let's keep going, milord," Graham said and moved toward the small passage at the room's far end, which had a stairway leading down.
Arthur obeyed. "Was this passage always here?" he asked as he walked. He hadn't noticed it while marveling at the grand knight's battle.
"Yes, my prince."
"So we could just sneak past the boss to go further into the dungeon?"
"Certainly, Your Highness, but it is only done by scouts in a rush or those who want to leave the easier monsters for others. Even strong delvers at least kill the floor bosses, no matter how easy or time-consuming it might be. And even capped awakeners will usually clear the entire floor, not to mention those with remaining growth potential."
An awakening stone gave you ten years to level up and could only be used once. Then, you had to use extension stones. The first extension stone used after awakening provided five more years to level up, the second provided three, and the third provided one. You couldn't use any more stones than that.
Capped awakeners were those who couldn't gain any more levels. They either had used all stones possible or hadn't used a new one after the effect of the previous one had expired.
"Awakeners won't ignore even the weak monsters?" Arthur was surprised. "Not even the capped ones? Why? And those who can still grow... Isn't it more time effective to aim for stronger monsters? Doesn't killing them make your level grow faster?"
They reached the opening leading to the next dungeon floor and started going down. All monsters in the room were already halfway into turning into light.
"Indeed, milord, the stronger the monster, the more your level progresses from killing it. Nevertheless, you must remember dungeon access is controlled. You might not be able to leave the dungeon and immediately return. Even if you do have a monopoly on a dungeon, most dungeons can't respawn monsters fast enough to let you do two consecutive runs. Ignoring the weaker monsters also doesn't make stronger monsters respawn faster. Therefore, not killing the weaker monsters is a waste, even for capped awakeners."
"A waste?" Arthur asked before the knight could continue. "Wouldn't killing them be a waste of time? And a needless risk to a delver's life?"
"My prince, most delvers became delvers not to grow stronger but to make a living out of it. No matter how weak or strong a monster is, you have a one in ten thousand chance of being awarded a skill crystal when you slay it, which is the main source of income for weak delvers. Bear in mind, however, that this statistic affects the entire world. No goblin dropped a single crystal in this dungeon until now, even though I killed about thirteen thousand. Somewhere else, someone might've gotten two crystals in a row. Still, if you keep killing monsters, your personal statistic will eventually end up as one crystal for every five to fifteen thousand monsters you kill.
"Then, for your original question, there are floor bosses. You are guaranteed to receive at least a silver coin for killing any. Unlike dungeon objects, you can take Fate rewards out of the dungeon. A single coin isn't much but better than nothing, and it's all about luck. The rewards range from a single silver coin to multiple gold coins to a few mythril coins to enchanted weaponry and armor to up to three skill crystals. Only someone very determined to get to the next floor would ignore a boss they are capable of killing. It's like deciding not to take free money, very rarely worth it.
"Lastly, even such individuals will only ignore a boss if they believe they are considerably stronger than the monster. A floor boss acts as a warning to a delver. The power of every room on a floor will, at a minimum, match the previous floor's boss' power. Not the entire retinue, only the boss—in this case, the hobgoblin. Even so, you saw how the number of goblins quickly multiplied as we progressed. Expect a similar setup below."
Just as the knight finished saying that, they reached the end of the stairs and floor below.
It had a hobgoblin and five goblins mounted on overly furry black dogs with shining red eyes and sharp teeth—worgs. Or puppy worgs, really. The hobgoblin wore chainmail over padded armor and wielded a spear and a wooden shield. The goblins wore padded armor and held crossbows.
Graham held a hand for Arthur and the maids to stop just before the end of the stairs and went inside alone. "The first floor is often called the tutorial floor, Your Highness. Things progress considerably faster from the second floor onward."
He turned into a blur and attacked.
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The first ten floors had goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, swamp trolls, frost trolls, orcs, and war orcs, often riding worgs, giant bats, or griffins.
"How deep is this dungeon, even?" Arthur asked.
It had been over ten hours since they entered the dungeon. Even the awe from seeing the knight kill monsters had faded over time.
Now, for instance, Graham was ripping the head of a twenty-foot-tall griffin off. Arthur found it impressive, but that was all. That had been the floor boss, and Fate gave him a new chest.
The chests got larger and fancier the more difficult the boss. This one reached the knight's knees and had a metal frame. The better the chest, the more likely it was to contain better rewards, but only marginally so.
"Any dungeon can have as many floors as its strongest monster, sire," the knight said as he opened the chest and took three silver coins from it. "Therefore, this dungeon has ninety-five floors."
"Monsters have levels?" That was big news. Shouldn't someone have told him that before? His father had mentioned this dungeon had level 95 monsters, but everything had happened too fast back then. "I thought only the Fated Races had, well, access to Fate and levels."
"They are not true levels, milord," Graham said as he moved to the passage with the stairway down to the next floor. They were always tight and uncomfortable. Arthur and his maids followed regardless. "Inspecting an awakener shows you their race and level. When you inspect a monster, Fate tells you their race, too, and gives you an estimate of their power in the form of levels. That is what determines a dungeon's danger level. One star means its strongest monster is level ten or lower. Two stars, between eleven to twenty, and so on."
"So this would be a ten-star dungeon?" Arthur asked, impressed.
"Yes, my prince."
"Ninety-five floors, was it? How far are we going?"
"I expect to stop anywhere from floor 50 to 60, Your Highness."
"What?!" the prince exclaimed. That would take days! "Why so deep?"
"The Peaceful Observer achievement requires you to see many, many monsters for many consecutive days, sire, but without engaging them in combat. We must get it as fast as possible because you can't get to level 100 without killing many monsters. Unfortunately, the monsters have to be at least level 50. Mercifully, it can be the same monsters over and over again. Floor sixty or so is where I expect to find rooms containing enough monsters of that level."
They reached the eleventh floor a few moments later.
The first room had an exact copy of the giant griffin boss above. Arthur inspected it and was surprised it was not around level 11 as he had expected from floor 11.
| Royal Griffin — Level 38
It made sense, of course. The thing was big and looked powerful; it had to be over level 11. But wasn't that a little too fast? Then again, Graham had said things would progress faster from the second floor onward.
"There will be a lull on the levels soon, won't it?" the prince guessed after the griffin died.
"Yes, sire. Dungeons grow stronger faster with delvers, but it's always a risk. Therefore, they create as many bosses as possible to show they are useful and shouldn't be destroyed. Rewards come from Fate, not the dungeon, so they don't care about giving us things. And indeed, the kingdom sometimes decides whether a dungeon must be destroyed based on how many low-level bosses it has.
"Regardless, it's safer for a dungeon to slowly accumulate mana from the environment until there's an outbreak. It gives them as much strength as many S-tier achievements. Delvers are a risk they don't like taking, and they seek to kill us as fast as possible. They want to throw strong monsters at us from the moment we step in, but they can't.
"As a shaper, I can feel the reason why: dimensional interference. The dungeon has less control over the first floors. In other words, the closer to the portal, the weaker the monsters they create must be. The tutorial floor has the most interference and is as easy as they come, then the dungeon raises the monsters' power as fast as it can until we hit its mana regeneration threshold."
Arthur opened his mouth to ask what that was, but Graham didn't wait for it to explain.
"A dungeon creates monsters and their objects using mana and absorbs that mana when they die, milord. However, part of that mana is taken by Fate. Scholars believe Fate takes that in exchange for leveling us up, though capped awakeners won't benefit from it. The more powerful the dungeon core, the more mana it regenerates.
"Until now, this dungeon hasn't cared about the missing mana on the monsters I killed. The dungeon core's regeneration can quickly and easily make up for it. The monsters were too weak, and the stronger the monster, the more mana it requires to be spawned. However, we'll eventually find monsters that, when killed, will leave the dungeon lacking some mana for a while. That is the mana regeneration threshold.
"Every dungeon's middle floors are filled with monsters just slightly above or below that threshold, as many of them as the dungeon can create. As you saw until now, dungeons constantly attempt to stop delvers with quantity rather than quality, which becomes even truer in the middle floors. When we're close to the mana regeneration threshold, monster levels only increase ever so slightly, begrudgingly so.
"That threshold usually, but not always, coincides with a dungeon's centermost floor. This dungeon has 95 floors. Half that is 47 or 48. Thus, I infer it'll start spawning level 50 monsters a little after we go past its halfway point. Floor 55 or so."
They kept going. Eventually, they stopped to sleep. Well, Arthur and Sophie did, on black mattresses, which Graham took from his spatial storage.
They stopped nine times. Tamara and the knight were awake when the prince went to sleep and when he woke up. She also always offered them a juicy apple for breakfast.
Sophie was mostly silent all the while. She was always crestfallen and often bit her lips or cried silently. Surprisingly, she didn't complain even once.
Whatever tests the girl had been subjected to, it was obvious that they were accurate.
----------------------------------------
Griffins gave way to wyverns, while war orcs were followed by giant tarantulas. Then, monstrous butterflies, rolling spiked turtles, wyrms, and so on. The dungeon could spawn a wide variety of monsters.
"Most dungeons are more focused on a few races, sire," Graham informed when asked about it. "There is a correlation between high-level dungeons and variety, but no causation was ever proven."
As they progressed, they came across rooms with dozens of thousands of monsters. After the thirtieth floor, Graham would almost always stop to rest before or after dealing with those veritable armies.
At long last, on their tenth day in the dungeon, they reached floor 58, where every monster was level 50.
It was also the first floor with lightning elementals. The first time Arthur saw them, he didn't even identify them were monsters. They looked like hundreds of lightning bolts endlessly cutting through the air of the floor's first room.
When Graham stepped in, he was already clad in flames. Immediately, the hundreds of bolts multiplied, and almost all rushed toward the knight. The thunder was deafening, and the flash made Arthur blind for a few seconds.
Even when his vision returned to the prince, he couldn't see the fight at all. He had to turn his back to it and could only marvel at the shadows Tamara, Sophie, and he cast on the stairs as so many light flashes came from the other room.
When the lightning bolts decreased, Arthur turned to see Graham's flames had turned dark purple and seemed to twist the air around him. The remaining dozen lightning bolts were shooting away from him, and he chased them. He was too slow, but they were always cornered, likely by some invisible skill.
When he got to any of them, they seemed to multiply. Arthur eventually realized one of them was the elemental, and the others were its attacks. It was confusing because the elementals never stood still, always traveling like any lightning bolt.
Eventually, Graham cornered and punched the last bolt. His punch missed, yet it still struck beyond his reach, as usual. The bolt exploded into a flash of light and disappeared.
Then, he rested for a few minutes and moved to the next room.
Hundreds of lightning bolts quickly turned into thousands. Eventually, they reached a room that took Graham an entire hour to clear.
When he killed the last elemental, his dark purple flames also faded to reveal his panting form. He might be level 68, considerably higher than the level 50 elementals, but the gap wasn't large enough for him to easily deal with thousands of enemies of that level.
"We'll stay here, milord," he announced as Arthur and his maids entered the room.
Blue light, more potent than any the prince had ever seen, came from the opening on the other side. The other room clearly also had lightning elementals, and so many he couldn't even individually see them, only a continuous blinding light.
Tamara immediately took Sophie to one side of the room and used a spatial storage, which Arthur had never seen her use before. Was it a new addition to delve into the dungeon? Probably.
She took a wooden panel from the storage. Except for the material and texture, it looked precisely like the palace walls, white with golden and black elven patterns for footers and headers. She placed it on the wall of the cave chamber and applied a little pressure before moving on. It stayed firmly in place.
Then, she took another panel from the storage and put it beside the first one. Like that, she started covering the walls on that side of the cave chamber.
"Your head maid will work on our accommodations, Your Highness. Let me explain your training program in the meanwhile."
The prince turned to the man and asked before the knight could continue, "Will my extra agility affect things?" His father had said no, but he wanted to make sure.
"No, milord. We won't touch or use your stats in any meaningful way for now. We'll focus on certain achievements first."
That was underwhelming, especially after seeing the man kill so many monsters. Arthur wanted to grow strong! "Why?" he asked, trying not to let his disappointment show.
"I designed the beginning of your training to make you physically incapable of overthinking your current position and thus deciding to quit, my prince. That is similar to your previous training regimen, albeit more intense. My wife insisted you became mature for your age, but screaming during an enemy invasion suggests otherwise, no matter how noble your motivations were. The king ordered me to keep you here for at least one year, no matter what, and I plan to deliver. I assessed focusing on some achievements before working on your stats would accomplish that while using our time as efficiently as possible. Even raising your mind stats first for extra resolve might work against us if you put it in your head to leave. A mind specialist's resolve isn't something easily brushed aside."
Arthur had gotten used to having things hidden from him. On the other hand, Graham's answer was so honest that Arthur realized it would take a while for him to get used to it.
Then again, while William was pointing out something Arthur had done wrong—screaming during the invasion—there was no bite. He was like Charlotte in that regard, not Stinson. It made Arthur interested in discussing the error to understand it better and find a way to improve.
"What should I have done, then?"
"Assuming you believed your mother was at risk and needed to be alerted, you did right at the start by trying to create chaos to sound the alarm. However, after the alarm failed to engage, you should've run silently, only quietly talked to the servants you found on the way, and acquired a weapon. Any weapon would be better than none; a broom would've done it. Then you should've tried to sneak into her quarters, even after seeing the enemy guarding the door. You likely would've failed regardless, Your Highness, because your enemy was beyond your power. However, you would have a one in a million chance of succeeding, as opposed to the one a billion that your actions gave you."
"Makes sense," Arthur admitted, embarrassed and still disappointed. "I... dislike not being trusted to do the right thing here, but I'm repeatedly told my actions have consequences. I'll accept them and strive to do better."
"And that, sire, makes me respect you a little more," Graham said while pushing his hand into his spatial storage and taking out a long metal cane.