Lacey bent over the body of the mage, looting it for magical items that could help level up the dungeon. It frustrated her that they could level so quickly and so far, and yet not be out of the tutorial. It made her think that there was something wrong with the system. She took a wand and the robes. It had been silly of Monty to just leave it there as he searched the wall near the well for hidden levers that could open some secret door. She’d used her favorite George to drag the body into the maintenance corridor before looting it. The shield the mage had used was actually in one of the rings. With all the timing out, they hadn’t had a chance to loot stuff off the group that kept coming in. Lacey put the ring on.
Then again, they hadn’t had to spend the credits to reset the dungeon either. With this group dying, they wouldn’t get the automatic reset they’d been getting all this time. If they didn’t manage to find a way to close the dungeon, they were going to lose a lot a credits resetting these rooms. That was why they’d only let the first floor of newbie rooms be defeated before layering in the Tombs with traps to destroy their unwelcome guests. The Tombs could be reset manually since they were basically just a bunch of traps and the small flock of Gossowaries that goblins could lead up from pens beneath this floor while the quickly reset first floor slowed down the party of adventurers.
They hadn’t really expected to get so close to wiping out the party so soon. The newbie rooms were almost nothing to reset from the pedestal. Even if something went vastly wrong, they were ready for another incursion. If the fighter died and another group came in, they’d spend credits to reset the first floor. If one of the Tombs was broken, they’d swap it out for a backup. The Tomb would only be broken if the final room’s mural was parted for access to the next Tomb.
They had plans and backup plans, but the longer Lacey had to sit in a tunnel and wait, the more her anxiety came back. There was no guarantee that the end of the tutorial would even end their troubles with this guild. Monty was tight-lipped. Lacey and Colt thought they understood the guild’s plans but what if they’d missed something, some rule that would blow up these plans like most of the previous ones. The anxiety was from the concept that every time they’d thought they finally had things under control, some new crazy rule would nerf their plans or add some new hoop to jump through to get out of trouble.
Lacey checked the periscope nearest to Monty, but he just sat there like it would all work out for him. Lacey was struck by the unfairness of him being able to not be worried, while she chewed and chewed on the skin around her nails. She’d tried to draw but had only managed to sketch a few alternate water traps. Unless the adventurers had water breathing, Colt and Lacey were pretty confident that they could now drown the lot of them in a tunnel collapse. If they did have water breathing, she and Colt had a few aquatic versions of Chuck and Muck, a mer-goblin, and a few kracken-like beings that were nowhere near big enough to worry the likes of Monty.
The problem was that while Lacey could draw magnificently terrifying beings, they were stuck at the levels the dungeon could produce. Lacey had drawn dragons only to have them come out as babies that could sit on a person’s shoulder. They even had breath weapons, but the lightning of the blue dragons only did a significant amount of damage if someone was in plate mail armor and standing in a puddle and didn’t save. They had a trap like that in the fourth Aztec Tomb. One had to wade through a pool of 3’ deep water in a 30’ section of tunnel where little blue dragons would poke their heads out of walls just long enough to electrocute the water. There was another one of those traps in the cleric’s hell level down below, but it hadn’t turned out to be necessary since Gimbol had been unlucky enough to hit his head on the way down the slides.
They used the green dragon babies to provide the poison cloud that descended out of the ceiling if a puzzle was done wrong at the end of this Tomb, but Monty seemed content to sit on his butt here in the beginning of the maze. Lacey knew that she was just doing her job to stall him here, but it was boring. She once again erased a section of plating used to trigger the sinking floor of the trap she was working on drawing.
“They are halfway to the surface,” Colt texted.
“Thanks for the update,” Lacey blew out a breath. “This guy is boring as hell.”
“He’s probably just waiting out the timer so he can come back in with a bigger party,” Colt replied.
“That makes sense,” Lacey got up to check on Monty through the periscope again. She had to push Adam aside. The elites had taken turns watching the adventurer eat his rations of dried meat, polish and sharpen his massively overcompensating sword, and try to take a nap. When Monty snored, Lacey would do something fun to wake him up, but he’d given up on sleep when she’d screamed like a blond girl in an old horror flick.
“I’m thinking when the goblins get to the last hundred feet or so, we’ll have the diggers work by hand to make a small hole to make sure the exit is relatively safe,” Colt reported.
“The worst that can happen is that another party comes in, wipes out the goblins there, and gets a free pass into the fourth Aztec Tomb,” Lacey told him. “If the traps in this one took out Monty’s party so easily, the fourth Tomb can take out a new party.”
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“You can’t work both sets of traps,” Colt warned.
“It’s fine,” Lacey gave him a thumbs up toward the ceiling. “Adam and his crew are getting the hang of the traps in this one. I think we can trust them to keep Monty on his toes. If he ever decides to move.”
“Ugh,” Colt’s thoughts came through their interface. “Another round of hurry up and wait!”
It really helped to know that she wasn’t the only one sick of this game. Sure, every game had a point where a person just had to grind their way through, but Lacey was normally the one to go play another game at that point. Colt didn’t mind the grind half as much as she did. If even his patience was being tested, she was pretty proud of her ability to grind in this one. The worst part was knowing that it could change at any moment back to the hurry part.
“What about this one?” she held her completed trap up for Colt to see through his display.
“Looks good,” Colt answered. “You could send it down here with a goblin.”
“I’ll wait until I have a few more before I send an elite down there,” Lacey gave him a wave. “No need to multiply the risks.”
“You should get yourself a couple of workers, just a few runners,” Colt suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” Lacey mused, starting a new drawing of an aquatic monster she’d though of while she was working on the trap mechanism for the previous drawing. “But while this maintenance tunnel is big enough for a dozen of us, if I have to move to the next one, it’ll be cramped with just who we have here.”
“I was thinking about that,” Colt said. “If they have to clear the dungeon, how could they do that with us in maintenance tunnels? If only the Georges can get in and out of those tunnels and they don’t have access to Georges, then they can’t wipe the dungeon.”
“Not bad,” Lacey raised her eyebrows, but didn’t stop drawing. “But if they kill you, they have Georges.”
“True,” he admitted. “But if we put a closet bunkroom somewhere pretty random, they’d have to search a whole dungeon for a single wall. I don’t think they could find you if you were hiding. At least they couldn’t in the 10-hour time limit.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Lacey looked up at the ceiling. “Monty knows I’m in here and he can’t get to me. He hasn’t figured out that there isn’t some secret door to access where I am. Even if some group got to us and looted a marble off of one of us, do you think they’d figure out how to use them?”
“No,” Colt scoffed with an lol in the text. “I think we may actually have figured out how not to get wiped at all.”
“Worst case scenario is the two of us hiding in secret rooms with George-only entrances,” Lacey gave a shrug. “I’m sure they’ll find some way to nerf it though, but I haven’t seen how.”
“They’d have to take away the Georges altogether,” Colt proposed.
“Great,” Lacey scowled at the ceiling and turned the page on the half-drawn monster. “Now I have to come up with a place to hide that doesn’t use Georges!”
Lacey began to scribble furiously, ignoring the lol from Colt that she did not consider funny. The resulting map was a massive maze of secret and one-way doors with 3’ foot thick walls and narrow 3’ wide hallways with enough water traps to drown anyone and everyone except a rogue. For the rogue, she designed a few trapped disarming mechanisms. And for the mage that had levitate, she added enough collapsing tunnels and underwater passages to kill a mer-goblin, not that she tested that.
She sent the drawings to Colt. An elite ran them to the nearest worker goblin they found that wasn’t working on the tunnel out. That worker goblin then took it to a goblin that was about to go to sleep for the night, who took the stack of pages into the control room where Colt was waiting. Colt added the pages to the things he’d add to the pedestal during the next break in incursions, just in case it came.
“They’ve switched to manual digging,” Colt told her after confirming that he’d gotten the maps. “It shouldn’t be long now.”
“That didn’t take nearly as long as we expected,” Lacey sent back to him, wondering to herself how Monty had the patience to just sit there and do nothing. She couldn’t have done it. “Did it?”
“I don’t think so,” Colt replied. “Eve and her group really sped things up with the explosions. I think Ginger was expecting Eve to pull a prima donna routine, but she really pulled her weight this time. When Eve ran out of mana, she set her assistant to take over. With rotations, all the workers had to do was clear, and figure out some creative places to store all that rock. The bat cave and whole first floor is packed full of rock.”
“So, they might not even be able to get into the dungeon next time?” Lacey considered that thought.
“Maybe, or maybe it’ll all clear when we reset the rooms,” Colt said. “In any case, that wasn’t enough space for all the debris. They’ve got the new passage cleared enough to allow a small group to climb a really long flight of stadium stairs, but they had to get creative. We have crafting goblins laying gravel paths with the smallest pieces, new mason-specialized goblins creating rooms in their caverns by shaping some of it into brick-like pieces, and I think we might have a budding sculptor goblin creating a statue out of a huge chunk of rock.”
“That’s more industrious than I’d expected,” Lacey admitted, scratching her head. “I didn’t even think about what we’d do with all that excavation material without access to the pedestal.” Goblins could have delivered the excavation materials to the pedestal but then the goblins wouldn’t have been able to go out of the control room. That would have led to a very crowded control room and very few goblins left to do any work. Lacey was glad they’d found a way around that.
“There’s more good news,” Colt sent to her. “We have gems.”
“Gems?” Lacey perked up.
“Whole buckets full of semi-precious stones including some gorgeous quartz formations, and a handful of geodes that are really pretty,” Colt admitted. “They have that stuff waiting in the water cavern on the steps to the control room so we can try to dump as many as we can into the pedestal the next chance we get.”
“You said gems, and I was thinking diamonds or something that would mean we were rich,” Lacey gave him a baleful glare.
“Not rich, but it’ll help our credit balance more than plain rock and coal,” Colt chided her gently. “At least I didn’t tease you with the pyrite.”
“That’s only because you know I wouldn’t be fooled by fool’s gold,” Lacey shook her finger at the ceiling. Then she thought for a bit. “I wonder if someone else might.”