14

Dungeon Based Magical Cloning is Scary

Lilith and I managed to talk our way into something of an agreement with Kasumi, the troll chief. It helped that we didn't intend to fulfill our end of the bargain. That meant we could make some pretty wild concessions. We did put ourselves on a bit of a time limit though.

The trolls would leave us be, and even deliver some interesting new materials for me to absorb and unlock. In return we had to deliver a raid of goblins every week, and samples of whatever rare materials we had unlocked. The first ‘tribute’ was due in a week, so we had that long to figure something out.

We might have been able to get more out of the deal, but the Gabriel and Gabrielle duo were due back any time, and it would probably not go well if we added more variables to the negotiations. Not to mention Gabriel would very likely lose any progress he had made if he saw Kasumi now.

Now we had some other problems to deal with. I made my way back to the bunk room where Tessa was still comforting Gale.

I cleared my throat and announced, “Hey everyone, time to have a talk."

No one moved, but I had everyone’s attention; even Gale stopped her soft sobs, sniffling quietly and watching me.

“I bought us a week, then we need to do something about the trolls.”

Gary raised a hand and asked, “Shouldn't Geoff be awake for this?”

I looked over where Gina was tending to the newly crippled goblin. It was a blessing that he was unconscious. When he woke up, he would probably be having almost as hard a time as Gabriel.

I started to shake my head and tell them to let him sleep, but Lilith interrupted, “We can fix that.”

Even Gina stopped her work to look at Lilith.

“None of you are going to like the solution... but we can get him back to one hundred percent... Gary too.”

Gary looked to be barely able to keep himself from bouncing with joy, “Let's do it; my arm is messed up good.”

“I am telling you, you won't like what I have to say.”

This was becoming frustrating, so I stepped in and said, “Just tell us, Lilith.”

“Mmmm… fine, but only you, Gary, Geoff, Gina… and Tessa can stay in the room when I do.” It seemed like adding Tessa to that list was physically painful to her.

I was getting a bad feeling about this. The goblins that weren't mentioned looked like they wanted to argue, particularly Gale, but I made eye contact with each of them and nodded. They didn't like it, but they left the room.

Even after the room had emptied, Lilith still hesitated.

Tessa was the first to succumb to the impatience, “Well, out with it. How do we fix Geoff's leg?”

Lilith made a sound like she was taking a deep breath, “We kill him.”

No one reacted.

It took me a moment, but I pieced together what she meant without asking. Gabriel and I had both died. When we respawned, we were in perfect condition, with the exception of Gabriel's neck wound that had turned him into a zombie. One day I would figure out that strange quirk of zombieism.

If someone was wounded, especially as badly as Geoff was, it was easier to kill them and let them respawn.

“No.” Tessa declared firmly.

I understood the hesitation; Geoff was one of us. But precisely because he was one of us, I didn’t want to see him in pain. I agreed with Lilith.

Lilith defended her plan, “Look, he's out cold right now. We can make it quick and painless, and he will be awake in seconds, back here with us.”

Tessa repeated, “NO.”

“What do the rest of you think?” I asked the two who had been quiet thus far.

Gary seemed unsure, and Gina looked about to be sick, but I needed to press them. This was a serious decision, and I wouldn't make it alone.

Gary shifted his weight uncomfortably and bumped into one of the bunks. The sharp pain caused him to wince, and that seemed to settle it for him, “This sucks. My arm is killing me, and my head is pounding. I don't want to die... But if it stops the pain and I will be fine in a few seconds, then I think I want to do it.”

He looked at Geoff before adding, “And he's far worse off than me... I know he would want to wake up whole rather than crippled and in pain. I vote we do it.”

We all looked to Gina. Without me voting, it would be the three of them, Tessa clearly didn't like the idea, Gary was on board, so Gina was the tiebreaker.

She squeezed her eyes shut and spoke in a rush, “I can't fix him. I can't even fix Gary... This is my fault… Let’s do it before he wakes up; we need to make it quick, painless.”

Tessa stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

We all looked after her for a moment before Lilith asked, "Alright, so how do we do this?”

We discussed for a while about the best ways to kill each other. I was beginning to join Gina in feeling sick by the time we had settled on a couple of options.

I suggested the rock fall; it would be expensive to reset, but I had already verified its efficiency and painlessness. Gary had a cheaper idea, but there was no way it would work. He suggested the strongest minion crush their heads with a rock... Yeah, aside from being brutal as hell, the only monsters that might be able to do that were Tessa and Terry. If I suggested that to them, then Tessa might just test it out on me first.

Gina really didn't want to talk at all, but after Gary's suggestion, she spoke up, probably to stop us from doing something ridiculous. Her idea was to suffocate them, not in the traditional sense, but in a hole with bad air. It shocked me to find out the goblins knew about things like CO2 poisoning, but that wouldn't work. We didn’t need to breathe.

As we debated euthanasia strategies, Gale barged in, looking very much like the time she had yelled at me about paper.

“What did you do to my rock?”

“Uh…”

Right, I needed to tell her I had decided to spare her having to trip the traps.

“I'm sorry?”

“Fix it! Whatever you did, that thing is a mess." She suddenly got much more quiet, “It saved us...”

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Damn, she was right. I had changed the trap to keep her from fighting, but that trap had kept us alive twice now. SHE had kept us alive twice now. I fixed something that wasn’t broken.

I tried to placate the enraged goblin, “Help me fix it up once we are done here, so you don't have to trigger it, alright? Oh… and the one on the second floor too.”

She didn't know about the cable trap yet, and her eyes widened. She almost ran off to inspect the trap right then, but stopped and looked over her shoulder, “I am sorry... But… Not for dropping the rock... not anymore.”

She let out a sigh and spoke again, “I want to fight. I want to protect my family. All of us. I’m going to fix your butchery of my traps; I'll make sure they trigger without me.

Then I'm going to level up and have Gary teach me to fight. Next time I'll fight back with my own hands.”

Before I could say anything, she darted off. I really didn't know what to do about Gale, and the only two people I felt comfortable asking were Geoff, who was out, and Tessa, who was probably leaving with Terry right now.

That was when the scouts returned.

Dungeon wave complete

Calculating results…

Adventurers slain: 0

Monsters slain: 5

Damage taken: 0

Damage dealt: 125

Minions slain: 0

Loot lost: none

Loot gained: 2 Deer corpses, 2 Rabbit corpses, Bird corpse, 7 Stinkweed stalks, 12 oz. of Death’s Kiss berries, 5 oz. Hunter's rest berries

Wave duration: 3:12:11

Wave reward: 2 copper 15 tin

Loot value: 2 silver 32 copper 12 tin

Convert Loot to mana coins?

I almost confirmed on reflex when I saw the loot value, but then I read the loot itself, and an idea took root. I asked Gina what she thought, and she quickly changed her mood; apparently, this would work wonders.

A short time later, we had brought all of the dungeon into the bunk room. That was Tessa's demand. If we were going to do this, then everyone should know what and why. Gina had me make cups and some tools for her to work with medicines, then claimed my empty boss chamber to work in peace while we explained the plan to the goblins.

“Do you all remember what Death's Kiss berries do?”

There was a wave of nodding and noises of affirmation.

Then I made eye contact with Gabriel; he would be the hardest to convince.

“Do you all remember when Gabriel, and when I died?”

Gabriel grimaced but nodded along with the rest.

“We came back to life, healthy. Death's kiss will kill painlessly, and Gina is mixing something to speed the process up as well. I want to give it to Geoff and Gary. Then they will come back whole.”

The goblins began shuffling and muttering uncomfortably.

Gary spoke up then, “It's better this way. We either stay useless and suffer, or we drink Gina's potion and we come back, good as new.”

Gary pounded his chest as if to demonstrate his words... but we hadn’t done anything yet, and he winced in pain as his broken arm shifted.

Gary had called the mixture a potion? Was that what this was? This was a fantasy world, so... why not? What was the difference between a potion and medicine? Was there one?

Gina returned after a short time in the other room, bearing two stone cups. I really needed glass. Maybe the trolls would have some.

Gary didn't wait and downed his cup without ceremony. Everyone watched him expectantly. The berries were supposed to take an hour to take effect without any prep work, but that was on living goblins. It was possible this wouldn't even work on a zombie.

Gary's eyelids started to droop and he began to wobble. Shakily he took a seat. Less than a minute passed from when Gary drank the poison to when he stood up from his bed on the other side of the room. His corpse remained in the seat.

Holy shit…

The implications here were insane. My mind raced as I tried to consider all the possibilities. For one thing, we had just created a new body for Gary, but the old one still existed. Not only was this a way to ‘heal,' but we could make corpses this way. I didn't have a use for a pile of dead Garys right now, but who could say what the future held?

That made me think about the not-Tessa with Kasumi. Did we do something similar to her when we made her a zombie? If the zombie infection killed a dungeon monster before turning the body into a zombie, then did that mean the original was respawned as well?

If that was the case, then I might be able to recruit a living monster and repeatedly turn it into a zombie. It would really, really suck for the original, who would have to die... a lot, but I could make infinite zombies.

What about something similar, but without the zombie infection? When did death register for the respawning to occur? Back on Earth, medical science could bring someone back who was ‘dead' minutes after their heart had stopped before their brain became too damaged to function properly.

If I made a defibrillator and then used it on a normal dungeon monster whose heart had recently stopped, would I get two of that monster via the respawn?

Dungeon-based magical cloning was a scary rabbit hole.

Some of these loopholes and exploits had a very mad scientist, evil wizard, flavor to them. It would be very easy to become a supervillain.

Lilith brought me back to reality as the goblins prepared to administer the potion to Geoff, “You should absorb some of that to unlock it before they use it, and the other loot they brought back too.”

I stopped time and did just that. I could see the value in being able to recreate a ‘die in a single minute' potion at will. I replaced the potion after unlocking it as a material, and none of the goblins even noticed anything as I confirmed and the world resumed.

Geoff was a bit more difficult to deal with. I had no idea how to make an unconscious person drink a liquid. I knew feeding tubes existed, but even that was beyond me. The goblins had no idea either. Eventually, Gina had us sit him up, and she slowly poured the liquid into his mouth. I suggested massaging his throat to stimulate a swallow reflex. I think I had read that was a thing somewhere.

It took some effort, and Geoff spit up most of what we fed him, but before we had managed to get the whole cup down him, he respawned.

One thing we hadn't considered was where he would respawn. Thus far, everyone had respawned in their own bed. When the magical dungeon system decided where your bed was for respawning purposes was a mystery, but it worked well enough.

Well, Geoff was IN his bed when he died. The dungeon didn't care what was in the way; by god, it WAS going to spawn him in that bed.

The result was… messy.

Geoff spawned halfway inside Geoff. The redead body exploded from the waist down, throwing gore all across the room. Gina was knocked back and off the bed; even Tessa slid back from where she had been holding him up. Fortunately, the only casualty was the body, and the newly spawned zombie was unharmed.

If Geoff had been killed by his own body being in the way when he spawned, it was possible he would spawn inside the remains of two of his bodies. How long would it take to fill the room with blended zombie? Would it stop?

I didn't want to find out.

It was a mess in more ways than one, but we had done it. Geoff, Gary, and I had all been bad off after Terrence's rampage, but now we were all back in fighting shape.

I quickly cleaned up the mess in the construction interface, saving hours of mopping. Then we went to rest again. It seemed like my days in this world were so much longer than on Earth. So much was happening all the time.

How did larger dungeons manage it?

Before I could slip into my torpor, Gale tapped me on the arm.

“What is it?”

“We need to fix the traps before something invades again. Your triggers won't work.”

I sighed and dragged myself back out to follow the taskmaster.

Gale led me back out to the rock fall room and asked what was even going on. She may have used the phrase ‘cluster fuck.' I just shrugged and asked what her solution was. I didn’t have the mental energy to think or discuss anymore, so I just did what she told me to.

Her solution was pretty elegant.

We removed all my nonsense and instead installed a trigger she drew out. It relied on a quick-release mechanism that I did not understand. It could all be easily tied to the trip wire and would work even faster than someone could cut it with a knife.

The same device was used to trigger the cable room trap but had to be manually triggered to avoid the trap power errors.

When we finished, and Gale was through making me apologize for “fuckering up" all her traps, she told me she would be leveling up.

“You can level up? How?”

“Mana coins… I have enough.”

“How? How many does it take?”

She looked at me in disbelief and said, “How do you not know how this works? I have ten tin coins; that's how many it takes to level up to level two.”

So... was this like how Lilith leveled up? And how did she have ten tin already? Her pay rate was only one a day like the rest of the goblins.

She reached into a satchel that I hadn't noticed her carrying and produced ten tin coins, just as she had claimed. Then she popped them all into her mouth, literally eating them.

A dungeon minion has leveled up

Gale: Level 1-2

Pay rate remains the same

Gale nodded to me, promised to train hard with Gary so she could protect everyone, and went to rest with the others.

So was that how everything leveled? I still had a level before I reached the maximum boss level, so could I do that too?

Might as well try, right?

Dungeon Boss level up

Rob: Level 3-4

No new abilities

I felt... stronger.

It was hard to describe. I felt like I could lift more and punch harder, but it was more than that. I WAS more.

I supposed I had better be more. Whether it was because of the level difference, or because I was a dungeon boss, or something else, it had taken me more than ten tin. I had to eat forty tin before the level kicked in.

The coins tasted just as I would imagine they should based on the name. I had never licked tin before, but it tasted metallic. There was also a bit of a tingling sensation each time I placed a coin on my tongue. I supposed that was the mana.

Well, one step closer to tiering up, right?

Hopefully, we could get strong enough to challenge Kasumi in a week. We had to; what other choice did we have?