“Your food is always the best, Deek!” the barmaid said, pouting her lips in a suggesting manner.
“Ease off the boy, he likes… ahem… other women.”
Being hit on by the barmaid, even if I wasn’t interested, still was a morale booster. Unfortunately, the obnoxious innkeeper always found a way to kill that mood. Two weeks had passed since I had found Garnet, and I was now at the halfway point in this dungeon. I only had six weeks to go.
Since finding this village, I had decided to stay nearby as I continued to level and grow myself. Of course, I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as Garnet anymore. I made sure to nip that in the bud, although the innkeeper still was convinced, we were in some kind of relationship. Maybe we were. I was unwilling to abandon Garnet, and I figured that if Lord Aberis did have some grand plan for her, then it made sense that I should stick by her.
I had gotten a map from one of the village heads, and they had helped me locate any area that I thought might be a safe room. I did daily excursions across the countryside, and with Portal, I was able to make it all around the dungeon. I had explored well over half of it at this point. Although there was no wall to show the edge, there was an impassable mountain range. I decided not to try to fight my way past it, even though I could technically teleport to the peak and glance over with a single Portal. I decided that was too much risk.
Either way, I had done twenty-three of Xin’s trials at this point, netting the majority of the armor toward a full star suit. I had also gained levels in various jobs, continuing to get stronger with each passing day. I could still feel Carmine in the castle, but the demon castle and the city that surrounded it was the one place I didn’t go.
Today was a rather rare break. I had more spots of interest to visit which may be other safe rooms, but lately, I just needed a day off. At this point, the town was convinced I was a suitor who was courting Garnet. Although it was known she was a dwarf, I still couldn’t shake some of the negative stigmatism associated with being interested in a younger woman. The barmaid still occasionally made passes at me, and for that, I had to blame my high charm. I had recently unlocked Charm Plus from True Hero, which made me devastatingly charming, or at least I imagined it did.
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Garnet had also passed around the tale of me making food for everyone back in the Miner’s town, and so even though I didn’t have any passion for making food as the current me, I was encouraged into cooking for the whole village. Impassioned or not, I had the Cook job and could whip something up that was better than most of the meals in this world without too much difficulty. Thus, the entire village had gathered around for an impromptu celebration. The innkeeper was providing the supplies and I was providing the cooking skill.
There were only about thirty people in the village, so passing out the food didn’t take long. As I talked and joked around with the village, I couldn’t see these people as some fake creation of the dungeon. They were real people with histories, memories, and personalities. I started to remember the theory of infinite dungeons, where the entire world we knew was just a dungeon that has existed so long that it couldn’t even remember its lore anymore.
The only thing that kept me from jumping on that theory was that I still had to find a dungeon within this dungeon. The closest thing to it was Xin’s challenges, and they didn’t feel quite the same.
Garnet had already lived here for years. This village and its people were a part of her. I wasn’t sure if I had a right to take that away from her. If I destroyed this world, wasn’t I consigning all of these people to death? The dungeon might desire a conclusion to its lore, but to the inhabitants, Dungeon Divers like me or Xin could be seen as world enemies, seeking to end everything these people knew.
It was enough to give me a headache. I didn’t have to destroy this dungeon, I just had to get past the Demon Lord and through the portal, and then past the Demon Lord on the other side who was holding the portal open. Should I leave these people to their fate, eternally repeating this cycle of a violent war, or do I end the cycle, condemning them to nonexistence? In the end, no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t come to a solution that satisfied me.