A few days after Kazue and Mordecai finished the fifth floor, they had a set of visitors from Riverbridge which included a couple of surprises. One of those surprises was the inclusion of Brongrim and Nainvil with the set of guards coming in for training. The dwarf and half-orc had managed to negotiate a supervised parole where they worked for the city guards, and part of that duty was going to include training at the dungeon.
The other surprise was a visit from their sister-in-law, Hainako. Moriko’s little sister had been sent with a few sets of medicines for Kazue to try and report back on efficacy. Once satchel and note were delivered she hung out with them in the war room so she could watch the training group move through the dungeon.
The group had two recruits with only a basic level of training, which bogged down the team a bit. Mordecai sent out instructions to keep the challenge down to a minimum, but even so, they only barely managed to scrape through the fourth floor and it was clear that they weren’t getting through the fifth floor. Mordecai was glad that they’d shown the good sense to call it off there, he’d have considered intervening if they’d tried to drag the newbies through the fifth floor, the chances of an accidental death were too high.
One side benefit of this particular group coming through was that Mordecai finally got to see what an expert gunner looked like. Brongrim’s fighting style was a skirmishing type that mixed pistol and short sword, and it allowed him to cover his reloading with attacks from his blade. It only worked because he also had his waxed-paper bullets readied in specialized bandoleers. You had to have everything set up for it, it wasn’t the sort of thing you could do on the fly and Mordecai could see where you had to dedicatedly practice certain movement combinations to bring gun and bandoleer into the right alignment without interfering with the rest of your movements. Still, the biggest flaw he could see in guns was the need to reload each shot that way, not that crossbows were any better really. Bows and slings both had much more fluid actions to ready the next piece of ammunition, but they also took more time to master, and neither could be used with only one hand.
Nainvil’s technique was a more straightforward style that focused on a two-handed grip for power, but with a light enough sword that he could free a hand for other uses and still be able to swing. That wasn’t a new variant for Mordecai, but all the styles and techniques of their visitors were being studied by the laganthros. Even if Mordecai knew most of them, there was no good way for him to try and teach every possible style, so he kept to the basics and let them practice and train to find their preferences. Though some of the works Moriko was bringing back included older copies of technique scrolls, maybe he should encourage Betty to study those and start her own school for laganthros.
They were the mundane type, with no learning enchantments or anything, but for the most part he preferred those anyway. Learning what you are actually doing was usually better than just having a combo or technique implanted in your head.
But that was for much later as the wagons were going much slower than Moriko on her own. For now, he made arrangements for everyone to have a place to sleep for the night, including a private room for Brongrim and Nainvil. No special prizes however, since the group didn’t clear the dungeon. Getting bonuses for clearing everything was going to get harder as they grew, and Mordecai was fine with that. Technically it wasn’t required, he just liked doing it, but it also wasn’t something he wanted to be dealing with constantly.
Now he could turn his attention to something else that Hainako had brought with her. It was a commission and payment for a set of equipment, with some interesting measurements for the armor and cloak. Traxalim was who had sent the commission with her, but according to the note he was relaying the commission from someone else. The work wasn’t particularly hard, but some of the materials were unusual, and the payment included samples of them: Wyvern hide for the armor, Worg fur for the cloak.
The request also wanted a pair of daggers long enough he’d almost call them short swords, except that the specifications for the armor were for someone rather tall and lanky. The instant return enchantments for the daggers were a fairly common design so it was no trouble adding those to each dagger as well.
On top of that was a full gear set complete with an Expanded backpack. It had just about everything one could want for exploring the world and surviving in a range of environments. It was like baby’s-first-adventuring-kit, except most folk couldn’t afford this level of gear when they first stepped into the world of explorers and mercenaries.
It wasn’t enough to keep someone incompetent alive, but it would make the job easier for someone new at it. And all the major components had a rather interesting insignia attached or inscribed in some way: A wolf with three horns. He had no idea what that meant.
But it didn’t matter, the dungeon had gotten some new materials to add to their repertoire, some more raw materials for the laganthros to work with, and a few new small animals that had been easy to carry in a cage this far. It was a fair trade. By the time the group was awake the next morning the dungeon’s part of that trade was complete. And when they had left, it was time to begin on the sixth floor. “Are you ready, love?” he asked Kazue.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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This was a bigger section to do all at once than she’d done before, but after talking it over with her husband Kazue rather liked the idea. They’d gone straight down so far, each floor looping back under the floor above it, but now that they were down this deep there was no reason to not also expand horizontally. The end of the fifth floor was approximately under the end of the first floor, this left them ‘pointing’ back under the mountain. So this time when she gathered energy to push their home complex down, she also pushed ‘out’.
There were a couple of design changes as well. Looping back and forth had made it simplest to bring the two paths back to each other at the end of each floor, and they’d used the stairwells down to keep them isolated. But there was no simple stairway between the fifth and the sixth this time. While the last door for each side could still either lead forward or reroute back up to the start of the sewer path, the forward paths merged into a meandering and slowly widening tunnel.
The tunnel opened up onto a wide, well-lit cavern that was almost meadow-like, excepting only that the ground cover was of a similar makeup to fungal floor five. At the far end of the meadow was a basin that would become a vast lake once filled, and at the shores of this lake-to-be was a large village once more occupied by laganthros. Only this time it was set to be a more well-rounded village, with a clear mix of potential combatants and noncombatants. A well-trod path led toward this village, complete with a sign saying “Lapin Lake Village”.
At the other end of the basin that was slowly filling with water the lake was split by a large peninsula that ended at the far wall. This signaled the divergence of the paths again, with two underground rivers splitting off from either side of the peninsula. This entire setup meant that at this stage people could decide to switch paths, though they would be obligated by the rules of the new path that they chose.
This did run some risk that someone might try and trick their way this far by taking the non-combat route to conserve their resources before switching, but they would still need to be well-armed to tackle further combat so it seemed unlikely that she or Mordecai would be unable to spot them and call them out on it. And they did intend to offer it up as an option for those who had cleared the fifth floor of the combat route previously and that were in good favor with the dungeon.
The village itself was the first challenge in progressing, as the laganthros were going to be building docks and boats, and the boats could be either sold or rented with a guide who would help pilot them. For the absolute cheapskates, they could even do a short rental to get them to the peninsula, where there were plenty of both normal and mushroom trees to potentially harvest and make their own rafts or boats from.
This was also an optional challenge and reward as some of the vegetation and fungi here were rare or valuable, if you knew how to identify and harvest it.
As for the rest, well, for the moment they had a pair of fairly simple rivers that led to another lake, though this one just had a sandy shore to pull up onto. Filling the floor out was a future endeavor, but the layout was ready. And now their home was even further under the mountain itself.
Kazue had been careful with this by using a trick Mordecai showed her, probing ahead with their mana as she sought to claim more territory. Running into worked stone or large caverns would have felt different and let her pull back before she fully claimed that area. Even if they had a perfect map of the dwarven kingdom, and right now they had no map at all, there was always a chance that something else lived down here.
Well, actually, there had been plenty of that. But those were all simpler underground creatures, and she’d been able to invite them into her dungeon’s ecosystem or as inhabitants. Kazue surveyed her work and was quite pleased with herself. Mordecai approved as well, but she realized then that he’d been partially distracted while she worked on their next level. Before she could ask about what had taken up his attention, his mental voice became excited.
“Kazue! Take a look at this. Focus on the aura of any of your dire rabbits on the first floor. Look at the whole thing.” He seemed to be eagerly anticipating something, so she followed his instructions with curious confusion.
What he wanted her to see quickly became obvious. Some of their mana was flowing into all of their inhabitants, enough to leave her a little hollow feeling given how much they’d just spent, but it was having an interesting effect, one that was most dramatic in the simplest creatures. She could see energy sparkling along the pathways of their brains, the individual components compacting into more efficient forms, then multiplying and creating more complex pathways.
Their auras fluctuated in response to these changes, their very spirits being altered by this physical change until suddenly collapsing into a denser, stronger form of spiritual energy. Every single one of her wonderful creatures now had a spark of true sentience in them, complete with the rise of a soul! A quick check verified it even applied to the clockwork creatures in the library and the spiders on the fifth floor, though not the simpler, reactive vegetative fungi.
This was great! They’d always been able to communicate ideas and concepts to all their inhabitants, but this would allow deeper, language-based communication! Though closer examination revealed that the mental capacity upgrade only barely breached that level, it would in many ways be like talking to a not particularly bright child. On the other hand, the upgrade seemed to affect all but the smartest of her inhabitants to some extent. Which meant Horace and a small percentage of the laganthros.
Hmm. And Mordecai seemed pleased but not particularly surprised. Kazue’s thoughts focused on him with suspicion only to be met with amusement, so her avatar stirred from where they were cuddled on their bed and bit into his shoulder.