The Azeria Mountain Dungeon had settled down into a new pace as the season rolled on while Kazue, Moriko, and Bridgette traveled slowly after their recent trials. With so many different paths and challenges, there was a constant flow of people seeking to challenge themselves and possibly make it rich.
This happened less often than it might seem that it should, simply because people often found the process a little addicting, especially those inclined toward combat to begin with. Even without the one-shot safety net provided by Kazue's boon, a dungeon was often the best place to push oneself. Unless the dungeon had some reason to not fight fair, a person should be able to reach a place in the dungeon where they are tested by the fights but not overwhelmed. This was where the thrill was, the exhilaration and adrenaline of combat in a somewhat controlled environment. And that combat came with rewards.
The people who wanted more of that thrill often spent most of their funds in improving their gear and supplies. Enchanted gear would never make up for a serious lack of skill or power, but it could provide a much-needed edge. A seasoned warrior with a random stick was more dangerous than a fresh-out-of-training soldier who has been handed a legendary holy blade of antiquity, partly because he lacks the power and experience to handle the blade properly. But given that you have two people of equal strength and skill, preparation and equipment make the difference. And luck. That one was hard to account for.
All of this was amplified by the dungeon's announcement of a tournament in the early spring. The exact date was not yet announced, but it would be about a month after the snow melted in the region, to give everyone a chance to get there in time, and that approximation should be enough to let most people know when to start traveling.
Qualification was simple; State your intent to join the tournament and clear the dungeon's combat path, once the dungeon announced that they had grown their last zone until after the tournament. Also, you needed to not die on your way down; all tournament entrants had to have the dungeon's safety net in place. Entrants would have priority placement for beginning their delves, to ensure the maximum number of possible competitors.
Per the dungeon's announcement, prizes would be awarded based on performance, plus half the reward value of the qualifying delve would be reserved and added to the value of the tournament prize. This would enable them to award larger, more customized prizes on an individual basis. Should an announced entrant not make it to the arena or otherwise not participate in the event, the reserved rewards would be forfeited, unless the entrant triggered the dungeon's safety. This was to keep people from claiming to be entrants for the priority delving slot while providing an exception for those who failed while sincerely pushing themselves into risky situations.
Spectators only needed to clear the non-combat path as an entrance fee, and they would still receive their normal value of treasure from overcoming the challenges.
One had until the start of the event to clear the final zone. It was generous in one sense, but it also put the last-minute party at a disadvantage for the first day's events as they would be tired from the recent boss fight.
Of all qualifying entrants, the ones whose strength stood out clearly would be pulled from the pool to be seeded at appropriate tiers. This was specifically to enable everyone else a chance to participate in the lowest tier or two without being immediately overshadowed.
Once they knew the number of potential entrants, a final decision would be made on the starting size and number of rounds/tiers. The pool of entrants would then be whittled down through preliminary bouts. They would be randomly paired and then duel up to three times. The first person to win two rounds of their duel won that match. Both people would then be assigned another duel partner, though this time with the dungeon doing their best to match up similar skill and power levels based on the previous duels.
This would continue until a person lost three matches, at which point they would be out. When the entrants had been reduced to the number of available starting slots, the preliminaries would be over. But power and skill alone would not be enough, one had to have control and restraint. Killing your opponent during the preliminaries was an automatic disqualification with a forfeit of reserved treasure value.
While they anticipated the possibility that there might be some fatalities during the main fights, the multi-round/match nature of the preliminaries made it extra important to discourage killing blows, as the loser would also automatically be disqualified for no longer having the benefits of Kazue's boon.
They also wanted to discourage bloodthirstiness in general while not making people unwilling to push themselves, so they created a different rule for the main fights. There were to be no deliberate kills, subject to the dungeon's judgment. Accidents might happen if one combatant's guard slipped at the wrong moment, but if there was a clear path to victory then the person with the advantage needed to proceed with patience and restraint, and the dungeon reserved the right to step in and declare a winner even if the losing side was managing to barely stand.
There was an unspoken implication here, for those who could see it. If it looked like one person was barely standing and the dungeon did not intervene, then the dungeon sensed some potential left in the combatant still. This did not mean that the potential would be called forth, merely that it was there. Those who had witnessed a surge of desperate strength and power before would be cautious in this scenario.
To accommodate the possibly very large number of simultaneous fights during the preliminaries, the dungeon set itself a schedule for expanding the size of the arena itself as well as branching corridors leading to a large number of training rooms and fighting rings, with the occasional connecting corridor between the branches. This network cost as much mana as an entire zone for a simpler dungeon, but their layout was making new zones costlier, so it made a smaller impact on their growth speed. Also, after their initial growth using smaller designs, Mordecai and Kazue both wanted larger zones.
Aside from the enjoyment of the creative exercise, there were practical benefits to this design philosophy. Larger, more complicated areas both allowed more simultaneous delvers in a given zone and slowed the relative progress of invaders. One could grow out an earlier zone, but the more one deviated from the original design, the harder and more expensive it was. They had branched out as many 'duplicate' paths for the first three floors of the non-combat path as they felt was practical, but each cost more than the previous one. The combat path had not gotten the same treatment as there were still only so many bosses for each zone, which was the real bottleneck of creating worthy challenges.
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As expensive as all of this lateral growth was, they fully expected it to pay for itself over time. The tournament itself should be a net positive for the arena before even accounting for all the extra delving that would be happening because of it.
Their sewer was becoming a rich source of mana as well, even if it was the other place they were expanding despite the cost. The small squads of Trionean soldiers were constantly training and progressing through the floors, and the first several squads had Mordecai's direct supervision once each squad had their basic teamwork down. The step after that was the inter-squad teamwork. A normal army didn't have to work this way, and guardsmen worked on a much smaller scale.
The patterns were fairly simple, but coordination and trust were hard. Team A1 cleared and secured a room, Team B1 went past them to secure the next room, Team A2 came up to provide support and a larger watch group for A1, Team B2 did the same for Team B1, and Team C1 passed through both rooms to secure the next one, and so on. This left twenty people guarding each room after it was cleared.
But once that pattern was down, they had to deal with branching corridors and keeping communications clear about which branches had how many teams and who had further chambers on their branch that needed clearing.
This required designating runners and making reasonably accurate maps. There were also only so many teams, so eventually the rearmost team needed to move up to the front and clear another room, though it would be the 2-group that did the clear and the 1-group that would provide support.
This teamwork was tested wherever the squads were when the refresh cycle hit and the various creatures respawned in the same rooms where they died and immediately attacked. Mordecai wasn't certain that this was how Deidre's dungeon was going to do the respawns, but this was the default behavior if the core didn't direct otherwise, and it would be difficult for Dimitri to try coordinating any specific changes.
These exercises wouldn't work for the larger zones in the Azeria Mountain Dungeon or for any environmental dungeon, but from what they had been able to glean from Deidre, it didn't seem she had any large spaces like this. Of course, this might change by the time the counter-invasion kicked off, but most of the floors should be like this.
The possible variation from the available information was also why the soldiers who died once were put into groups to do 'normal' delves. They needed the experience of seeing the breadth of what a dungeon could do, lest they become complacent in their expectations.
There was a very noticeable 'mortality' rate in the soldiers doing the sewer training. Mordecai did not attempt to modify the combat or trap challenges once they were set, including not intervening in a fight that was swinging one way or another. The inhabitants down here were actively trying to kill the soldiers once combat started, but at least they were not actively trying to hunt the soldiers. Yet. That training would come later.
While the dungeon was setting its new routine and laying out plans for its lateral growth, three travelers were making their way closer. Moriko, Kazue, and Ruby were traveling slower than they could have, but despite the restoration of their bodies and mana or chi, their inner spirit was still suffering from having been siphoned off so thoroughly. They also had three young dragons to train and feed, and feeding that many mouths meant hunting. Fortunately, most of the training was covered by hunting and playing right now, and that worked well with spiritual recovery. Rest alone was not the optimal way of recuperating, it worked best when combined with an emotionally rich and positive life. They still had to take breaks more often than they would have, but the young dragons certainly had no issues curling up for a nap, especially Kazue's felinesque dragon, Carnelian Flame.
This lasted until the day before the Autumn Equinox. Moriko and Kazue had left home almost three months ago and they did not want to miss a major holiday away from their husband. It took them a little bit to figure out a configuration; eventually, they settled with having Moriko carry Ruby in her arms, having Kazue in fox form on Ruby's stomach, and the three hatchlings clinging to Moriko's pack and the hastily rigged padding on her shoulders.
Then Moriko ran. Her pace was unsteady at first, she'd not tested herself since they'd started their recovery, but she found her footing pretty quickly. Once her speed was stable, Kazue started focusing on the magic provided by her liminal spirit. It was better with edges and borders, but dimensional space was an aspect as well. She used that magic to reach for her home and that other piece of herself, and she pulled on the space between.
The ground in front of Moriko seemed to shrink, though only in the direction of the dungeon. The contraction was nowhere near as strong as Kazue would have liked, but it was enough to make a difference for the first couple of hours. She couldn't hold it for longer than that without over-straining herself.
Moriko was forced to go off the path in order to follow that straight line, but it didn't matter much to her. She simply let go of her grip on the ground and ran through the air about a foot above it. This push was enough to close the distance to the dungeon's territory by mid-afternoon.
Across the border, she could see Mordecai waiting for them, which was more than enough for a last boost of speed. Kazue leapt into Mordecai's arms while Moriko took a bare moment to set Bridgette down before joining her wife and husband.
The only thing keeping the trio displaying even a modicum of decorum was the presence of one amused guest and three agitated baby dragons. Once the trio could spare a moment to disentangle and breathe, Moriko and Kazue made introductions all around and Mordecai manifested his eidolon, Shenlong, to play with the hatchlings.
Shenlong was not a discrete entity manifesting through Mordecai the way that Takehiko's fairy Kayda was, but he could act independently enough for this scenario. That let the three of them escort Ruby to the guest quarters near the core with minimal harassment from the over-excited familiars and make several more introductions along the way, including Fuyuko getting to meet Moriko for the first time and getting hugged half to death by Kazue's avatar. Fuyuko was, of course, immediately enamored of the dragon hatchlings and was quite pleased to think about how jealous Shizoku and Derek were going to be that she got to meet them first.
There was a lot of socialization to be done until dinner, which was a feast in celebration of the eve of the autumn equinox. Much of it was consumed by the familiars, though Moriko was certainly devouring her share happily. The dungeon reset had happened well before dinner time, and she was happy to be able to taste her food again. Kazue also teased her about being able to finally hold a fork properly again.
When the three young dragons curled up by a hearth to sleep with full bellies, Fuyuko was happy to join them and use her enchanted ring to gossip with her friends, who were indeed rather envious. Shenlong settled in to keep an eye on the hatchlings while the married trio slipped away for a more private celebration.
As for the nature of that celebration, well, Kazue's core got some inspiration for a few new heated scenes for her seven-book series, "The Princess of the Red Rose and her Samurai Septet". Three of the samurai were women, but all were going to be part of the princess's harem and there were so many possible combinations available for the spicy bits.