They drove another hour before Levi found a dungeon close enough to the road for his ping to reach.
“This way,” Levi pointed, and Gordon pulled off the highway. It took a few false starts in the wrong direction before they pulled into a parking lot behind a warehouse and got out.
Fifteen minutes later, they finally located it.
Destruction Dungeon: Level 1
“Will you still be able to get anything out of it?” Gordon asked. “You being level 5 and all now.”
“Of course. I'll need to be around level fifteen or twenty before level 1 dungeons become basically useless. I do wish I had a way to get word out so they could get leveled before I reached them, but I can't imagine who would listen.”
Gordon's brow furrowed as he considered. “The thing is your claims come with verifiable information. If you'd told me 'There's an apocalypse coming, I'm a time-traveler, and there are dungeons' without having your shimmer of air that goes into a different dimension, then I'd have driven you to a shrink myself.”
“But who would listen?”
Gordon snorted. “You really have been gone a long time. People might be skeptical, but do you know how many tens of thousands are desperately yearning for something like this? For a game to suddenly become real, or aliens to invade, or anything like that to be proven real? You won't need to scream it, just post it online anywhere and the people who want to find it will find it.”
Levi nodded slowly. “Yeah, that is how the world was at this time, isn't it?” He hadn't actually thought about the internet as it used to be in anything but vague terms for a long time.
“Yep. I don't know what platform people are using these days, but it wouldn't be hard to find out. You could probably do it right from your phone.”
“I left it in the car. Dungeon atmosphere is bad for technology. If I tried to use it in here it'd basically implode. You can talk me through it on the way once we finish this dungeon and head back outside.”
“You don't slow down, do you?”
Levi shook his head. “Can't. I have too much to do and nowhere near enough time to do it in.”
He wondered how best to present his appeal to the world. His first try had been less than exemplary. Blurting everything out to a random group of teens... what had he been thinking? Of course, that wasn't going to do anything but get him laughed at.
He had better resources now. He had the manablade, much more impressive equipment, and he was beginning to mentally stabilize.
His mind and emotions had been in turmoil, to put it gently, ever since he'd died and not-died. Reappearing in the past may have given him a second chance to change the fate of humanity, but it had done nothing to erase his trauma.
Dying violently wasn’t something anyone should have to remember. He shoved the thought aside and stepped into the dungeon. They could work out the appeal on the internet after.
This one was full of corrosive water, streams running haphazardly down hallways, spilling down walls, and pooling in depressions. The pitted stone gleamed, polished smooth between the rivulets. Levi had to pick his way carefully across the uneven terrain.
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The danger made him feel even more confident, if that were possible. This was what he was used to, dungeons doing their all to annihilate any intruders. Of course, the rooms were strangely empty, which detracted from the illusion. No hordes of ogres, no clouds of scarabs trying to eat your eyes, not even a swarm of gremlins to trip you up and knock you into the corrosive streams.
“Did this dungeon decide it didn't need anything but traps?” Levi wondered aloud as they reached the third room without opposition. Dungeons of this level could only have a certain amount of environmental hazards, and by his count this one was getting pretty close to the max.
And still no monsters. He hoped to teach Gordon some proper swordsman stances and attacks, so he'd stop swinging his blade around like he was trying to clear undergrowth in a jungle. Without enemies, that plan wasn’t going to be much use.
Skarm and Two were having a grand time, chattering away with each other in quiet squeaks as they jumped back and forth across the dangerous streams of corrosive.
“You mentioned dungeons being intelligent, are they able to understand us?” Gordon asked softly.
“No, no. They're intelligent in the same way as... I don't know, a shark or a bear. They can learn and adapt, but don’t have sapience. Maybe not even sentience. They’re more like an artificial construct than anything.”
“So, like an AI?”
“Sure.”
“Can they be hacked?”
Levi shrugged. “If so, I've never heard about it.”
“I bet they can be. If they're a learning but unalive construct, there has to be a way to subvert their programming.”
“You're basing that on an awful lot of assumptions. We don't actually know if dungeons are alive or not, just what they do.”
“Can they be killed?” Gordon pressed.
“Destroyed, yes. Shattering the core collapses the space in which they exist, forcibly ejecting anyone inside and closing the door forever. People used to do it for the boost to leveling, before dungeons were declared a precious protected resource.”
“Are you shitting me? Dungeons that want to kill humanity are to be protected?”
Levi gestured around. “They're our only weapon against the demons.”
“Dungeons, demons... aren't they the same thing?”
Levi laughed bitterly. “Not in the least. Demons destroy dungeons whenever possible. Dungeons are the one way humans have of gaining system energy to level without fighting demons directly. Between attacks, they're our only training grounds. You can't hunt earth-native wildlife for levels, it has to be system-integrated beings. Demons count, dungeon creatures count, and that's about it.”
“So your gremlins aren't baby demons?”
“No. Gremlins are destructive creatures, but if you saw a demon, you'd know not to mistake the two. Even the weakest imp could wipe us all out in our current state in seconds.”
“Even you?”
Levi gave a short nod, eyes haunted. “The weakest imps in the first wave can burn through a town in a matter of hours. They're slow, but their magic power is high. They can turn into living flame, only for limited amounts of time, but it's enough to flash roast anyone nearby without at least 300 stamina or specialized armor. And they can throw fireballs with just as much damage potential. Outnumber them sufficiently and you can wear them down eventually with sheer desperate numbers, but the casualties of those fights are unimaginably high. If they didn’t underestimate us for these first few waves, there’d be nothing left within a year.”
“If that’s your idea of underestimating, I don’t want to see the alternative.”
“That’s very wise. If any demons showed up here, I'd order us all to run without hesitation. No town where a demon portal appeared has survived more than a day or two at most, but they do have a limited number of troops. That's your only hope, at this level. Outrun them and wait for them to get bored and start fighting among themselves or chase after someone else.”
“Infighting? Can we exploit that?”
Levi shook his head. “It's been tried. The best we can tell, there are factions among the demons that will take advantage of the conflict with Earth to do some quiet backstabbing — for whatever reasons demons have to kill each other. But it's always small in scope, and never has a major impact on their strategies. Their biggest losses are against the dungeons.”
Gordon frowned. “So we’ve got humans on defense, demon armies on the attack, and dungeons mindlessly killing anyone they can?”
“Pretty much.”
“How has my life come to this?”
Levi laughed humorlessly. “I’m just thankful we have a head start this time. Three months of leveling will go a long way toward keeping us alive.”
“If it doesn’t kill us first.”
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