Ian stared at his dungeon. He intended to make the F and F+ floors similar to the F- floor, which only took a little over five days, but the sudden absence of anything but bugs invading his dungeon worried him. Quick floors were good for reaching level one hundred, but not so much for combating a serious threat.
There weren’t many individuals that he knew of who could bypass his EX rank floor, and with his father unlikely to ever enter a dungeon, most of those would still have trouble. Still, just because he never met them, didn’t mean they didn’t exist. It was also possible there were ways to proceed through, or damage, dungeons beyond simply having extraordinary power. He may have devoted most of his life to dungeons and magic, but others had lived longer and had a narrower focus.
With his dungeon core being indestructible, at least to his knowledge, until the gods decided it wasn’t, he was probably being a worrywart. But better a worrywart than unprepared. To combat the possible imminent threat, he needed more difficult floors. While the EX floor was a solid explosion, he needed to also make the intruders slowly bleed out as they proceeded.
His decision made, Ian’s focus started to drift away from the F- floor. However, it shifted back immediately. His cover folded backwards in an attempt to rub his nonexistent neck. He forgot to make puzzle doors for each room. Considering the floor was already complete, they weren’t needed, but they were a good way to increase completion time for a floor. Besides, they fit themed rooms very well. With that, he placed the appropriate picture puzzle doors in the entrance of each room. After the puzzle door’s completion, he moved back to contemplating the next floor.
The strongest thing he had to combat intruders besides his magic was the spider automata. Sadly even with his current mana pool, it was impossible to create one….well, impossible from the monster menu. However, constructing such an elaborate automata would take a couple days….not that making a floor would be any shorter. He had no reason to think it wouldn’t, but would the dungeon system help him create an S rank automata again? Now that he had the ability to create the monster on his own, it might leave him to his own devices.
Ian shook himself. Why was he even thinking about power? He already had power in abundance, what he needed was length, and a variety of monsters to populate it. His mind reached for his previous idea of an extraordinary long maze. He discounted it before due to the time it would take to fix all the minor details, but now he knew an appropriate level of magic got rid of that problem.
His most abundant variety of monsters were his spiders, but they were all low rank. That could be fixed, but he already had a monster group that fit his needs: the goblins.
He hoped these goblins wouldn’t be influenced by his core like Mina and the rest, and, thankfully, the goblins on the EX floor provided some good evidence they wouldn’t. However, even if they were the vile goblins that existed normally, they didn’t live in bare caves. Their cave abodes still had the makings of a home.
His current terrain was cave, town, and swamp with two cubic kilometers unselected. For one of the unselected kilometers, he combined the town and cave terrains. Pleased that it was a success so easily, Ian immediately started to construct the floor.
As he made the floor, he started to get into a daze. Corridors and rooms. Long and short. Big and small. Curved and straight. Round and square. Twists and turns. Shared walls and disconnected walls. It was turning into quite the maze. A more natural maze, unlike the EX rank maze.
His daze continued until a rustle of movement registered in his sphere of perception. From a bush, a rabbit with a single horn sprouting from its head leaped out. Its nose twitched as it looked around. Suddenly it froze, and after a second it sprinted towards his dungeon. It wasn’t the only one, as approximately one hundred horned rabbits dashed to the entrance of his dungeon.
This was not normal. If they had sprinted into his sphere of perception, then he would have assumed they were running away from something. However, their attitude changed soon after the first one entered his sphere of perception.
He informed the goblins of the incoming rabbit army. Well, most of the goblins. Narcy wasn’t able to reenter the G- floor yet. They would have to deal with all of the rabbits at once as the party function for instances didn’t seem to affect animals and monsters. At least so far.
The goblins jumped up, from squashing bugs and napping, in preparation. Since bugs didn’t require much attention, they were already grouped together. The spider automata was prepared to combat the rabbits in another room….he should really give the automata a name.
As they dashed into the dungeon entrance, the rabbits did not lose any speed. They sped down the middle of the entrance hall right into the transfer formation. The activation of the transfer formation was near instantaneous, allowing groups of rabbits to be periodically transferred.
After transfer, the rabbits resumed their sprint. However, they did not all go the same way. Instead, they split up at each branching path. Most of them were bit, grabbed, spored, flashed, skewered, attacked by the goblins, or splatted themselves on the spider automata, but a few reached the boss room. Sapients needed to open the doors themselves, but as with the previous invaders, the boss doors opened for them. The early rabbits had to face the boss on their own, and were mostly killed. The later rabbits entered the room in groups, and were able to skewer the boss with numbers.
So far the level and number of invaders hadn’t been high, so the furthest any got was the boss room. Now, rabbits were sprinting through his G rank floor. The first rabbit reached the puzzle door to the water elemental room. Ian perked up at this. A rabbit wouldn’t be able to solve a puzzle. Did that mean he wouldn’t have to worry-. However, his thoughts were interrupted as the puzzle door simply opened for the rabbit without any effort on its part. Ian huffed to himself and slammed his core shut. That better not happen when an extremely stupid sapient entered his dungeon.
The rabbit didn’t last long as the water elementals pelted it. When the water elementals had first started attacking it, it retaliated. Once it realized it could not win, it tried to sprint further into the dungeon. However, all it could do was crawl with its bleeding and broken body until it died.
The goblins, stationed in the fern room, were currently dealing with a horde of rabbits. Mina and Pugi stood up front slashing, punching, and kicking them as they came. Botan was focused on ordering the constriction ferns to hold the rabbits down as long as they could. Izu stood in the back pelting them with water shots and water balls. Water ball to stun and water shots to damage. Yervin stood at the back and sliced off the heads of rabbits that made it past the front lines. Each blink teleported him next to a rabbit, where his nails cleaved through their neck.
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Yervin, and thus Botan and Izu, were undamaged, but the same could not be said of Mina and Pugi. Pugi had taken the most damage with scratches from the tips of horns covering her entire body, and multiple puncture wounds from the rabbits stabbing her limbs. Nothing vital had thankfully been hit. Mina was only covered in a few scratches due to her better armor and higher skill proficiency.
If the group weren’t in a dungeon, they would have been inhibited by the blood and increasing pile of bodies. It took a lot longer for loot to appear outside of a dungeon. Even with approximately forty rabbits killed by them, the only one slowing down was Pugi.
Mina saw Pugi’s condition and ordered her to return to the town, so Ian could heal her. Pugi pursed her lips, but sprinted towards the boss room. However, as she started to sprint off, Mina cleaved the last two rabbits in half. The four remaining goblins waited for more rabbits to come, but none came. As such, they ran after Pugi.
Soon after, Pugi ran into Ian’s core room, “I request to be healed, Ian!” She spoke louder than normal and gave a clumsy imitation of Mina’s salute.
Before she even received a response, her cuts closed, and the flesh that disappeared due to the stab wounds rebuilt itself. Pugi looked at the previous location of her stab wounds with wide eyes.
The other four ran into the core room with a longer delay than it took Pugi to get there. Mina, seeing that Pugi was healed, grabbed her into a tight hug.
Pugi hugged her back and asked, “Did you kill all the rabbits?”
“Yeah, I cleaved the last two right after you left,” Mina responded.
Pugi sighed, “I didn’t really need to run back here then.”
Ian broke into their conversation, “Yes and no. Yes, because you could have stuck out until the end. No, because there are still bugs on the first floor, so I couldn’t have healed you there.”
“I’m just glad you’re healed,” Mina smiled, “and I suppose the core room is better than the town for healing.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s why I came her,” Pugi replied while avoiding Mina’s eyes.
“You were great Pugi!” Botan ran up to her. “Whenever one of the ferns got a hold of a rabbit, you punched and kicked them until they died.” He did his best imitation of her form.
She smiled and rubbed her head with a slight blush to her cheeks.
Izu had also approached Mina. “You need to get Ian to heal you,” he fussed as he dabbed the superficial cuts with his robe.
“They’re nothing to worry about. They’ll heal up fine without the lord’s help.” she muttered.
“Do you want scars?”
“....Maybe.”
“Well, if you do then fine. I’ll love you either way. However, you might come to regret asking him later.”
“....Fine.” She turned to look at Ian’s core and opened her mouth. However, it wasn’t like he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Her wounds instantly closed even without asking. The two of them turned a light shade of red as they realized Ian was still focused on them.
They thanked Ian for healing the two of them, and went off to relax in their houses. On the way back, Mina was stabbing Yervin’s side with her fingers. She wanted to tease him about his uptight response to her thanking him for keeping Botan and Izu from harm. Yervin was trying his best to keep a straight face, but the edges of his mouth were twitching upward.
Ian internally smiled at the leaving goblins and moved back to his goblin maze floor. Before he restarted his floor making, he contemplated the rabbit rush. Something was obviously controlling those rabbits. It was probably some sort of mind control with their single mindedness, lack of reaction to pain, and persistence to head further into his dungeon. Tamed creatures wouldn’t have acted that way. Besides, mind controlling a horde of monsters and sending them into a dungeon was not normal policy….although, it might be normal policy for whatever nation he was closest to. Still, it seemed worthless as they only information that could be gotten from that tactic was: the dungeon can kill a horde of horned rabbits. Unless they could peer through the eyes of the rabbits, they would have no idea where in the dungeon they were killed.
With a sigh, he continued where he left off and finished most of the basic floor structure a couple of hours into the seventh day after opening. However, the basic floor structure he had created was all cave and no town.
The cave part had been simple as he had plenty of practice, and it didn’t matter too much where every stalactite, stalagmite, and column went. Creating a good setup for a town was another matter. He knew the basics, but the basics didn’t completely apply to a town that didn’t require food and water.
He thought about it for a while and decided to make a centralized area for the goblins. In the bottom left corner of his floor plan, he created larger communal areas, a large entrance hall, and a section of bedrooms. The bedrooms would be for the higher tier goblins as he planned to have a lot more goblins than the number of bedrooms he created.
Each bedroom had a flimsy wooden door, with a cot, and a wood desk inside. No chair though.
The large communal rooms and entrance hall were currently just normal caves, but he had some plans.
For the entrance hall he formed a grand throne that stood in front of the passageway to the personal rooms. The rest of the room was filled with long tables and appropriate seating for grand feasts. He formed stone chandeliers which glistened with his light magic. The long dining tables had stone candlesticks with a more subdued version of his light magic. Of course, stone dishes and cutlery were also present. Even though the goblins wouldn’t require food, he planned to changed his orders for the floor. Hopefully the change of orders wouldn’t be too mana intensive. Furthermore, Ian enchanted the room with strength buff magic.
However, in the middle of his enchantment he noticed more rustling in his sphere of perception. It seemed the rabbits were only the first. A group of approximately eighty foxes entered his sphere of perception and ran towards his dungeon entrance. He promptly informed the groups of goblins smashing insects on the first floor, which once again included Narcy. The goblins prepped themselves once again in the fern room, while the spider automata stood in a separate passage awaiting the intruders that would smash themselves on it.
The foxes didn’t really pose a threat, so he left the goblins to their devices and resumed enchanting the goblin entrance hall.
However, in the middle of the fox invasion, a problem occurred. Like last time, Pugi received the most wounds, but it occurred much faster this time. She ran to the boss room to teleport back, but as foxes were challenging the boss, she was unable to teleport and was killed by a stray fox. Ian informed the rest of what happened, which seemed to fuel their slaughter of the foxes, but also resulted in Botan’s death as well. Both of them were fine after they respawned, but they would be unable to participate with the rest of the goblins on the G- rank floor.
As both Botan and Pugi rested their chin on their hands, Ian gave them a suggestion, “Why don’t both of you fight foxes on the G rank floor? Or just ask the rest of the group to come to the G rank floor with you?”
Both of their head perked up, and as they gave a glance to one another, they ran off yelling ‘Thank you!’ back at Ian. He decided not to correct the fact that he could hear them in any part of the dungeon.
More foxes had made it into the G rank floor, but not past it. This time he ordered his monsters to gang up on the intruders rather than only attacking after they got within a certain distance. This proved especially effective with his slightly overpowered creatures for a G rank floor.
For the goblins, he debated purchasing and enchanting some equipment for them. However, he knew that using equipment far above someone’s level would handicap their growth, and decided to let them deal with it on their own. Besides, they could just respawn, so it wasn’t too much of a problem.
Hoping he wouldn't get interrupted again, Ian went to finish his strength enchantment.