Interlude 2.3 A Meeting of the Adventurer's Dungeon Council
Mastermage Orwen hurries his steps as he sees that the Sky Arrows have just passed the customs desk from the Dverolion portal.
"Tom, Park, good that you are here early. I know that the planning meeting for the next evaluation run was to be in two days only, but I got a very disturbing news this morning and called for a special meeting of the dungeon council in about one hour. Would it be possible if you two give your packs to your friends and come to that meeting?"
The members of the Sky Arrows look at each other before Tom Blueeye answers "Yes, we can do that. What has happened?"
"Later, then I only have to explain once. Let's just say that your evaluation run has become even more important than we thought." After that Orwen hastens to the Rivansea portal, leaving the Sky Arrows (and the General Core, who was listening in as soon as he got the notification about the Sky Arrows entering) to wonder what this was about.
Park shrugs "Nothing to do but to go to this meeting. Corvin, Gladia - can you take our packs while we go to the council chamber? And make sure to remind Siirn that we'll need a good restock on potions and food after our runs on the Bremarin Dungeon, especially if they want the evaluation run to start earlier than intended." "OK, can do"
Leaving the dungeon, the group walks down the one hundred meter street to the harbor. The street is now paved, and almost half the buildings on both sides are finished, with the others in the later stages of construction. after a few dozen meters Tom and Park split away to enter the council building while the rest of the group continues to the tiny building near the pier that was their reward for the evaluation contracts.
One hour later they're sitting in the council chamber listening to Orwen explaining.
"Greetings everyone. Please allow me to make a quick summary to bring everyone up to the current status before I come to the news from this morning that prompted me to call this special meeting. Luckily this has nothing to do with the insanity floor, so let's skip that for today.
After the Elven team guided some [Very Low] ranked adventurers to the eleventh floor to trigger the escape conditions there, we could confirm that the dungeon core passed the level restrictions and the experience overcharge and continued to build. More specifically it continued to fill the eight floor that was basically abandoned in a push to create the ninth to eleventh floors as well as continued to build more floors. Curiously it did not change the tiny floors nine and ten.
However one month ago there was an overwhelming Lifeforce release. It was so much that we couldn't really tell what was built, but several mages offered their suspicions that it would have been enough to build either multiple floors or a floor three or four times as big as the dungeon should be able to do. Considering the gate connections between the second and third floor most of them tend to the suspicion that this core has a special ability to build multiple floors at once.
This was what started the planning for the next evaluation run, especially since it was repeated with a second such wave one week ago. We just wondered how and where the dungeon could have gotten the energy for that as our calculations of the runs would not have produced that much energy for the core.
But this morning the ritual to identify the gate entrance rooms was finally completed with astonishing results. The rooms are called [Remote Entry Rooms] and their rank is [Heroic]."
"WHAT?!?" Everybody in the council chamber starts to talk at once, because no dungeon core could use any structure higher than its own rank, and that would mean that their dungeon is [Heroic] ranked and not [Very High] as they assumed until now. It takes a few minutes for Orwen to calm his collegues down, and then Tom Blueeye is the first to speak.
"That doesn't make any sense - we thought the dungeon was [Master]-ranked because the five or six size meters it would get from that rank would have made no difference for the Mapping Hell. But two ranks? That would mean at least twelve or thirteen meters, enough to increase the grid on mapping hell. We could have been dealing with a Mapping Hell of 41 rooms instead of the 25 rooms it has, and that would have increased its defense value a lot. What could have made a dungeon sacrifice that protection?"
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Orwen didn't like to hear that the Sky Arrows had considered the Dungeon to be [Master]-rank at a time the council still believed it to be [Very High] ranked, but he stops before commenting on that when councillor Owlkan begins to speak.
"That is a question that we should answer in time, but I think we should first concentrate on the excellent news that this dungeon is even higher ranked than we originally thought.
It will no doubt take some time for the core to get to the really valuable deeper floors, although it is digging faster than we assumed when we thought it was only [Very High] ranked. On the other hand we know that there is no dungeon core of that rank on several other lands in every direction, and that is on top of the System Quest for the insanity floor.
We can basically charge almost anything for adventurers that want to access this "
"SHIT" comes from Park Lumberman
"I beg your pardon? Is my concern about money irritating you?"
"No, sorry, of course not, councillor Owlkan. My expletive had nothing to do with your speech. All this time I was thinking about why a low level dungeon would split off some of its space for things other than defending itself.
And unfortunately for all of us I just realised that there is a reason. We're missing one specific room on the first floor, and that room is all the reason for splitting the dungeon space. All we have on the first floor are the magic gates to transfer us in, but where is the physical exit?
The dungeon has to be placed somewhere, and that means a physical exit and entry on the first floor - and that room and its connections has to be in the extra ten meters of space the dungeon has hidden so far on every floor."
Markus Ohannus looks poleaxed. "Are you telling us that we have a [Heroic] ranked dungeon with an unrestricted and open exit at an unknown location???"
Lady Nasii K'tara is the one who answers "The dungeon has to be in the Blackshale Swamp. That swamp is central and in range to all known Portals to the dungeon, and wild and unexplored enough to be a perfect place for a dungeon."
"It gets worse" Tom Blueeye adds. "The Adventurer's Guild knows that there are four or five black-ranked dungeons in that swamp. They never bothered to contain them because a dungeon of the first three ranks isn't strong or valuable enough to warrant the expense of pushing through the swamps. And now the mana released by those weak dungeons will make locating the last exit from this one much more difficult."
The councillors and their aides look at each other. Finally Councillor Owlkan speaks again. "We'll have to report this to our government and they might decide to send scout teams into the swamp, but there is nothing we can do about that from here. So the important question for us is the evaluation run for whatever comes after the trap-floor. Can the Sky Arrows go in sooner than in one week? I know that this was the original plan, but I would really prefer if you can go in tomorrow and try to find out what else the dungeon core has been hiding."
Tom and Park exchange a look and Park shakes his head before Tom answers "No, not tomorrow - we will need one or two days to prepare and rest before we can go in. [Heroic] is the first gold rank, and no one around here has any reports on conquering a gold-ranked dungeon. That is difficult enough for the silver-ranked ones we had in the past, but we always succeeded in those cases.
The dungeon being [heroic] ranked does partially explain the many tricks it has thrown at us in the first floors, but that is another reason why I want extra preparation before going in deeper. The losses to other adventurers on the insanity floor are high enough, and I don't want to underestimate that dungeon core again."
From that point on the discussion turns to the details and preparation of the next run to be done by the Sky Arrows.
On the next day, Mastermage Orwen visits the Sky Arrow's new home alone.
"Hello everyone, I won't distract you from your preparations for long.
As you probably have guessed, the reason why the other councillors didn't discuss the physical exit further is that every one of them plans to find that exit for their own government. Rivansea is at a disadvantage there because we are not only much smaller but also the only of the four countries that didn't have a border to the Blackshale Swamp - and for some mysterious reason the customs paperwork to get a permit to travel upriver from here suddenly requires much more extensive declarations to fill out.
Well - we are not going to try, not when such obvious obstacles are hindering us without costing the other governments anything. Instead we would like you to try to push through to the core. If the core is conquered before that fifth entry is found, then it will be worth much less.
In this bag I have a number of healing potions for you to assist in that task. I hope it will be enough to get to the core, especially as the system will force it to install another [safe] floor soon."