> Dungeon Status:
>
> Tier 2
> Level 48/100
>
> Heart 8,294,400/8,294,400
> Experience 1,339,715/2,073,600
> Mithril 23,851
> Adamantine 30,991
> Mana 10,200
> Poison, Greater 500
> Deadly Scorpion Venom 51
>
> Quest: Destroy another dungeon.
> Quest: Kill 10 Noble-born.
> Quest: Reach level 50.
>
> Situational Quest: The King has entered your dungeon! Kill him to gain an extra floor!
Travis tried to pull back, but with the entrance opened, he was stuck with it. "Please! Don't! I'm—" Reasoning hadn't worked so far, and for all the city was furious at a dungeon for intruding, he didn't want to attack it either.
Two huge forces moved. Each was connected to him in bonds that had become tight friendships. Northridge and Home braced and protected him, imposing themselves between the furious city and Travis.
"Hold your ground! Travis isn't attacking you!" Home's voice boomed around Travis, cowing him a little and, he hoped, Polfay.
It seemed like Polfay wasn't ready to give up, though. "Who are you to stand before a monster?! Out of my way!"
This was supposed to be Travis' comfortable space. Somewhere he was safe from being attacked. In short, he'd had enough. "I am not a monster!" His shout seemed to stun all three, so he went on. "Yes, I'm a dungeon, but I want the same thing all of you want. People deserve to be happy and safe and do what they want. I'm trying to help you!"
"Me?"
Polfay sounded bewildered, so Travis used that as a wedge. "Yes. You, Home, Northridge, even the kingdom itself! There's a war coming, and I want to help. Using my entrance, you can send wagons directly to Home. People, too." Now that Polfay wasn't shouting, Travis was hearing far more emotion in their androgynous tones.
"War?" Now Polfay seemed even more discombobulated. "The West? I felt— What happened?"
Home cleared its metaphorical throat and started explaining. Starting with the sluggishness of the western cities in responding to any pleas for help by the kingdom, they reached the point where West Reaches tore itself clear of the kingdom.
Polfay's anger and curiosity both seemed to desert them. "Then the kingdom is dead."
"No." The presence of the kingdom itself was bigger than Travis could imagine. "With support from Dungeon Travis, Dungeon Breeze, and the gods—I survived."
Travis let out a relieved sigh as Polfay metaphorically took a seat in his mental landscape. His mindscape was quiet for some time. Finally, Travis couldn't handle it anymore. "Are we good now? We're doing this to help move around soldiers and materiel for the war effort. Also, your people are welcome to mine my resources."
Polfay laughed at that. "I'm the greatest center for dungeon delvers in the kingdom, and you offer to let them mine you for free?"
Home said, "Not free. It will cost the miners a percentage. Right, Dungeon Travis?"
"Right. I think King Stewart is heading out to make an announcement. That should settle things, right Polfay?" Travis asked, doing his best to keep his tone level and not freak out over having a third city slowly invading his senses. Already, lizards were slipping out and giving him vision around his new entrance.
All he saw was looming, huge figures (that were people to lizard vision) all staring at the entrance while some of the King's Guard stood there, blocking anyone from coming in. Then he watched as Stewart left, flanked by even more guards.
The biggest relief for Travis was seeing the situational quest going away. Maybe dungeons like Breeze wouldn't care about not having one extra floor, but he had a lot riding on how many floors he had. It was the worst kind of temptation. He wondered if he could talk to the kingdom about maybe relaxing the rules for long enough to resurrect Stewart.
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Travis found, over the following day, that there was something even better than having a king wander into his dungeon regularly. Stewart, he had calculated, was giving him a million or more XP a day. When Polfay's leader sent the fifty thousand troops they'd rallied marching through him, he managed to figure out that each was giving him around six hundred XP.
As day cycled into night, he leveled up. Twelve times.
> Quest Complete: Reach level 50.
> New Quest: Create 100 weapons.
"Progress!" Travis had only shouted it in his headspace, but the mental emanation acquired attention. He felt Breeze reach out to him, an unspoken question vibrating in her very being. "I finished another quest. I don't know what it— Oh! Guns!"
What the quest had given him was a new research option that was already completed. "We did it, Breeze. Any gun we can make ten of will now be available for manufacture in the gunsmithy." He was giddy with the thought of it. No longer would Tinpot need to spend the better part of a day slowly constructing a single pistol from parts he'd spent a week making by hand. Breeze, though, only showed more curiosity at his answer—and a little confusion. "Uh, something we have been trying to do for months."
Breeze wasn't sure precisely what it was, but they were content their friend was happy. But even though Travis was happy now, Breeze didn't like how few floors he had. There was a simple solution to that, Breeze knew, and that was by spending food resources to add more floors.
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Travis spluttered as the gift of resources hit him. "Breeze? What's all this? Is that half a million food?!" The eager impression Travis got from Breeze did nothing to cover his confusion. "Why?"
"Grow." Giving their fellow dungeon the mental equivalent of a head-pat, Breeze returned their focus to their interior again, seeing about adding more floors themselves.
"What am I meant to do with this much food?" Travis stared at the notification for a few more moments before flicking it away. With traded resources sitting in a buffer, he didn't see any of that food appear in his stats—but it still weighed on him by being there.
Not that he was running short of much. He had a bit over five hundred thousand gold, most of which was piled up in Penelope's boss room. There was also a large fortune of adamantine and mithril that he thought he might have to start giving away if the mining boom continued.
"Uh, Polfay? Can we talk?" Travis asked.
Having been used to being quiet, with only their avatar to converse with, Polfay hadn't expected to be in discussions to on a daily basis and was a little nervous. It had listened to the King speak to its people and its leader, and Polfay had felt terrible for trying to attack Travis without giving him a moment to speak. "Yes." It had been following along with the interactions between Travis and the other two cities, as well as with Breeze, and so the stilted reply it just gave left Polfay feeling more nervous.
"Right. So, I have a lot of food right now. Is there anything you can do with it? Can you turn it into actual food for people?" Travis asked. "Oh, here, let's test it."
When Polfay felt the food transfer to them, it felt confusion. Polfay had never just had resources like that before. Poking at the mass of food, Polfay felt a way it could push the glut that would do something—and did so.
"Wow!" Polfay spilled the word out in their excitement. "That filled a warehouse!"
"That was fifty thousand food," Travis said. "Do you want the rest?"
"Why are you doing this? I attacked you."
The question caught Travis a little off-guard, but he had an answer quickly enough. "You were only doing that to protect all your people. You saw a dungeon encroaching and fought it. In the past I made some bad decisions too—ones I really regret. It'd be hypocritical of me to be angry at you for that." He pushed the remaining of the five hundred thousand food over.
It took time for Polfay to figure its way through the mess of emotions that statement triggered. But, Polfay liked that advice. To set aside confused actions and allow themselves to move forward was very good, but it also made it curious as to what Travis had done. To cover for their distraction, they shoved all the food they could into warehouses that looked like they should have food in them. At last, with nothing else to say that it could think of, Polfay said, "Thank you."
"You're welcome. If you ever need anything, just ask. We're going to be together for a long time, I hope, and part of that is knowing when one of us needs help and when we need a little quiet. If you get what I mean." Travis hadn't, until he'd woken up as a dungeon, done a lot of planning for the future. Now, however, he had to face facts that planning ahead was the only thing that had saved him so far, and would likely continue to.
"Oh. Okay. My delvers are interested in you."
"Great!" Travis was rubbing his metaphorical hands together in glee. "I have training dungeons that they can try. They get gold and rewards, and I get the resources I need to level up. Send them in, and the guards will explain everything to them."
The reaction surprised Polfay, and it felt confident now in asking questions. "You want delvers?"
"I do. I have organized with the local temples in Northridge to pay for adventurers' resurrections. Just having them in my dungeon helps. That army the King marched through to Home? That got me twelve levels! And then there's Stewart himself. He walks in to say 'hi' every day, and I wind up getting a million XP just from that!" Travis barely managed to stop his flood of words. Polfay seemed interested in what he was far more than Home or Northridge. "Sorry. I'm not used to having someone asking about this stuff. Okay, I kinda am, but you're a city and that is new."
Polfay couldn't help itself, it laughed. Peals of giggles and mirth rolled around the mental landscape before it could manage to get hold of itself again. "Sorry! I just—"
"It's fine, Polfay. You don't have to apologize."
"I do! I'm not used to talking like this. My avatar doesn't ask me many things, so the most I get to do is listen to people. You can hear me and talk back, so it's new to me too." With the admission out, Polfay's spirit felt lighter than it had in decades. "It's good. I like talking. Can we keep talking?"
"Sure we can. Did you want to know anything else about how my dungeon works?" Travis asked.
"Please! What is this 'XP' you mentioned?"
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Travis wasn't sure if it was weird to chat with someone for ten days solid. The new adventurers from Polfay had been wary at first of using his mini-dungeons, but some groups had warmed up to them. Those groups had been, from what Felna had told him, fairly weak to begin with. He didn't care—that was why he was doing this.
"We're leaving tomorrow, Travis," Penelope said. She'd escorted Stewart to the dungeon for the last time before the march to war. At least, in her case, she wouldn't be marching. "Elanor is going too."
"I figured she would. This is nothing if not a continuation of the fight she got pushed into. I wish I could send Fife along to guard you too, Stewart, but she's still taking care of the goblins for me." Travis couldn't keep his focus off Penelope though. It would be some time without her, and she was the most important person to him. "Stewart?" he asked.
The seriousness in Travis' voice took Stewart's full attention away from checking over his armor for what felt like the hundredth time. "Yes?"
"Last time I let Felna say it, but it's the same sentiment. You take care of Pen, and if I hear she's been hurt by your actions, I'll rip myself out of the ground and hunt you down." Travis managed to keep his tone serious until the end, before laughing. "Just be careful; both of you. I like the changes you're making, Stewart, and I'd hate to have to break a new king or queen in. Pen, don't let him fall." Implied, he hoped, was that he didn't want her to fall.
"Trav, didn't you learn anything from my fight with Hilda? She's the most skilled warrior I have ever seen—and she couldn't kill me. She wouldn't have gotten as far as she did if I hadn't landed to fight her. Besides, Stewart won't be that close to the front lines." Turning her head to look at Stewart, Penelope hoped he understood that when it came to battlefield placement, she was the mobile part of their pairing, and she got to make such decisions for herself.
"Of course, Lady Penelope," Stewart said, bowing and lowering his eyes all the way to the ground—affording her the gesture that would have caused a stir had he used it in public.
image [https://cdn.excessive.space/Dungeon/Chapter%200170-floor1.jpg]
image [https://cdn.excessive.space/Dungeon/Chapter%200170-floor2.jpg]
image [https://cdn.excessive.space/Dungeon/Chapter%200170-floor3.jpg]
image [https://cdn.excessive.space/Dungeon/Legend3.jpg]
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