Waves lapped at her feet, the warm ocean environment of her newest floor only doing so much to distract Delta from all that was going on. Delta hugged herself as the people trailing into her Dungeon during the day were near non-stop. It was like her front door had been taken off its hinges and now her home was public property…
All the people from Fairplay had set up rotations, making maps, destroying her monsters to see what they would drop as loot, and in simple terms… were being pests.
The experience was akin to having ants crawling in her hair that Nu kept having to smack with a newspaper…
Not that Delta tried to look that much. Actual dungeon delvers weren’t fun to watch after experiencing Ruli, Deo, Kemy, and even Estal’s groups. It didn’t matter if her monsters returned after a time… Delta could neither bear to watch them suffer in any capacity nor the treatment they endured from the indifferent Fairplay folks.
But even factoring that in, Delta classified found that there were three ‘types’ of Fairplay people.
The first were the simplest and most common type to enter her Dungeon. They were the hired help, the people who wore the colors or the symbols but were here for the paycheck. They did the bare minimum, didn’t push too hard, and in general they lacked any impressive magical equipment or even the experience needed to get far.
Not quite adventurers, but not quite helpless.
More often than not, her goblins and rooms kept them at bay. Cois was eager for revenge and ended up giving more than a few some nasty burns to take back on the road with them. One group made it to Fera, who simply clobbered them with a chair.
The second were the previously mentioned Adventurers. Those were closer in style to Estal and Kemy’s groups. A tougher lot that often managed to reach Fran and Bacon with continuous success. They seemed to have joined up for access to the Dungeon but didn’t completely jive with Fairplay as people.
Not that they were angels, they seemed to be more thrill seekers and actively prodded each other to test monsters and traps. A lot of knives were stolen by Nu’s pop out sign because of their jumpy nature. They became even more skittish after running into Fran.
The first time this happened, they seemed to laugh at the idea of a goblin boss without a horde of minions to back it up. Swaggering up to the boss with swords drawn but hardly any tactics in place, they labored under the impression of Fran being ‘just a first floor boss.’ Delta greatly enjoyed their expressions when Fran demonstrated exactly why he was a strong independent goblin who needed no army.
As the thrashings continued and stories began to spread, people began to enter the boss room
with far more trepidation than before. That made Delta feel better. Fran and Bacon deserved some respect after everything.
However, something Delta noticed made her frown. These adventurers, their seeds, little pieces of the lost Little Brother in all people, were far more developed and Delta was truly worried she wouldn’t be able to purify them all due to the sheer volume being drawn to Durence. It was a little interesting to see the seeds in different states of growth and nature. They varied in dozens of levels of strength, but none came close to the level found in the people of Durence, such as Ruli or Deo. Even mana starved, Deo’s seed had been something else.
Aside from that, a lot of the groups had been low-tier mixed in with some hidden gems. Some had artifacts that looked as if they were mass produced in a magic factory, while others used custom equipment made to their specific mastery.
It was usually the latter that made it to the boss room. They understood the rules, allowing them some leeway which some used to skip some of the harder rooms while others learned to completely stick to non-lethal runs to see if that helped.
To Delta’s delight, a few even seemed to turn it into a badge of honor to make it to the boss room without actually beating any of her monsters, while still completing the room challenges. Nu informed her there was a rumor he heard the groups whisper about.
The secret challenge modes.
Delta tried not to think about poor innocent folk trying to flip that switch.
The third type was the most alarming, consisting of Fairplay’s inner members. These people
Delta dubbed as ‘Scrubbed.’ Their mana, their seeds, even their very being radiated an artificial light which reminded her of the buzzing hallway light in a hospital. Awash in pale dull white light.
‘Pure’ was not the right word. She had met Kemy and seen purity. This was like a favorite shirt that had gone through a wash one too many times and had completely faded.
A photograph whitened by time.
A soul eroded by purpose.
Delta shorthand called them ‘Scrubs’ to keep it simple.
These people had identical weapons, carbon-copy magics, cookie-cutter tools, and even more similar stances. They did not negotiate or bargain with Delta or her monsters. Whether it was a simple path with a goblin on it or a hellish road covered in lava, Fairplay Scrubs would sooner set themselves on fire than suffer a Dungeon monster to live. It was scary to watch the self-assurance of their spirits. Unbending until they snapped in half.
All the ones she saw wore a badge of sorts with a single silver finger touching an unsettlingly familiar round spherical object. If that was their goal…
Delta didn’t want these people touching her core.
She really didn’t want that.
The only upside was that whenever Delta felt bloated with the mana from all these people, almost ready to burst in pain… Ruli seemed to sense it and closed the Dungeon off to outsiders.
Delta heard from Hob and Gob that she got a lot of foul language for that and more than a few people had whispered she was a ‘Dungeon Simpleton,’ someone who apparently didn’t get that Dungeon’s were basically below everyone in the social hierarchy of rights.
Delta asked the goblins to point out anyone who did this to Ruli if they came into the Dungeon. ‘Somehow’ the difficulty mode for those people was automatically set to stage 3…
Still, the break was nice as it allowed Delta to splurge mana on things on her third floor like paintings or more rugs to give it more ambiance while she also spent some on her fourth floor, getting a gluttonous amount of shells, stones, and starfish for her island beaches.
“If this is how normal Dungeons get supplied, I’m not surprised Bro and Sis moved on to putting actual people in charge of a core. I’m barely scratching my fourth floor, and I can barely stop myself from turning them all into insane death traps,” she sighed, a hand to her chin.
“It’s not death traps, it’s ‘Natural Selection’s little helpers,’” Nu said casually as he drew up plans for the fourth floor, but all Delta could see on his ‘blueprint’ was a massive squid eating screaming Fairplay people.
“Nu, what if it gets worse? I feel itchy with them on my first floor, how will I feel when they hit my second, then third? It’s… bearable, but what if I want to nap or think… or just be alone for ten minutes?” Delta explained as they both sat on the beach on the fourth floor, basking in the radiant fake sunshine.
“I’ll stop being sarcastic for a moment and put aside the easy answer of ‘make them afraid’ and say… treat them like your squishy human nose,” he suggested as the squid on his blueprints gained laser beams mounted on each arm.
“My nose?” Delta repeated, bemused.
“Sure. You see it all the time - but you don’t. The mind adapts, and you’re not just human, you’re Dungeon too. Dungeons are designed to have that feeling as normal. People are just boogers on your nose - faze them out,” he went on blithely.
Delta pondered that as she stood up off her sand castle throne and began to walk on the ocean surface.
“Faze it out…” she muttered.
He made it sound so easy.
“I’m happy to let loose my ‘Mecha-bone-kracken MK.XIV’ and cull them if you prefer?” Nu called.
“Nose… nose… nose!” Delta tapped her head as she walked.
Delta was a people person, she enjoyed interacting with people, watching them grow into better people as they helped Delta be a better person. But if the people coming to her little safe haven were all intent on being unreasonable, she might have to take breaks from them. Boundaries were just as important as work.
A work email arriving at 4.59pm on a Friday can wait until Monday.
Delta nodded to herself, accepting this as her truth now. If people didn’t respect her boundaries, Delta wouldn’t respect their property, pride, or personally held beliefs that involved hurting others.
Fair was fair.
She paused as a group made it to Fran and Bacon, the leader of this particular group of Scrubs was a little more washed out than others. On his chest was the same badge but had two fingers around the orb.
Delta snorted to herself.
She had lived long enough to see herself become a dreaded mythical creature. Delta had become so unreasonable to handle that she had summoned a manager.
With a thought, she moved to the boss room to see the white sands and colosseum-style edges ignite with flames from the nearby sconces as the entertainment got started. The doors opened outwards to reveal the hall connecting to Fera’s bar. Delta took a look to see how they got past Fera unscathed when she saw the Goblin maiden was busy on the third floor with troll cooking.
Ah. Dumb luck.
The five-man group didn’t really feel like people so much as a homogenous crowd. Any unique features such as hair color or eyes or even mannerisms seemed to be held in check by their practiced emotionlessness and uniform.
Said uniforms looked a little… tight on them. Delta whistled innocently to herself as she took a seat firmly on Fran and Bacon’s side of the room.
Another downside to all this activity was it was quite hard to make minor adjustments to the first floor due to the constant outside interference of the people, so when they began to figure things out that Delta hadn’t quite intended, such as if they used water magic in the mushroom grove, it overgrew, trapping Boary somewhat to allow quick escape with little challenge.
The storeroom could just be blitzed from outside with the use of explosions, rendering Merry’s available tools down to nothing, but they had not found Maestro’s tunnel just yet. It seems that the Fairplay officer was still keeping the secret to herself.
All in all, her first floor had some issues that hadn’t been revealed until now thanks to the volume of people trying to get creative.
It was something she’d have to work on.
She wondered if she could make a mini-boss that would grow if it got wet for the grove? Like one of those neat dinosaur sponge toy things?
Wait… she could just make dinosaurs on another floor?
Her menu pinged the request to Sis which returned a ‘would you like to?’
Delta put a pin in that for later.
She watched as her first floor boss Fran strode in on Bacon with a quiet power to him. The room’s enchantments worked into place, and Fran soon seemed to gain strength within himself, but Delta noticed something.
Unlike the other groups, one of the members seemed exhausted, tired… weak. He was no fighter, but his ink stained fingers reminded Delta of writing reports.
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But why? Why was that a familiar sensation?
The simple fact was that Fran grew stronger to the average power of the group coming into his room, meaning he should always be a challenge up to a point, but now Fairplay had brought a very weak person with them… and by the rules of averaging things out?
Fran wasn’t as tough as he could be.
“Did they figure the trick out, or did they get lucky?” Delta mumbled to herself as Fran offered them clemency, but as before, the group ignored him to spread out around the second-ranked officer whose rapier looked…
Different.
Delta eyed the weapons and felt a little horrified.
It looked to be a magical weapon summoned forth by the man, but from what Delta saw, the tool was his seed , himself, in a manner. How on Earth did they learn to not only control the seed, but push it into submission like this without a Dungeon?
It was also a little wrong to see something like someone’s seed being used like a tool of battle. Delta could only liken it to someone using their dismembered hand as a weapon while still bleeding from the stump.
It was half as long as the man’s body, but instead of metal, it looked to be made of some sort of wood at a distance, but when Delta peered closer, she saw it was closer to a crystallized tree branch.
Between the strength manipulation and the odd weapon, the uneasy feeling in her chest grew. The only thing good about the whole thing was that the people’s seeds were pretty much inert or transmuted. If there was any trace of the Little Brother left, Delta could not sense it with either her human mind or Dungeon senses.
“Have at thee,” Fran thundered as Bacon stomped the sand before charging, his stead picking up speed as it rushed forward, kicking more sand up in his wake. The group didn’t scatter like the more inexperienced groups, but held their posture, two of them lifting lances to create a death wall if Fran continued to charge.
Normal people wouldn’t push Fran back with simple lances, but these were neither normal people nor did they have simple tools.
Fran made Bacon swerve, sending a cloud of sand over the intruders to distract them as he brought his own lance down to bear. One of the people tried to counter with the shaft of his spear, but while they may be better than normal folks…
Fran was still a boss monster; Delta’s boss monster at that.
The spear snapped, and the man suffered a nasty gash down his front before Bacon turned and donkey-kicked him across the field, sending him out of bounds. Delta was a little worried about his health, but one of the others had used a sort of pale healing magic that felt almost without faith and more… purpose.
It didn’t wake the man up, but he wouldn’t die. Delta would need some sort of stasis or healing effect to keep people from dying as a fight went on. If the people couldn’t get medical aid or were unaware of their ally’s plight then Delta would have to step up her game and do it herself.
The second-ranked officer swung his odd weapon, and when Fran’s lance clashed with it, there was a disorienting warble in the air that sounded like a tuning fork being abused. The impact was almost visible, and the force pushed Fran back and gave the man grounds to push his attack.
Delta watched as Fran’s lance seemed to almost lose physicality for a moment before the mana reasserted itself.
Delta stood up as Nu pinged her from the second floor, demanding updates.
The officer struck again with two of his companions raining fireballs and arrows down on either side, forcing Fran to retreat or charge.
Fran did not retreat.
They clashed again and this time, when the man struck Bacon’s side, the cut spread out like frost coating a surface. The Dungeon mana holding Bacon together became weak and some of its strength was sapped.
Delta’s heart dropped. Anti-Dungeon weapons? Anti-Mana tools?!
Made from seeds of the Little Brother?
Just as this began to feel unfair, Fran hooked his lance under the man’s foot and toppled him, sending his weapon skittering away for a second before the sands slowed it down. It seemed they weren’t expecting actual combat skills from Fran more than bash and charge.
“Knight Rush!” Fran cried, activating some skill that he had been practicing. Blinking, Delta watched as the secondary core inside Fran began to pulse, feeding him Mana that was mostly Delta’s but also a little unique flavor of his own.
Delta really had so much to keep a track of, and Nu was a horrible secretary.
Fran vanished before teleporting to one side of the arena and dashed across it in a flash of light that sent waves of sand parting like waves and the air to rush past. He stopped, then he repeated this trick two more times, rendering the mage and one of the spearmen unconscious.
“Field lines! Adapt! Central position, eyes to east and west!” the officer yelled, a little more panicked now as he scrambled for his seed-rapier.
Fran’s luminous eyes turned to where Delta was sitting, awaiting her judgment like a royal knight seeking permission from his queen.
With dramatic flair, Delta put her hand out in front of her, thumb sticking out sideways.
The thumb was turned downwards.
“Knight Rush Extreme.”
Five lines erupted in a star formation across the stage, leaving smoking lines in the sand and the end of Fran’s lance glowing cherry red.
Fran looked down at the terrified ‘fighter.’
“I’m just a receptionist,” he pleaded to the goblin boss.
“Take your lunch break, scribe - and make it a long one,” Fran rumbled, and the man fled the room, screaming.
The seed-rapier flickered out of existence and Delta could only stare at the sand that had been touching it, a dead gray inert mass that had to be replaced slowly.
It was too crucial for the second-officer to take it. It’d be akin to performing soul lobotomy with toothpicks.
But… she eyed the fallen man and smiled. There was something she could try.
“Mother… that look is the worst thing I’ve faced today,” Fran muttered as he watched Delta move closer to the fallen men.
“Shush, Fran. I’ll do my thing, you shake their pockets out,” she instructed the boss.
“…shinies… I like shinies.”
---
“You’re staring,” Mas said. Princess Serma turned to him with a blink, then flushed a little.
“Apologies, Mas. I’ve just never seen such… such…” she struggled to find the right word for the scene before her of three men holding a fourth upside down over a keg as the man turned blue from the lack of oxygen, but not alcohol.
“Festivities,” she concluded with grace. The tavern of the small town was fascinating as they had straw on the floor, a door leading to the stables to toss drunks, an outhouse, and more.
Nearby, Lorsa sipped a tiny glass of something she told Serma was ‘lemonade but fun.’ She blended into the shadows far too well for it to be an accident.
Serma had not often been out of the castle and never had she been outside the capital in such fashion, everything was new when it came to the people. Disguised mostly in ‘snooty but not snob’ clothes as Mas described it, Serma was an oddity but not too likely to stand out.
“If you wanna do a stand, I can arrange it, but it’s not fun or tasty. I prefer fruit juice!” Mas said brightly and Serma gave him a small smile.
When she was queen, she’d plant a grove of fruits from around the world for him. Lorsa gave her a thumbs up from behind Mas, the meaning of which Serma couldn’t decipher at all.
Still, when she knocked down her father’s tomb and buried him in a pauper’s grave instead, there’d be plenty of space for a few gardens.
Hm… no, she’d be doing her best to eliminate the poverty that gripped the city’s lower quarter, so pauper graves would be out of style.
A ditch, then.
“What’re you thinking about?” Mas asked around a leg of lamb.
“Oh, delicate princess things,” she said airly.
“I can listen, I don’t mind,” he promised. “Do you think I will be a good…” she lowered her voice, “queen?” she asked her knight.
Mas didn’t even stop chewing.
“Yep,” he replied instantly.
“How?” she pressed, needing to know what was going on in his head other than breathing and eating. The boy was rich with wisdom if he just shared his thoughts more.
“Same way I know the sun rises every morning or water is wet or good food is awesome. You just will be… just are,” he shrugged.
Lorsa downed her drink and gestured for three more glasses from the bar, eagerly.
Serma felt a warmth in her chest she hadn’t had since she was younger.
“I believe I can be that queen you think I am - if you’re by my side,” she whispered to Mas.
“We’re sitting next to each other. I’m definitely by your side,” Mas said brightly as he offered her his spare leg of lamb, dripping in some gravy. Lorsa buried her head into her hands.
Serma stared at the leg of lamb, then took it without grace or manners and bit into it.
It was overcooked.
But as long as she was sharing it with Mas, it was delicious.
Later, when she got too warm, she stepped outside for a moment, not wanting to bother Lorsa or Mas’ eating match over more lambs. They were like wild animals gnawing on bones, and Serma needed fresh air.
She exhaled as she went to check on the carriage, but stopped as someone put a knife to her throat from behind.
“Your loving sibling sends their regards,” the man hissed. Serma struggled, kicking back and making the man kneel over for a moment, and she got only a few steps back when he grabbed her long hair.
She was only half-way to Durence, so close to being the queen! Having a long reign of prosperity with Mas! She slammed her hands back, and the man cried out as something cracked in his chest before she reached to her side and slashed her hair down to her head, freeing herself finally.
She turned in rage, but the man… was simply gone. Strands of her hair fell gently, raining down on a curious orange slime that was staring at her wide eyes.
“Did… you see where he went?” she panted and the slime just burped cutely.
He must have fled, fearing he took too long. Serma sighed as Lorsa crashed through the tavern wall in rage, a second assassin in her hands.
She stopped when she saw Serma with the slime.
“I got one too!” Mas yelled as he held up an unconscious imp creature.
“He tried to murder my steak,” Mas announced. He stopped when he saw Serma, and she felt dread in her stomach. Her hair… she must look horrible in the gloom and low light and even worse during the day.
“I’m here,” he said, coming close and moving to her side as he promised before.
“Poi!” the slime said. Mas gasped.
“It’s orange! We should cook it in a soup! Slimes are full of nutrients! An orange one must taste super weird and healthy!” he told Serma as Lorsa had gone pale.
The slime looked up at him and simply burped again.
“M-master… Dur..ence…” the imp croaked in his ‘sleep.’
Serma picked the slime up and hugged it. It felt warm.
“Let’s pay for the damages and leave,” Serma said quietly, putting the slime over her shoulder as it seemed to be highly affectionate.
---
Lorsa watched as the hulking monster king’s aura was compressed into a small form before it coughed out a boot with a foot still inside it, the princess and her knight blissfully unaware of the process.
This had… gotten complicated.
Real fast.