The Dungeon Without a System

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Outside the Dungeon, Medea Island, Kalenic Sea

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Layla was informed the moment her relatives and their party had returned and she quickly set her paperwork aside to go out and meet them.

On the way down the short path, she noted that the waterfall pouring off the cliff had ceased. Most likely, Medean's men had diverted the river down towards the valley where they could make better use of it. When she caught sight of the party she almost burst into laughter. Thankfully, she was able to hold her composure, despite her relatively prim and proper aunt looking like a drowned rat and her uncle practically naked from the waist down. Though it certainly wasn't ideal, they had just returned from a potentially deadly situation with what seemed like no injuries.

Setting her expression, she approached.

"Aunt Isid, Uncle Jerrad. Lieza, Lione, Ferai. Perhaps it would be best to return to your rooms and compose yourselves before we have the debriefing." She suggested, wary of the furious expression on her Aunt's face. Isid gave a jerky nod, still breathing heavily, and they all bundled into the guild hall.

It took another hour until they had all gathered in what Layla was calling the 'Dungeon Room'. In this room she had collated every scrap of data they had on the dungeon and it's monsters. She was particularly interested in the strange rune-like script and iconography. Little hints at a fallen civilization. A table in the center of the room was covered in notes and reports, her own and from the other delvers. Off to the side, she had started collating the data into a book. It would only cover the first floor, but she had a feeling each floor would need it's own tome in the end.

The members of her aunt's party all collapsed into chairs around the table. The scribe she'd organized was prepared to transcribe the meeting, though she'd ask them all to submit their own reports later. They might remember an important detail after a good night's rest.

"I feel like the first floor wouldn't have been a problem for you, but did you have anything to say about it before we get to the second?" She prompted. Jerrad cleared his throat and sat forwards.

"The dungeon sent wave attacks at us, obviously worried and trying everything it could. We didn't take the cores, since that would have taken too long, but we did take the core from the big one. Has anyone taken a corpse out of the dungeon to test if they're edible? Good quality monster meat is hard to find. Some nobles really enjoy crustacean, you know." She shook her head.

"It's not been practical to try, yet. If the delvers are focused on hauling out monster corpses, they'll be vulnerable to ambush. Teleporting the corpses out would be more efficient and safer, but you're the only group with teleport crystals on the island." She said. "We'll try to get at least one corpse out to test it. Could end up being a valuable export." Jerrad nodded.

"The second floor was a maze, half-flooded by salt water." He explained. "Following common methods of navigating mazes leads you back to the center, where the stairs to the first floor are." Isid leaned forward.

"The monsters were fish. The first thing we knew about them was Jerrad's little wardrobe mishap." She commented, her humor obviously returned after time to de-stress.

"He lacked any other wounds, though that could be attributed to the full coverage of his armor rather than any mercy on the dungeon's part." She continued, more seriously. "Teeth sharp enough to tear the leather straps, fast enough for several passes in the five seconds it took for him to get back out of the water. Lieza shocked the water, and with my mage light under the water I got a good look at them.

"Three different monsters, based on the cores in three of the fish. There were dozens of fish in the water, most of which were possibly food for the monsters. One with the size and teeth to cut Jerrad's armor off, one that looked normal and a more numerous one that looked like an arrowhead."

"At least half the maze is submerged, partially or fully." Lieza piped up. "It made it real easy to shock the water and deal with the fish." Layla winced a bit at that.

"I have mentioned that the dungeon learns magic, or at least re-learns it, from watching us? Herna, the fire mage who died on my initial delve, cast a fireball at the crab guardian and it gained the ability to use fire magic." She informed them, to a barrage of curses.

"We assume it has modified it's monsters for lightning resistance, then? Or created a monster that uses lightning?" Layla shook her head.

"One of the parties that regularly delves it has a lightning mage and we haven't seen any new monsters yet. It might change the fish, given the lightning was such a huge weakness." She said. "We really have no way to know."

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Oh, I totally made electric eels. Man, it's so much easier to spy on these meetings through cracks in the walls when I can actually understand what they're saying.

Anyway. yes. Electric eels. Not really. I made the Sharpscale's scales more metallic and conductive, then taught the fish how to push out lightning mana. After the fish had shed it's scales, the area around it becomes highly conductive, even more than water normally is. Then, in a flash, electricity arcs within the silvery cloud under the water.

Every other fish in my dungeon, I did the opposite. Their scales all become more insulative, building on the 'resistance' I'd observed in survivors of Lieza's lightning spells. I made sure Sanguina was doubly insulated, not that I expected them to use lightning spells when fully submerged themselves. That took most of last night.

Afterwards, I spent some time thinking about how the humans perceived me.

They believe that I'm an incredibly old dungeon. Specifically, a dungeon which has been 'conquered' then killed it's enslavers. They expect me to have rare or valuable resources that they can use, they keep attributing abnormalities to things I learnt from them. So, Let's run with it. If they see things they expect to see, it'll distract from the things they don't expect. especially when they're expecting the unexpected.

Did that make sense? I think it did.

To keep the theme/deception going, I added some Romanesque ruins through the jungle. Mostly free-standing columns or platforms half-overgrown with vegetation. The fourth floor didn't get this treatment, but then again that's not what it's about.

The fourth floor is a warren, with the largest tunnels just short enough to make a grown man stoop at all times. There were plenty of smaller tunnels, some big enough to crawl through and others too small to do more than stick an arm through. It was these tunnels that led to the rats' breeding grounds. This was of course, the normal-sized rats. This floor had no regular animals. Every rat was a monster, and I had decided not to interfere in their development in order to see what happens.

I'll probably just end up with giant rats, but I'm not going to modify them directly.

The delvers would enter on one edge of the warren, then have to crawl their way all the way through the tunnels with minimal room to move and fight. The entire time they'd be surrounded by rats that desperately wanted to eat them.

The first floor was a warning, a gatekeeper. What posed no threat to the prepared would kill those who assumed it would be easy. The second floor was a closed door, which only those extremely prepared could pass. The third floor was an exercise in frustration, with no clear exit it should take a while to figure it out if they ever do. Hopefully all but the most determined would give up, at least until the method to pass it became well known.

My fourth floor was a true deathtrap, created to stall further progress by the delvers for as long as possible. I wanted as many floors between the surface and my core as possible. Four floors just didn't seem like enough, and the fourth should keep them back enough to make some breathing room.

After this next delve, I'd get started on the fifth floor.

When Isid's party approached the entrance once again, I gave them my full attention.

They passed through it easily enough, even with the wave attacks. They fought over the increasingly large piles of crabs as I threw more of the monsters at them than I had ever done before. By the time I'd exhausted my reserves, they were sweaty and breathing heavily.

"That was... rough. It definitely doesn't like that we're trying to go deeper." Lione commented. He walked around, pulling bolts from the many, many corpses that surrounded them. "How many was this? A couple of hundred?" Isid nodded.

"That sounds right, though I wasn't exactly counting." She replied. After that, they fought the crab knight. This time wasn't like the last, when they murdered him easily. This time he used fire magic extensively, sending out waves of flames with every slash of his pincer. They still took him down and collected his extra-large core, but it was a hard fight.

When they moved down into the second floor, they were once again confronted by the four exits leading from the room. with a twist.

I'd increased the water level, rising it enough that It sat an inch above the floor they stood on. Multiple layers of defense in action, here!

"This makes things more complicated." Lieza said, frowning. "I can't use my spells here, unless you want to get shocked."

They explored carefully, and when they found themselves going deeper they pulled out their first bit of prepared equipment. Each party member pulled out a metallic mask they placed over their mouths. They'd used them before, but it wasn't as important. mostly because they'd already killed the monsters.

This metal mask let them breath under the water, while some mage lights illuminated the dark water. Their first look at the flooded tunnel was of ten Bloodfish, a large school of Arrowfish and a smaller school of Sharpscales. In seconds, the battle had begun

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Jerrad pulled himself out of the water, covered in cuts and burns. His armor was warped and dented, rips and tears littered the tarnished metal. Isid followed seconds later, her leather armor and porcelain white skin likewise ruined. They scurried away from the water, desperate to escape. A glance back at the black, roiling waters revealed nothing. Seconds later Lione burst from the water, screaming in pain and struggling to keep his head above the water. In the next instant Jerrad was there, pulling the injured rouge to the shore.

Isid collapsed in his arms, having exhausted all her mana. Lione was lacking his left leg below the knee, ending in a bloody and torn stump. He wasn't screaming anymore, but a quick check proved he was just unconscious, not dead.

Lieza never surfaced. Ferai's blond locks never poked above the water.

After waiting a minute, just in case, Jerrad activated their teleport crystals and squinted his eyes at the suddenly blinding light of the surface. They were out. Out of that deathtrap.

Dazed, he recalled the fight. At least, as much of it as he could. The fish had rushed them, not letting them get their bearings. The fish shaped like arrowheads sliced into their skin, the large red ones slamming them with their bulk and tearing armor to pieces. The silver fish, who burst into a sharp, silvery cloud. Then they released lightning into the cloud, contained but still dangerous. Just as they had feared, the dungeon had learned, or remembered, how to use lightning mana.

They'd fought, because that is what they do. That's their job. But there were too many fish, and...

Lieza was overwhelmed by the arrow-like fish. Ferai had been shocked into paralysis. Lione had lost a leg to the red and black fish. He and Isid had been the only ones to make it out of the water without major injury.

This dungeon was incredibly dangerous, quick to adapt to change and vicious in it's defense. Yet... oddly restrained. It could have thrown many more monsters at them than it had. Jerrad recalled that while they were engaged by at least a dozen of the monsters, dozens more held back. Almost like they were waiting their turn.

The healers closed their wounds, smoothed over their burn scars. Lione recovered his leg, but had a distant look that heralded wounds the healers couldn't fix.

Jerrad sighed, running a hand across his now unblemished cheek. He had a report to write.

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