Dungeon Noble - Squire

Jake woke up with a start, automatically beginning to sit up before groaning and lying back down on the familiar stone slab beneath him. He could almost feel the teeth touching the raw skin around his neck.

As before, Jake was the first out, and he waited in silence with Ari until the rest had emerged.

Heading back to the tavern as a group, they slumped into chairs at a table in the corner as Ari ordered some food.

“So, how are you all feeling?” Ari asked, his lips twitching into a smile at the dead-eyed glares he got back from them. “Fine, fine, here, your loot for the delve.”

Ari dropped a pouch onto the table that hit with a satisfactory thud, the slight jingle of coins within making Jake perk up as Ari started to stack the coins up.

“How much was it this time?” Alan asked, leaning forward to eye up the pile of money.

“Sixty-five again,” Ari said, sorting the stacks into four groupings. “Enhanced creatures like the murk hounds can vary in strength, but they don’t change between delves. A practical example would be that those two are at the weakest end of Enhanced, worth only five each, whereas one at the top end of Enhanced would be worth ten Wyrdgeld. With me?”

“Those are the weakest Enhanced get?” Jake asked, feeling nauseous at the idea of fighting a murk hound at the peak of Enhanced.

“Yep, that they were,” Ari said cheerfully. “One of those same creatures at the peak of that tier would rip through all of you.”

“So, sixty-five Wyrdgeld, how are we splitting that?” Karl asked, glancing over at Jake meaningfully.

“Thirty-five for Jake,” Ari said, sliding a large chunk of the coins over to Jake. “Then there’s ten each, so a nice round number.”

“So, is it always set how much Wyrdgeld you’ll make on a delve?” Jake asked Ari after he’d passed out the last coin. “Will we always get sixty-five every time we finish the Dungeon?”

“Yes and no,” Ari said, leaning back in his chair and kicking his feet up onto a spare one next to him. “Creatures within the Dungeon don’t vary, so sixty-five is always the same for them, but the chests and harvestable materials vary considerably.”

“Chest and harvestable materials?” Rhew asked, frowning in Ari’s direction. “We didn’t see anything like that. What do you mean?”

“So, chests are provided after each Guardian, and when a Challenge is completed, they provide anything from ingredients to materials or equipment. Harvestable materials would be more like butchering the creatures for meat or parts, picking fruit from trees, or anything else. The only parts of a Dungeon you should leave alone are the doors, any pre-placed torches and the walls themselves. The rest is up for grabs.”

“Fruit trees?” Alan echoed the confusion that Jake felt. How exactly would trees grow in those dark tunnels?

“There’s a chest after the Guardian?” Rhew asked at the same time.

“Yes, and yes. Plant life is dependent on the Dungeon’s environment, but you’ll see more of that when we go through a bigger Dungeon. Chest-wise, there is one after the murk hounds and krok flies, but before you ask, no, I will not loot it for you as that would be disrespectful to the Dungeon. Killing and looting the last creatures is one thing, but taking the chest when I’ve not delved into the Dungeon properly is frowned on.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Rhew said reluctantly, though Jake could tell she was disappointed.

“Anyway, rest up, and we’ll go back in tomorrow. Jake, ensure you rank up tonight, ready for training tomorrow.” Ari said, waving a dismissal to them.

“Are we going to keep going in each day?” Alan asked, making the rest of them pause and look to Ari for an answer.

“In the short term, yes,” Ari said, giving Alan a sympathetic look. “A tier one Dungeon like this will make you feel like shit when you die, but a good night’s sleep should be enough to clear it now you’ve died a few times. The higher tier the Dungeon is, the worse the revival sickness will be, so bear that in mind for the future; it’s one of the reasons why delvers quit or stop progressing.”

“It gets worse?” Alan asked plaintively, looking a little pale-faced at the thought. “We did some training yesterday, and everything felt harder than normal. I can’t imagine going for another day or two feeling like that.”

“Same for me; I felt like I was struggling just to spar,” Karl said, Rhew echoing the sentiment and Jake making a noncommittal noise as he nodded. He’d felt fine by the time they got down to training.

It was more evidence that he seemingly recovered from dying in the Dungeon faster than the others, but Jake wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.

“Yeah, it’s rough, so keeping a steady pace now will help you prepare for later. It did for me, anyway,” Ari said, a distant look in his eye that he quickly shook off. “Besides, once you start surviving your delve, it won’t be so bad at all. I won’t expect you to delve every day, though. We’ll have days off here and there once you’ve got your feet under you.”

“Not much point in a day off until we have money to spend,” Rhew said, looking over to Alan as she spoke. “We have some now, but we’ll need all that and more for the Triarchy and the Association. My requirement says it’s forty Wyrdgeld to rank three, so I’m going to save up for the tax first before going for that, and that’s if I don’t spend any on equipment.”

“Yeah, all this money and I still feel like I’m drowning in costs,” Karl said with a heavy sigh.

“Don’t worry, your income will go up a little when you start reliably clearing the place, so you just need to start surviving,” Ari said, chuckling at them before waving for them to go. “Now go, rest up and be ready for tomorrow.”

They all started to leave, but Jake hesitated at the door and went back to Ari, remembering that he’d said to speak to him outside of the Dungeon.

“Everything okay, Jake?” Ari asked, raising a brow in Jake’s direction as he sat back down.

“You said to speak to you after the Dungeon.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Ari said, idly tapping his fingers on the table before nodding to himself. “By your expression at the time, I guess you were questioning how the doors work?”

“Yeah, I realised I couldn’t see Rhew’s torch, even though she was only just on the other side.”

“So, if you speak to some of the more learned Classers out there, you’ll get a bunch of fancy terms to do with dimensions and spatial pockets, but the basis of it all is that the Dungeon is its own place. Once we go through the entrance, you’re somewhere else entirely, and the only way back is victory or death. Well, or leaving at the end of a tier, but I’ll call that victory.”

“So you’re saying that the doors aren’t really doors?” Jake asked, trying to get his head around what Ari was saying.

“Exactly, they are links to the other ‘floors’ of the Dungeon, which are their own area. Each new tier the Dungeon reaches allows for bigger floors with more things, to the point that they can be truly enormous by the higher tiers, or so I’ve been told.”

“I think I understand,” Jake said slowly. Now he considered it; the floors all being physically connected made no sense. The area would be massive for the first five floors alone. Maybe if it went down each time, but the only stairs were at the beginning.

“Don’t feel like you need to understand Dungeons completely,” Ari said after a moment. “They are part of the System and are well outside our comprehension. The best we manage is understanding how they respond to specific events, not the reasoning behind that response.”

“That feels wrong, though,” Jake said, his brow furrowing in thought. “The Dungeons are a huge part of our life. Why would we not learn more about them?”

“It’s not for lack of curiosity on our part, that’s for sure. The problem is working out how exactly to find out more about them.”

“I suppose,” Jake said begrudgingly.

“If you stumble on any nuggets of knowledge or want to discuss anything else you see, let me know, alright?”

“Will do,” Jake nodded before getting to his feet and heading up to his room.

-**-

After resting for a short while, Jake made his way down to Ivaldi’s and checked out his usual gear.

“Anything else?” Ivaldi asked as he passed Jake his gear.

“The armour and the weapons in here, how much are they?” Jake asked, looking around at the plethora of equipment that lined the walls

“A pack like this would be a single Wyrdgeld,” Ivaldi said, tapping the one that he’d brought out for Jake. “The sword and shield would be an additional Wyrdgeld each, as would any of the weapons here. Arrows in groups of twenty-five and items provided in bundles, such as a pair of potions, are a Wyrdgeld each as well.”

“What about armour?” Jake asked, eyeing some of the armour sets around the room. There were thick leathers, chainmail shirts and even a heavy-looking metal cuirass to pick from.

“Non-metal armours are twenty-five Wyrdgeld per piece, while metallic armour is fifty Wyrdgeld per piece.”

“Per piece?” Jake kept his voice somewhat even, but it was a close thing.

“Indeed, the cuirass would be fifty, as would a chainmail shirt or the metal gauntlets below it.”

“I think I’ll stick with the standard gear for now,” Jake said faintly, taking the equipment Ivaldi had provided as he tried to wrap his head around the rest of the costs.

“Of course, let me know if you need anything further,” Ivaldi said, a faint smile touching his face for a moment.

Thanking Ivaldi again, Jake belted on his sword and shouldered his new pack before heading back to his room at the tavern. If the last two deaths were anything to go by, he’d be feeling more like himself by mid-afternoon, but he didn’t want to waste any time just standing around.

All these opportunities to earn money and get stronger still felt surreal to Jake, and he had no intention of letting them slip or taking them for granted.

The others hadn’t seemed interested, and if what they said about feeling rough during training the day before was right, he doubted they would want to do anything too much before they’d fully recovered.

Still, Jake felt a little rough, so he decided to wander past the other stores, first of all, and take a look at what they sold.