DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

The dungeon interface showed a momentarily empty dungeon when Nate opened it that morning. However, the resource counter had increased by a bit more than expected. It seemed as though the changes he had made last night had made some difference.

Or, maybe the monsters since then had just been more stupid than the earlier ones, it was hard to say for certain.

Either way, he had already decided the next changes he made to the traps were going to be done through the avatar. So, for now, all he was going to be doing was taking notes while watching so he could refine the process.

Well, there was one more thing he wanted to do, and that was to create more signs at the entrance. Especially one's warning off those families. With any luck, they would get annoyed enough to enter.

It was a long shot, but he could hope.

He had just finished adding the last of the signs when he heard the front door slam shut. Closing everything down, he hurried downstairs and saw his father leaning against his mother.

“It’s done. We’re not going, and moreover, we are even still employed. However, I think the price might be too high.” Niall’s tired, muffled voice came from Nina’s shoulder. “They put us on probation instead.”

She drew in a deep breath before beginning to curse with a vehemence Nate had rarely witnessed before.

“I’m missing something here. What’s so bad about being put on probation?” He dared to ask.

“It locks our contract with them. We have to go on the next job they call us on, or they can refuse to let go of our contract. Which means we wouldn’t be able to work somewhere else. Not legally, at least.” His father explained.

“That’s absurd! Who came up with such an idiotic system? That would be so easy to exploit. All a company would have to do is always have their people on probation.” He couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly agree to this sort of setup.

“The local governments prevent the guilds from doing that. Supposedly, the contract system is meant to protect everyone involved. Now that we’re on the other end of it though, I’m beginning to see a lot of things differently.” Nina admitted.

“Are there bylaws, or any sorts of protections built into the contracts for situations like this?”

Nina looked at her husband, who scratched his chin thoughtfully. “There might be, actually. There’s a provision in them about mission wipeouts. If the mission we have been placed on probation for not participating in suffers a catastrophic loss of life, then the probation is automatically deemed void.”

“What constitutes a catastrophic loss of life in this case?”

His mother shrugged. “Normally it would be anything above thirty to forty percent of the team. However, since we’ve pretty much all agreed that they are going for a nearly complete party wipe… I’m sure they’ll find a way around that.”

“So, everyone needs to die then?” Nate asked, not sure of how he felt about all of this. There was little doubt in his mind that few of those people would even be alive to reach the dungeon. However, any that did enter would not be allowed to leave.

Niall nodded. “Unfortunately for us, that would be the best-case scenario.”

“How likely is that to happen?”

“Not very. The leaders they’re sending will be strong.”

Nate sighed. “I know it’s wrong, but I hope they do.”

“Understandable. We’ve all been having our eyes opened in a lot of ways lately.”

“Yeah, anyway, I’m going to take a nap for a while. I just wanted to come down and see how your meeting turned out.” Nate hugged his parents and went back upstairs.

He had no more time to waste if he was going to make the dungeon as deadly as possible. It was time to go back in as his avatar and start perfecting the traps.

Nate got comfortable on his bed and donned his avatar. He re-entered the dungeon beside the core once more. That was something to consider in the future. If he always entered right next to the core, then building large dungeons would be a pain.

Especially with his body in its current condition. Moving through the dungeon and a single near-death experience had been enough to wipe him out the night before.

He would simply need to be more careful in the future… even if he did want more equipment. Walking around with only a pair of pants on was going to get old quick. He wanted boots, socks, underwear, a shirt, and armor. He wanted everything.

Right now, with his chest and feet exposed, he felt vulnerable and well exposed. He didn’t like it.

Nate brought up the dungeon interface and its screens. Quickly finding that there were two monsters inside at the moment. Both were seemingly lost and wandering around in circles while avoiding his traps by pure luck each time.

That was why he needed to fix them as the avatar. Right now, the rooms had traps, but there were gaps everywhere. They didn’t extend all the way to the wall, or they didn’t go off at the right time, or there were visual cues the beasts could pick up on.

Doing it the other way was quick and dirty, but then he needed to go in and fix everything afterward to make it perfect.

He stopped at the opening of the corridor that led to the core and looked at the traps around him. There were gaps everywhere. It was pure luck that no monster with decent perception had come this way.

Nate had originally planned on heading over to the entrance and working on the traps there. Now he thought it might be smarter to fix one or two of these traps first before doing that. The core needed to be protected above all else, and that wasn’t going to happen in its current state.

He began by taking the spear trap and extending it to every corner of its space. There was no longer a way for something to simply step around it if they knew it was there. Then he extended the spike walls the exact same way. Nothing would be running along them to escape.

They were basic traps, but effective. He wasn’t worried about being overly clever or visually spectacular with these. This was a dungeon for beasts, not one of the more intelligent monsters that were out there.

The last thing he was going to do was find a way to hide all the openings that the spears would shoot out of. He needed them disguised until he remembered that this wasn’t a normal corridor. He didn’t want them coming down this way. Showing the traps could be a deterrent all its own.

Satisfied for the moment, Nate sent the order through for their changes and watched as his resources dropped. It took several times more to make these changes than it had to create the stupid things. Cursing out the system in his head, he watched as they slowly began to change according to his orders.

He had forgotten that any changes he made while a monster was in the dungeon took longer. Which meant that everything he wanted to fix from here on out was going to take forever unless he got extremely lucky.

Nate glanced at the screens, looking for the beasts that had been there earlier. They were both gone, having died while he was busy redoing his traps. And yet the speed remained slow. It seemed that the speed, while he was in his avatar, wasn’t dependent on the existence of anything in the dungeon. It was just plain slow.

That was going to be a pain for sure.

Regardless, he took one last look to make sure everything was going in the direction he wanted and then took off at a jog. There was no better time to reach the entrance than right now when there were no monsters in the way.

He kept one eye on the screens as he ran, passing through one room and corridor after another. The place was much bigger than he had initially given it credit for. He had used all those valuable resources to make it big and impressive, instead of perfecting the traps like he was probably supposed to.

Once again, the lack of a manual had bitten him in the behind.

All those precious resources had been wasted. He didn’t know if they were a first dungeon bonus, or if that truly was how he was supposed to approach the creation of these things. There were so many unknowns. All he could do is what he thought was best, and hope it wasn’t a mistake at the time.

His breathing was heavy and labored by the time he reached the exit or entrance of the dungeon, depending on the way you were going. The screens also revealed the presence of a new beast inside the portal room.

The traps at the entrance of the dungeon presented a unique problem to him. They had to be hidden from both humans and monsters. Hiding the holes they sprang out of was easy going in one direction, doing it in both directions was another matter entirely.

Nate stopped right at the entrance before trying to walk through the opening. He couldn’t. There was a barrier that prevented him from leaving the dungeon. His avatar was restricted to only being inside it and not leaving.

It didn’t matter that he had been able to make the signs on the outside. That was not part of the dungeon proper, so he wasn’t allowed out there.

Shaking his head, he focused on the traps around him. It had been a long shot and something that he hadn’t really even considered until that moment anyway. Not being able to leave in this form didn’t really affect him in any way, but it could have been fun.

The last trap before a monster left was the exact same as the last one he had worked on in the corridor before the core room. It had a spear trap floor and spike walls. With that in mind, he made the same modifications and extended them to their limits. Next, he increased their sensitivity so they would react quicker.

The only thing that wasn’t covered at the moment was the ceiling.

Nate sent the order through to begin the changes to the current traps while he thought over what to add there. A quick glance at his resource counters showed that he was running low on everything.

There wasn’t enough wood left to make a decent arrow-firing trap, even if the dungeon absorbed them afterward. The same was true for iron and copper as well. Even the other trace elements weren’t exactly bountiful.

Honestly, the only resource he seemed to have enough of at the moment was energy. He was loath to even think of using that though, since every single thing he did, used it.

He could make an energy trap, maybe even something futuristic instead of fantasy, like what he had been going with. The only problem with that was again how much energy it would constantly consume.

It would need to be an item he wrote down as a possible trap for the future. Not right now though. He was in penny-pinching mode still.

He glanced up at the ceiling and sighed. It would have to remain blank for now. That was the sad truth of the matter. There was nothing he could do until there were more resources available.

Speaking of which, he wondered how far the beast had gotten. It had been some kind of shadowy-thing that he hadn’t been able to see properly before. Surely something like that was fairly strong.

It took him a moment to find the monster on the screens and then abandoned them entirely as he looked up with a gulp. It was standing in the entrance of the room, with all the traps currently deactivated as they were improved.

Nate cursed and felt his knees go weak. This was not how he had been envisioning this day ending.

Wisps of shadow curled around the being as it stepped into the room with him. A low rumbling growl burst from its hidden mouth and Nate scrambled backward in fear. He had never been in a fight before, and certainly never this close to a monster before.

What had happened last time with the beast and the trap had been a fluke. He wasn’t trained or a hero. He was a sick person, simply clinging to life and enjoying the second chance he had been given.