DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

Nate shut down the extraneous traps and went back to monitoring the group of elves. Since it didn’t count as modifying the traps, he didn’t have to worry about shutting down the entire dungeon.

Unfortunately, simply disabling the traps that weren’t even being used at the moment had no effect on the prodigious energy drain. The only solution for that was getting rid of the blighted elves in the two trap rooms.

He would simply have to put up with the energy loss until then.

Nate kept watching the elves as they freaked out about their companion. The first death had really made them panic. He saw everything with a sort of detached attitude that surprised even him. He had always known he could be a little cold and uncaring to people who weren’t part of his personal bubble.

Still, this one was a tad new for him. Just like with the beasts from the first dungeon, he didn’t see them as anything more than enemies. It didn’t matter that they were humanoid in appearance or that they could speak and had intelligence. Aura had already proven that both of those things could be true for the beasts as well.

Besides, the dungeons had taken out cultivators a few times, and he hadn’t cared about them either. Sometimes, people were no better than trash and didn’t deserve to be treated any better either.

Nate was a very firm proponent of the golden rule. Treat others as you wish to be treated. If you want to be treated like crap, then treat others that way. Personally, he only really cared for a select few people. However, that didn’t mean he treated others badly. He simply ignored them unless they did something against him or went against his bottom line.

Pushing those thoughts to the side for the moment, he switched cameras to the group Aura was monitoring.

They had made their way into a trapped room as well by that point and were contending with two different traps. The two combined had caused them to pause and halt entirely. The first was a gravity room. It was currently set to increase everything by three times. It could be an excellent training resource if you were a certain spiky-haired orange-Gi-wearing meathead. To everyone else, it was enough to send them crawling to the ground in desperation.

The enhanced gravity was only the first of the traps in the room. The second was the railgun. Once everyone was on the ground, and barely moving, the railgun could take its sweet time charging and aiming for each shot. The electro-magnetically charged shots fired small metal disks, and each shot shook the room.

Self-cauterized holes could be seen in each of the blighted elves, and he made a note to turn down the power on the railgun.

The trap was effective, but it was another energy-sucking room.

It had been somewhat easy to create certain items from his memories for the dungeon. However, the more outlandish they were, the more energy they needed to operate. The cost for the gravity room, for example, was exorbitant. As far as he knew, that had never been done outside of anime and television.

The railgun, on the other hand, while still expensive, had actually been something real. The Navy had several working models of the idea.

The point was that if he stuck with items that had actually existed, it would bring the energy cost down a small amount. However, having the Dungeon Core start researching all the tech items is what would really make the difference.

Aura’s group was quickly wiped out, and he went back to watching his original group.

He was just in time to see one of them dive in between the three lasers. The elf in question was close to making it through cleanly before he clipped the heel of his boot on the beam of light at the last second. A solid chunk of the boot’s heel was sliced off and fell to the ground.

Outside of that one slip-up, the man made it through without a problem. He did thoroughly inspect his foot to make sure that everything was still attached afterward. As soon as he was done with that, the remaining eight members of the group each took their turn, jumping through them as well.

In the end, the trap room that was sucking up his energy reserves like nobody’s business had only managed to eliminate one of the blighted elves. The other trap room, while also expensive energy-wise, had been far more effective, and had even performed quicker.

He made a note of it and kept watching the elves. The first few runs through the new dungeon were more for information gathering than anything else. They were all about learning what did and didn’t work.

In this case, he had learned that the lasers worked great to keep the elves inside the room. However, he would need to rethink everything else.

In the corridor past the room, the blighted elves were talking again. Their hands were waving about in the air, and it didn’t take a linguistic genius to understand what the looks on their faces were all about. They were frustrated and even a little scared.

They had gone through the portal, expecting to end up in the wilds of Earth, not wherever and in whatever this place was.

Things had changed, and they were trying to come up with a new plan for how to go through the area. The plan they eventually settled on was one that involved sacrificing the person at the front of the group each time. At least, it was more or less a sacrificial position.

That was the person who would be entering the next room first, and they would be doing it by themselves. If they could survive and show the rest of the group who were hanging back how to survive, then great. The more likely option, however, was that they would die after activating whatever trap was in that room. In which case, the rest of the group would at least know what traps were in the room and could come up with a plan.

Nate kept an eye on them for the next few rooms, watching as their numbers steadily dwindled. The plan they had come up with worked. Except there were more rooms inside the dungeon along their path than blighted elves in their group.

He kept making his notes, before switching his attention to the latest group of five that had made an appearance. They were acting differently from the other groups that he had seen up to that point.

Originally, they had chosen to take the same door as Aura’s first group. They had reached the room where that group had died. However, it was at that point that they had stopped. One of the blighted elves had held out their hand toward the room and began talking rapidly to the others.

As soon as they were finished, all five turned around and headed back to the portal room.

From there, they chose the third door, the one that hadn’t been chosen yet by any of the other groups.

The elf who had saved the group before was now in the lead and appeared to be acting as some sort of detector for them. A rather useless endeavor since they were still in the corridor that Nate treated as a safe space, not that they would know that.

Nate kept his eyes on that particular elf as the androgynous figure stopped everyone in front of the new room and tilted their head. He quickly pulled up the specs on the trap that was inside that room and winced.

That was a particularly nasty one if it worked the way he thought it would.

The entire room was a giant speaker and worked on the idea that everything had a specific frequency at which it would deconstruct. The trap would require a lot of power, as it moved through each frequency. The real problem is that it would have to hold the frequency for an undetermined amount of time once it was found. This particular trap was more of a pet project, something that was geared toward the long-term, rather than short-term results.

As long as the noise didn’t mess with their minds too much, it wouldn’t be too hard for the blighted elves to escape.

Still, Nate thought it was interesting that one of the elves seemed to have the ability to detect the dungeon’s trap in some form.

At least, that is what he thought the lead elf was doing. He supposed that it was possible they were doing something else, but it was the likeliest option, he thought.

And if that was indeed the case, then that meant this new world had access to some form of magic. Or at the very least, that their energy skills were far more developed than humanities, not that was hard. It was too early to tell which it could be, or even if he was on the right track. With only one of the blighted elves having shown that particular talent so far, it was hard to say.

All he could do was add it to his notes alongside everything else and keep watching them. Which is exactly what he did.

From another screen, he spotted Aura lounging, undoubtedly watching the same group.

“What do you think of them?” He sent to her.

“The elf in the lead is an interesting one. She seemed to be able to tell that a previous group had died in that room. Yet, when they reached the new room, she could also somewhat detect the trap there.” Unlike when he had been on his expedition, despite still being separated from her, he could still hear her just fine. Where back then her message had come across as a text message, now it was like they were on a phone call.

“Her?” He hadn’t realized the elf was female. “How much of a problem do you think this will cause for us?”

“It’s hard to say.” He could practically feel her shrug. “The first few groups we saw didn’t have anyone with this ability. It could be rare, or they might have simply been unlucky. I think it is still too soon to say either way, for sure.”

They kept talking and comparing notes as they watched the group enter the room and the speaker activate. It gradually worked its way through the different frequencies as they struggled to walk through the room. The level one Dungeon Core was still smart enough to note which ones were important and which ones weren’t.

Some of the frequencies disturbed the inner ear, others made you lose control of your bodily functions. Then there were ones where the fabric was being shaken apart.

Unfortunately, the room never got to work through all of them, so while the blighted elves had all lost a few pieces of clothing by the end, they were all still alive.

Nate would have to wait for the next group to go through before he could learn at what frequency steel and other metals shook apart at. Then there was the ultimate frequency. The one that held bodies together. However, he had noticed that the sound waves had been damaging to the dungeon itself in certain ranges. He had made sure that the Dungeon Core knew not to use those frequencies in the future.

As far as he was concerned, the room was a success. Especially when you looked at how each of the blighted elves looked after they came out of it. Without exception, they all looked as though they had been sick for several weeks. The front of their armor was stained from where they had vomited. Not to mention that each of them was walking funny as their pants had a distinct sag under their rears along with a slow creeping stain.

The room may not have killed any of them, but it had most certainly made an impact on them all.

The group didn’t even dare to sit down and simply leaned against the wall of the open corridor for several minutes.

Nate laughed and cringed at their misfortune before turning his attention to the latest group to have arrived.