Saga of the Soul Dungeon

Life isn’t worth shit. A flick of the blade and it’s over. Still, it’s worth more than anything else.

-Iotopa, Head Assassin of Piataba

==Zidaun==

“We… know how we got into this situation,” Fjorre said.

Currently, we sat in a meeting room, which was inside my embassy. Quite fortunate we had a meeting room at all, since my office would have only barely held us. Someone had foreseen the potential necessity of a meeting room.

Izradi, almost certainly Izradi.

I said a silent prayer of gratitude that I wasn’t doing this on my own.

Actually, odds are good my old Ancient was in this same position, long ago.

I made a silent resolution to always have both a capable aide, and also a successor that I could send off to serve any new ancients.

Plus that means there is less chance I will ever need to handle this entirely on my own.

Best to also be prepared to help new Ancients in the future. Just a plus if there is less risk I need to run things on my own.

My own thoughts aside, we had managed to enter and occupy a relatively small portion of the room. The meeting room was obviously prepared to handle much larger groups.

Hope I won’t need to use it at capacity anytime soon.

The adventurers seemed to be a fairly typical group, with three men and a woman. With less female adventurers overall, it was a fairly common mix.

No-one wanted to only have a single gender party and then die to some overly specific mental effect.

The kind of mental attacks that only targeted a single gender were usually easy to disrupt, at least at lower levels, but that was only if there was someone who could.

The leader, Fjorre, was currently standing. He was a stocky blond male that was obviously native to Froa. The others looked much the same, though hints of dusky features made one of the other males stand out at least a little, indicating mixed ancestry.

So far, all we knew were their names. Fjorre for the leader, Hlong for the other Froan look-alike who was gently massaging his right wrist, Sindar for the male with slightly darker eyes and skin, and Eineri for the female.

Normally, more distinguishing details would be present in their armor and weapons, but they weren’t wearing any.

I had been too distracted, initially, to think much of it, but here in the dungeon no one traveled without their weapons and armor handy. Not necessarily because they were expecting trouble, but because unattended items were likely to disappear.

Like that old joke, what is the difference between an adventurer and a thief…

Based on the continued development within the grotto, it was likely that inns and other services would eventually render that concern moot. However, with most people, at best, camping out in tents, some degree of thievery had been inevitable. When all those people were combat capable and armed…

Fortunately, it’s not my problem.

People had complained to some of the Adar, of course, but we weren’t the cause of the problem, and we had referred them back to the adventurer’s guild.

Whatever was currently going on with the dungeon, however, almost certainly was relevant and potentially my problem, so I was paying close attention.

Fjorre was healthy, as best I could tell, but his face looked harrowed, and that was matched by the other three. Whatever they had gone through seemed to have shaken them.

“We got impatient, greedy,” he said, with a wan smile. It didn’t reach his eyes, whatever imitation of pleasantry the smile signified fading to nothing long before it went that far. “There has been a lot of competition for time slots… as I’m sure you know.”

I nodded along with the others. After all, I had approved the current setup, as had the guild leader.

The dungeon could only accept eight groups at a time for any given section, but the number of adventurers was swelling every day. Adventurers first had to go through the dungeon’s testing before they were allowed into the actual dungeon, which was fortunately also duplicated multiple times so many more groups could be tested. Done efficiently, that testing could be completed rapidly.

There were still far more adventurers that wanted to go through the dungeon than there were slots available. Generally, one group would be waiting to join as soon as one left, based on the schedule. As soon as that happened the next group would be notified to come wait for their own turn.

Different areas were also being allowed exclusively for certain groups. After the first required run through, only very low level adventurers were being allowed to return to the Final Refuge area.

Most dungeons were much less regulated. Admittedly, in total surface area, most of them were much smaller as well. And in volume… I was pretty sure only some other Adar dungeons beat out this one, and none created such large open spaces.

Maybe some of the really odd dungeons could beat this one for that, as well.

A new dungeon, relatively speaking, was straight forward from beginning to end, and those might only allow one party at a time. Even those that were larger, however, usually lacked the teleportation inherent to this one. What, maybe another half dozen dungeons that use that? As such, in a standard dungeon, parties simply entered and did their best to clear out sections without running into other parties. This was helped by most dungeons being much denser, at least in terms of traps and monster population.

Most dungeons were entirely focused on doing just that, packing as many monsters, traps, and other dangers into place as possible. There was a small concession made to theming and a slight change in difficulty from beginning to end, but overall dungeons focused on packing as much danger in as they could.

“We arrived early, and we had been doing well, but slots were getting further and further apart. We had gone through the Meadow a few times, but always had to return so we didn’t face the boss.”

He gave a small laugh.

“We didn’t think we were ready, initially. However, we all finally leveled up, each of us at level fifteen.” He paused, standing straighter for a moment, a smile flashing over his face for a brief moment before he seemed to shrink back into himself again as he continued. “We heard the reports about the Mirage Dancer, and it was only level seventeen. We knew the recommendation was to have an equal leveled party…

“We knew…” he sighed. “We just thought the recommendation was overly cautious.”

He shook his head and Eineri stood to place her hand on his shoulder from behind. Fjorre gripped the hand with his own, his arm crossing over his chest, his knuckles white.

“The initial reports for a new dungeon, a floor, anything like that, are usually overly cautious. Plus, the difficulty scaling here has been much more gradual.”

I nodded at that, such reports usually did show an abundance of caution.

Of course, those reports were usually even more cautious than our recommendations.

We might need to address that. Let people know that our reports are actually less cautious than the guild would make them.

I made a note to myself to deal with that later, while Fjorre kept talking.

“We talked about it. The meadow is relatively short. A team can finish it really quickly, once they know what to expect. The storms can slow you down, of course, but if you go fast enough you might not even run into one.”

He inclined his head toward me.

“And then we found out more about the Wandering Woods. You can spend many days there. And once someone figured out how to get out-”

That was actually a fairly recent development. It turned out that if you went backwards through the entrance to any level in the Wandering Woods, five times in a row, that you would summon a teleportation room. However, if you left, you would need to do the entire floor over again from the beginning.

We had taken the time to do a little testing with it. My team and I could actually teleport directly to any of the sub-floors in the Wandering Woods now. It was only the first completion that required a single contiguous slog.

Otherwise, as seemed to be a part of the dungeon’s standard design, it was both highly accessible and repeatable.

The thought of needing to go through the entire floor again, every time I needed to go deeper, was enough to make me shudder.

Once was enough.

“-we decided,” he continued, “that it was a much better place to level up. If you don’t even try to solve the puzzles then the odds are good you will repeat the same floor over and over, and you can always leave if you get to a floor you can’t handle.

“We managed to convince ourselves that taking on the boss was a good idea.”

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment, then smiled bitterly.

“We were wrong…”

His voiced trailed off for a moment, and his eyes unfocused, before he shook his head.

“From the beginning, it was a hard fight. I’m the bulwark, so I was in front. My armor was a leather cuirass, banded and studded with sections of steel. I thought it would be fine, but it wasn’t holding up as well as I would have expected. Still, it should have been enough for the moment.

“The real problem was my shield. It just… wasn’t tough enough. It was practically scrapped as the fight went on, and it was already a nightmare… trying to figure out where the attacks were coming from. That was taxing me to the limit. My skills helped, but I went to block a blow… and its tail blew through my shield.

“It,” he coughed for a moment and cleared his throat, his hand reaching up to massage his throat. “It went through the shield, through the leather at my throat, and sliced open my neck. I… I don’t really know what happened with the fight after that.”

“Sit down,” Eineri said gently, speaking up after Fjorre trailed off, her voice filled with emotion, and her eyes tender.

“It took us apart,” she said, standing behind the now sitting Fjorre. “Fjorre dropped, and it immediately went to attack the rest of us. I was in the back, our ranged specialist, so I fell last.”

Sindar spoke up for the first time, his voice a huskily resonant rumble.

“It was all chaos. I tried to slow it down with ice, but it was too fast, too agile… My blade was coated with ice, but even with that it was a challenge to strike it. Even before Fjorre went down… After, it was impossible. It tail was like a whip, I didn’t even see the blow that struck me down.” He shook his head for a moment. “Just the stabbing pain and then everything fading.”

For the first time Hlong spoke up, his voice soft, his eyes were downcast, and he didn’t look up at us.

“Fjorre is the only one who is really trained to act as a bulwark. I tried to step up, to use my staff to deflect its attacks. I only managed a few frantic deflections before it…” he trailed off, his left hand turning white as it squeezed around his right wrist. “It cut off my hand. I…”

Hlong stopped and shook his head, obviously unable to speak further.

Eineri spoke again after clearing her throat.

“It struck me down after that. Its tail cut me across the ribs. I could feel it as they splintered.”

She shuddered, then continued.

“I don’t think the others saw… but they disappeared, vanishing even before I was hit.”

Fjorre didn’t bother to stand back up, though he started to talk again.

“I woke up on a soft mattress in a small room. Some of those white dungeon lights were stuck in the walls, keeping the whole thing lit. My clothes were clean, and repaired, and… so was I. There was no blood, no sign of any injury.

“I stood up and checked myself over. It was like it had never happened in the first place. Well, my weapons and armor were gone, but I still had all my money. The same for all of us.”

The others nodded their heads while Fjorre made a dismissive gesture.

“I went over to the door and the crystal token was there in a little slot, the one I’d gotten from the dungeon. I hadn’t even noticed it was gone, at that point, but the door disappeared when I took the token out of it.

“I met the others in a kind of antechamber. There was enough space along the walls for a lot more rooms than just ours, but the doors were invisible from outside each room. The room I was in was impossible to find after I left. After that, well, we all left.”

Fjorre pulled out a familiar crystal coin, the phoenix emblem flashing for a moment before he turned it to the other side. There, Caden’s symbol for two was plainly displayed.

“None of us had ever seen the symbols before we got here, but we learned the symbols for the first three numbers easily enough. It used to be a three. It was the same for all of us.”

I crooked my finger.

“Slide it toward me, please,” I said.

Fjorre hesitated for a moment, his fingers almost reflexively spasming around it, his knuckles white for an instant, before relaxing again.

I’d want to hold onto it too, if it just saved my life.

I looked at the others with Fjorre.

Or if it had saved my companions… Firi.

“Only to look at?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said, offering a reassuring smile, “it still belongs to you.” In a more matter of fact tone I continued. “They can’t be stolen, anyway.”

People had tried. The coin teleported back to its owner.

Fjorre moved the token closer, the crystal gleaming as it caught the light.

On identifying it, new details were present since the last time I tried.

Token of Life and Prosperity: 2

Dungeon Bound – Immune to Theft – Transferable

Times Respawned: 1

Cost of Next Respawn: 1