The Dungeon Traveler

by Alston Sleet

  Oh, the change that only a few months can make. Before, I never actively wanted the death of another human being. Now I have an almost visceral bloodlust for the murder of two people who have done no more than annoy me.

  My woolgathering was quickly ended when I watched Lady Stick bribe creepy mage. I had missed the conversation at first, but I remembered it once I thought to check on it. The memory thing still felt weird mostly because it didn’t actually feel weird in the slightest, and that was weird.

  The creepy mage was playing the weak-willed and frightened spell caster; his robe sleeves were flapping around his scrawny arms as he practically flinched back from her threatening demeanor. From my sight though, I could see how his arms were up and shielding his face to hide his smile rather than cringing from her recently drawn sword. He had blubbered and claimed that he needed a vast amount of mana to open the dimensional doorways, that he was unable just to open a way directly, that it would take an effort to make headway. She at first threatened him but when that failed she offered gold in exchange for assistance ‘ridding the world of an agent of darkness and disorder!’

  He hemmed and hawed, quivered and quaked, flinched and floundered, but eventually, he agreed to help her kill me. The creepy mage had just moved up to number one on my kill list with Lady Stick at spot number two. Denda was not on the kill list, but this happening right after her visit told me that this was no coincidence. She might move up to the number one slot if she didn’t have a good reason for her actions. That is if I survived this obvious setup.

  Moving to my vestibule, the creepy mage dude squinted as he stared at the closed dimensional doorway. I could feel his magic swirling around him and reaching out to the entrance to my labyrinth. Just when the pure mana under his control was about to touch where my dimensional control was most potent, it shifted from pure mana into space specific type. His mana wrapped around the points holding my door closed, and pinched through my control like snipping threads. The dimensional construct that had been squeezed shut all this time snapped open. The creepy mage made an act of sweating and practically crawling towards my new door, even though his use of magic had been more a scalpel than a chainsaw. If he could maintain that kind of control, he would be able to reach my core in an hour of work at most if he didn’t have to waste mana stopping my monsters or traps.

  When Lady Stick passed the acting mage, she slowed and began walking as she had when she first entered my dungeon; Carefully. One leg forward with knees slightly bent, she started to edge ahead. She would step and then bring her back leg forward, never letting her weight rest too far forward or back. The mage just walked behind her, gasping like a geriatric instead of the spry old man I knew him to be.

  Even as she slowly trudged along in her balanced, careful stance, she still triggered the first trap. I had designed the trap with my final strategy in mind. The floor had a pressure sensitive trigger which would release the tension on a steel string that had been drawn back within the wall. A small metal needle with poison was situated in a hole in the wall, backside resting against the line.

  This trap was purely mechanical in nature, with nothing magical to give it away. Some traps had magical triggers and physical structures, physical triggers with magical effects, and every other mix I could think of. I wanted to keep drawing attention to the floor and the walls, leaving the ceiling ignored. I wasn’t sure if I would need my final trap, but setting up the extra layer of misdirection for the end had been almost the only thing which had initially silenced my dungeon instincts.

  I had based the design of this first trap on a bow, with the tension of the steel wire matching that of a bowstring. Sadly, the sound was similar to that of a bow as well and combined with the pressure change of the floor trap and the odd hole in the wall, she was easily able to predict the trap and avoid it. I had counted on that, though. Hoped against it, but considered it a possibility. Next came the psychological games. After they passed the first trap, the teenage sword wielder leading, the ‘frightened’ mage following, they turned a corner, only to be presented with a hallway lined with holes precisely like the one the needle had sprung from. I couldn’t wait for them to try the floor since each and every stone tile sounded like a trap, even when they did nothing. Some of the tiles sprang traps from the wall beside the tile that was stepped on, some from holes behind them, some ahead. I had initially set it up to try and catch those dodging forward or back, but if it hit the mage, so much the better.

  After they had passed down the hallway beyond my dimensional door, I struggled with my mana until I was able to close the passage behind them. Having such high level and mana dense people so close by made my mana rapidly lose cohesion unless it was ‘locked’ into an effect with [Will of the World]. At least I wouldn’t have more people rushing into my labyrinth after these two.

  I settled into a watchful obsession of dungeon instincts screaming in my ear as I the pair slowly trudge forward through my hallway. I just hoped the two were killed by my traps or monsters. Barring that, I was hoping the looping construct on this hallway would be missed by the mage. If I could just kill the mage, Lady Stick would be stuck without a way forward.

  Letting her die of hunger was pathetic, but I would rather live pathetically than die from a sword-wielding teeny-bopper.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Ponytailed Assassin Bot

  Cheering, I watched to see if the trap lobbed spike of metal that, if impacted against the paladin’s head, would kill her. Sadly, the young woman hunkered down behind her glowing shield of magic before shaking her head, focusing, and channeling her heal spell. Even after almost thirty attempts, I still couldn’t figure out how her heal spell worked. It first took on a strange shape and was imbued with a weird tint of light, and then the mana faded, and some other structure of something pushed the mana away and healed her. It was like watching the waves in traffic move backward while the cars moved forward. Except, in this case, the thing moving was shifting the mana away. It was more like watching a wave of a hole in the surrounding mana instead of watching the mana itself. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to recreate it.

  I might be able to recreate the healing effect, but whatever she was channeling, it wasn’t mana. That was a serious concern because she didn’t seem to be running out of it, and she was starting to remind me of an unkillable robotic assassin. I’ve found more than one new way to slow their approach, but they are still approaching.

  My initial estimates of their speed were grossly wrong. I had thought that the dimensional mage’s mana was going to be the limiting factor. Not even close. It was definitely the paladin's mana which was the bottleneck. She used mana to form a white glowing shield over herself as well as the dimensional magician and used it to make her sword glow with incandescent light. That sword spell turned her blade, a regular chunk of metal in all other regards, into a blazing white bar of cutting power. If I had something only reinforced with the [Will of the World] such that it would reset itself, then that blade would slice through it like it was moving through water. It would show hardly any signs of slowing down as the edge parted stone in its passing. If instead, I forced a semblance of resistance and reinforcement, something I had done for all of my walls but stupidly not all of my traps, her blade would have to work to cut through it. It was like she was trying to work a knife through a difficult Thanksgiving turkey.

  I was worried about the paladin, but the mage was still my primary target. My initial estimate of her being trapped because of the dimensional doors was too optimistic. She would be able to cut her way through the doorway with her blazing sword. Considering the number of monsters I’ve been throwing at her and the martial prowess she has shown, the combination of carving through doors and fighting off waves of attackers probably would take her down.

  Her stamina was limited. She would need to sleep sometime.

  The mage, on the other hand, he was driving me nuts. He left the paladin to absorb all the physical damage and to figh
t off any monster I released. At first, I tried to build them up into an unkillable wave, but that backfired quickly. They were too close for me to shut the doors they had come through while he actively fought against me. The monsters were killed promptly by her blazing weapon, and so they advanced faster. At one point early on, he pretended only barely to dodge a swing at the last second. He avoided the swings of one of my ogres, the club leaving a dent even in my reinforced floor, while she quickly slaughtered the other two brutes. After that, she kept him close and used her own mana to protect him with the glowing white shield.

  This left me freaking out about him even further. The mage helped me by only using Lady Stick-in-Butt's shield to protect himself, draining even more of her mana, but he also helped her by opening doors. With the paladin, I knew what her goals were and what plan she had. Find core. Kill core. Simple. The mage, on the other hand, was a giant, deadly, and scary question mark.

  My initial introduction to this world, being contained and controlled by the prison construct of the old mage, kept running through my head. Was this his plan? Some of the memories from failed contestants also haunted me. Cores being ground down to make a stronger version of manastone, being cut and shaped to reinforce one magical aspect, and then being used as a focus in some magic weapon. The list of horrific things just the ignorant adventurers and noble’s vassals knew was enough to make me cringe, let alone the thought of what a powerful and experienced mage could do.

  Stopping to take a breather, the two huddled under the paladin's white shield. This was the part that was giving me grave concerns. If it were just a super long battle of attrition, then I would be fine. It was the semi-torpor meditative state the paladin would go into, hunkered under that shield, that was the real issue. I could feel the mana density under that shield increasing, that same ‘not-mana’ mana thing she used to heal was also being used to refresh her mana forcibly. I had more mana than any cadre of mages and regenerated it at a breathtaking speed. If it were a battle of my mana versus hers, I would win.

  I actually had an issue with too much mana. This was the reason I had to leave a way to reach my core in the first place. It was a trade-off. The stone of my little cubby hole was reinforced with [Will of the World] to keep mana from billowing out of my dungeon and letting its location leak to the world. This also meant I had trouble with the amount of mana blasting off of my core. I felt like I was sitting under a raging river, only this was a river of mana that flowed through me.

  On the other hand, this left me with a slightly larger than human-sized tunnel leading to my core. One solution I had was using a much larger shaft, one practically lined with ogres, but blocked by unreinforced steel plates with small holes in them. The holes let the mana through, the steel only slowed it slightly, and the ogres slowed the paladin even further. Sadly, it also meant that she only had to fight one cell at a time. My efforts of releasing multiple cells just resulted in a lot of dead ogres and faster progress. The traps by this point had become almost perfunctory. She would stab her sword into the ground and walls, swing them around, stirring up whatever was inside them, then move forward. A few had been triggered this way but rarely anything seriously dangerous to them.

  What I needed was a one-hit kill. Something so violent and deadly and quick that one of the two died instantly, preferably both. I had some hope of hitting her with such a thing, but a lot less confidence in killing him. Even while she worked to keep him alive with her glowing shield spell, he had a massive swarm of mana held tightly around him with only the slightest hint of space influencing it. Given his previous demonstrations of dodging and attacking, I bet he could warp space to evade or destroy anything that threatened him using that field of mana he held. She, on the other hand, was just leading with her body since the head shots hurt. Not precisely a nuanced strategy, but a practical one none the less. She just put up that glowing shield and plowed her way through. If I made it through this, I planned to quadruple the length of my labyrinth and maybe work on different kinds of magic. A few flame spells, maybe some lightning, some poison clouds, a few vacuum chambers, and high-pressure sound fields…those would make this far more difficult.

  Once they had slowed their progress to a crawl, I had thought that the lack of food and water was going to be my savior. Sure, they might be here for three days straight, slowly crawling forward, but it wouldn’t matter if they died from dehydration alone. But of course, the evil space mage came to the rescue. During one of their rest periods, he reached into the folds of his robe and pulled out a waterskin which was far more substantial than the pocket it came from. The same magical ‘rabbit from hat’ trick resulted in hard bread and dried meat. At one point, he even pulled a steaming bowl of stew from his pocket and ate it while lady paladin was meditating. She was less than amused with her getting the hard bread and meat, but he claimed he only had the one bowl of stew. I somehow did not believe him.

  Now I was thinking that the only thing which would stop them was the mental strain and the lack of sleep. That, or a change of minds about attacking me, perhaps with a lucky, high-speed piece of metal going through it. If I notice either of them trying to set up for a nap, I would have to throw a monster at them. I couldn’t let them get any rest. Even if it meant they gained a little bit of progression, I needed them stressed and tired.

  It took almost a full day of their slow slog before they reached the midway point. My looping stair trap was far less effective than I had expected it to be when I first built it. I had little hope of any of the dimensional tricks to stop or trap the mage, but the stairs actually showed some use. I think he had been so troubled by moving down the stairs carefully that he hadn’t noticed the first looping effect. On the second time around he managed to discover the trick and find the hidden doorway. A full hour was taken up with them scouring the different doors which hooked to the endless staircase before they found the one with the most mana. I made a mental note to add more up and down progression to my future changes. I had some; stairs, poles, and ropes to climb or slide down, and a few other things I thought of as group or rhythm breaking, but not nearly enough. The benefit of this type of terrain issue is the need to bring ropes and pitons, and the difficulties of defending a position while others advance or retreat. Yet more changes to make. In my defense, this was more of something a trained military man would know. I needed to scour one of the nobles libraries and start studying. Also, I needed a way of moving things at a distance. Combined with [Far Seeing], I could cause a lot of mayhem with that.

  My maze area should provide a better diversion than the first part of the ‘labyrinth.’ The first half was designed around being a single line from the entrance with severe danger and death. I wanted to kill whoever came this way as quickly as possible. For the second half, I had hoped that whoever was able to move through my dimensional doorway would be stuck, with the huge number of possible doors to travel through combined with the numerous dangers. This time I was lucky. I hadn’t thought about the large flow of mana escaping me as a way to detect my location. In retrospect it was obvious, just swim upstream to the source. Now though, with the multiple passageways and loops within my giant labyrinth, the best he could sense was the general direction. Many of my pathways had equally large streams of mana. A change for the future will be to suffuse my maze with a ton of dead ends, but with lots of tiny tunnels connecting them, that would let the mana evenly spread across the whole maze. Sadly, at this time that still meant they could find the right direction, but it also meant I could possibly attack from multiple directions instead of just the one way as I had before. It’s relatively easy to attack and defend from a single tunnel, but a whole other thing to protect an open vestibule with monsters charging from different directions.

  Meditate little paladin; things are going to get a lot more dangerous from here on out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Start and End of a Rebellion

  Reaching into his casual robes, Josedus pulled out his trusty fl
ask of stomach medication before taking a hefty swig. Whereas on the trail he used mana vials to store his medicine, in the city a flask was less noteworthy. He had never intended to be in the thick of things. If he had wanted such a life, he wouldn’t have focused on divination. He would have become a combat magician.

  The king marched in front, his pace faster than was comfortable for the older magician. Surrounding them were four squads of the king's soldiers. It was the fourth elite squad, which directed everyone away from the king, that concerned Josedus. The elite team was made up of a lightning [Mage], two [Warriors] who focused on heavy armor and weapons, and an [Archer] of considerable skill. While the regular soldiers were routinely used when monster swarms occurred, this squad was usually only called out for a large monster subjugation. The number of units following the king was not so excessive that it couldn't be ignored with political platitudes, but this squad said only one thing: the king was making a point of his power.

  In a slightly breathy voice from the swift march, Josedus tried again to intervene, “My king, your skill didn’t trigger, this could be…”

  …but the king quickly snapped at his diviner to be silent.

  Reaching the Gardflow estates, the king hardly slowed as the gate guards moved aside. Josedus noticed the guard at the mansion’s entrance slipping inside before the king could reach the doorway. The Gardflow capital home was a large, well-tended lot in the noble district with grounds that spread over three standard sized blocks. The medium-sized mansion itself was built close to the street, the rest of the land was taken up by barracks and training grounds for the Gardflow’s renowned elite vassals.