by Robin Rhodes
Charm: A mana-intensive spell which increases your coercion stat by 100% for a period of thirty minutes.
There was no point in branding a slave only to have them disobey you, and having only one chance to brand someone meant he needed to make sure he was successful. The charm was a necessity, he decided. He'd charm someone, brand them, and then use them to gain more XP to keep progressing along the talent trees.
It was a solid plan.
Your dungeon specification is complete. Please pick a profession.
The professions were generic. Alchemist, Enchanter, Beast Tamer, Sorcerer. The only one which caught his attention was Bard.
Bard: Specialize in the ability to produce music. Your songs are imbued with the mana in your dungeon and have special effects on the adventurers who hear them. Unlock special creatures, such as the siren.
The extra effects were good—it would go well with his boosted coercion stats, and the special creatures sounded interesting, but the initial draw was to the fact he'd be able to have music within the walls of his dungeon. He didn't know how primitive the world he was now living in was. He might not be able to just buy a radio. Keeping some background noise while he watched the people suffer through the challenges he was going to give them, he could get behind that.
Experience and Credits are gained through adventurers and creatures dying within the walls of your dungeon. You will have a number of ways to kill. You have picked Dweller: your Avatar can equip weapons and do damage to enemies. Player v Environment damage is available in your dungeon. Minions will spawn in your dungeon, and do damage to invaders. Please pick two minion classes from the list below.
Orcs
Imps
Slimes
Plants
Pixies
Lizards
Aaron honed in on lizards the second the word appeared. He'd had a bearded dragon growing up, and when the little bastard had died he'd insisted on holding a funeral for it. He was thirteen at the time, but he'd been renting pet-free apartments since he left home at eighteen. His lease was up soon and he'd been looking for somewhere he could keep a pet when he moved. If he was stuck as a conscious rock for the rest of his life, at least there was no landlord telling him he couldn't keep a pet.
Strategically it was stupid, of course. The bigger lizards would pack some firepower, but he doubted he'd have access to them at level one. He had no regrets, though.
A pet, and a slave.
Maybe this whole not having a body thing wasn't so terrible.
It meant he needed some brute force with his second choice, though. Pixies and imps were out, and he wasn't sure what he'd been getting if he picked the plants, so he ruled them out, too. Between slimes and orcs, he picked orcs. If he was going to venture out in the trial rooms of the dungeon at some point he didn't want to get covered in slobber every time.
Or maybe he'd just be able to magic it away again. Would that cost mana? He had no idea how any of this was going to work, and for a minute his heart thrummed with anxiety. Did he even have a fucking heart?
Congratulations!
The voice startled him out of his racing thoughts, and some cheesy ribbons and party horns appeared. They weren't animated or anything. He was pretty sure it had been taken straight from old-school clip-art.
Your dungeon selection process is now complete. You will be teleported to a new location to begin creating your dungeon. An instruction manual is included.
Good luck, AaronDonoghue#4381. Welcome to the Braxian Expansion!
Chapter Three
Weeks passed, and Aaron was impatient.
He built his dungeon and itched to reveal it to the outside world. He didn't sleep anymore. He didn't need food or water. He didn't need to take dumps. Life was just creating his dungeon from the block of dirt he'd been teleported to and while it was fun at first, he was desperate to see how real people would fare against his traps.
He needed to see real people again. The stupid orcs he'd chosen as his minions could barely walk in a straight line, never mind speak to him. They were good for clubbing things to death and that was about it. His pet lizard, Gonzo, was amusing to watch stalk around the huge cage Aaron had spent his first credits on, but there was only so much entertainment the bearded dragon could give him. Using his bard abilities he played music throughout the dungeon, but it wasn't enough to get rid of the oppressive feeling of loneliness.
Days and days of building and erasing rooms and traps and terrain wore him down, and so eventually he said fuck it, and decided it was time to see how people would handle his dungeon, even in the simple state it was in. He created a tunnel to the surface of wherever he was.
Warning! When your dungeon has been exposed to the outside world, it cannot be made private again. Are you sure you're ready to make your dungeon accessible?
Yes, yes, of course he was ready. He was fucking bored. He wanted to see some people, to see what had happened to everyone else. There was some basic information on what had happened to the world in the instruction manual. The Braxians, an alien race, had taken over the planet and assigned new functions to people. They were living in an MMORPG, for the entertainment of these aliens. Only, instead of being controlled by the aliens, it was some weird Truman Show type thing. They'd watch and judge, but it didn't look like they'd interact in any way.
Aaron hated the idea of being watched. He'd cringed in embarrassment every time he'd made a stupid design choice and rapidly deleted it. But what were the chances anyone was watching him create his dungeon? That wasn't the interesting part.
Information on the rest of the world, and what was happening out there, was limited. People had been assigned roles, knight, healer, ranger; all standard stuff. He'd read the descriptions in the guidebook and had taken a brief look at the early stages of the talent trees and spells, but he'd never liked reading the rules. He liked to learn by playing.
Only now if someone struck his dungeon core with enough force, he was dead. Properly dead.
That was written in caps lock, bold and underlined, multiple times in the manual. He had a beating heart just like the rest of the world, only his was beneath a glass dome at the back of his dungeon. He could still be beaten.
So, when the congratulations message telling him he was now open for business came up, he looked at the floorplan of his dungeon and immediately saw all the ways someone could kill him.
The dungeon layout was simple. He was only level one, and he couldn't afford to do much with his space yet. The first room adventurers would come to was nothing special. Two orcs, armed with short swords, stood in wait in a darkened room. If there were any real noobs who stumbled across his dungeon they might be taken by surprise, and it would deal with any unintelligent life that came wandering in.
The next room was like a small desert. The room was just long enough that people wouldn't be able to see to the other side when they entered—they would have to choose which direction to go in, and even though the door to the next room was directly opposite, no one would guess it. They'd all pick somewhere else to go and end up lost in the barren wilderness. He'd laced the entire place with traps and creatures. An artificial sun beat real heat down on them, the sky was coded to look real.
Level one lizards weren't as pathetic as he'd expected. They weren't big and brawny, but they had special abilities that would be very useful. He had access to three kinds right now. One type was poisonous, and he expended a lot of Credits placing lizards with poisonous bites throughout the desert. The poison wasn't powerful, so he suspected it was slow-working, the kind which would haunt someone even if they got out of his dungeon alive. He wouldn't be able to see them suffer, but in some ways, it was better. He would be operating outside his dungeon, pushing the boundaries of this place he'd been confined to. Even if he didn't get to see them eventually keel over and die, he'd know it was happening, and that was good enough.
The other two types were more interesting: they paralyzed o
r made people hallucinate.
He'd spent way too many Credits on the lizards, but watching them dig their holes in the sand to watch and wait for intruders was entertaining.
Much more entertaining than the orcs, who sat drooling on the ground while they waited for something to do. Maybe they weren't going to be much cleaner than slimes after all.
The desert had other traps besides the lizards. Cacti filled with water that would give hallucinations to the drinker, a few sinkholes which would suffocate anyone who was swept into them, and the possibility for random sandstorms to occur.
There was one piece of loot, too, in an oasis near the center of the desert. The water there was free of bad effects, and the temperature a little lower. The loot was just a piece of chest armor, but with the Braxian Expansion only just live, he hoped it would be enough to entice people.
He'd spent a lot of Credits in the desert area, and he couldn't wait to see it in action.
It was days before anyone did stumble across him. He was stuck watching birds flying down the steps into his first room and easily be taken out by the uncoordinated orcs. A pet cat, complete with a collar, was the biggest prey he'd absorbed so far, and he wasn't even a quarter of the way into his first XP bar.
He needed some people.
Thankfully, the wait wasn't too long.
Chapter Four
Aiden stood with his legs shoulder-width apart and then dropped into a squat. He raised his arms in a circle above his head and breathed deeply.
Elizabeth, beside him, snorted.
"Look, it's easier to use my magic this way," Aiden defended himself. "I can't help it if these stupid aliens made it this way." The magic was flowing through him as he spoke, pounding through his veins and making him light-headed for a second. He still wasn't used to being a mage.
He'd had no idea what any of it meant when he'd been picking his class and traits. He'd been too busy panicking about not having a fucking body to read the descriptions or think too hard about it. He'd rushed through it all hoping he could get to the end and get his body back.
His body had come back, but it had come back with a staff in its hand and the feeling that someone had drugged him while he'd been having his out-of-body experience. That and his suit had been replaced by long, flowing scarlet robes. He still hated the robes.
Elizabeth continued to laugh behind her hand, and he glared at his girlfriend.
As a healer, there had been nothing for her to do yet. Nothing had changed for her.
"There's a lot of magic here," Brandon confirmed. "Even I can feel it." Brandon had chosen guardian, and his connection to the magic that the Earth was now imbued with was minimal.
"This has got to be it, then," Lizzie said. "You said you'd felt the dungeon opening up. This must be it."
Aiden nodded. "Yeah. I reckon."
He'd read about dungeons in the instruction manual and wanted to tackle one right away. This was how to progress at life, and progressing had always been his goal. Since his position as inspector had been made redundant by the alien takeover, he was going to have to start climbing the ranks again from the bottom.
Dungeons were the best way to do it, even if they were the riskiest.
Aiden didn't care about risks, he cared about winning.
"This way," he said.
Lizzie laced her fingers through his and they walked side by side. "I can't believe I've never been out here before," she said, looking around at the open fields they walked through. Wildflowers sprouted among the grass, and cows grazed. They were only a forty-five-minute drive from Jersey City, where they lived.
The game didn't mean life had completely stopped. People still needed food and water, they still wanted the conveniences of the internet and cell phones.
People still had to work.
But the police force was struggling. Leveling up had been slow without the dungeons open, and it meant catching criminals who were the same level was almost impossible. He couldn't assert his authority over anyone anymore.
Except Elizabeth, but that was practically cheating.
He squeezed her hand now and she looked up at him through dark lashes. Her black curls cascaded down her back, stopping at the dip in her waist. Her freckles seemed to glow since the expansion had launched.
"Don't you think?" she prompted, smiling with plump pink lips. "It's pretty."
"Sure."
He didn't care if it looked pretty. He cared that there were XP and Credits ready to be harvested below him. This must have been one of the first dungeons to open to the public, the forums hadn't reported many yet. All the ones they had been in had been simple to overcome, and people had been bragging about the loot they'd obtained.
Either the dungeons didn't have enough Credits to create a real challenge yet, or they'd opened too early and not spent enough time building. Either way, Aiden was confident.
He was ready to level up. He was stuck only halfway through level one and was eager to start building his talents. If he was ever going to get a promotion in this new world, it was going to be by out-leveling his boss.
The entrance to the dungeon was a hole in the ground, and Aiden laughed. "Wow. This guy's really trying his hardest, huh?" he said, peering into it. A staircase led downwards, but it was too dark to see further.
"What do you think is in there?" Brandon asked. "Some of the reports said things about slimes, and plants that moved." He lifted his heavy sword and Aiden wasn't convinced he could actually swing the thing. "It'll be dangerous."
"Don't be a pussy, Brandon. We're three people. I read posts about people taking them by themselves. And we have a healer. This will be a piece of cake."
"We are the ultimate party," Lizzie agreed. "I read a guidebook that said tank, DPS and healer were as good as it gets."
"See. Piece of cake," Aiden repeated. "Now come on, tank man. In you go."
Brandon was Lizzie's friend rather than Aiden's, and Aiden had never liked him much. He always looked at Lizzie a little bit too warmly, always sucked up to her a little bit too hard. He was trying to get in her pants, Aiden was sure. But it was the ultimate dungeon crawling party, so Aiden had agreed to bring him along.
If nothing else, he could make Brandon go first and take the most risks.
The party descended into the darkness, only able to see a few steps ahead of them. Aiden couldn't conjure a big enough light, even though he kept whispering the incantation again and again with increasing frustration.
"You're going to wear out your mana," Brandon said, looking over his shoulder and almost missing the next step.
Aiden hated the stupid mana requirement, it was always getting in the way of him practicing. He wanted to sit at night for hours practicing the spells he had access to, but a woman's voice was constantly screaming You're out of mana, you cannot cast that spell right now and it drove him wild.
At the bottom of the stairs was a door, and they all paused outside it, forming a huddle. "You all know what to do," Aiden said. They'd talked about this a thousand times. Aiden had made them practice on the local wildlife, and they'd gone as far as to kill some raccoons in order to test their spell rotations, but there wasn't much in the way of targets to practice on in the middle of Jersey City. The XP they were rewarded with petered out quickly, too.
Elizabeth clasped her wand in her hands like she wasn't convinced it would work. None of them had been willing to hurt themselves to see if her healing powers would be effective. She'd healed some of the animals, but that was nothing compared to a human.
Brandon squared his shoulders and lifted his two-handed sword in front of his body, ready to strike whatever was on the other side of the door.
Before they went in, Elizabeth stood on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to Aiden’s cheek. "Be careful," she said.
"I don't need to be careful, you can just heal me," he replied, stretching his arms. The staff in them felt highly underwhelming. He wanted a sword or a knife, something
that he could do damage with, but this was the only weapon he'd gotten, so he was stuck at the back with his girlfriend shooting fireballs instead.
He and Brandon nodded to each other, then Brandon pushed open the big metal door and they entered the dungeon.
Chapter Five
Elizabeth's heart pounded as they entered the first room of the dungeon.
She could feel the magic like the others talked about, but it was more than that for her. This was the first time she'd be using her powers properly. People were relying on her, and she wasn't sure she could provide what they needed.
The room was dank and dark inside, but the minute she stepped over the threshold, the door slammed behind her. She felt the air beside her head move as something came thundering toward it.
She jumped and tried to move away, but she wasn't fast enough and the blunt object hit her in the arm, throwing her to the floor and breaking the skin.
"We need some light," she said, scrambling away and hoping she moved faster than whatever had just hit her.
Aiden lit up the room, and she could see him grumbling under his breath about being a glorified torch. Brandon dealt with the orcs, decapitating one with a surprisingly easy swing. He'd never been an athletic guy, but he made the attack effortlessly. Elizabeth had tried and failed to lift the sword before; it wasn't light.
She shut her eyes with her hand over her throbbing arm, murmuring the incantation of her level one healing spell. Cold relief spread through her arm, and the pain disappeared.
It had only been something small, but at least her healing spell had worked.
Brandon took out the other orc, while Elizabeth made her way over to Aiden. She held his hand and ran her finger over his knuckles in an attempt to make his scowl fade, but it only seemed to increase.