by Robin Rhodes
DAMAGED DUNGEON
Robin Rhodes
Copyright © 2018 Robin Rhodes
All Rights Reserved.
This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reported or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher.
Chapter One
While he waited for his avatar to respawn, Aaron finally looked at his XP and saw that the interaction with Mark and his party and the enslavement of Delilah had pushed him just into Level 3.
Something else good had come out of his mortification then, at least.
Leveling up was exactly what he needed to rework his dungeon into something more threatening.
Congratulations! You are now Level 3. Your level-up bonus includes:
200 Credits
Two new talents
Your avatar has gained +2 to all stats.
Mana Regen increased to 6 per minute.
Mana Pool increased to 275.
Earn 200 XP to reach the next level.
Please pick your new talents.
Two new talents. Perfect.
That meant he could pick another brand. He'd chosen it before even looking at the others. As if he would have ever picked anything else when he could have another Delilah and Elizabeth.
He couldn't imagine how mad he'd have been if Delilah had come striding into his dungeon and he'd not had the brand for her. She might have escaped and he would have never had her under his control. The brand was the most important thing in his entire arsenal.
His other talent was more difficult, though. He had plenty to choose from.
He'd thought that being able to respawn his slave should anything happen to them would be a top priority, but they'd not come into any danger since he'd had them under his control. He wasn't intending to bring them out into his dungeon and make them interact with it, or with the adventurers. He was keeping them locked away where he could control them, out of harm's way. His and only his.
Soon he would set them to work creating some of the group loot his class gave him access to.
If he was going to revamp his dungeon so it was more deadly then he needed to offer bigger incentives for people to come down and face it, too.
It meant the ability to respawn his slaves wasn't such an appealing option, though.
A boost to his base coercion stat was tempting. If he followed that path it would get to the point where he didn't need to use Charm on his slaves at all, they would always be under his will.
Doubts about whether Elizabeth was doing what he wanted because she wanted to or because of his coercion stat resurfaced, though, and he decided not to feed those doubts by increasing his coercion stat further.
Instead of picking an Overseer talent, he went for a Bard one instead.
The music aspect of the Bard talent was something he'd picked for his own piece of mind, but the creatures were the thing he was really interested. Now he had access to the siren, and so he used his talent point on accessing it.
The siren was a beautiful woman who could charm adventurers with her song. At the first rank that charm had the classic effect of luring adventurers to their deaths by seducing them, but the more talent points he put into it, the more effects he could choose the siren to have.
And he would have something beautiful to look at, which was never something he turned down.
Pleased with his selection, he turned his attention to his dungeon as a whole. He had more credits, access to more materials, and the ability to do whatever he wanted to his space.
He was ready for a drastic change.
Chapter Two
Jake Leyland had been given the order to watch the entrance to the dungeon where his boss, Inspector Aiden Donovan, had lost his friend and girlfriend.
It wasn't official police business to be preventing people from entering the dungeon, but no one really knew what official business was anymore. Things had all changed so rapidly that there had been incredibly limited official guidance from the head of the force, and that was it. Government had essentially collapsed. How could the President give out orders when he was Level 1 just like everyone else?
Things had remained surprisingly civil so far. The world hadn't descended straight into anarchy like he'd expected. People still needed money. Credits weren't the be-all and end-all.
At least, they weren't while everyone was still Level 1 and still had jobs to hold down to get food.
There was food available in the store. It had become easier to grow your own crops and food with the mechanics of the game.
The more people leveled up, the closer the world got to falling into a free-for-all, Jake was sure of it. Chaos was coming.
So guarding people from entering the dungeon served a dual-purpose. Preventing people from going in there to level up—since it was one of the only dungeons currently open to the public—would help stifle level progression a little bit longer.
And it would allow Aiden to get revenge on the person who had become this dungeon and used his power to harm innocent people. It would help Aiden get his girlfriend back.
As he was driving to the dungeon, the entrance marked on his GPS, he saw an SUV. It was parked nearby, and empty.
His heart sank. They must be in the dungeon. There was no other reason for an empty car to be parked in the middle of nowhere like this.
He pulled up behind it and peered into the windows. He couldn't see any indication of how many people had gone in. If Aiden, the boss he'd never seen fail at anything, had been bested in there, Jake didn't hold out hope that people would be coming back to the SUV.
So he was pleasantly surprised when a party of three people came traipsing back toward it when he was peering into the back windows. There were two guys and one girl. A tank, a healer and a mage, he could tell from their clothes.
He was wearing his police uniform, so he had some authority, but he was acutely aware of the fact he was just Level 2 and there were three of them.
They looked exhausted, though.
"Did you go in the dungeon?" Jake asked. Maybe they had walked over to the entrance and decided otherwise. They were coming from the opposite direction.
"Yeah," the taller of the two guys responded. The tank. "We've just come out. I hope you're not thinking of taking it alone."
"Definitely not," Aiden replied. "I'm here to warn people from entering."
All three frowned. "Why?"
"You had an easy time of it in there?" Jake answered with a question of his own.
The woman's face fell, and she looked away.
The tank answered again. "We lost one of our party down there. She’s not dead, just trapped. We don't know how to get her out. We killed the guy in the dungeon, but she couldn't leave."
"That's why I'm here to stop people entering," Jake said. "This dungeon acts maliciously. Beyond his mandate to provide challenges for adventurers to gain XP. He kidnaps and tortures and kills in cold blood. We want to warn people of that."
"Well, he's dead now, it doesn't matter anymore," the woman said.
"You killed the dungeon core?" Jake asked.
"We killed him," the woman said, impatient. "He's dead."
"You will have just killed his avatar. He can respawn that. You have to kill his dungeon core to make the dungeon disappear."
All three faces fell. "What?" the woman whispered. "So he's still alive down there? He's still alive and down there with Delilah?"
<
br /> "I'm sorry," Jake said. "If you'd come back to the station with me, I can tell you more. One of our own has lost his girlfriend down there, too. We're mounting an attack to get her back. We could rescue your friend, too. And you can help us with information on the dungeon."
They looked at each other, but didn't need to discuss it. The tank answered for them. "Sure. Whatever we can do to help."
Jake dithered, knowing it had been his orders to guard the entrance to the dungeon, but believing that getting these people back to Aiden was the best idea.
"Let's go," he said. "You can follow me back." He gave them the name of the precinct and the address anyway, just in case they got lost along the way.
He called the precinct as he was driving to let them know what he'd done.
It was Aiden himself who picked up the phone, and his tone told Jake that he'd definitely made the right decision.
Chapter Three
As Aaron was browsing the catalog to see if he was hit by any ideas for his remodeling, the cooldown on his avatar finally hit zero.
Aaron transferred his consciousness into his avatar the moment it became available. He wiggled his fingers and felt all the places he'd been injured by Mark and Delilah's blades. They were fully healed now, not even a twinge.
He was back to fighting form. He wouldn't have any physical scars to remind him of his torment.
When he took his revenge, it would wipe out any of the mental scars from being thrown onto the ground and knives being plunged into his body. The fact they had left him for dead, and had been glad that he was dead.
That wouldn't matter when he'd actually killed them.
And they couldn't just wait a few hours before their body came back to life, as good as new.
He was going to wipe them from the face of the Earth.
All except Delilah, of course. Delilah he had much more in store for.
He'd materialized in the room of his dungeon core, and when he shut his eyes, he could see Elizabeth and Delilah next door. They were both lying on the bed, talking to each other in hushed voices, as if he didn't have the ability to zoom in and hear exactly what they were saying.
He didn't care about eavesdropping right now, though.
It was time to meet Delilah in the flesh again.
He was annoyed that she'd figured out he wasn't dead before his avatar could respawn. He would have loved to appear beside her while she was celebrating his death and rub it in her face, to see her face fall when she realized who she was trapped down there with.
That disappointment was completely overshadowed by the reaction he'd get when he started punishing her for killing him, though.
He strode through the door and the conversation between the pair immediately ceased. Elizabeth cowered, seeming to shrink in on herself as she hunched her shoulders and pulled the comforter higher over her still bare breasts.
Delilah was on her feet immediately.
She stormed toward him with her hands balled in fists around the handles of her daggers. She was going to try and attack him.
She lunged, lithe as a leopard as she darted across the floor and aimed her blades straight at his neck. He was still wearing his rough-spun tunic, and his neck was completely bare.
The attacks glanced off his skin, the blade not even piercing him. He had the invisible armor of having branded her now. Her attacks were useless against him.
She still tried again and again, dancing around him and trying to get deadly hit after deadly hit to actually do some damage.
"You can't attack me," he said, grinning.
Elizabeth hadn't moved from the bed.
"Bastard," Delilah hissed in between lunges. "Bastard. What have you done to my daggers?"
"You're my slave now." Finally he reached out and snagged one of her wrists, wrapping fingers around it like a vice. "You can't attack me. I'm immune." He squeezed her wrist tighter until she was forced to drop the dagger.
The sound of it landing on the floor echoed around the room, and Elizabeth flinched.
Delilah didn't stop fighting with her other hand, and continued to aim ineffective shots toward his midriff, the only place she would get to with one arm trapped.
It was getting old very quickly, though. The grin on Aaron's face faded and he easily captured Delilah's other hand, forcing the dagger out of that one, too. Delilah was cursing and screaming, and he hated the assault on his ears.
"Shut up," he said. "You're not going to be screaming every time you see me, or I'll gag you permanently."
"I'm not going to do anything you say," Delilah replied, still struggling against his grip. Unlike with Elizabeth, there was no moment of indecision, no moment where Delilah looked like she was going to do what he said without questioning it. She must have a higher stat in something—a higher base of resistance that stopped her from bending to his will as easily.
Watching her fall apart was going to be fun, but right now all he wanted was to fuck her. He wanted her to break right now, to see her immediate submission to his cock, to his power.
She tried to kick him, kept shouting that he couldn't do anything to her, that she was free.
He started dragging her toward the stocks. It had worked maybe a little too well on Elizabeth to punish her—she seemed completely docile now—but the higher base resistance stat Delilah appeared to have made him think she wouldn't be so broken after just ten spanks with his sword.
Delilah struggled, her feet scrambling to get a hold on the carpeted floor beneath them. Aaron was stronger, though. Again it was trying to get her into the stocks that was the hard part. He didn't have enough hands to keep her wrists and neck in place, and he wasn't convinced that she would get them in place when the stocks came crashing down. He didn't want to deal with blood and gore right now. It wasn't sexy.
He'd just about gotten both her wrists in their place—there was no way she'd risk having her neck broken by the stocks when he brought them down—when someone grabbed him from behind.
He knew it had to be Elizabeth trying to tug him away from Delilah and stop him from getting her into the stocks, but he couldn't quite believe it. For a moment he considered how someone else might have materialized in his dungeon without him realizing it.
It was Elizabeth, though. She was tugging with all her might on the back of his tunic, saying, "Please don't do that to her. Don't do it. You don't need to. She'll do whatever you ask, just don't punish her."
Maybe Elizabeth wasn't yet as tamed as Aaron had thought.
And that made him grin.
It made him grin for a second, anyway, before the fact that between them they were too strong for him to completely control became evident. They could never escape his dungeon, and if he chose to harm them, they would fall easily on his blade, but in terms of ability to make their bodies do whatever he wanted, he couldn't overpower them.
He had no choice but to charm one of them. His mana was completely replenished, so he could charm one of them and make her do whatever he wanted for half an hour.
The question was which one he wanted to submit to his will. Delilah was the one he wanted to break today, but to break her would require her to resist him. Elizabeth had already endured punishment once, spanking her again wouldn't be as fun.
He used the charm on Elizabeth, and she immediately stopped fighting him.
Delilah stopped too, not understanding what had just happened. She stopped pulling at Aaron and turned her attention to Elizabeth. She was standing there with a blank expression, hands limp by her side, still naked.
"What are you doing?" Delilah asked.
Elizabeth didn't answer.
"What did you do to her?" Delilah turned the question on Aaron now.
Aaron ignored her. He'd rather show her what he'd done than give her an explanation of how the charm spell worked. "Elizabeth," he said, voice strong and looking into her docile gaze. "Help me put Delilah into the stocks."
Elizabeth went to try a
nd restrain Delilah immediately, and together they got her kicking and screaming into the big wooden stocks he had at the end of his bed. Her wrists and head captured by the device, Aaron had complete access to her.
When she was secure, Elizabeth stood watching, expression blank.
Aaron felt physically exhausted after spending so long wrestling with Delilah, but an idea struck him. "Elizabeth," he said, and magicked a belt out of thin air to hand to her. "Spank Delilah."
"Don't you dare!" Delilah was screaming. "Elizabeth, I know you don't want to. You can fight it. You don't have to do this. You don't have to do what he says."
That wasn't the way the world worked anymore, though. Aaron had cast a spell with a 100% success rate, and it was going to work.
Elizabeth immediately stepped forward and took the belt from his hands, and began spanking Delilah with it.
Delilah shrieked with every blow. Elizabeth was holding back, that much was obvious. She might be bound to follow Aaron's instructions, but that didn't mean she didn't follow them in the way her nature felt most comfortable with.
"Take her pants off," Aaron said, his cock already hardening in his pants. "And spank her harder. Spank her ten more times."
Delilah struggled to stop Elizabeth from getting her barely-there pants down, but Elizabeth was determined and Delilah was trapped. As soon as the pants were around her ankles, Elizabeth resumed her whipping with the belt.
With each cry that Delilah couldn't hold in, and every wobble of Delilah's ass at the hand of the belt, Aaron got harder. He stood stroking himself through his pants but determined not to climax until he'd actually gotten to fuck one or both of them.
When the ten spanks were done, Aaron walked around to Delilah's face. It was red, and mascara she'd been wearing ran down her face. "Suck me off," he said, looking her straight in the eye.
This time, there was hesitation.
Hesitation before she spat at him, hitting him in the chest.
"Ten more," Aaron said, without pausing. He was almost glad she hadn't just given into him. "And make them harder."