Chapter 34

Red Sands Desert, Contested Border Region.

Dungeon Factory, 1st Floor.

Alexandra winced as she saw the blade come down, and one of the adventurers just fly to the other side of the room. They might be copper ranked, but they clearly weren't of the same caliber as the assault guild. At least in term of caution. Did these idiots not get a warning that there were traps there?

At least they had good reflexes, as the poor elf fighter was instantly surrounded by his allies, holding off the remaining golems. Not that there was any real need to, as the last one fell before their healer even had the time to open their potion pouch.

Alexandra shook her head, and smiled at Emilia's questioning gaze.

"I'm not sure if I should be pleased, or angry honestly. I mean, the trap worked, and if it did with these guys, it's certainly going to net a few kills, perhaps on an iron, or steel ranked adventurer. But at the same time...I mean, even I can recognize that this trap is pretty bad. No, let's be real, it's very bad. The pressure plate is about as obvious as it can get, and the axe isn't exactly discreet either."

Emilia shrugged.

"In the heat of combat, people tend to forget a lot of things. Remembering this kind of things is what sets good adventurers apart from the rest. Your level and skill doesn't matter as much if you can't keep your head cool and focused in the middle of a battle."

"Yes, but still..." Alexandra sighed, and shook her head. "I guess I do apply a bit too much military standard to these adventurers. I'm too used to mandatory training being pegged onto ranks, but the guild doesn't care about that, does it? It's just a question of power and equipment, at least in the lower ranks."

"Well, to be fair, the guild does offer training, it's just not mandatory. Although it is pretty pricy." Emilia gestured at the screen. "It's their choice whether they want to learn from the guild, or sheer 'real' experience. Needless to say, a lot of adventurers don't get said experience fast enough, and they, well, die. That's part of the reason why dungeons with insurance policies are so popular with the lower ranks. It gives them a chance to gain experience, while risking a few years worth of essence, and all their equipment. For those that had their sentiment of invulnerability stripped away, that's very much worth it."

Alexandra tilted her head.

"Then why don't all dungeons offer the same thing? I mean, if it boosts popularity so much."

Emilia shrugged.

"There are a lot of reasons. One is obvious, to get the full essence value of dead adventurers, instead of taking just a tithe, and giving up the rest by resurrecting them. The others...less so. Some believe it detracts from the challenge, and the true spirits of dungeon delving. Others believe that the full essence is their just compensation for letting the adventurers do their delves. And some just don't want to bother making and maintaining the insurance policies." Emilia winced. "Not mentioning all the shenanigans that come with it. Some might see losing their equipment and a few years of progress instead of dying as a definite plus, but others...."

"Others always want more?"

The vampire girl nodded, and Alexandra chuckled. Sore losers were the same everywhere apparently. Although the stakes were a bit different than on Earth, she supposed.

"Hey, look, they're moving out again."

Alexandra shook herself out of her thoughts, and looked at the group of adventurers, who were, indeed, moving into the next room. It always amazed her how fast you could heal someone, like that elven fighter, with just potions and a bit of magic. She idly wondered if it was just overcharging the body's natural processes, or if something else was at work...

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Right.

She focused back on the screen, where the adventurers were now very cautiously moving through the hallway between the 10th and 11th room, probing for any drop axes or spike trap. They found the one spike trap easily enough, but the incident in the previous room seemed to have given them a somewhat brutal wake up call that the golems weren't the only 'real' threat in the dungeon, no matter how seemingly easy to dodge the traps might seem. The fact that they'd skipped the challenge room altogether proved that they were trying to minimize risks and maximize rewards at least, which helped explain their caution as well.

Finally however, they stepped into the 11th room, and took up a fairly standard combat formation for adventuring parties, and engaged the golems.

Alexandra picked up another slice, and started chewing it thoughtfully. She might need to edit some stuff on the first floor, it was all fine and dandy right now, but the main stretch was pretty flavorless. It had traps, and some novelty from time to time, but it was really a standard, room by room clearing dungeon floor. Not that there was anything inherently wrong with going with tried and true designs -gods knew missile and railgun armed light cruisers were always useful back on Earth, well, Earth space-, but it offended her professional pride a bit.

The adventurers on their end were fairing fairly well. Thanks to some help from their ranger throwing bits of golems he'd taken from the previous room, after having dug out the electronics from said golems, the pitfall traps had been quite handily revealed, and the fight had been over in fairly short order. Martial golems were all well and good, but this was the equivalent of throwing a lion, in the middle of a flat concrete floor, at a hunter with an assault rifle. Sure, the lion might kill him if he got close enough, but that was never going to happen. Same here, the golems could prove deadly if they got close enough to an unarmored target, but with a party of that rank, that was never going to happen either. A few came decently close though, forcing the adventurers to adjust tactics, which was a testament to their resilience, if nothing else.

This time the adventurers didn't wait to regenerate any injuries, and directly stepped into the safe room. They looked around for a bit -probably more by reflex than anything- before settling down, pulling out rations, and some just settling into a lotus position, and-

The screen flickered. And a quick look at her dungeon view confirmed her suspiscions, the interference area projected by the adventurers had indeed increased. By quite a bit, actually.

"They've started cultivating, haven't they?"

"Yep." Simply answered Emilia.

Alexandra frowned. She'd gathered that a lot of people cultivated in this world to gather mana, but she never did get a good feel for how important it was, or it's real implications. She hadn't needed to cultivate a single time either, thanks to her extradimensional status, which meant she didn't even knew what cultivating meant, really. In fact...

She quickly looked up her TO-DO list, and quickly found the item in question. It looked like she'd had the same thoughts before, apparently. Well, this was as appropriate a time as any.

"Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure." Said Emilia, looking at her like she'd grown a second head. "Answering your questions is part of my job descriptions."

"Fair enough. So, I was wondering, what is cultivation exactly?"

Emilia froze, then slapped her front.

"Right. The basics. You don't have the basics. Why do I keep forgetting that." She sighed. "Well....What do you know? Just to get an idea of what you've gathered so far about it."

"Well, I know that cultivation enables normal people to regenerate mana, or at least regenerate it faster, that most adventurers need to partake in it at least semi-regularly, that it depends on ambient mana density, and that for some reason it makes the adventurer's influence interference field even bigger when they're using it." Said Alexandra, listing each point with a finger.

"That's...not as a bad as I thought. Short explanation is, cultivation is...complicated. It is indeed a way to regenerate mana, and although there are other methods, like absorbing it directly from a mana stone -or another being-, it is by far the most popular. See it's like...a siphon. And you're siphoning the ambient mana around you. Cultivation is one of the main reasons why dungeons are so important. Not only do you give loot, and enable the area around you to be brimming with life again, but your ambient mana is off the charts, especially the closer someone gets to your influence. Once someone is actually inside your influence however, ambient mana concentration spikes even higher, and people start regenerating mana even without having to cultivate, which doesn't normally happen. The reasons for that are complicated, and I'd rather avoid getting off topic." She said quickly as Alexandra opened her mouth.

The Earth-born closed her mouth with a clap, and then nodded for Emilia to continue.

"Good. Now, the big thing about cultivation is that it enables much higher mana regeneration, and thus technically allows you to gain money, in a way. That's rarely a primary occupation, as usually there are far more profitable things you could do with your time -even high mana density areas tend to have better opportunities in terms of mana gained per hour spent-, but there are always people cultivating regardless. Usually it's considered a nice bonus, and on top of everything else, it's pretty restful if you know what you are doing."

Emilia stopped for a few seconds, obviously gathering her thoughts.

"Mana cultivation relies on cultivation techniques, and those are...odd. Some are just tips and tricks, but a lot of them are far more complicated than that. They're...I suppose a form of enchantments would be the right word, or mana constructs, kind of like CQ. That's the reason why their interference fields increases, because it's like they were slapping enchantments on themselves, and since interference fields combine, and get bigger rather than canceling out..."

She held her palm up, and Alexandra nodded.

"I see what you mean. It's like a bunch of temporary enchantments."

"In some ways, yes. There is an infinity of cultivation techniques, all with their advantages or disadvantages, but they all boil down to getting as much mana out of the environment, and cramming it safely into the user's core."

"I'm sorry, 'safely'?"

"Yeah. There are...dangers, involved in it. Just throwing mana at a core is seldom a good idea, or an efficient one, and if you just send too much energy at once, things can get...violent. The effect is nearly the same as a mana feedback from a spell, even if the cause is completely different. It's...not pleasant. Take my word for it."

Alexandra nodded, shifting a bit to face Emilia, but still keeping an eye on the screen.

"So, it's like trying to draw atmospheric deuterium to power a fusion reactor."

Emilia blinked.

"I have no idea what that means."

Alexandra winced. Explaining that concept to someone from a pre-nuclear society might be....interesting. She hesitated to say 'medieval', because given some of the stuff she'd seen -like the airships- she was very hesitant on calling this world truly 'medieval' in the first place.

"It's like a...power system, that provides electricity, but uses a variant of hydrogen, the gas, called deuterium, and...it doesn't burn it, but that's the closest analogy I think you'll understand, at an insanely hot temperature to generate energy. It was suggested back on Earth that you could make a device powered by deuterium just in the air, and it could run on a planet nearly indefinitely. No one really cared to try it out for anything serious -it's much easier to get deuterium through a process called electrolysis from heavy water-, but it was a proven concept, if you could get the device to fly high enough where there was enough hydrogen in the air to sustain it."

"I...see." Said Emilia as she wrote down notes in her notebook, and Alexandra blinked, not even having realized the vampire girl had pulled out said notebook.

"Well, in any case, I think I'm starting to grasp some of the implications. Not all of them, but it's a start. We'll have to discuss that further, especially the economics." She looked at the screen. "But for now, it looks like our friends have a somewhat overeager ranger."

Emilia turned towards the screen as well, and they watched as the group's ranger, a human, for once, decided to try his luck at the swinging blades hallway, while his group was resting. He was obviously emboldened by his previous success in the 11th room -which only underscored how different he was from the assault guild, they wouldn't have forgotten the disaster of the 10th room that fast-, and he stepped forward, judging the rythm of the blades. He very clearly already had the tune for it, as he had begun mouthing it even before he had the time to properly observe the blades themselves.

Then, after a few seconds of attuning to the rythm, he surged forward. He made it past half the blades...then missed a beat.

The missing beat, in fact.

His foot depressed the pressure plate in the middle of the hallway, and the screen was suddenly filled with fire.

Alexandra winced. She'd decided to use a lesser version of the flamethrower trap for this, to make the hallway more than just a joke, but it was still jarring to see someone get burnt by a flamethrower. At least it meant her dungeon transformation hadn't taken her empathy from her, although she had a sneaking suspicion it wasn't necessarily helping on that front either. Not that it was manipulating her, more that her new capabilities and lack of normal human concerns gave her a more and more...detached feeling from her former brethren. Kind of like she'd heard digitalized people started feeling towards biological humans, she'd been told.

The rest of the party was up in an instant, rushing to rescue their comrade, but they were a bit too late. The burning, screaming ranger simply walked into the blades, desperately trying to escape his fiery torment.

The first blade was glancing blow, which he recovered from.

The second hit him square in the shoulder, causing him to be thrown against the wall.

The third split his head in two.

His party made it to his corpse regardless of his current status, with the fighter literally shield bashing blades back into their recess, usually causing them to stop outright, as their failsafes detected that the blade really wasn't where they were supposed to be, and stopped their motion. In a few seconds, they were by the side of their comrades, and they quickly extinguished his body. Luckily for them, the flamethrower trap had to be rearmed between each shot, otherwise they would have probably had some serious problems, given their rush.

They talked for a few seconds, having stopped the blades by the simple expedient of physically stopping them, then having the fighter press the button at the end of the hallway for good measure, then simply dragged the body of their comrade to the other side of the hallway, leaving him there, and walking into the next room, obviously trusting her to resurrect him.

"Emilia, he looks pretty badly burned, can we-"

"Resurrect him? Certainly. You picked the best insurance policy you could use, so it's going to take a lot more than that to prevent resurrection. Like, say, your avalanche of bouncing betties, although I suppose it'll depend if they get caught in at ground zero or not."

Alexandra winced. She...hadn't thought of that while designing the trap. Maybe she should tone it down a bit. It had been made to send a message, but she'd rather have the cheaters spread the word themselves than just the people that watched them get vaporized. It would get her point across regardless, but there was something to be said for the impact of relaying your own ass kicking.

"Good, then let's go." She froze. "Well, I guess you go and I fetch CQ?"

Emilia frowned, then shook her head.

"How about we try it on automated first? We already had plenty of tries manually, and all it really needs is some input on the teleport spell. I'll walk you through it, then we'll see if works properly."

"Sure."

"Alright, so, go into you dungeon view, and start-"

*****

"You know, we really need to get cameras."

Emilia blinked, and turned towards Alexandra.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that while, yes, your scrying spell is very handy, we won't be able to rely on it all the time. And sometimes we'll need to keep an eye on things without using a golem."

Alexandra nodded at the screen where Jared was once again playing babysitter for a resurrected adventurer. The ranger looked kind of pissed, but when Alexandra had confirmed, through a golem, that indeed, he was free to cultivate while his friends made their way to him, he had gotten a whole lot more accommodating, and had stopped fuming. Mostly. He still looked pretty pissed about loosing all of his stuff, except his clothes.

"Ah, that's...a very good point. Maybe you could just...use golem heads?"

Alexandra thought for a second, then just shook her head. She knew how creeped out she'd be if there were just heads on the ceiling following her with blank, metal faces. It would be even worst for adventurers used to seeing those heads attached to golems actively trying to kill them.

"I think I'd rather make proper cameras. Less creepy. Plus, I could try to integrate some of the sensors we got from the turret! Infrared, here we come!"

Emilia giggled as Alexandra thrust her fist into the air.

"Right, well, sorry to break your bubble, but they're preparing for CQ."

Alexandra blinked, and looked at the screen, where, indeed, the adventurers were preparing to fight her boss. She was a bit disappointed they'd decided to bypass the challenge room, but they had decided to hit the shrine of war, and gotten the most positive-ish outcome, which had divided in half the number of golems in the 16th room, allowing them to clear it without any real issues. The previous rooms had also been cleared in fairly short order, and although the trapped hallway between the 15th and 16th room had proven time consuming to master, they'd eventually done it, with caution and a lot of throwing pieces or outright limbs of golems to trigger traps. Which was ingenious, if nothing else, especially as they'd realized that the smaller pieces they were using weren't triggering the drop axes, hence the use of severed golem limbs.

Right now they were organizing their equipments and drinking potions, clearly preparing for a tough fight. Then, once everyone was ready, their mage -who looked more athletic than their fighter, hilariously enough, with his short sleeves revealing bulging biceps, and towering over the rest of the party- cast a series of wards of protection on the party, then they moved forward into the hallway.

The battle with CQ was...anticlimactic.

Alexandra knew CQ couldn't get someone every time, but it was still a bit disappointing to see a party with good information, and preparation, just side-step all of her strengths and crush the poor boss. There were a few close calls here and there, but their mage doubling as a pretty decent duelist saved them from damage to their traditionally more squishy backline combatants. The Royal Guardians and Palace Guards Mk2s did their best, but they were clearly outmatched and outmanoeveured, and were reduced to scrap metal.

The Earth-born made a note to get CQ an upgrade...And probably move her altogether, actually. She'd need a boss for the second floor after all, and the spider tank would fit in pretty well as a boss for the first floor. Plus, it would justify going all out on CQ and her protectors, as she would need to be able to face tougher foes.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Now that she thought about it, she should probably move her core, at the very least, to the second floor as well. There was never going to be 'too many' defenses between her and whatever assholes wanted to steal her after all. Moving the command center and the core hallway with all of it's traps might prove a bit...trickier though. Moving a floating crystal from one room to another was one thing. Moving a pile of bombs, flamethrowers and lasers was another.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Maybe I should make a notification sound instead of a text pop up when I trigger this thing.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Alexandra rolled her eyes, and turned towards Emilia.

"Well that was...anticlimactic."

The vampire girl shrugged.

"It was bound to happen someday. Better it'd be early than later, so we can get used to it. Adventurers are going to be prepared for whatever we throw at them, and they will plan around your defenders and their capabilities. Whatever they are, they aren't idiots. Or at least, most of them aren't. And even when just motivated by greed, they will take care to maximize their profits by avoiding death or damage if they can."

"Fair enough, I suppose." Alexandra smiled. "And it looks like our friends are...intrigued by my little sign.

The adventurers were currently arguing and pointing at the sign towards the second floor, with one of them gesturing at the door leading to the command center. Alexandra frowned, and subconsciously checked her defensive systems, before relaxing as she realized they were arguing on whether to fetch their resurrected comrade first, or pick him up on the way out.

Eventually though, exploring further first won out, and they prepared to move out into the second floor.

Alexandra smiled, and grabbed another potato slice.

"Well, this should be interesting....Let's see how they fare when they don't have all the cards in hand."