10

There was a surprisingly small amount of farmland surrounding the city of Unica: barely a small ring two or three fields deep before the forest began. And the forest surrounded the whole city, Charles noted after an exploratory run around the place, with no roads leaving the city and venturing into the forest. It was as if this place had been left to its own devices, completely forgotten by everyone else in the world. Plane, actually, his LAI reminded him. He was still getting used to the notion of a flat square of land existing somewhere for some reason. Perhaps he should send something into space and see what there was beyond what the eyes could see, and maybe he’d have some answers.

Or just more questions. This was a world of magic, where everything could be possible through the application of enough power, in the form of mana, and imagination. Perhaps the planes were artificial and not naturally occurring, or perhaps this universe just did not care about entropy gradients and potential energy curves. The latter was probably the case, he realized sighing, as probably mana did not only respond to sapient beings but interacted even with other kinds of things, making it the ultimate scrambling mechanism. There was just no way to predict what would come out of a world with mana, even if what he’d seen so far was not that odd.

He had to little data to draw conclusions, though, so he just left it there for now. In the future he could revisit his theories and get to actual meaningful conclusions.

The answer to how so little fields could sustain a medium sized town like Unica came as he was making his way back towards the dungeon. There was an old man tending to his field, doing quite mundane work that Charles would have ignored altogether if not for what came after. The man approached a strange thing shaped like a scarecrow but made of living wood and leaves, looking like it had been grown in that shape and as he stepped closer, he took out a bright green core of a monster out of his bag and jammed it deep inside the living wood statue.

The core dissolved, and motes of light emerged from it and covered the entire field in a shower of green fractals. Little beads of green poked out of the ground, buds turning to leaves and into fully grown plants like a time-lapse video seen in real life. In a matter of a few minutes, the green plants became yellow and the field was full of ripe wheat ready to be harvested.

That was one more mystery solved, at least. Between this kind of magically boosted agriculture and the monster meat from the dungeon, the city could easily grow to considerable size before it encountered any problems with food. The monsters on the lower levels, while they gave almost nothing in the matter of experience to level up, were weak enough to be killed even by lightly armed peasants. Water was available in abundance, thanks to the river that crossed the city and went into the sea.

He arrived at the guild after some time, most of it spent trekking on overgrown roads, and saw that Isabelle was at the counter again. As soon as she recognized him, she winked at him. The action reminded him of the fact that the last time they interacted she mistook him for a noble because of the ring, a thing that led to a cascade of other things that ultimately resulted in his hurried building of the workshop.

The queue was quite short this early in the day, because most people did the guild business after they went in the dungeon and not before. He too would have to come back, but first he wanted to see the results of the mountain of corpses he dumped here last time.

He mentally prepared for the interaction with the woman. He also noticed how everyone was looking his way now, but disregarded the thing as just some random cultural thing he did not care about.

“Good morning.” He said.

“Hello, sir!” She said excitedly, beaming a smile at him. She leaned in closer and whispered. “I still don’t know your name…”

“And you don’t need to.” Charles replied flatly.

It was her behavior that was making him the focus of all the attention here, and he did not like that. It was not the attention per se that was the issue, but it was the increase in the chance of a bad encounter that bothered him. More attention, more possible bothersome people.

“Did you manage to get anything good out of the stuff I had last time?”

Isabelle did not skip a beat. “Of course, you brought quite the number of useful things here. I hoped to see you earlier, but I guess that you’ve been busy with your, uhm, private business.”

“I have been, yes.” He replied.

“Are you going into the dungeon again?” The woman asked, still smiling.

“I am.”

Isabelle frowned for a moment, then produced a small bag full of copper and silver coins. “This is the revenue from selling your loot!” She purred. “I made sure to get the best possible deals myself.” She added, leaning even closer to his face.

He took a step back and snatched the bag from her hands and threw it into his ring without paying any attention to its contents. He briefly noticed that there were also a couple of monster parts, each of them with a label and a brief description. This woman was turning out to be quite useful after all. At the same time a few motes of white light entered his body, probably because he had unknowingly completed some quests or because his standing with the guild increased.

“Good.”

He was about to ask if she remembered to pay the workers and keep enough money for herself, but didn’t. He had already told her as much, and was not about to repeat himself. She was still staring at him as he finished that train of thought, saying nothing but looking at him in the eye. He nodded and left.

It was finally time to face the dungeon and gain some levels.

The first floors flew by very quickly thanks to the LAI hyperfocus mode. He dropped out of it and resumed control of his own body once he got to the one with the fire wolves. What was the point of finally having his gun with full ammo if he was not the one shooting with it? He only used the LAI so far because he remembered that in the floors up to this one there was nothing worth shooting at. From now on, though, he wanted to have fun.

He exited the staircase, and immediately a gust of wind hit him in the face, carrying with it all the hot air of this place. The sun was fixed at the zenith, making it impossible to guess at the time and eliminating all possible shadows. He did not remember that this floor was this bad, but just a few seconds here reminded him of the fallibility of one’s memory. It was quite the jump from the easy floors below to this one here, and without his suit he was not sure how long he’d survive. It was clear that the dungeons, or at least this one, were not made for the average person.

The heat was almost unbearable, just like the last time if not more, but he didn’t let this little detail spoil his fun. He had an almost unending supply of food, water and metal rods for his gun in his ring now. He was not the same person who arrived here a couple of weeks ago, and he was more than prepared to fight the enemies of this floor.

The first wolf appeared in the distance, sunbathing on a large flat rock. Its mane was completely on fire and yet not burning, just like last time. One could see the beauty in it, in the ever-changing shapes that resolved into images and patterns, like the clouds on a windy day. Charles took position five hundred meters away, hidden behind a rock outcropping, and ordered the LAI to provide him with an aiming reticle.

His vision shifted into a tactical sight, with lines providing the best firing patterns and diagrams showing the direction of wind, the pull of gravity, the projected path of the bullet and everything else that he could ever need to take the perfect shot.

He squinted his eyes, gave the mental command to the LAI to set the gun’s power to 35% of maximum, and squeezed the trigger. The action was not needed, as he could just order it to fire with his mind, but he enjoyed the sensation that the cold metal of the gun gave on his bare fingers. The thin, long rod of iron, one of the many that he spent all night forging, left the barrel of the gun without a sound, accelerated just below the speed of sound by the electromagnetic fields that were being generated inside the rectangular barrel. Then, an unexpected sonic boom shook the whole desert and barely a moment after the wolf exploded in a maelstrom of blood and viscera.

“What the…” Said a stunned Charles, looking at his gun as if it was an alien object.

He half expected the barrel of the gun to be fuming like in the old movies, although this one was a completely electric gun and not a black powder powered one. Still, the sonic boom was an indicator that there was something going on here, as the power level he fired at was not supposed to bring out such destructive power. His plan was to execute the beast with a perfectly aimed shot and to retrieve a body as intact as possible. What happened here, instead, was the complete opposite. His bullet had not only breached the sound barrier, but had completely obliterated everything in its path and had even left a deep hole in the ground behind the target.

It was just an errant thought, at the beginning, but then the realization hit him. The gun had gained levels, just like the ring and presumably all other artifacts in this world, and thus had increased in power. Significantly so too. His frown turned into a wild grin. This world was not ceasing to surprise him, and this was a very welcome surprise indeed. The small handheld railgun could become quite the fearsome thing with enough grinding, even rivalling the ship mounted rail-cannons that the empire used to vaporize entire continents.

He set the power lower this time, and aimed around looking for more targets. The loud noise had scared away all the wolves, though, who were very aware that something much more powerful than them was now roaming their desert. There was a new apex predator roaming the place now, and the wolves were very aware of that.

Charles sighed and, after digging out a perfectly intact red core from the puddle of gore that was the wolf, made his way towards the tallest pillar of rock that he could see. If the wolves were all hiding, then it was no fun to hunt under this punishing sun and heat. He reached the pillar. There, he took the stairway up and finally arrived where it all began. To the floor with the vampires.

There were three of the creatures waiting for him in the first cavern. Without skipping a beat, he raised his gun and pulled the trigger. The shot flew through the air soundlessly this time and hit the creature perfectly in the middle of its eyes. With a swift motion Charles took out a rod from the ring, inserted it into the barrel of his gun and aimed at another vampire. It took just one second, but it was all the time that the remaining monster needed to make its move. The third was in fact rushing at him now, but Charles was not worried.

He aimed his gun at it immediately after killing the previous one and pulled the trigger without reloading. The vampire slumped to the ground like a ragdoll, a small round hole on his forehead. Charles took out two rods from the ring, the two pieces of iron appearing in his hand while he mimicked pulling out arrows from a quiver, then he jammed them inside the barrel of the gun where they were put in a magazine by the internal mechanisms.

The grin had never left his face all this time, ever since he realized that his gun was growing alongside him. His expression faltered, just for a moment, when he examined the remains of his last target. He clicked his tongue in annoyance; the shot had deviated three centimeters to the right of the center of symmetry.

He put the three bodies in his ring, expending quite a bit of mana which was restored almost instantly thanks to his passive cultivation. The air in the dungeon was much richer in mana than it was outside, making replenishing his reserves quite faster than normally possible.

The massacre continued for hours, with him mercilessly killing everything that moved within his sight. His supply of bullets was large, and they were reusable if fired at slow speeds, so he never ran out. In the end, even shooting at monsters got boring. The repetitive action was devoid of any challenge, at least as long as he used his gun, and he didn’t want to risk his life by switching to fighting with swords. It was time to go up a floor, to get some variety.

He stepped into the forested area, the second floor that he ever explored in this dungeon and in this universe in general. The animals were back at the pond, standing still and waiting for him to approach them. But he was not about to approach them at all, as he raised the gun and shot bullet after bullet at them all without pause.

He stepped closer and collected the bodies, then continued on.

It was only when the charge on his gun reached half that he decided to turn back and head out. This thing about needing to recharge his equipment was a necessity that had been bothering him for the past few days as he worked at the workshop, and then later as he hunted through the dungeon. If there was a way to make mana into electricity, he’d save himself a lot of work for sure. If not, there were other ways.

All that was necessary, after all, was to have a magnet rotate while in the middle of a coil of copper wire. He could make a coal power plant or, perhaps, he could harness the power of magic. He saw people summoning fireballs while fighting in the dungeon, and that gave him the idea of using the cores as a source of mana for sustained spells that could power a generator.

If mana could be made to move electrons directly then it would be perfect. If a spell was needed then it was alright too. It could not be worse than having to burn fossil fuel to do exactly that, especially with the almost limitless supply of cores to use right next to his base. Seeing the farmer use the core to power up his spell on the wheat field also told Charles that he didn’t have to use pure mana crystals, at least not if he figured out how to bring out the power from the cores safely.

He arrived at the guild almost without noticing it, absorbed as he was in his thoughts of technology and magic, and shook himself out of his musings. He repeated the same steps he did the first time, but this time everything went quite smoothly since Isabelle already knew him. The door to the private room was left open this time, which attracted a lot of attention from the people waiting behind him in line.

“Gods!” Isabelle yelled.

What followed soon after was the gasps of the nearby crowd that had gathered, as soon as they too saw the mountain of bodies appear.

“These are so much more than the other time! And, and… a hellhound? Vampires? Mystical Denizens as well!” She nearly fainted as she saw the wealth of powerful creatures lying dead before her eyes.

“I thought those were still quite weak.” Charles said.

He remembered how the party he slaughtered treated such creatures as if they were worthless fodder. As soon as he said that, the voices coming from the corridor outside the door erupted into a loud chatter, but he ignored them.

Isabelle quieted down, looked up at Charles and smiled while blushing. “Of course, these are but weaklings for a noble such as you.”

He rolled his eyes. Too much subtext here, but this confirmed at least the fact that nobles sometimes arrived in this town to farm the dungeon. Now he also knew that they usually didn’t sell their materials to the guild, or Isabelle would not have been so surprised. The people outside gasped again as soon as they heard her words, most of them never having seen a noble before and now looking at Charles with interest.

“Same as last time.” He said and left.

As he left, the crowd parted around him. The people were looking at him and talking to each other, most of them treating him with reverence while others looking at him sideways. He also heard someone comment on the fact that he had no class, and that a classless person should have not been able to kill such monsters. They evidently had no idea about real weaponry and real power, he thought to himself smiling.

He was quite satisfied with this dungeon run. He had reached level 94 after erasing all traces of life on several floors, floors that were considered to be quite hard to beat for the usual adventurer of this town despite how he initially thought. The new level meant that now, he was 2.5 times better than a normal human being in all aspects. Something not to scoff at by any means. And on top of that he also had a large amount of exotic materials and cores that he did not sell to the guild and that he could use for his experiments.

He was whistling, walking along the road with a nice pace. The air was fresh and pleasant, something that he could appreciate after spending a life in space breathing artificially recycled air, and then so many days in the dungeon without seeing the light of the sun. When he got out the first time, he could not appreciate the simple beauty of having a real sky over his head, but now he felt like he was a new man. His worries were eased by the fact that he was armed, and he could take some time to look up into the sky. The sun was shining in the sky, suspended above this plane by methods unknown. The birds were chirping.

This shitty town in the middle of nowhere was not so unpleasant today, perhaps. In fact, it was looking rather nice despite his initial judgement. Today he decided that he would focus on finding a way to recharge his equipment, then he could take some time off and actually enjoy this new world for the first time. Then get to work again, as he never was one to sit by idly.

A large man barreled through the crowd and stopped in place right in front of Charles, blocking the way. Charles was not in the mood to shoot at someone just because of that, at least not today, since he was quite in a good mood and so he stepped aside to go past him.

The man, however, moved to intercept. He was wearing full plate armor but had no helmet on, revealing long blonde hair and a chiseled face.

“Move aside.” Charles said flatly.

“You. You are a thief and a murderer!”