Sarzina "Zina" Acacia was a well educated noblewoman from the elven Queendom of Alfamér. Her goal in life was to have history remember her as someone great. While elves were a long lived species they weren't immortal. Dungeons, on the other hand, were. So, as a young elven girl Zina had decided to become a dungeon mistress, so she could shape one in her image and be remembered for all time.

While pursuing this goal by studying at a pristine spell Academy, Zina learned that it wouldn't be that simple. One couldn't just change the layout of a Dungeon. In fact there was no known way to make a Dungeon change. It was only possible to stop it from doing something new.

This just made Zina work harder, as she had realized she needed to get her Dungeon quickly and slowly guide it on the right path.

Most dungeon masters wanted a Dungeon with easy to beat creatures and puzzles, as few traps as possible and as much loot as they could get. Few dangers, while getting a lot of EXP and treasure.

Zina wanted her Dungeon to give plenty of EXP and treasures as well, but didn't want to rid the Dungeon of all its dangers. Her perfect Dungeon was challenging. Not just in its puzzles but through the need to detect traps and fighting against monsters as well.

The elven noblewoman loved a good challenge and found it odd that so many others wanted to take the boring, easy way.

But still. It wouldn't do to have too many people die in her Dungeon. So Zina intended to have a portal control to ensure people were probably prepared to enter her Dungeon.

If they then ended up biting over more than they could chew, it would be due to their own overconfidence.

The portal control would also be in charge of collecting taxes of course.

And now, at a mere 204 years old she was getting her own Dungeon! Most elven dungeon masters were in their third century before they were ready to get their own Dungeon. But Zina had been in and out of Dungeons several times a week for her whole adult life and had gotten the needed Intelligence and Awareness Scores needed to become a dungeon mistress a couple of years ago, when she reached level 59.

To cast the spell to link oneself to the Enchanted Dungeon Core Cage one needed to have a minimum Intelligence of 60. For the spell to then work one needed to have a high enough Awareness to overcome the Dungeon Core's natural defenses. Despite the many theories surrounding the topic, no one actually knew how to precisely calculate the needed Awareness. The only thing known for sure was that generally a Dungeon with more Floors had a stronger natural defense than one with less.

But Zina was confident her Awareness of 45 would be more than enough to overcome natural defenses of a Dungeon Core as young as this one.

Oona, her dawon, had been with her the last 5 years and with how often Zina went in and out of Dungeons the feline had quickly reached Zina’s level. But as all animals of Alfamér were forbidden from having a higher level than their owner, Zina had been forced to start leaving Oona behind when entering Dungeons.

To Zina's great satisfaction she had gotten special permission: Should Oona level up during the taming of her master’s Dungeon, the dawon wouldn’t be put down for overleveling just this once.

Not that it was likely to happen. The Dungeon was too young to be able to give either Zina nor Oona any EXP. The only way she would be leveling up was if some of her Skills leveled up and gave her enough EXP.

But again, with a Dungeon this young it was unlikely to challenge the experienced dawon enough for even one Skill to level.

Still. It was nice not having to worry!

So, naturally Zina was excited. A challenge, fighting with her darling Oona and getting her own Dungeon! The day almost couldn’t get any better!

Well… Once the fun part actually started.

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It hadn’t taken long before someone came by and saw that the marble boulder had turned black and duplicated itself. I hadn’t known beforehand that I would be able to sense how many 0%’ers had entered the 1 kilometer radius of my Portal, but I thought the two black boulders made my meaning obvious once I had realized I could.

I didn’t see any member of the Tribe the next 26 minutes, at which point Riska came by to announce that an army of elves had been spotted, and the Tribe was in a frenzy packing everything up, so they could evacuate.

Well, then. I passed the word along to my creatures.

So… Has the elven army been infiltrated by the cult or do they just have several supervillains in their midst?

While it’s possible that both of them aren’t mind controlled cult members, I do believe at least one of them is. Having a 0% karma seems like it’s super rare outside of the cult. It seems more likely to me that both of them are mind controlled.

And with my creatures being desperate to attack and kill all the bad guys, I sorta doubt I'll be able to free their minds before they die…

…

Self preservation first and foremost. I can't forget that the cult wants to kill me.

Well, steal my Core, but it's the same thing really.

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It took longer than I would have liked, but the Tribe was successfully evacuated in time.

While most of the delays were expected, Baaktha going into labor during the evacuation was not one of them. It probably should have been, as the pregnant mouselady was a couple of weeks overdue, and of course the stress caused by needing to evacuate in a hurry would force her into labor.

At least they got her to her house on the 9th Floor before it truly sat in. Though, it does seem like it's going faster than the Tribe expected. Short labor means less pain for the mother, right?

I made sure the mother was healed by the unicorn bunny when they passed it. Just to be on the safe side.

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As per the estimate of lieutenant Alnus, it was shortly before noon when the company and the small group of civilians they were escorting arrived at the Dungeon Portal. Captain Gleditsia was quick to order that the company take a lunch break before proceeding with their mission.

A lunch break where the captain drank to his heart's content.

There was a reason why Zina stayed away from the captain when possible…

When lunch had been eaten, and captain Gleditsia couldn't delay the mission anymore so he could drink, the company got ready for action. Checking gear and weapons, getting dressed in armor and preparing themselves mentally. They didn't expect any trouble but Dungeons always carried dangers for the unprepared.

The company was well prepared of course! As one of the Dungeon's traps rusted weapons and armor, most armor was made purely of thick leather and thread and just about all their weapons were made of different types of rocks. The three highest ranking elves - and the three richest, Zina wasn't afraid to admit - had acutium plate armor on top of their leather armor.

Acutium was mined from 3rd or higher tiered Dungeons and was a metal mostly known for making incredibly sharp, yet durable, blades. A lesser known fact about acutium was how it rusted like it was a mineral-filled rock rather than metal. A.k.a. very slowly and only to a certain degree.

Acutium wasn't the most expensive thing in the world. But it was really only good for pointy things, like daggers and nails. Making a proper armor made of it was known to be incredibly tedious, and no blacksmith would want to waste the time to do it properly.

The metal was extremely durable when hit from two angles but sort of brittle if hit from any other. The two durable angles were always at the opposite end of each other, so blacksmiths would make sure these angles ended up being the tip and bottom of the weapon.

While it was possible for a blacksmith to make the durable angles the front and back of an acutium plate armor, the larger surface area made it very time consuming and not worth the extra effort. As such, unless one wanted to pay an obscene amount of money, acutium armor would be able to take several hits but was more likely to last days of use, rather than years like other metals.

Due to all the weak spots, acutium was only really good when its purpose was to stick one end into something else. It was, however, really good at that!

So it was only due to the metal's rust resistance that Zina, captain Gleditsia and the highest ranking medic, the 5th tier Miss Pinckneya, had decided to have acutium armor made for the mission.

Of course, Zina's brother Braern had made her armor and gifted it to her to celebrate her finally getting her own Dungeon.

Normally he simply refused to let her pay for more than the price of the material.

It was his way of showing he supported her.

But this time he hadn't even allowed her to pay even that much.

He's such a sweet guy.

Weapons such as daggers, throwing knives, short swords, arrow- and spearheads were made of sharp obsidian, jadeite or, if the soldier had a bit more money to spend, acutium. The half-a-dozen elves, who preferred a hammer, had theirs made of dense quartzite. The company expected that half the weapons would break by the end of it, so everyone had been ordered to carry an extra weapon for emergencies. The brittle nature of stones also meant that no one would be using swords or longswords or such.

For weapons, Zina had a small crossbow meant for use with only one arm, a leather bolt quiver filled with bolts strapped to her left hip and an emergency dagger in a hylster on her right. With Intelligence being her main Ability Score, Zina naturally intended to mainly attack using spells, but she had been in Dungeons often enough that she wanted to be extra prepared.

Having studied at a pristine spell Academy, Zina naturally knew a lot of spells, a lot about spells and a lot about spellcasters. All beings had one or two elements they were connected to. Spells of said element would be easy for them to perform, while it would be much harder to learn spells of other elements.

There were 15 natural elements, which were seperated into 4 groups, each of which had a stronger or 'mastered' version. The first group consisted of the 4 common elements: Heat, Water, Pressure and Earth, along with their stronger versions known as Fire, Ocean, Force, and Earthquake. Zina's teachers had taught her that these elements combined with each other in various combinations is what made up the other natural elements.

The 4 common elements were named so, as it was more common for someone to be connected to one of these 4 than any other element. The second group was the 6 uncommon elements, each made by combining two of the common elements. The 4 rare elements were likewise made of three common elements, while the perfect element was the perfect combination of all 4.

Zina favored two elements: The uncommon Light element and the rare Forest element. Her dedication to her training meant she had already figured out how to turn the Light element into its stronger Lightning form. But while she had supposedly mastered the Light element by doing so, she had yet to master Forest by knowing how to cast Overgrowth spells.

This was normal. The rarer the element, the harder it was to master. Even for those who favored it.

And she was still young. She would figure it out one day.

Until then, Zina's prefered way to deal with powerful Dungeon monsters was to trap them with plants made from Forest element spells before repeatedly hitting them with Lightning.

In addition to the 15 natural elements, there were the unnatural elements. These elements were reflections of the natural ones, but versions that couldn't be favored. The massive research one needed to do to discover an unnatural element had also led people hoarding the knowledge once found. As such, Zina had only heard the name of two, but had little idea on how to cast any spells with them. Sickness was the obvious opposite to the natural element of Healing, and likewise the unnatural Debuff was the opposite of the natural Buff element.

It was commonly known in certain circles that those two were only publicly known due to how obvious they were.

The elven noblewoman didn't spend a lot of time checking her weapons and armor, however. As the dungeon mistress-to-be, her job was mainly to tame the Dungeon Core. But before that, she also had to activate what had been named the 'allow all'-tool. Said tool would disable the restraint on a Dungeon's allowed number of sapients for 24 hours, so the whole company could enter at once. It would disable all loot as well and respawn monsters in abandoned rooms, but that was a small price to pay for having the safety of numbers. Especially since monsters couldn't leave their rooms anyway, making the respawn part pretty irrelevant.

It also had the side effect of rendering the normal 'go down a Floor, then back up to leave'-strategy invalid. The only way out would be through the Dungeon Portal or the Dungeon's Core. But when one had numbers on their side like this, it never mattered.

Granted, for a Dungeon this young, sending a whole company was a bit overkill, but the captain had insisted.

Zina double checked that the Dungeon Core Cage was intact in her backpack, grabbed the 'allow all'-tool, made sure Oona was ready as well, before standing by the Portal next to her dawon. When the captain begrudgingly declared they were ready, Zina placed the circular tool onto the stone back of the Portal and filled the device with mana. A click could be heard as it stuck itself to the Portal. Then a swoosh, before the sound of glass cracking.

Walking back to the front of the Portal, the greenish, dirty water reflection now had cracks along its sides. None of the cracks reached all that far into the center of the Portal, but it was still an unnerving thing to see. Even when one was prepared for it.

With that, the whole company could enter the Dungeon at once. Only the civilians with them were going to stay behind to take care of the horses and begin building a new town around the Portal.

Having a large force enter the Dungeon at once, was the tried and true method to get to a Dungeon Core with the fewest possible casualties, no matter a Dungeon's size. Normally it wouldn't be needed for a Dungeon this young, but the captain had insisted on it.

…But oddly enough only after his grandfather had informed him it would be for the best, if he led the mission himself.

Or… At least that's what the rumors said. Zina wasn't normally the kind who listened to rumors. Captain Gleditsia just really seemed like the type who would take any chance to slack off his duties so he could get drunk instead.

As the only one who could tame the Dungeon Core - and thus the VIP of the mission -, Zina had to wait till it was time for the backline of the company to enter.

She was not happy about having to miss some of the action.

And she so planned to jump to the frontline as soon as possible!