Chapter 2

The spiraling staircase that stood in the center of Ryan’s third level entry room was connected to the second floor via a rather spiffy trapdoor. Ryan, deciding to continue to enhance his dungeon’s aesthetic, made the trap door in the visage of a human skull, with two keyholes in the eye sockets.

If adventurers inserted the keys they received from Steve, the one-armed entry level boss, and Buttercup, the wolf-deer hybrid second-floor boss, it would open the trapdoor, allowing them to skip straight to Ryan’s newest layer. After all, Ryan was more than willing to allow returning adventurers to skip ahead to his more dangerous areas, as long as they had already cleared the previous bosses at least once.

The moment they arrived on his third floor, the similarities to his second level stopped. That wasn’t to say the second wasn’t a great floor. Ryan still loved its design, especially with the eerie red lighting from the ruby-eyed skulls in the ceiling. However, he had decided to continue stepping up his game, and really tried to do his current best on his third layer.

As such, the third-floor entrance room was a massive, grand open area, with alternating black and white floor tiles. He had made the flooring from various types of stone he had discovered as he continued spreading his influence and excavating to grow his overall dungeon size. The black stone was granite; the white was marble. He really liked how the two contrasted, and had utilized the marble and granite in a lot of his formation and finish work for his third floor.

The vast entrance way to his third floor was a square room, with four different exits, one on each wall. Each of these exits were highlighted by a glowing gemstone, held in place with dark mana to keep enterprising thieves from trying to steal them. Because Ryan already knew what his boss mobs were going to be, he had decided to use their elemental affinities as a bit of a theme.

As such, the four doors had four different gems, each representing affinities of his elemental bosses, which they would eventually challenge in his grand boss room. Ruby for his fire mage, obviously; sapphire for his water mage; emerald for his earth mage, and smoky quartz for his wind mage.

Ryan decided adventurers should be able to choose which mage they had to face. It would actually make his life easier, since he wouldn’t have to randomize their summoning feature. Which he was obviously capable of, but hey, he was trying to be an efficient dungeon now.

Each of the doors would lead down paths which would bring adventurers, eventually, to a special room holding within it a skeleton key, much like his second floor. However, depending on which keys the adventurers gathered, their boss battle could be very different. His design would give adventurers the opportunity to either be very brave or very dumb, the separation of such traits of course being rather small.

The door to his boss room, which adventurers would discover after they made their way past the ruby marked door and its challenges, had four different keyholes. If adventurers used a single key to unlock the door then Ryan would only summon the skeletal mage associated with that key. If they used two keys Ryan would create two skeletal mages. Three keys meant three bosses, and four keys would mean the adventurers were going to face all four at once.

Ryan set up a slight delay on the door opening so that no matter the situation, if any group were brave enough to use all four keys, he’d have the chance to absorb any leftover mobs within his dungeon, so he would have the mana to summon all four bosses. Doing so cost him 1000 of his current 1200 mob points, after all.

This option gave adventurers an increased chance at higher rewards, as well as more experience. Ryan knew from his time as a bronze and silver tiered dungeon that the greater the reward, the higher the risks adventurers were willing to take. And while he wasn’t going to purposefully become overpowered, neither was he going to pass up the chance at a decent amount of experience if some adventurers decided to take on a challenge they couldn’t handle. After the run-in with Viktor, Ryan could no longer trust his survival to the world outside. It was a dungeon-eat-man world, after all.

Once adventurers decided upon which door they would take, they would be privy to walking down various well-furnished and well-lit hallways. These were all being lined with fancy fabrics, the occasional painting, and of course, his full-sized skeletal replicas. Essentially, his first floor felt like a dungeon. It was crude and rough, just as he was when he first created it.

His second was more refined, and had hints of modernization, of craftsmanship. His third floor was going to scream sophistication. He wanted adventurers to feel like they were in a classy castle, not some eerie underground tomb. The fear factor would come later, with his mobs.

Along the third-floor hallways, various rooms would open up, and depending on the door the adventurers had taken, the room composition would be different. Ryan was committed to his elemental themes. He loved the idea of them, and while he may be limited to darkness abilities and mobs, he could still have a little fun.

His ‘fun’ came from his traps, not the mobs – because the mobs were always going to be undead, skeletal or zombie types. Mostly skeletal, his was the ‘Bone Dungeon’ after all, though the earth room was going to have a zombie-type mob. It just fit the theme of that affinity.

For his fire-related room, there was, well, fire. Getting fire in his dungeon had been a large pain in the core for him, because he couldn’t make fire himself. At first, he had planned on having Erin go out onto the floor with flint and steel to prepare the fires. Then the fairy, being either helpful or lazy, Ryan wasn’t sure, had reminded him he had fire mage skeletons, which suddenly made the task a lot easier. Though, even with his fire affinity skeletal mage helping, it required a bit of creativity to get exactly what he wanted.

The room was currently lit with a crimson flicker; Ryan had lined the room with coal, and made his skeletal mage ignite it. Coal, he had learned from one of his books, provided not only a decent fuel for fire, but also created hot embers, which he could utilize for stage two of his trap: dropping oil on the smoldering coals from above, which would instantly bathe the room in dangerous flames. The convenient thing about skeletons was that they didn’t care if they were surrounded by fire. Bones took quite a long time to burn. Flesh, on the other hand, did not.

His earth-related room was less tricky, consisting of stalactite traps, pitfalls, and a few poisonous gas traps. For fun, Ryan had those poisonous traps cycle through his three favorite types of poison: paralysis, hallucination, and, well, poison-poison. The mobs in the earth-themed rooms would consist of a variety of poisonous zombies, though he wasn’t one hundred percent sure which ones yet. After he finished decorating, he planned to finish fleshing out his zombie mob creation. Ha.

The water-affinity rooms had pitfall traps as well, but these were filled with, well…water. Ryan knew some of the tankier classes, such as knights, had a hard time against water. Apparently, wearing a massive amount of heavy armor caused you to sink. Ryan had been watching adventurers actively dive into his dungeon for at least four months before the battle with Viktor, and had noticed some patterns; as such, he knew the water traps would likely be super effective against the ‘meat shields’ that usually led the way into each room.

He also had a few of the rooms coated in ice, courtesy of his water mage. At the very least, icy floors would disrupt footing. And from what he could tell, living things didn’t like the cold. Flesh, apparently, was quite the hinderance.

The final rooms – his air-themed rooms – had been the hardest for him to devise. He probably spent a good week or two just trying to figure out what types of traps could be utilized specifically for his air rooms. In the end, he had come up with two solutions. The first was poisonous gas-type traps. However, he was already using those for his earth rooms, and he didn’t want to seem unoriginal. His pride as a dungeon was on the line.

The solution he went with was the absence of air. Living things needed air in order to survive. Skeletons, well, they didn’t have lungs, or flesh, or brains, or any other pesky things that required oxygen to survive. With this knowledge, Ryan decided his traps in the air-related rooms would steal the very air from the area. Testing out such traps had been rather difficult.

The only living thing Ryan had on whom to test the traps was Erin, and she had been less than thrilled with his request for assistance. In the end, though, he found using dark mana-enforced stone to completely seal off an area would prevent oxygen from flowing into it. Once the air was depleted, the room would become an oxygen-free zone.

Killing adventurers by suffocation was not quite up his alley, so Ryan incorporated a quick way to disarm them. The moment adventurers killed all the mobs in a room the trap would deactivate, allowing fresh air to flow in. In reality, Ryan’s traps weren’t meant to gain him that many kills, but rather to punish anyone foolish enough to take on his third floor before they were ready. If the adventurers couldn’t survive his trapped rooms, they wouldn’t stand a chance against his bosses. Especially since his boss room had tricks of its own.

The boss room was his pride and joy. First off, the door into it was amazing, if Ryan did say so himself. Ryan had embedded four skulls into the door, each crafted out of the appropriate gem, with keyholes situated in the center of each skull’s forehead. He had even added in the extra feature that when the key was turned, a small amount of mana would pulse into the skull, causing it to glow eerily. He figured it was the subtle things like his attention to detail and neat little effects that helped separate him from other dungeons.

Once the adventuring party had inserted however many keys they wished, and prepared themselves for the fight ahead, they would finally set foot into the boss chamber. It was enormous. Four rows of massive columns supported the ceiling nearly fifty feet above. These columns – crafted out of marble, with skulls engraved all around their surface – were each wider than a man was tall.

In the very center of the room was a slightly raised pedestal of marble. Inside it, a staircase spiraled down into a smaller room from which Ryan would summon his bosses. He had also decided to implement this same feature into the pillars. Every other pillar actually had a false wall on it through which a skeletal archer or fighter could easily walk and join in the fight against the adventurers.

While Ryan had no plans to abuse this new system, it gave him the ability to interact a little more with adventurers during their boss fights, and also to spice up the challenge if he needed to.

These implementations were also a contingency plan. Because Ryan couldn’t summon mobs directly into the room once the adventurers entered, as their magical auras would negate his ability to do so. A feature of being a dungeon which still confused and frustrated him, though Erin had assured him the magical laws surrounding being a dungeon had their purposes. With his rooms beneath the floor, he could circumvent the magical laws. If for some reason his core room was ever threatened, he would be able to mount a considerable defense against the intruder. Never again did he want to rely on others for his and Erin’s safety.

With the completion of his third floor – his official start as a Gold-tier dungeon – Ryan was making the resolution to become the strongest dungeon he could. There was just one final step.

It was time to summon some mobs.