Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 31/100

Heart 3,459,600/3,459,600

Experience 158,665/864,900

Workers 45/193

Monsters 34/195

Traps 80/474

Mithril 6,390

Adamantine 1,133

Mana 6,420

Poison, Greater 500

Deadly Scorpion Venom 51

Quest: Kill 62 city dwellers.

Quest: Half populate your dungeon: Workers 45/66 | Monsters 34/67 | Traps 80/162

Quest: Reach level 50.

A week had come and gone. The group of adventurers had practiced again and again, which meant they came into the dungeon every single day. More still arrived. He allowed Fife to have more and better armor, and with the extra difficulty she even overwhelmed and killed them a few times.

He'd made it a challenge, now, that if they could clear the mini dungeon with Fife in a layer of adamantine, they could get a set of armor and weapons each of either mithril or adamantine. Not a single party had turned down that chance, and so he started getting more and more challenges where Fife won—and he got almost a full level of experience from it.

He watched as Fife got beaten, after several attempts, and the current party made their slow way to the cannon room for the first time. Since they were in the no pulled punches mode, the cannon was loaded with scrap metal.

It was a disappointment when their rogue found the trigger for the cannon and disarmed it. They moved into the treasure room, which Travis had half filled with gold, and read the message sitting on the table within.

Congratulations. Take as much gold as you can carry, and ask Fife for directions to our smith for your new armor and weapons. Please note: the fighting is now over. Do not attack anything you see in the dungeon.

"Alright, Brayden, they've read the note. Head in and get Fife back on her feet. Their mage really did a number on her."

"Got it, Trav." Brayden moved slower than normal. It had to do with him wearing a full suit of adamantine for protection. "You know, maybe I should just get Astrid to come in here after this in her full armor. I hate being in this giant tin can."

"It's not tin!" Sounding offended, Fife let out a few curses. "That's good armor, that is!"

Approaching Fife's body, Brayden let out a laugh. "Water mage? This is some very nice work." He braced himself and mana started to pool around him as he beseeched his god to restore life to Fife.

"It was cheap, is what it was. How am I meant to fight back someone who fills my armor with water and then uses it to constrict me?" Grumbling some more, Fife didn't stop even as she jerked awake back in her body. "And that's another thing, I need better healing. Trav, can you make me a priest?"

Travis contemplated going right ahead as she instructed, but first felt the need to explain something. "I'm pretty sure that will make you weaker, Fife. You might not be able to wear all your armor. The info I can see about Tank is that its best stat is physical defense and its worst is offense. Priest's best stat is mana."

Stopping, Fife grumbled and shook her head. "Yeah, okay. Let's not do that right now."

The group of adventurers, leaving the treasure room, all paused at the sight of Fife on her feet again. "Sorry for the attack, ma'am," the mage said. "We wouldn't have gotten past you any other way."

Laughing, Fife made a dismissive gesture. "It's fine, really. Shows me a weakness in my defense I need to work on. You can make it up by coming and having some ale, then explaining how I could avoid that."

Travis let out a silent sigh of relief. As much as Fife seemed like she held a grudge, she never did. He turned his attention back to his stats and sighed. "These quests are taking forever."

Turning to leave, Brayden wandered around the dungeon to check each room and rearm the traps. "We have time, Trav. I meant to ask, what did we get for the dungeon delving one?"

"Oh, right, I told Axel about it— When we smelt raw ore, we get twice as much product out of it. Nothing but pure crazy dungeon magic." Travis laughed. "That one had been bugging me almost as much as the kill city dwellers one. The adventurers are helping with that."

"'Helping', yeah. I need to go and thank Brother Rupert for his support. Without him boosting our reputation, I don't think half of them would take the risk." Brayden slipped his gauntlets and helmet off. "Do we know how Howard has gotten on?"

"Not until he gets back. He'll get his title and make all his promises to the King, then come back and pay the visit to Hearthhome. That should kick the hornet nest over and make Liz panic." It had come to Travis as a shock to find out the trader who'd helped so much was a spy among them. "Think she'll take the bait and not realize we all know?"

"She'll figure it out, Trav. She's not an idiot, for all she is a fool to be working for whoever she is. I was talking with Steph, and his thoughts on it are that it's almost full indoctrination. They pick people who don't have any other option and they feed them lies and half-truths until they think they're doing their job for the good of everyone." Leaving the training dungeon, Brayden marched right to the original watering hole and found a party already in progress. "Don't mind if I do."

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"Two shots in a rifle?" Anichka asked Tinkpot, looking at the gun and examining it. "Is it meant to be broken like this?" She glanced over to Tammy, who shrugged.

"Yes!" Tinpot had spent an entire lifetime enjoying his craft, but now he'd found something new and exciting. Firearms had always been for those with far more money than he, and no one would risk a precious weapon in the hands of a tinker who had no idea what he was doing. Now, though… "I was reading one of our boy's books"—that was another thing that he'd learned to enjoy, reading—"and he speaks of wondrous weapons that would spit more shots in a second than a line of our rifles could manage in a minute."

Sighing, Tinpot wished he had the know-how and the tools to make some of the magic-seeming guns he'd read about. "But these things need to come in steps. I am trying to make the more basic designs, and the first of those is a gun that loads from the back."

"Show me," Anichka said, feeling bubbling excitement. Of all the people she'd met, excluding Tammy, he was the first she'd ever connected with in their first meeting.

Picking up the gun, Tinpot made sure he was aiming it down to the testing wall of soft dirt. "I needed to come up with two new inventions to make this work. First I got help from the nice wizard lady. Her work with traps was exactly what I needed to make the hinge mechanism here. Her brother solved the other problem for me." With the gun broken open, the over-and-under barrels were nothing more than high precision tubes. He pushed the little metal-wrapped bullet and powder combinations into each of them and snapped it closed again. "This chemical is sensitive to shock. The two arms of the firing mechanism will strike them one after the other. It's loaded, Annie."

Keeping the gun aimed at the wall of dirt, Anichka inspected the mechanism. "I don't have to put powder in?"

"Point and shoot." Tinpot waited for her to line up and fire, each barrel performing perfectly, much to his relief. "Now, lift the lever on the side and break it open again."

Following the instructions, Anichka marveled at the two smoking metal canisters. "How do I get those out?"

"Just tip the gun back a bit. When the bullets fire, they shove backwards on the empty cartridge—so they don't get wedged in tight." When the two canisters came out easily, Tinpot passed her two more of the precious cartridges. "Now reload."

Anichka's fingers almost trembled as she did so, slotting her ammunition into their holes and then snapping the gun closed again. "Tinpot, this changes everything."

"That's what Mister Travis said!" Watching as Anichka fired two more shots, Tinpot felt the excitement pouring off her like it was a palpable wave. He couldn't deny he felt it too. "This should speed your firing up, yes?"

Tammy nodded and held up one of the cartridges. "How hard are these to make?"

"Not terribly. The tricky part is pushing the bullet into them. You can't use a hammer because"—Tinpot turned one over in his hand to tap a claw on the percussion cap—"if that goes off, you have to start over, and maybe ask Brayden for some assistance."

"Should I save the empty ones?" Anichka asked, before firing twice more. The gun didn't kick as hard as her flintlock rifles did.

"Oh! Yes! I can pop the cap back out and add more of the special chemical to them. Maybe I should add some kind of bag to catch them in?"

Tammy shook her head. Like Anichka, she'd warmed up to the kobold gunsmith quickly, and felt more comfortable talking to him than most other folk. "I can keep a bag on my belt. We're going to need a lot of them, though. You've seen how fast Annie can find her targets, and if I can reload as fast as you showed, with just two of these we could keep a constant fire rate of a shot every two seconds."

"Can you make the guns lighter? Maybe use mithril?" Anichka asked.

Shaking his head, Tinpot tapped the steel prototype. "I have found it's better to make the barrels out of thin adamantine. It's lighter than an equivalent amount of mithril to contain a similar amount of powder. The problem is working it thin enough takes much longer. I'm trying to fix that."

Travis was at a loss with Tinpot. He loved that the guy seemed so determined to recreate the things from his memory books, but at the same time there was probably a lot of stuff in there he hoped no one ever tried to make. Still, him figuring out how to make a breech-loading rifle was beyond amazing to Travis. He didn't interrupt the conversation going on, but he did feel pride that these new tools would only come from his dungeon.

Blake was in his happy place. His own private quarters had a large wooden drawing board that Stephan had made for him. Real paper adorned the board as he drew precise and measured lines with a straight edge and some graphite.

Glancing at the diagram that he'd stuck to one side of his board with a little blob of the basic sludge Robert made for their traps. "Are you sure this is what you want?"

"We're giving away adamantine and mithril too freely. I want to make three tiers of difficulty in mini dungeons." Fife tapped the page she'd painstakingly worked on. "This will be the new mithril dungeon. Then I have an adamantine dungeon, a magic dungeon, and a firearms dungeon."

Stopping, his claws having barely finished ending a line, Blake turned his head to look at Fife with an eyebrow ridge raised.

"Too much?" Fife asked.

"We'll need more when we reach the next big level milestone. These give us a good supply of rock, too." Blake was shaking his head and talking fast. "Then we can have specially designed combos of equipment, encourage adventurers to try for what they specifically want, and they can die over and over!"

Bouncing in place, which Fife realized would shake a building if she wasn't standing on flagstones, Fife pointed at her drawing. "So you want more of these?"

"As many as you can make. Uh, Travis?" Blake was a touch worried about getting Travis' attention, mostly because he knew how busy the dungeon was now.

His name, asked as a question, snapped Travis' focus to the work room. "What can I help you with, Blake?"

"We want to build more dungeons on the second floor. How many more traps and creatures can you make for it? We might use, uh, ten to thirty traps per dungeon." Looking at Fife, Blake got a nod from her on the numbers.

"Well," Travis said, already feeling excited about this, "If you used the maximum amount, I'd have enough traps for ten more. As for monsters, with ten dungeons, I could let you have about twenty per dungeon. And those numbers will keep going up, so uh, go crazy and build cool stuff!"

"Thanks, Trav. I guess I need to get busy," Fife said.

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