Dungeon Tour Guide 1, page 35
part #1 of Dungeon Tour Guide Series
I stepped backwards, counting in my head. One… two… thr—
The body exploded into a shower of viscera and flame, incinerating the rock that had killed it and eliminating its corpse.
I’d remembered right. Mephits self-destructed on death, even the base forms, though those only really did heat and blood while the more advanced forms used other types of damage—ice shards, acid bursts, and the like.
I wasn’t quite sure where I would put them yet, but there were decent odds I ended up just using them as fodder enemies. See how adventurers dealt with them.
The thing was, their explosions were pretty powerful, but you could pretty easily get rid of them by just double-tapping the kill. They were functionally going down to 1 HP and then exploding, and finishing the kill would make that stop.
It would be a good lesson in showing adventurers that you could never really be sure that something was dead until it was dissolving away. There were a number of monsters with that trait I could think of that the Kingsguard might use.
With that finished, all I had to do was wait, regenerate mana, and think about how I was going to guide people from here on out.
I went to grab pen and paper, silently thanking Rose for having the forethought to get me some.
This is going to work out.
Minus One returned at sunrise. I had no idea why they were here again, but they were pretty heavily worn.
For some reason, they were carrying a sofa?
I met them in the safe room as per usual, closing both doors to the dungeon.
“Hey,” Rose said, obviously tired but still chipper somehow. Her armor was torn up, and I could see new scars on her arms where magic had healed wounds imperfectly. “I told you I’d get you one of these.”
“Okay, you’re going to need to back it up a little, here,” I said. “Explain? I don’t even want to ask about the chair.”
“I picked that up,” Ryan offered. “There was an open store on the way here.”
He was similarly hit, sporting another fresh set of scars. His armor seemed largely untouched, though.
Troy had taken the least damage, but he still looked weary as hell. “Hi, Lucas. Good to see you.”
“You were injured,” I said, a vague anger that might’ve been protectiveness burning within me. “What happened?”
“Oh boy,” Rose said, “have I got a story to tell you.”
Chapter 47
“Do you have everything?” Rose asked, practically bouncing with excitement.
“Troy has his stick,” Ryan said, rolling his eyes and smiling. “I didn’t let the order know about this, so… no armor, unfortunately. I have my sword, though.”
“It’s an arcane focus,” Troy protested. “And are you sure you’re going to be alright without your plate? I know how good you are with that blade, but…”
“It’s fine,” Ryan said. “My sword is magical, and I’ve practiced enough to fend off a few bandits.”
“Don’t kill them all,” Rose said. “You never know which of them might’ve been forced into it.”
“I understand,” Ryan replied, patting his sheathed sword. “The order emphasizes the sanctity of life.”
“I’m just saying,” Troy said, stretching his arms out, “if someone tries to kill me, I’ll probably try killing them back.”
“That’s fine,” Rose said. “We’ll see how it goes. This is our first time, after all—all the books in the world can’t accurately simulate what it feels like in real life.”
They’d delayed their first adventure together for what must’ve been months at this point—between Ryan’s training in the order, Rose’s business trips with her mother, and Troy’s never-ending lessons, the three of them had been hard-pressed for time.
Still, they’d managed to assemble a time slot, though that was in part because of an emergency. One of Rose’s mother’s Ketz vaults had been raided, and though the loss of the gold within hurt, it was the disappearance of a work-in-progress artifact that’d caused widespread alarm. Her mom had canceled her plans, Ryan’s order had been mobilized, and Troy’s teacher had been enlisted to locate where the bandits had taken them.
Thank the goddess, Troy’s teacher was still an adventurer at heart. He’d recognized that Troy might want to take part in this, and after judging the situation as one that probably wasn’t too high-risk, he’d ‘accidentally’ let the coalition’s plans slip to the [Apprentice Mage].
“Remember, guys,” Rose said. “Four hours.”
“More than enough,” Troy said. “The old man gave me a specific enough location and path. They’ll definitely pass through the valley in the next half-hour.”
“And we’re almost there,” Ryan said. “Let’s get set up as fast as we can, shall we?”
“Yep, yep,” Rose said, nodding. “The projection was six of them, right?”
She was going over information they all already knew, but she was so excited. This was their first proper adventure! After her mother had spent so long telling her off every time she went into the woods to practice her more offensively-oriented songs, Rose was finally going to be able to give her the finger and take part in something real.
Rose couldn’t wait.
The thirty minutes stretched on for far longer than they should’ve. During that time, Rose double-checked that everyone was full on mana and ready to go at least six times.
At long last, though, their target was in sight.
“There,” Ryan said, pointing to the entrance of the valley they were situated above. “The caravan’s coming.”
The ‘caravan’ in question was a single covered wagon, pulled along by some magical power instead of horses and flanked by four identical armorclad behemoths.
“Woah, those guards are bigger than I thought they’d be,” Rose muttered. “That’s gotta be, what, two and a half meters?”
“Around that, I’d gauge,” Ryan said. “It makes sense, right? They need strong soldiers to guard a valuable target.”
“There are still only four of them,” Troy said, one hand on his chin. “Plus, if the old man’s right, two more inside. That’s not much to guard a supposedly powerful artifact.”
“They’re probably pretty strong,” Rose said. “They’d have to be, otherwise my mom would’ve never even considered waiting four hours to gather her forces together.”
“Can we even do this, then?” Troy asked. “I don’t want to back out now, but if even your mother needs time to prepare to deal with these people…”
“We can,” Rose asserted. “My mom wants to have a hundred percent chance at success. Our chances might be a little worse, but we can think of something, I’m sure. Some way to lead them off. If it comes down to it, I can try to [Song of Displacement] one or two of them away.”
“Something’s weird with them,” Ryan said. “They’re too perfect.”
“Too perfect?” Troy asked, joining the [Knight] at his position atop the edge of the cliff. Fifteen meters under them and about ten meters to the left, the horseless covered wagon was slowly approaching them.
“Their movements,” Ryan said. “They’re in lockstep. As far as I can tell, they’re not missing a single beat. They could just be super well trained, but…”
“You think it’s something magic,” Troy surmised. “Let me take a look.”
Rose felt the air shift as the [Apprentice Mage] drew mana to his eyes in a novel application of [Detect Magic] that his teacher had revealed to him a month or two ago.
“Shit, you’re right,” Troy said. “Their entire armor is magical.”
“Doesn’t that just mean they’re more powerful?” Rose asked, her heart sinking. That would be hard to deal with.
“I don’t think it’s that,” Troy said. “If I trace the magic back… oh. Oh, damn.”
“What is it?” Rose asked, trying a little too hard to not sound desperate. They’d finally managed to come on an adventure like this, and now having any reason to not turn back in the face of overwhelming firepower was her last thread of hope for this to still turn out fruitfully.
“There’s magic at their core,” Troy said. “It connects to a spot inside the caravan.”
“That means they’re…” Rose flipped through encyclopedias that her mom had made her memorize, ages of despairingly long lessons finally coming in handy. “Automatons? Constructs of some kind?”
“That sounds right,” Troy said. “If you can get those four away from the wagon itself, I might be able to make a play.”
“Do you need us to go down there?” Rose asked.
“Anything works if you can distract them—safely distract them,” Troy said. “Can you do that?”
“I can try something,” Rose said. As a matter of fact, she had been practicing something for niche scenarios where she had to distract someone. “Wish me luck!”
She ran off, sprinting away down the valley’s edges. The caravan wasn’t moving very quickly, so she was able to outpace it pretty easily.
When she was at least thirty meters away from her two best friends, she looked down into the valley.
Rose breathed deep, and then she sang.
It was a basic song, a boss theme from one of her other self’s favorite fantasy games back on Earth, but it was infused with just the right mana for it to trigger a [Song of Provocation].
It was an almost useless spell. She’d likely not be able to use it anytime in the near future. What kind of physically weak [Bard] like her was going to explicitly try to attract attention to herself from enemies that could easily take her out in one hit?
She wasn’t quite sure why, but it worked well enough. The guards noticed her, and then they started walking towards her, all four of them abandoning the caravan.
Why? Why had they left the caravan with the valuables unguarded?
Unless… Troy had given her reason to believe these were automatons, artificial creatures of steel and mana. Maybe her spell had hit the people controlling them, causing them to send their guards on a wild rampage?
Whatever the truth was, she had to get out of here. They were gaining on her fast, each of their steps cracking solid rock underneath them, and they didn’t seem to care about silly little things like gravity as they quite literally ran on the walls of the valley to get at her.
“Good work, Rose!” Troy shouted. “Now watch this!”
The [Apprentice Mage] activated the [Manaburst] he’d been so proud of perfecting, sending a bolt straight at the wagon.
Rose was too busy running for her life to notice the impact, but when she turned her head back, she saw that the roof of the caravan had a massive hole punched through it, revealing two armored individuals inside it along with…
“There are two artifacts in there,” Troy said, panting with effort. “Goddess, I love this spell, but I don’t think I can cast it again for a bit.”
“Your vision tells you that?” Rose asked, still sprinting towards them.
The [Apprentice Mage] nodded, hands on his knees. “I think Ryan might be able to spot them out.”
“I see them,” the [Knight] said, walking to her and leaning closer so that she could see where he was pointing at more clearly. “Can you?”
If Rose squinted, she could just barely make out three vaguely box-shaped items within the still-moving caravan. One of them was all too familiar to her, but the other two—both substantially smaller—were completely new.
“I can get those, I think,” Rose said, preparing to sing.
Before anyone could comment on that, she sang, weaving the powerful mana provided by her unique [Final Soloist] skill into a jaunty tune about a girl escaping the chains that had bound her for years, and her [Song of Displacement] manifested inside the caravan below them.
She kept singing, strengthening the song, and she had to hold on to Ryan’s armored shoulder to keep herself stabilized as the mana drained out of her. Still, she’d gotten it to work, and her three targets were flying through the air with all the grace of a crippled pelican.
They barely made it up onto the flat part of the top of the valley when her song gave out, the mana escaping the weave and dissipating into thin air, but they made it.
“Holy shit,” Ryan said. “You did it.”
“I did it!” she shouted, a mixture of adrenaline and elation filling her even though she hadn’t seen any combat. “We did it!”
“Destroy that box,” Troy said, pointing at the smallest one of the items she’d fished out.
“I got it,” Ryan said, drawing his sword. “Why?”
“Automaton control unit,” the [Apprentice Mage] explained simply.
Ryan got to work attacking it. Between the power of his sword and his practiced strikes, he eliminated the box.
In the distance, the robots—er, automatons, Rose got her words mixed up sometimes—fell, their strings cut.
“That was so cool,” Rose said.
“Yeah,” Ryan replied. “I didn’t get to do much, though.”
“How about this,” Rose said. “Let’s look around. See if there’s anything else worth doing in this area. We have the day to ourselves, after all. I’ll drop Mom’s artifact back off to her and leave before she figures out how I got it, and then we can go into the woods and see what we find. We’ve got another artifact that I don’t need to report to Mom and plenty of time. Let’s find another adventure, yeah?”
“Now that,” Ryan said, grinning, “sounds like a plan.”
And so, the three of them walked off, heedless of the two Kingsguard still left standing behind them.
On that day, they discovered the Ketz dungeon, and their lives were forever changed.
“I can’t believe it’s only been, what, a few weeks? Maybe a month or two? Anyway, it really hasn’t been that long since we found Lucas’s dungeon,” Rose said. “I feel so much stronger now than I was then.”
“Can you imagine what it’d be like if we had to handle that again?” Troy said. “We totally could’ve just taken down the automatons ourselves.”
“Screw that,” Ryan said, puffing up his chest to exaggerate his words, “I could’ve done it myself. A few [Agility Boost]s and I could’ve just taken the artifacts and left.”
“I still don’t think we should be using that artifact,” Troy said. “I still can’t make heads or tails of it, but it makes me uneasy.”
“It’s made some of our training sessions seem way more effective, right?” Rose asked. “I feel more powerful when it’s out. I don’t actually know what it does, but… I think it’s useful.”
“Didn’t that one intruder… the [Astral Monk], right? Didn’t she have a Kingsguard artifact on?” Ryan asked.
“Think so,” Rose said. “But I keep it in the vault most of the time, and we’ve got a load of security on it. If they wanted to activate it, I feel like they would’ve when we first got it.”
The three of them were standing just outside the vault in question. Though Iris had claimed to never spoil her child, Rose was sure that even a blind man could see that the [Bard] had been afforded certain advantages in life.
One of those advantages was this. A vault large enough and safe enough to store any magical items, money, or just really anything she wanted. It was voluminous enough that she could’ve easily fit half a mansion inside there, but she couldn’t deny that she appreciated her mother giving her free reign with it.
“I guess,” Troy said. “I do agree that it feels better when we have it in training, but I’d still like to err on the side of caution.”
“It’ll be fiiiine,” Rose said, drawing out the word intentionally. “Come on. It’s been a long day. I’ll treat you guys to ice cream or something.”
“That sounds nice,” Ryan admitted.
“As soon as the guards finish changing their shifts,” Rose muttered. “It’s been a fair bit longer than usual.”
They normally swapped shifts in under a minute. Rose was sure that it’d been at least five by now. What was the holdup?
The [Bard] tensed. Maybe it was just because they had just been having a discussion about the artifact they’d stolen from the Kingsguard, or maybe she was just being paranoid, but something felt off.
Her guard never missed shift swaps. They were paid far too much to risk that.
If not incompetence, then…
Malice. Enemy action.
“I’m going to go check in on them,” Rose announced, stepping forwards towards the entrance of the building that held her vault. “I’ll—”
The doors smashed open and fog spilled forth, obscuring the bulk of the vault from Rose’s view.
It wasn’t dense enough to hide the figure within. Rose looked at the person walking out of the vault, carrying an awfully familiar spherical artifact, and… she vaguely recognized one of her guards.
“What are you doing?” Rose asked. “What’s the deal with this?”
The figure stopped in its tracks, and mana flashed around the man, coalescing on his body.
“Kingsguard!” Ryan shouted.
Rose’s eyes widened, and she dove for the ground just as the man she’d thought to be her guard blazed towards her at speeds that would’ve been mind-bending if she hadn’t witnessed Ryan sprint.
She registered a single twinkle of light reflecting off the blade descending upon her, and she raised her arms in front of her face, knowing it wouldn’t be enough.
The blade made impact, a metallic clanging reverbing throughout the air hard enough to rattle Rose’s bones, and she looked up.
“Go!” Ryan shouted, deflecting a second blow with his sword. “Out of melee range!”
Right. She recovered from her shock, singing a brief note to begin a [Song of Displacement] that pushed her away from the enemy.
And this was an enemy, that was for sure. Whether it was someone else that was mind controlled or a bona fide Kingsguard infiltrator amongst the ranks of her guards, he’d taken the artifact that she’d stolen from the Omen king’s army, and he’d just tried to kill her.
She switched her frame of mind, clocking out of the chill out with friends mode and swapping to fully focusing on combat.
