Dungeon Expedition: A Dungeon Core Fantasy (The Fallen World Book 2), page 1
THE FALLEN WORLD
DUNGEON EXPEDITION
BOOK 2
PLAYWARS -AKA- ALEX S. WEBER
CONTENTS
Summary
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Adventure Continues…
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Maps, Character Art, and Lore Files
Acknowledgments
About the Author
SUMMARY
One more step toward vengeance, but another toward war.
Alexandra’s dungeon has finally been discovered, and as news of her existence ripples through the world, empires and kingdoms take notice… and prepare for war.
Her isolated dungeon sits between two nations with a rivalry that is centuries in the making, and neither is willing for the other to control the powerful dungeon that could link their war-torn nations. The Republic will do whatever it takes to enslave her, even if it means an all-out invasion.
For Alexandra to keep her freedom, she’ll have to form a questionable alliance with a pair of former enemy adventurers, all while preparing for a secret war of her own. While the humans squabble in the light, she is building an army in the dark. She will be no one’s pawn, and she intends to use her new powers and superior forces to find her friends and get vengeance on the ones who took them.
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ONE
Red Sands Deserts, Asarian Kingdom Border
City of Darthar, Adventurers Guild Hall
Starvak looked at his tablet and sighed.
He put the tablet down and contemplated the simple message on it.
This was it. After all the shenanigans of the last couple of days, it was finally time to reveal the dungeon’s—Crystal’s—existence to the rest of the world.
Oh, he knew some organizations and nations had to have gotten their hands on his reports. He had faith in his colleagues. Well, most of them at least. But given the abundance of guild halls and guildmasters, it was almost certain that someone had leaked the information, whether accidentally or in exchange for a favor or a payoff. That wasn’t even counting the possibility that the communication network of the guild’s leadership could have been compromised, or that more conventional espionage techniques could have gotten hold of the information.
But this would make it official. This message, sent to every guild representative at every court, ruling council, and senate on the planet, would proclaim the existence of a new dungeon.
Usually, he would have preferred to wait until he had a firm presence established there, but it wasn’t an option. Thanks to Elkaryos, he was fairly sure he’d have an expedition up and running before anyone else. But quite frankly, hiding a newborn dungeon’s existence was always tricky at best, and it was outright impossible in the current context. Darthar was too big a trade hub to have a guild expedition of the magnitude required to establish a survivable presence in the wastelands not be put under intense scrutiny. While the dungeon would flourish eventually, it would still stay a deserted hellscape for a few months, depending on how proactive the local population would be at terraforming the land and reclaiming the wastelands. Anything affecting the flow of trade was too vital not to investigate.
And that train of thought brought him to the next point. That in this case, withholding the information could be actively dangerous to the guild’s reputation and standing. Dungeons were always an important affair, but this… This was much more than that.
“Link dungeons” they were called, dungeons that bridged the wastelands separating entire chunks of a continent, with said bridge being called a “link.” They had always been massive hotspots for conflict and trade, but they were rare, very rare. After all, they usually happened only once or twice for every continent, depending on the size.
He sighed again and leaned over his desk, and before he could think to stop himself, pressed the “send” button.
“Wait, seriously? Why can’t I just create some out of thin air?”
“I have no idea. I don’t make the rules.”
Alexandra shook her head and looked at the wall. A wall currently made out of iron ore. Which was rather the problem. She was, with Emilia and Jared, inside one of the portions of the original tunnel system that she had severed from the rest of the dungeon when making her redesign. Right now it was connected to the workshop through a long tunnel she had dug up mere minutes ago.
“So let me sum this up. I can create a regenerating deposit of ore mixed with stone, any ore I come across, which will regenerate over time by literally regrowing, for an absurdly small mana upkeep, but I can’t just create the same quantity of loose ore? I mean, no, I can, it’s just, what, ten times as pricy? And creating pure ore costs even more per weight!”
“That about sums it up, yes,” the vampire girl said, nodding. “Although the ‘pure ore’ compared to ‘mixed ore’ price per actual weight of metal apparently changes depending on the ore. It’s closer to a thousand times more expensive for mythril, for example.”
Alexandra looked at Emilia and pinched the bridge of her nose. Sometimes the...quirks of her dungeon nature gave her headaches. And she wasn’t physically supposed to have them anymore! Or maybe she was. Did dungeon cores have some version of aspirin? She shook herself slightly. This wasn’t the time to go on a tangent. The problem at hand was key to her plans.
Apparently, she wouldn’t be able to just create loose piles of ore for her golems to throw into a furnace, she needed to actually mine it. That could prove problematic. Transport and handling shouldn’t be an issue, her golems were deceptively strong, but mining it in the first place... Contrary to popular belief, pickaxes and other traditional tools sucked at breaking down rocks and ores. In fact, the most effective method during the Middle Ages was to pile up wood, set it on fire, then once the flames had died quench the searing hot rock wall in water. The thermal shock then weakened (or outright broke) the rock, and it was just a matter of prying the ore out. The problem was that it was time consuming, and quite frankly extremely inefficient in terms of manpower and time per weight of ore extracted, not to mention the dangers of having fires in confined spaces.
One of the reasons the iron and steel industry had enough raw materials to expand was that Nobel came along and boom went the dynamite. Literally, in this case, since his invention of the high explosive let large-scale explosive mining take place much more safely than with black powder, some types of which were actively suicidal to use in such a confined, industrial environment.
The problem was that she couldn’t synthesize nitroglycerin (yet) for dynamite, and while she was fairly sure she’d be able to manufacture black powder soon, there was no way in hell she was going to use it in a large-scale mining operation, especially if she had the forges nearby, as she planned to here. Dynamite was stable and easy to contain. Black powder, at least the most basic version of it, most definitely wasn’t.
Which brought her back to the conventional tools.
She sighed. “I’m going to have to make a miner golem with a pickaxe, aren’t I?”
“Probably, yeah.” Emilia shrugged. “To be fair, you don’t need that much ore yet. You’re trying to manufacture weapons and armor for your golems, not build an ironclad warship.”
“True.” Although Alexandra didn’t mention that she planned to produce far, far more than mere weapons and armor. There was no need to panic her poor advisor. “I suppose they’ll at least be better at it than normal humans would.”
“Well, low-level ones at least. You should see what a high-level geomancer can do. They can dig a hole the size of a castle in a single day if they really want to!”
Alexandra raised an eyebrow, and reminded herself—again—not to take anything for granted here. Sure, she had a fairly good idea of what medieval and early industrial technologies and techniques could do, mostly thanks to books and documentaries. She had quite the hobby back in the day when she was still building energy weapons assembly lines for Fleet Logistics and Arcadia Systems. But those capabilities were from Earth. Not Alcheryos, which was apparently the name of the planet she was standing on, where magic and superhuman powers were part of everyday life.
“Point taken. But let me guess, you don’t have a book about these spells nor any training in them.”
Emilia looked at her feet and fiddled with her grimoire, squirming a bit, and Alexandra had to stop herself from patting her on the head and telling her it was alright, although her resolve steadily eroded at her advisor’s cuteness.
“Welllll... No.” She sighed and looked up at Alexandra, meeting the dungeon’s gaze. “It was hardly considered a priority, if only because a dungeon is the greatest geomancer there is. You can build or destroy entire mountains in a matter of minutes, so it was assumed that any geomancy spell I could learn would be entirely redundant. I’m sorry.”
Alexandra sighed.
“It’s fine. It’s not like your family or teachers could have foreseen my...unique view on things.”
Emilia put her hand in front of her mouth, hiding a giggle behind a cough.
“Ahem! That’s something of a euphemism Alex.”
The Earth-born smiled.
“Perhaps. Anyway, a golem with a pickaxe should be fairly easy to make. Ditto for a basic rolling cart. Now, we get to the fun part!” Her smile turned positively insane, and Emilia suddenly looked very worried. “It’s time to build the forges of hell itself! Let the fires ROAR!”
“Wow. Okay this is way bigger than I expected.”
Elkaryos smiled in the corner of Allya’s vision as she peeked out of the curtain.
“Well, I might have...emphasized the importance of this event in my invitation.” His smile fell. “It is unfortunate that we cannot announce your new title of nobility as planned, because of the security reasons. But, at least the preparations didn’t go to waste.”
That, Allya thought, was one hell of an understatement.
She was currently in the backroom of the city’s public square stage, peeking out the curtain at the massive crowd gathered before it. She had seen bigger crowds of course—there were only about three thousand people there, nothing compared to the millions that gathered during the annual Imperial Address in Starcore, the capital of the Eris Empire, where the ruler of the Empire made a full speech to the citizens of their realm and apprised them of the plans for the coming year. But she hadn’t seen one this big gathered for her since she was awarded the title of knight valiant, and she’d almost fainted on that day! The only thing that had kept her from doing so was Cassissa constantly throwing innuendos and having to restrain herself from strangling the insufferable princess. Which, now that she thought about it, might have been the reason her erstwhile friend had teased her as much.
Well, at least they weren’t here for her. Thanks to Elkaryos’ vague wording in his original dispatches, they had been able to deflect her ennoblement ceremony into a private affair in the city’s castle, where she had sworn fealty to the Kingdom and the Count. The young noble had seemed quietly amused rather than infuriated at her schemes and possession of the dungeon, which was a relief. The last thing she wanted was to have her liege hate her guts. And in place of the original public ceremony, they’d slotted in Starvak’s announcement of the dungeon’s existence and the formation of the expedition. Which, with Alkeryos’ full backing (both financially and in terms of influence; it’s amazing how much faster things go in a city virtually owned by the merchants guild when one of their highest-ranking members is on your side), would leave in only three days. Allya wasn’t a specialist of this kind of thing, but Pyn, who had been part of several large cross-wasteland caravans, had told her that it was an impressively low time, especially when supplies had to be gathered on such short notice.
“Well, it’s time. If you’ll excuse me Lady Aubétoile?” Starvak said.
She turned around and opened her mouth to tell the old guildmaster he could just call her ”Allya” before seeing the twinkle in his eyes and realizing that he was messing with her. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and stepped to the side, letting the dwarf pass.
She had to admit, he didn’t look like much (he was like, a meter and ten at best?), but he carried with him an...aura. A presence, so to speak, of authority and assurance the likes of which she’d only seen in Imperial Guardians and a few of the generals of the Eris Empire. It was strange how he managed to somehow trigger this at will, as he most definitely hadn’t during their private meetings.
As soon as the guildmaster passed, she went back to peeking, hearing a chuckle from Elkaryos. She looked at him, her eyebrows raised, and he simply waved his steaming hot chocolate mug at her. Where had he even gotten that? They were several hundred meters from his house and Jeremy was guarding the entrance, alongside Valker.
“After a while you’ll learn to look as impassive and disinterested as possible—while remaining polite of course—while things like that go on, without missing any of the information. It wouldn’t do to let your enemies know you’ve been surprised or are otherwise stressed out by such revelations.”
The assassin-now-baroness slowly nodded.
“I see. Well, I don’t have your mastery of the art of dissembling yet, so if you’ll excuse me?”
The dark elf nodded, smiling at her rebuke and taking a sip of his hot chocolate. Allya shook her head, and went back to looking at the crowd. Then she felt something touching her shoulders, and it took her a split second to realize it was Pyn’s chest, as she looked over her.
“Wow. That’s a lot of people.”
“Yep,” Allya said, torn between being annoyed at the taller elf and embarrassed by the fact that Pyn was pressing her fairly large bust against her. “Most of them look to be adventurers. Although there’s a large collection of merchants here. I think I saw a few of them holding the bigger stalls in the bazaar, but I’m not sure.”
“Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough. Starvak is about to speak.”
Allya stopped looking at the crowd and refocused on the guildmaster, who had just stepped up behind an absurdly small podium. He tapped the crystal in the center, and the sound reverberated into the whole plaza, relayed by multiple other crystals dispersed on tall metal poles throughout it. Allya winced. This kind of apparatus, which was pretty expensive, might appear just a harmless way for politicians to boost their own ego at political rallies (and not rely on people repeating what they had just said), but she’d seen it converted into a sonic weapon in one of her more...bloody jobs. It had been terrifyingly effective, and completely stunned the crowd as she and her colleagues disposed of the targets that had been on the stage and their guards.
“Greetings, people of Darthar! For those who do not know me, I am Guildmaster Starvak Estorius of the adventurers guild. I head the guild in this very city. We are all gathered here today because I have a very important announcement to make.”
The dwarf stopped for a second, masterfully building anticipation, before he leaned forward.
“A new dungeon has been discovered. And I am mounting an expedition to explore it and settle the region around it.”
For a few seconds, the crowd was stunned into silence. Then, a scarred dwarf in heavy armor, with a double-headed battle axe protruding over his shoulder, threw both of his fists into the air and yelled.
“HECK YEAH!”
This seemed to break the spell, and an incomprehensible mess of exclamations, questions, and expletives flowed out, each louder than the last. Starvak waited for a few seconds, then held his hands out for silence. Most of the adventurers quieted down quickly, while the merchants continued yelling at one another. Starvak’s face darkened. He almost gently pressed a button on the podium, and the crystal stopped glowing. Allya’s eyebrows rose until she saw him take a deep breath, at which point her eyes widened. He wasn’t—
“ENOUGH! This is most unseemly, ladies and gentlemen! Control yourselves!”
