There is no Epic Loot here, Only Puns. - Chapter 181: Skull and Eyes

Delta expected something a little more respectful from Fairplay, despite everything. Less than two days after the robot invasion, groups of them began to enter her Dungeon once more with their one or two Finger-Badges. Delta could now see clear differences in some of the badges. There was a type holding a sword or an arrow, and very rarely, one holding a book. None of them made it much further than the Mushroom Grove or the Goblin Fort.

Billy and Numb were honestly terrifying in their own way. Billy took down whole groups when he was bored, stalking them from the shadows, and Delta had to remind him he wasn’t allowed to ‘soul gulp’ any of the poor people.

Numb went through any group like a bowling ball, his fist making strikes with a dashing smile.

Cois was acting odd, but Delta gave him space. He wasn’t one to be rushed, and Delta had time to let the goblin come to peace with whether he wanted to evolve or not.

There was a marked difference in how Fairplay operated now. Less like a steamroller and more willing to play by the rules. Some of the groups swapped out their swords and spears for blunter versions, while their mages didn’t go so hard on the lethal elemental spells.

It clearly was not something they enjoyed doing, being ‘gentle,’ but they respected their orders if nothing else.

Fairplay was just one thing, but what was more exciting, or ‘concerning’ if you ask Nu, were the groups coming between Fairplay.

Adventurers had finally been let into the Dungeon, and they had come in droves.

There was just one little issue…

‘Maximum number of outsiders in Dungeon. The Entrance is sealed!’

Delta was roomy, but fifty people at once, even spread across floors, just wasn’t going to work. The fact that the second floor was ‘a mark of expertise’ made Delta understand something she just didn’t want to admit before. Her Dungeon was just a little…

“DON’T BREAK THE POTS!”

“Duck! DUCK! Retreat!”

“I can’t get out of the mud, I’m in plate armor!”

Delta’s Dungeon was a little misleading.

The weird thing was that despite tons of new people coming, the offerings that some left remained common stuff. Copper, some local wood sculptures, the same old coin and change, and not a lot more.

Delta was hoping for something a little more special or interesting after a while, but she guessed Adventuring was a lot like buying storage units off dead people and hoping that inside was a treasure trove.

More often than not, it was a cost sink with a rare windfall. The people bought what they needed, carried what they could, and moved on.

“If you killed them, their gear would likely be more interesting,” Nu said, reading Delta’s thoughts. Delta stared down at three people getting tossed about and tormented by Merry and Twittee.

“I can’t. They’re just so sad to look at,” she said after a moment.

“One of them got knocked out by your sign before the Spider-room. One of them was beaten before they reached the first room. Nu, I’m drowning in noobs,” Delta said with a pitying expression as one of the adventurers climbed down the well in the Goblin Fort room, thinking it was a secret passage past the unstoppable duo of Billy and Numb.

His scream when he found Clamamity was shrill.

Delta might need to make a rotation of the goblins. Numb one time, Billy another, and Cois in between. Three at once could be a challenge or a raid!

Still, it didn’t solve her current issue.

The solution to her problem was there but Delta had a problem to the solution to her original problem.

Create a Secondary Instance to allow more people inside at once? Instances are mirror dimensions of your Dungeon, replicating it down to the last detail. These collapse and do not respawn monsters after the Adventurers pass through, making them cost effective. However, all personalities and more unique event markers will be toned down to make the cost affordable.

All Mirror Dimensions lead to your true core.

These mirror copies of her Dungeon felt like a step forward, two to the side, and then three back. The whole point of her Dungeon was to show how murder and bloodshed weren’t the only options. These mirror dimensions would be badly generated AI mimics that people would treat as normal Dungeons.

The other factor was that interaction with people helped her monsters grow. Shunting most of the adventurers into little fake copies would also be depriving them all the experience.

She tried to get more information from Prim.

Mirror Dimensions are collapsible and unable to be changed by the core due to their impermanence. Those sensitive to the Dungeon can use different methods to tell if they’re in the true Dungeon or a Mirror. The most obvious is that the entrance can still be seen and interacted with in the true Dungeon while in the Mirror Dungeons, the entrance is obscured by a wall of mist.

“Hm good to know, but it doesn’t offer a solution,” Delta mused as she watched an adventurer sneak past Numb and into the Hog’s Head, only to be knocked out by Fera when he tried to charge her.

‘What solution do you even want?’ Nu asked irritably as if he found all this to be beneath them both.

“Work backwards?” Delta said, thinking about it. She wanted people in her Dungeon, but didn’t want to be overloaded. She wanted a way for a lot of people to be in her Dungeon without causing congestion. This was important but she didn’t want to forsake her values and her intent with low rate knockoffs.

Thinking, Delta opened her menu and found the Instance menu. It seemed innocuous enough with a purchase button, a destroy button, and customized button-

“Oh what does this button do?” she hummed and pushed the quivering screen with one finger.

Instance Customization.

To unlock this you must pay 20 DP-

“Add to basket and order,” Delta said instantly. She had so much DP due to everyone’s offerings, and the occasional dropped item, that it was a wonder how she got anything done before.

Delta paused and grimaced.

Right… Mushrooms.

‘Option purchased!

Instance Reality Logic now functional!

Error, numerous bugs have been detected due to corruption of the core system. Continue?

“Eh, I don’t see why not?” Delta said with a shrug.

Instances:

Mirror Dimension: 50 DP

Boss Rush Mode: 30 DP

>n>secretgardenprison<>

All Monsters are now Blackhole Piggles: 1000 DP

Linked Overmind Zone: 300 DP

“What’s that last one?” Delta said, ignoring the rest with all her willpower.

“Five Instances are melded together to make a truer experience of the Dungeon. All Monsters in the True Dungeon ‘exist’ in both, experiencing two bodies at any given time. This is usually done to allow Dungeons to maintain lethal tactics used by certain monsters or bosses across all instances. The memories of one zone do not merge with the true Dungeon monster until it is defeated in the LOZ instance or the invaders fail and are ejected. This will only cover the first floor. Repeated purchases for other floors at increasing costs are available after the purchase of this instance.”

“It is six times more expensive than a normal Instance, but how much would floor 2 cost if I got the same purchase?” Delta asked slowly.

“500 DP”

Delta almost let out a woop of excitement but had to ask one last question.

“What’s the downside?” she asked and Prim hesitated.

“LOZ instances are true in both directions. If an event would cause immense destruction in a LOZ and the True Dungeon at the same time, the damage would be considered doubled at the same space instead of spread out. The more LOZ instances, the higher chance you risk the possibility of a dangerous attack occuring at the same place at the same time in all the zones. The result is multiplicative, not additive.”

Delta stared at the screen,

“I exist in more dimensions, but all dimensions lead back to me if something goes wrong,” she summed up as she thought about the purchase. If there was an exploding He-Ro unit on every LOZ instance and her true Dungeon…

“And I bet I can’t close an instance if people are inside?” she guessed as she floated over Waddle’s lake.

“No. If there is room in the True Dungeon, they might be moved there, but otherwise the instance cannot be closed.”

“It’s risky and an unnecessary risk compared to normal Instances,” Nu chimed in, making the screen partly blue and partly green with smidges of orange in places.

Her menus were beginning to look a little like a poisonous mush-

Frog. A cute little frog.

“It’d only be a risk if my monsters were weak or mindless. I trust them to protect me, I trust all versions of them,” Delta said confidently and bought the upgrade.

It was going to be fine-

—-

An orange mote in a still land of gray. It vibrated. It shook. It shivered.

Then it split into two identical spheres of the same shape and size.

The subspace used for Dungeons to contain their ever spreading bodies was monitored closely by Brother, and he stared as the first instance of Delta dwarfed others massively. The balance looked perfect at first, but unlike other Dungeons, threads of green and blue sprouted between the two orange spheres, causing them to come together in such a way that there was a tiny bit of overlap.

The blue and green ‘veins’ spread around each sphere, making them look like some very scary cherries.

It looked like a set of eyes.

—

Delta was worried she might gain a twin (an evil one), or perhaps she would begin thinking in hyperspeed with double speak, but… it was just like adding a new floor to her Dungeon. The only difference was the LOZ went sideways and sort of glued on to her Entrance.

Delta just existed there, same as before. She did feel more anchored to the world, more real in a sense of having metaphysical weight.

“That could have been worse,” she admitted.

Her screen next to her was constricting, then contracting, like a heartbeat with the sides melting, only to solidify with a snap a second later.

“Nu? Prim?” she called out, a little nervously.

The screen turned totally blue as Nu seemed to return.

“It’s fine! We just encountered an unknown sensation. We are at peak condition with salad dressing. Salad… no I meant serenade… no I didn’t.”

The screen turned teal, then aquamarine, then leaf green, then blue again. Delta peered at the screen, then went Dungeon Mode to utterly gaze at them.

Nu and Prim had their wires crossed due to the fact that the system had tried to take everything over, including them, to ensure quality.

It didn’t see Nu or Prim as separate, leading them to be all bunched up. It was easy to fix as she grabbed Nu’s ‘self’ and sort of just pulled off Prim’s green bits. Her grabbing and moving was actually deep complex coding that she didn’t quite understand how she was doing, but her Dungeon Mind was excelling at.

If she pretended parsing and call commands were fingers while references and debuggers were her pulling motions… it worked out.

Mana, soul, self, and other tiny things were just fun little symbols that hurt her mind to gaze at. She held Nu aloft, admiring how his essence looked more refined than Prim’s. It was even a little fun to gaze at Nu in a Dungeon sense.

MeNU: System? Partner? Co-COre? Nu.

Status: Operating. Annoyed. Scared.

Origin: Piece of Delta soul, willingly offered. Sudden existence. Imprint of Defining Item.

Delta tilted her head. That was strange. She suspected she had pushed Nu into sentience, but that last statement was interesting. She clicked on the tooltip.

History of consumables:

1: Soul of ‘Delta.’ Merged, did not affect item history.

2: Broken skull.

3: Dirt (Removed to make space)

4: Stone (Removed to make space)

5: Mushroom.

“I absorbed a dead person?” she said with a grimace.

Error: Skull was consumed at a time of low processing. Item was not catalogued. Error: Skull cannot be loaded as it was used. Error: Skull cannot be located due to history. Error: Delta, please stop!

Delta blinked out of Dungeon vision to see that Nu was still in isolation in Delta’s overpowering Dungeon grip. She gently eased his personality back into place and he shuddered visibly on the screen.

“That was… I’m sorry,” Delta said quietly with a little guilt as she now saw she had been burrowing deep into Nu’s being like a dentist with no anesthesia.

There was a long pause, and Nu grunted, forming his human body to show his discomfort, but not any signs of betrayal.

“You owe me one semi-lethal trap now,” he said finally, not wanting to address what Delta saw.

“Nu, what was that skull?” Delta asked, not willing to drop it.

“No clue. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to process it. I don’t want to meddle with it,” Nu said stiffly, and Delta stared at his blue back for a moment.

“It was a woman’s skull. Not yours. The shape does not match your avatar’s projected features.” Prim said, managing to pull herself together, which was a little impressive.

Even Nu seemed surprised to hear this.

“No clue whose it was?” Delta said, feeling like she was sitting on a mystery this whole time.

“Only that she was adorned in rusty metal left to decay in the elements. A shallow grave, or buried another way. The metal was not absorbed as rust was not a preferred element to your beginning growth according to the records left by the grand system.” Prim said firmly.

“Sis knows, or Brother does. If they don’t wanna tell me, it’s because it must be like what Gamma is under. A person people are tracking by someone saying their name or something,” Delta rubbed her nose, feeling a headache come on.

She gave Nu one last look.

“You truly know nothing?” she asked, pleading for him to trust her, and Nu sighed.

“Only that Fairplay, before we even met them… makes me angry,” he admitted and disappeared.

—

Mharia listened to them talk, her presence like a shadow. Delta could see her, would see her, if she cared to look, but the Dungeon was like an ant colony. It was so very easy to just become another little bug in a small tunnel.

This explained everything.

It explained how Mharia had been so wrong when she tried to fight Delta.

The possibility of the bloodthirst, the potential to fall, the power to ‘hear’ the Silence… it had never been in Delta at all.

It had always been in Nu.

Luck or fate? Mharia honestly didn’t know.

Mharia was honestly glad now that she got her royal behind handed to her by Delta. Nu was…

Unbalanced as she was. If Nu had been a person or perhaps even whatever the hell Delta was? Then Mharia would have had some confidence in manipulating the Menu if she had known.

But Nu? Nu was a cold and desolate moon to Delta’s radiant sun. Almost a shadow, but the term wasn’t correct. No, Nu had become something else.

Instead of a shadow cast by light, Nu was a cold ringing echo to the song that was Delta.

Mharia couldn’t wait to see what would happen next.

—

Yattina bent down and picked up a frayed piece of fabric, the stuff slightly stained with a dry ichor that still glimmered a little silver in the light. The woods around Durence still had a sort of stillness to them that she found unsettling.

Like the land was holding its breath to surprise her. The fabrics led Yattina and a squad of Blades to a clearing where something akin to animal attack had taken place. Pieces of silver fleck and cloth seem scattered about, but there was a figure propped up against a nearby tree near the center of the carnage.

It looked like a normal average man that had raw skin barely healed over and bloody patches of his scalp exposed as if something had ripped his hair out violently.

The fabrics they found seemed to have come from this man.

Estal had given an image of one of the Silver-people. A human messed with tumors of silver and monster parts.

This man was normal, if badly wounded.

“Sil?” Yattina called and the man fluttered his eyes at her, not seeing well.

“Esta..l?” he groaned and nearly fell over. Yattina caught him, fearing no ‘infection’ as most did. Silver-taint was not infectious, and anyone who did a modicum of research would know this.

“Who did this to you?” she asked, and Sil frowned in pain as she tried to speak with a tongue that must have felt too smooth, too normal.

“Animal… Old master. He came… called… me? Not me anymore. Silver, ever shifting. Wolf, then a bear, then a nightmare,” Sil heaved. Yattina frowned, trying to get water to his lips.

“Silver…like the old Dungeon?” Yattina asked, and he drank the water with a moan that sounded like he hadn’t tasted properly for years.

“Yes. Core that walked… it passed through, and it sensed me. It took the silver from me. Drained. Left, said the area was too… dead. It didn’t like this area,” Sil heaved and wheezed around the water.

Yattina’s blood froze in her veins.

“It spoke?” she whispered.

“Yes. It said this area was teeming with old memories. Old parts. It wanted them back for… the rematch? Old match…” Sil said, his eyes closing as exhaustion took him.

Yattina stared at him.

Old parts? This was a dead town until a few months ago. Any parts should have withered away long before Delta arrived.

What the hell was going on?

—

Gentle shivered as he felt the wind blow on the back of his neck. He felt spooked as if someone was watching him from the trees or the shadows, but that might just be Durence itself. Ever since the Dungeon exploded and Miss Yattina was made to be in-charge, Gentle hadn’t had much time to visit Deo or explore much. Still, he had the eerie feeling someone was watching him.

No matter where he went unless it was on patrol around the Dungeon entrance, he felt watched.

His skin itched, his joints felt stiff, and he was constantly anxious.

“What’s wrong?” the older teen called Lim asked, and Gentle showed him an apologetic look as they stood guard in front of Miss Yattina’s room. They didn’t make for a very intimidating set of guards, but Yattina seemed to trust them over others.

“Don’t know. I just feel like something in me is wanting to go somewhere. Never felt it before,” he admitted. Lim smiled.

“Adventure is calling, but do it after your shift,” he teased. Gentle nodded seriously.

This urge… he could tamper it down. Gentle had to do it a few times in his life when he went out of the safety of Fairplay HQ.

But it had never been this strong.

It had never been this emotional.

He jumped as Yattina rushed past to the infirmary located nearby the blades carrying a deeply scarred man who looked delirious as he rambled aloud in some hysteria. His eyes locked on to Gentle’s startled ones and he pointed.

“You! Danger!” he warned, the whites of his eyes giving him a mad expression as he locked on to Gentle.

“Wha-” he began, but the man nearly grabbed Gentle by the hem of his uniform.

“Called! Run! Called! Must run! You are me!” he said, spittle flying before he collapsed into a sagging heap, being carried away quickly.

A pretty woman in high heels walked by, pointing.

“He’s confused! Nobody sue him for anything! I know a form of fireball from Wizard Weekly that ensures you all get a bad tan!” she growled, defensive of her ‘friend.’

“She’s beautiful,” Lim mumbled.

Gentle was more aware of her heels leaving cracks in the cheap wood floor.

‘Scary’ was more apt.

Still, the man’s words were disarming.

Argus Gentle was nothing like a stark raving madman.

At least, he hoped not.

It was hard to tell these days.

“You wanna be part of the Dungeon groups?” Lim finally asked as he stopped ogling after the weird mage woman. Gentle shook his head.

“Dungeon air makes me ill. Prefer being outside,” he admitted with a wince.

This Dungeon was especially bad. It was stomach churning, the potency of the mana and more. Plus, happy Dungeons were just… weird.

Not ‘murder happy,’ Gentle understood that, but to see a Dungeon supposedly so fluent in an emotional range beyond ‘eat’ and ‘outsider’ was really weird.

Feeling the air a little thick, even this far back in the camp, he covered his mouth to cover a belch of stomach acid and pulled his hand away to see a mix of saliva and flecks of a dark gray metal.

It was getting worse…