Dungeon’s Path Just A Wink – Chapter 375

Over the next two weeks, the entire world readied itself. Ace sorted out the teams that would go in first. Doyle worked on swapping out fully realized kobolds until most of his team had the scavenge skill. None were quite sure when things would finally go down.

Then it happened. All over the world, just outside of every settlent, a gate rose out of the ground that looked sort of like a Torii, except made of a strange yellow-ish green crystal with a heptagonal cross-section. Once fully uncovered, space wrinkled up, pulling away from the edges of the gate until it seed to tear free, revealing what looked almost like a pure black field, except when seen out of the corner of one’s eyes or in a reflection, it is a colorless white.

So people noticing this would go on to try a few spells and techniques to alter or improve their vision. While in doing this, the actual portal did not change in appearance, even from their peripheral vision, the reflection certainly changed. Those with more mystical forms of sight could see an inverse rainbow of sorts that radiated off the gate. While those who simply improved their vision acuity saw black waves ripples across the white gate.

Maybe if soone had been watching those reflected ripples, they would have seen what happened next while Ace got everything set up around the gate. No one was though and so Ally took the chance to sneak the team of ten kobolds through almost unnoticed. Almost being the keyword as The Jinn in charge of the soul lamp shop winked at her as she passed by.

Though Ally told Doyle not to worry about it too much. The jinn works for the system directly and so won’t be allowed to reveal stuff like that. While she can’t exactly go out and have a chat with him, as that would be stretching it. Him simply seeing her moving about, even with monsters in tow, isn’t going to be a problem. Well, as long as they don’t do sothing stupid like get revealed while bystanders are around to see them as well.

Not that Doyle has long to worry about that kind of thing because Ace didn’t prepare for so long only to stumble at the first hurdle. Within six hours, the final preparations are complete and three teams of ten are through the gate. Much to his disappointnt, Ace isn’t one of them, though Jim sohow managed to slide his way into a team.

In theory, Jim, even more than Ace, should have stayed behind. While Ace is only the ruler of the local town, Jim is technically the head of the planet’s Adventurers Guild. A much more lofty position. However, when possible the guild prefers actual adventurers take up leadership positions and so give a good bit of leeway for them to go on an occasional adventure.

And an adventure he was going to have. His team had been shaken by Bill’s death and for a while he had thought Tess would also leave. However, with ti to heal, she returned to heal, what with her having picked up healing magic. Above and beyond that, Jay Sela who had been in a temporary team with him had joined up full ti. Not to replace Bill, no one could do that, but the team had needed a sixth person and he filled a role they needed.

On top of that, since these were teams of ten, Jim also fit in four more people. Two of them even as they looked around at where the quest had dropped them, were joking about being the red shirts. Just a couple of guys who had been in town for a while, but certainly not the type of people you’d expect for Jim to pick up. Except Jim had had his eyes on them and liked their work ethic and moral fiber. Besides them, there was also one of Doctor’s suggested healers to take along and Nancy Williams to act as a secondary scout. After all, the team leader can’t exactly be skulking around all the ti, they need to lead at so point.

Not that any of them were going to be scouting for the next day or so. Well, not any further than the nearby buildings. Those would need to be checked out for any pre-existing threats. While none of the refugees had seen monsters, this was in a dungeon and it was just assud that the system wouldn’t make it a walk in the park either.

Though speaking of parks, that was exactly where Jim’s team landed. Even if few would likely call it such, it was indeed as park-like as anywhere on the entire planet was going to get. Just about a block of greenery at the center of a massive roundabout. From where they were, Jim could see at least seven lanes, though there might have been more as the crashed vehicles blocked the view.

Wherever this was based on had clearly been a place of non stop traffic. And as they did so basic scouting, this actually made things a bit safer. While there were buildings right up to the edge of what turned out to be a ten-lane roundabout. Those buildings were solid, with no obvious entrances. They clearly weren’t ant to be accessed from this particular road.

The second and third teams from Wolf’s Rest didn’t end up anywhere quite as exciting. Both were placed in areas very similar to what the refugees had seen. This ant a bunch of residential buildings. Yes, those buildings were still quite tall, but not to the level of being called skyscrapers, unlike what Jim was in the middle.

As the three teams spread out a little bit more, another difference is revealed. The area around the second team was quite open in all directions, looking more when you’re in the middle of a normal city. Even if the buildings did tend to be wider and heights more averaged across the lot of them. The third team saw much of the sa, though could see what looked like a wall or so such off in the distance. Except it was so far away that whatever it was, would have been the height of true skyscrapers.

Then there was Jim’s team. They quickly found that in each of the four directions the road went, said roads soon got covered over. Not just that, but the ten lanes began to split up into different heights. So of those lanes were even going down.

A discovery that worried Jim quite a bit. And so, as the rest of the team sets up camp, he has Kelly do a little side project. That of digging a hole. Already the buildings around them were quite tall, if a little shorter than skyscrapers. Though the fact that wherever possible, they had used those quartz bricks was a bit strange.

However, Kelly didn’t have to dig far before she found a flat sheet of tal. So, she digs another hole, and another, and another. Each ti, no matter where she placed it, there was a sheet of tal at the sa depth. Or, as Jim now suspected, the sa height. They weren’t in a small bit of greenery that was left to grow in the center of a roundabout. They were on an elevated green space with who knows how many levels of building below them. The entire area was likely ant to act as a vent for air circulation on a massive scale.

With that discovery, Jim pulled Nancy back from her scouting. This wasn’t a situation to be scouting alone. Kelly couldn’t even fathom what kind of work would be required to make a place like this, let alone the rest of the team. And it had been built without magic. That, at least, was easy to tell. While there was obvious devices making use of magic, they were clearly either new equipnt or had been retrofitted.

Those last ones being of particular interest to Kelly. While devices made to work with magic from the get go would be useful. The retrofitted devices would provide a much more useful look into things. After all, they would have a direct analog in sothing non-magical to compare it to. This would be especially helpful if they could find sothing like a magic motor that still relied on combustion or magnetism instead of pure magic.

Though with all three teams focused on setting up camp, that leaves a certain group of kobolds to check on. And either the system or the dungeon was placing people in much less than random locations, because they had ended up in an area that looked quite a bit like at one point monsters had been tearing the place up.

So buildings had been reduced to rubble, with massive claw marks quite clear. One such building even appeared to have had the rubble shoved around into the shape of a giant nest. Though not all of the buildings had collapsed. Just as many still stood.

This, however, was a matter of sothing having wanted them still standing. One built over with what is clearly the paper nest of so sort of wasp. So with the windows all busted out in the upper floors to provide nests for so kind of flying beasts. Though most nurous are buildings that almost look perfectly preserved. Except, anyone with a keen eye would soon notice the lie to this facade.

Those buildings, seemingly preserved, had been ho to the undead. Had been, being the keyword. Despite all the clear evidence that the ten kobolds had been dropped in the middle of so sort of danger zone, there were no swarms of monsters. The giant nest was empty, no wasps buzzed around, and the undead weren’t glare out from the dark buildings.

A fact that carried over to every single team from every single community. While where the kobolds had ended up was the most obvious place to have been inhabited by monsters. More than enough, other teams had at least seen signs that monsters should, in theory be around. The question on everyone’s mind was this a grace period, a safe zone at play, or would the quest truly just be exploring the ruins?

Hah, as if anyone with two brain cells to rub together actually believed that last one. The system wasn’t just going to give them free rein. Besides, why put the required party size and participation ti if there wasn’t any danger? If this has truly been an alien world without any danger, the system wouldn’t have to force people to join. It would just have to promise the place was free of dangers and people would have flooded in to try and discover stuff.

At the mont, actual magic items were non-existent. Sure, there was probably a few pre-system objects that managed to gather enough conceptual weight that they beca magical. But this quest represented a chance to find more down-to-earth things. Even just a masterwork pot enchanted to heat up and powered by just world energy would be a massive boon.

Wolf’s Rest was lucky that their dungeon provided wood. Many settlents were having problems providing enough fuel to cook food and heat houses. In fact, the self-heating pot likely wouldn’t even necessarily be used to primarily cook food. Instead, being more needed to heat a house or similar.

Sure, such enchanted items wouldn’t be that common as they couldn’t be mass produced. Whether by craft or dungeon, the masterwork pot would need to be provided by an actual person. However, as clearly seen by nurous refugees, this world had clearly been using magic to power things without them being enchanted.

Though with that in mind, there was one very disappointing discovery made by any of the teams that knew enough to look for it. All the random stuff they could loot? None of it was masterwork quality. So of the teams even tested this by seeing if they could bring items out and they weren’t just set dressing. And on one hand, they were thankful that they could bring the items out. On the other hand, even once out, the items weren’t masterwork. It seems the system wasn’t quite ready to hand out tons of masterwork things. After all, just one stationery store would have likely set a town up for making magic scrolls for a good long ti.