Chapter 6
Alexi met me early the next morning as he promised. My favorite guild girl wasn't working yet, and that was more disappointing than I expected it to be.
A long-legged vixen with thick thighs and high black leather boots stood at the counter with Alexi. Her butt was like two halves of a globe, threatening to burst through her leather pants. When she turned, I saw she had full lips, green eyes, and black hair tied into pigtails.
Alexi welcomed me back. “Byron, this is Wistia.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. I activated Sense Weakness and learned her weakness was self-confidence. That was odd for the leader of an adventuring party, I thought.
Wistia cut right to the matter at hand. “Alexi tells me you want a tour of our dungeon.”
“If it's not too much trouble.”
“Thinking of relocating to Minsic?” she asked with a hand on her hip. “Should I be worried about more competition?”
“No danger of that. I'm just being a tourist.”
“You don't think you could keep up with me?”
I smiled. “I asked Alexi for a guide, not a trash talker.”
Hunger flashed across her eyes. “Sounds like you're avoiding the subject.”
Alexi looked around for an excuse to exit this conversation. In fairness to him, I was also surprised by the hard flirting from the very start–especially at 6 a.m. Wistia practically tackled me on the playground and pulled my hair.
Also, fuck Alexi. I wasn't letting him get away that easily.
“Guild Master Alexi,” I said. “Is everyone in this chapter this cocky, or is it just Wistia?”
“Well, uhh-”
She dipped her chin and looked up at me. “Is everyone in Grubiit as cocky as Byron?”
Alexi visibly sweat. “Happy to have introduced you two. I have appointments to keep, I'm afraid.” He spun on his heel and retreated to his office.
“We have a three-day crawl ahead of us,” Wistia said, attempting to be serious. “Give us a day off and come on the next run? I'd invite you today, but I don't want to surprise my party with something like that the morning of. I try not to mess with their heads, if that makes sense.”
“It does, and it's not a problem. If you happen to come back early, look me up.”
“We're not the kind of party to pull out early,” she countered.
“Maybe be extra careful this run? For me?”
She searched my face. “What makes you say that?”
“I've got a bad feeling about the dungeon today,” I cautioned. “I'm not trying to disrupt your confidence, but I would never forgive myself if I didn't say that and something bad happened.”
“Okay, Byron,” Wistia said with slitted eyes. “I'm intrigued, and thank you for caring. I'll leave word for you with the Guild when we get back.”
“Good hunting.”
She looked as if she wanted to say something but decided to teasingly withhold it instead.
I lingered as she collected the other 5 members of her party, 3 of whom were men. I didn't know what Higcliff looked like, and he could be in this party, or he could not be. In the few minutes they needed to pack up their things and leave, no one in the group referred to each other by name.
I turned to the nearest counter girl, a full-bodied blonde. “May I borrow a pen and paper?”
She handed me one of each with a smile. Standing at the counter, I started writing a letter and got as far as “Wistia,” when I paused.
“This is embarrassing,” I said to the girl. “Wistia just told me everyone's names, and I've forgotten them already. I wanted to leave a thank you for the hospitality they showed me.”
After a brief saunter, she leaned on the counter. “You're so thoughtful. It's Gale, Hixxi, Klein, Higcliff, and Zane.”
Oh wonderful. A little bit of luck was on my side.
Alexi having the idea to recommend them without my asking for anyone specifically would go a long way toward making me less suspicious.
Being from Grubiit on the heels of Horpus not getting what he wanted would raise any reasonable person’s eyebrow, but I had somehow avoided that completely.
At least so far.
How much Wistia knew about Higcliff’s behavior was difficult for me to gauge at that point in time.
Alexi, meanwhile, must have shit a brick when he first heard I was here.
The Fiend of Flowst. The Kingslayer. The man accused of being the sole force behind all the killings done by the supposed Reapers.
That same person was loyal to someone with good reason to be angry with Alexi and the Minsic chapter as a whole, and he just paid a surprise visit.
Alexi seemed to buy the story I was here for the dungeon, though. Otherwise, I doubt he would have put me in a group with Higcliff.
I was pleased with how this day started and the good fortune it suggested was in the future. For me, personally. Every adventurer in the dungeon was going to have a difficult time today.
Wistia's party was about to discover that the Minsic dungeon had changed, and she wouldn't be able to stop thinking about how I knew. A little intrigue would make her more forthcoming on dungeon intel and less likely to consider me a suspect in Higcliff’s inevitable murder.
Until then, I decided to have an ale and hang around the guild house.
In a few hours, adventurers would run through those doors to talk about the weird things they saw in the dungeon.
I passed the time until then mentally reviewing recent events and recent learnings.
Revisiting old ideas helped me to spot connections I didn't see before, so I made it a point to reflect regularly.
Thinking about the possible ways the Minsic dungeon might change that day got me thinking about my dungeon core.
When I inherited the dungeon core from the Gol-Gol brothers, I was gifted a no-cost chapter submission, which meant I got to write the next part of the dungeon’s story without spending DP. If the system accepted that submission, the dungeon updated to match.
I used that as an opportunity to inject more of my brand into the Grubiit dungeon experience and also to add new monsters to my spawn options.
My story added a succubus, upgraded most of the existing monsters, and added a new type of combat golem based on the reconstructed bodies of the demon hunters who chased the succubus into the dungeon in the first place.
That made me think of the Lopav dungeon story being about lizardmen forging a contract with an ice demon.
When Samson first acquired his core, it was probably a lizardmen-themed dungeon, but Samson liked ice, so that's what he added.
As soon as I gave him the Flowst dungeon, he did the same thing there, too.
Which led me to a larger realization: at 5,000,000 DP, paying to submit a new chapter was a big and very expensive decision.
For my daily DP gain, I would need 281 days to bank that much, and I couldn't see myself choosing a chapter over the more specific and less costly unlocks I could acquire instead.
I doubted I was the only Dungeon Lord to reach the same conclusion.
So why then did every Dungeon Lord blow the DP on a new chapter when I came to town?
Then it occurred to me. They weren't spending any DP.
For dungeon changes to be this consistent at that cost, the more likely explanation was that those Dungeon Lords got a free chapter because I showed up.
No way would someone like the Gol-Gol brothers, who were saving up points to unlock Cosmic Constructs for their spawn options, blow DP like that.
This whole time, I thought I was pissing Dungeon Lords off, but really, I was giving them a free upgrade chapter, or 5,000,000 free DP. Visiting their dungeons was a favor!
Except for the Gol-Gol brothers and the Flowst dryad, that is. Killing them wasn't much of a favor, but Lopav, Zaglis, Borja (twice!), the Capital, and now Minsic: You're welcome, you ungrateful pieces of shit.
If I hadn't received a bonus dungeon chapter yet, did that mean Samson hadn't once visited Grubiit after I opened my doors to him?
Was not wanting to give me a bonus dungeon chapter enough reason to deny himself access to a whole city?
Yeah, the Samson I knew would prefer me to be as weak as possible. I was certain of that.
Now that I knew how chapters worked, I was going to force him to visit Grubiit. I wanted my free upgrade.
Eventually, news of the dungeon change reached the guild hall, forcing me to turn my full attention away from scheming.
Prior to that day, the Minsic dungeon was a fire biome inside an active volcano. Fire and lava elementals were common, as were a few different reptile-type monsters, a goblin variant, fire worms, and a juvenile dragon that served as the dungeon’s boss.
The new chapter added a whole new first floor: an overworld city that had been encased in pyroclastic flow as if the dungeon volcano had erupted. Somewhere in that city was a path down to the biome that used to be the first area of the dungeon. Or so it was assumed.
No one had gotten through the new first floor yet.
All of the dungeon townspeople who had been encased in hardened lava reanimated, breaking away from their prisons to pursue adventurers.
The adventurers in the guild hall that day described them as nearly invincible zombies because the stone exterior made them difficult to kill.
They weren't exceptionally quick, but they didn't need to be.
In the expanded dungeon story, no one slayed the young dragon at the bottom of the volcano. It matured and triggered an eruption when it climbed to the surface.
That dragon, now a fully grown adult, patrolled the first floor.
One party wiped because the stone zombies forced them out of hiding as they tried to sneak through the city.
The adventurers had been waiting for the dragon to pass when the stone zombies caught up.
The dragon heard the fighting, flew in, and burned them alive.
Maybe I needed to rethink this dungeon tour angle I had taken. A stronger version of the previous boss was now a first-floor mob? Fuck that.
Shit. If Higcliff got himself killed, I wouldn't get the help I wanted from Horpus.
Once I had a read on what the dungeon changes were like, I took that information to Mirko at our new shop.
The enchantments we could flip for profit were limited to various forms of fire resistance in this case, so it wouldn’t be the windfall of revenue that usually came from a dungeon change.
We could, however, buy fire resistance enchantments in other cities and instantly put them on sale in Minsic.
That gave us an inventory advantage at a time when interest in the dungeon was suddenly renewed, so we would still come out ahead.
Wistia’s tan skin was cherry red from booze when I returned to the guild hall late that evening. Her party had pulled out of the dungeon, and she sent a messenger to my inn to let me know.
In that same message, she invited me to join her for drinks. The message didn’t mention it directly, but I suspected she wanted to talk about my hunch, which was good. My being around was even less suspicious if people saw Wistia and me together socially.
She dipped her head shyly when she saw me approach the table with her party. “I didn't think you'd come.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because-” she caught herself about to say something. “Because you're a popular man.”
As if to reconfirm that fact for herself, she looked around the guild hall. When I did the same, several people jerked their heads away, attempting to hide that they had been watching.
“Let's go somewhere else,” Wistia suggested.
The men in her party booed her for wanting to leave. I still didn't know which chode in particular was Higcliff, but that was only a matter of time at this point.
Wistia took me by the arm and pulled me to the door. She paused before we stepped outside.
“I need to tell you that I'm not a prude, but I just… I'm not looking for anything physical right now.”
“I don't have a problem with that,” I replied.
She studied my face, her hips twisting back and forth nervously. “Okay. How would you like to see a few touristy spots in Minsic?”
“That sounds great.”
“That doesn't sound lame?”
“Not at all. Lead on.”
Wistia did as I requested, and I followed her round butt out the door. The heat gave her skin a sheen and her cotton summer dress just the right amount of sweat for the fabric to cling to her form.
Outside the guild hall, the desert heat retreated with the sunset, and mage lamps started to click on.
“The oasis is the most popular part of the city,” Wistia said, guiding us down the street. “The mage lights look really pretty on the water. If the sunset is right, the whole oasis looks like watercolors.”
“Do you go there a lot?”
“Not often enough,” she admitted. “This is a nice excuse to change that.”
When Wistia described the attraction as an oasis, I pictured a small pool of water shaded by a few palm trees, but the Minsic oasis was quite large, actually. It wasn’t a lake exactly, but it was vast enough for rowboats on the opposite shore to look small in the distance.
The palm trees were more plentiful than I expected as well.
While they were certainly densest near the water, the bounty of the oasis spread green outward for a full block and a half.
With the sun setting and the gentle ripples of distant rowboats, the water looked like recently spilled paint, dozens of reds and purples swirling into each other.
Wistia looked at the water with sincere wonderment, the ripples of the oasis reflecting in her eyes. Her love for this place was endearingly wholesome.
“How did you know?” Wistia asked finally. She had held it in for an impressively long period of time, I thought.
“Know what?”
She scowled. “About what? The dungeon. How did you know it would be different?”
“I meant it when I said it was a hunch.”
“People talk, you know,” she said. “Anyone who thinks you're not calculating every little move you make is an idiot. You're not here by accident, and that was not just a hunch.”
“You decided that based on rumors?”
“Everything about you is a misdirect, but I can play along if you’re going to hold back. Now that you've seen the most popular part of the city, how about I show you my favorite place in the city?”
“After you,” I said. “I'm intrigued.”