Chapter 8
They didn't need individual dungeon passes. They counted as summons, as extensions of the adventurer, but it took an hour for a supervisor to show up and confirm that.
A few dozen adventurers got to see my busty, halberd-wielding robots while we waited for the supervisor. Some of them twice. Several parties ventured inside only to retreat the second they saw the dragon. They stared at the golems just as much on their way out.
Great marketing was not the idea that gave me an erection. It was a welcome side effect. The real inspiration for the victory boner was a ways off. Getting constructs into the dungeon was only step one.
When I finally descended the long, steep slope of the cavernous entrance and saw the city on the dungeon's first floor, I was in awe. I had heard a dozen different descriptions of what the hardened lava looked like, and none of them did it justice.
I stood beneath a raised gate as if I had just passed through city walls and not a cave stuffed with three different parties arguing about how to get by the dragon.
The city was like an incomplete sculpture.
All of the edges were rounded, and the people still needed their bodies shaped and faces revealed.
The final form of this place was somewhere beneath, if only you took the time to chisel that way.
Delivering this scale of destruction to an entire city…
I saw that as a unique expression of power, and I couldn't help but marvel.
The volcano had frozen a moment in time, and that moment would never get to conclude. It would always be almost finished and nothing more. Human mages had sought that level of destructive power for millennia and never came close to stopping time as this volcano had done.
The parties already waiting at the city gate froze when they saw us. Rather, they froze when they saw the silk soldiers, but the effect was the same. They watched us walk by in silence.
“These constructs really have a chance against a dragon?” Higcliff whispered. His tone sounded more curious than doubtful.
“I've never fought a dragon before, so I don't really have a frame of reference. We'll know pretty quickly if they'll last long enough, though. We just turn around if it looks bad.”
“Your sense of ease is impressive,” Zane said, talking over his shoulder. “I wish I could be as relaxed.”
“I wish I had something tough to reply with, something like ‘I’m not afraid to die because I'm already dead.’”
The party laughed.
“Are we ready to do this?” Zane asked. When everyone nodded, he said, “Byron, on your mark.”
I sent four silk soldiers to our right, ordering them to attract the attention of the dragon and draw it away from the route we planned to take on our left. We kept the other 4 soldiers with us so we could use the same tactic to exit the dungeon when we came back through.
The constructs jumped to the rooftops and leapt across the city in great bounds.
One fell through a roof on its second jump but recovered admirably to follow the others.
Since they were so soon out of sight, each of the machines produced an unending whistle.
When the whistling stopped, I would know none of the constructs were left.
And no, these constructs weren't armed with bombs. We removed them and stored them for later. The bomb capabilities were best kept secret for as long as possible. A first-floor dragon wasn't worth revealing that arsenal to the world.
Dragon wings reminded me of the snapping noise the sails of a ship made in strong winds. For a moment, I was on the deck of a boat on its way to Zaglis, but then I was back in the dungeon.
I didn't actually see the dragon, but its shadow crossed over our party, and I could feel the beat of its wings in my chest.
The whistling grew distant, but it never weakened. All four golems sounded very much alive.
“Go!” Zane called, and we sprinted through the strange statue city.
As we moved between buildings, across streets and down alleyways, stone zombies staggered in our direction.
Ahead, a pack of them blocked the road. Higcliff uttered an incantation and summoned a stone barrier, except he laid it on its side like it was a ramp. That was clever, I thought. I had never seen that trick despite it seeming so obvious in hindsight.
We ran up the ramp and jumped off the other side.
A few turns later, we found a chasm with stone stairs running down its walls. I spared a glance over my shoulder. The last whistle of the lone surviving construct cut out. The dragon needed less than 8 minutes to defeat four silk soldiers. That was pretty good, actually.
A full-grown dragon needed zero seconds to vaporize adventurers with minimum levels of 20, so surviving 8 minutes was fantastic.
We ducked into a tunnel at the bottom of the stairs and paused to collect ourselves.
“Those stairs are new,” Zane said. “Does anyone recognize anything about the layout?”
Everyone shook their heads, except for the silk soldiers. They just stood there with their big metal breasts.
“Byron, you've seen dungeon changes,” he continued. “How much can be different?”
“A few features seem to stick around from dungeon to dungeon, but this could be a whole new floor.”
Zane sighed. “Alright, everyone, we can't assume we know anything about what we’ll find. If there was a dragon on the first floor, we could run into anything down here.”
So we proceeded with caution.
Lava and fire elementals flooded the second floor, so we were too distracted to notice at first, but the tunnels we passed through were lava tubes, and they took us back beneath the city.
We found a set of stairs with an iron hatch at the top.
From above, it probably looked like any other building floor covered in hardened lava.
If you knew where it was, though, you might be able to dig through and free the hatch. I suspected that was the solution for the dragon on the first floor. Get to this building and then go down instead of trying to cross an entire open city.
We left that hatch alone for the time being to preserve our exclusive access to this floor and set about exploring.
The original dungeon was pretty large in its own right, but the party seemed convinced it had grown.
We wandered for two days through caves and occasionally found small shrines like you might see on the side of a highway.
They varied, but each was some version of two decorative pillars holding up either end of a rectangular stone.
Sometimes those columns were raw rock. Other times, they were bricks. Or individual sculptures, or stacks of several smaller sculptures.
They struck me as something religious, but I couldn't point to any specific reason why. I wasn't the only one who was curious about them. The first night we made camp, Wistia’s party debated their significance.
“Maybe the eruption revealed them somehow?” Higcliff proposed.
Zane shook his head. “They're built on top of the dried lava flow, like they were added later.”
“No, you're right,” he admitted. “That's a good point.”
“I wonder if we will find more,” Wistia mused. “Or maybe something more elaborate. Travel shrines are always between places, so is there a place at the bottom?”
“That's an interesting thought,” Zane said. “City on top? Maybe a city on the bottom too?”
“If there is a city, that means more than beast types and elementals,” Higcliff suggested. “We might see more sophisticated humanoids.”
Gale and Hixxia laughed.
Higcliff raised his arms. “What?”
“‘Sophisticated,’” Zane teased.
Wistia leaned toward me. “This is a bit of an inside joke. Higgy hired live-in maids and called it ‘sophisticated,’ and we've been giving him a hard time ever since.”
“He’s right!” I argued. “That is sophisticated.”
Higcliff grinned. “Thank you!”
God, it was so easy to fool people. Agree with someone on something dumb, and suddenly they forget you might want to kill them.
“Getting maids was the best thing I ever did,” I said with a shrug.
Wistia hit my shoulder. “You're no fun.”
“I won't stand for bullying.”
Higcliff laughed. “You’re alright, Byron. You can take Zane’s job if you want it.”
“I don’t recommend it,” Zane joked. “It's a shit gig.”
Higcliff and Wistia both ended up being right, though that wouldn’t be confirmed until weeks after our run. The bottom of the dungeon wasn’t so much a city as it was an incredibly large temple, but there was a humanoid civilization down there.
We reached the third level on the fourth day and weren't provisioned to be in the dungeon much longer.
In the half day we had to explore, we encountered the outer edge of the underground temple.
We searched halls and chambers covered in artwork depicting naked women worshipping a red dragon.
The temple was guarded by female dragon kin of all colors, but the red dragon kin appeared to be superior to all the others.
They gave the orders, and they were always the most protected.
I would have liked to spend more time investigating than that, but we had to turn back.
That journey gave me a lot of time to think about how the Minsic dungeon had changed. This new chapter moved the dungeon story further forward than I would have thought possible. The other dungeon changes I witnessed truly felt like a single chapter, but the Minsic dungeon was far more than that.
In Lopav, the kobolds conspired with the Frozen Fiend to overthrow their lizardman masters.
In Flowst, the dam near a troubled kingdom broke and flooded everything, awakening a dryad seed deep beneath the castle.
In Grubiit, constructs and slimes took an evolutionary step forward, going from abandoned science experiments to strange new hybrids.
But Minsic went from a juvenile dragon sleeping underground to an adult dragon lording over a destroyed civilization, while an elaborate temple full of worshippers lived under the volcano.