Chapter 17
The Flowst dungeon was finally defeated, but not by me.
My party hadn't gone farther than the demon mini-boss guarding the castle gate at the top of the stone pillar.
News of the triumph got us curious again, so we returned to the dungeon, killed the demon guarding the gate, and started to explore the castle.
When the Dungeon Lord dryad was still alive, my party explored this structure extensively, looking for a four-pronged keyhole. The floodwater had since drained, and technically, the layout of the castle itself hadn't changed, but the sculpted ice made it feel like a whole new place.
Icy spikes and columns coated the old castle, turning the drab gray stone into a sparkling pale blue palace.
Ice sculptures of armored knights patrolled the halls, wielding frozen polearms and casting Ice magic.
Another ice sculpture joined them sometimes, but this one was unarmored and unclothed. And had a shiny frozen erection.
This is difficult to explain.
Well, not difficult. Uncomfortable.
Adventurers called them “boner knights.” The new boss of the dungeon was responsible for their creation, and until the recent success of another party, nobody knew what that boss was. When I learned it was someone I had encountered before, the boner knights made more sense.
The new boss was once a disgraced sorceress queen whose spirit was imprisoned in the depths of the royal tomb. No one outside of my party knew this, but that queen and I tag-teamed Purity once. I supplied the dick. The queen provided the tentacles. We all finished.
That technically made the Flowst dungeon boss an old hookup.
She must have enjoyed the dalliance because those stiff-cicles were recreations of yours truly, accurate down to the vein.
With how much we had invested in Byron's Blessing and Byron’s Bliss, the shape of my dick felt like proprietary property.
This sorceress duped my competitive advantage and couldn’t even be bothered to let me know.
If she had, I would have complained immediately and stopped these monsters from ever being made.
Since that possibility had long since passed, all I could do was laugh at the absurdity of copies of my dick running around the Flowst dungeon.
No one but me had put together who the boner knights were based on, and that was good because the sorceress queen had dark tastes, and she designed the monster accordingly.
Ice Byrons targeted and assaulted female adventurers.
I never had to resort to forcing myself on a woman, not once in my life, so I didn't appreciate that representation of me, and I was even less enthused when strange stories started to spread.
Female adventurers were rumored to surrender to it willingly on a regular basis, and one all-women guild was believed to have incorporated the monster into a new hazing ritual.
At any rate, the point is the Ice Byrons were never approved products.
More importantly, the new intel on the Flowst boss gave me what I needed to feel comfortable adding the sorceress queen to our dungeon rotation, so we hung a teleporter noose near the boss room.
We could now pop in for that fight as easily as we could the Borja boss room.
I had yet more boss XP to claim.
For the low and simple cost of a few gold coins, a Dungeon Brawler carried a silk noose to the bottom of the Zaglis dungeon, adding that to our shortcut list as well.
That was the easiest fight yet. The Zaglis boss was an amphibious, kraken-like horror that dragged adventurers into the water to drown them if it didn't rip them to pieces first. Podni and Solara fried it with Bolt damage, and the only job the rest of us had was to not touch the water while it happened.
We hired another brawler to hang a teleporter for the Lopav dungeon so we could add that encounter to the loop too. That boss was a frost demon, a weaker Frozen Fiend essentially.
Borja, Flowst, Lopav, Zaglis–That boss rush route netted us 850,000 XP in about an hour.
Eventually, Minsic and the Capital would join the route, and once we climbed high enough in the tower for the kind of big XP return I was after, I would incorporate tower encounters as well.
With Solara's Demons of the Storm, Podni’s mega Bolt bombs, my Unholy Smite, and Invia's Unholy Smite, we could overwhelm any of those bosses in seconds.
The Minsic dungeon boss had yet to be defeated, and the elder lich boss at the bottom of the Capital dungeon was believed to be the strongest encounter in the world. Even if we could get to that boss room, the rewards didn’t justify the risks. I needed XP, not challenges.
In addition to the XP, we collected the boss crystals and all of the boss loot. That meant we had a partial monopoly on aspect tomes and magic items coming out of dungeons, giving Sanctuary South a steady supply of exceptional merchandise.
If, for some reason, my party was ever unavailable, perhaps because we were climbing the tower, Cici did the boss rush by herself.
That way, all of the XP was fed into a weapon I controlled, and I still got all of the loot.
After a few years of Cici pitching in during our off days, she would be strong enough to end worlds all on her own.
XP wasn't the only resource we needed to grind for. I needed good-aligned levels for Invia’s Silk Sword upgrade, and I needed them for Corpse Builder as well. Thanks to my new ability, Hymen Harvester, I could gain 1,000 good-aligned levels if I fucked a virgin to death.
Well, the system description sounded more like the process of creating the levels killed her rather than my dick, but the outcome was the same.
Anyway, we needed a high density of willing virgins to do this efficiently. Invia's suggestion was to prowl the various university campuses, but that was too scattershot for my tastes. I proposed a different idea, and that took us to Orthlox.
I needed to add a new entrance for Penny’s in the city anyway, so that made it easier to endure the brief run from Flowst.
When the teleporter was active, Invia joined me because she wanted to spill blood, which will make more sense when you hear the whole plan, and Podni joined because she wanted to do more tests with Intoxicate+100 Bombs.
We were still making them by hand because of the delays in our construct creation, but that also meant more time to experiment and gather data.
The three of us stood in front of the Orthlox nunnery and next to a wagon half-filled with baked goods.
I flew a square of silk through a window into an empty room. Podni Silk Stepped inside and detonated four bombs, each enchanted with Intoxicate+100 twice over.
When she returned, I knocked on the main door.
A small, wrinkled woman opened the door. “Yes?”
“We have a donation for you, sister,” I said. “Food for the convent.”
“We didn't order any food.”
“That's why I said donation. This food is courtesy of Valice Chastain. Let us inside so we can drop it off.”
She opened the door.
+1 Will point.
And that was ultimately the sisters’ undoing.
Tell me your name.
Tell me where you're from.
Take this treat.
Sit down.
Say, “Thank you.”
The Will points trickled out of them and into me until I was brave enough to say, “Take me to your bed” to one of the nuns.
The old bag blushed and led me to the closet of a room she shared with another sister. And I started to grind for good-aligned levels.
A couple of things to note: It was a toss-up whether or not they got wet enough to fuck.
Sometimes it was a rainforest, and other times I gave myself cotton mouth from having to spit so much.
I had to climax for Hymen Harvester to trigger, so this was also a lot more work for me than I expected it to be.
The biggest surprise of the evening was how few of the nuns were actually virgins. I expected a few priest-fuckers in the mix, but out of 22 nuns, only 5 triggered Hymen Harvester.
Who was in charge of quality control around here? Abstinence was the whole point!
Whenever Hymen Harvester triggered, the nuns turned into black sand like dead dungeon monsters and dissolved to nothing. When it didn't trigger, Invia took the confused old woman into another room and killed her. Every nun we killed, minus a single exception, was level 1.
Podni didn't stick around for the whole night of grinding. She saw how well the bombs worked, and that was all she needed, so she left Invia and me to finish the rest of the job.
When the night finally ended–and goddamn was it a lot of work–we had 5,021 more good-aligned levels.
“You look as disappointed as I am,” I said to Invia as she dumped a few bottles of lantern oil along the top floor of the convent. “Didn't really scratch the murder itch, huh?”
She shook her head. “And we earned way fewer levels than we hoped.”
“Indeed. Indeed.”
“Stacey said she finished the sword but wouldn't tell me what enchantments she put on them,” Invia said, changing the subject.
She tossed an empty bottle on the floor and let it shatter. She pulled another from her pack and uncorked it, resuming her dousing.
“I thought I'd make it a surprise,” I replied.
“Can I be surprised now? I'll earn it if I have to.”
“You already earned it,” I said. “In addition to the fire crystal base, I spent some of the levels I had for other enchantments.”
Which was a Corpse Builder option:
100 Levels - Imbue a target weapon with an ability or spell that you know.
“I wasn't sure if the system would allow me to do what I wanted,” I continued. “But it did. When you use your ability to add that new sword to your Silk Sword summons, each of them will also have Slow, Ghostly Feint+5 and Sharpen+27.”
“No fucking way.”
I smiled.
“Nonstop Ghostly Feint activations and a 100% chance to ignore armor?”
I nodded. “Correct. Our enemies will see the illusion of the Silk Sword attacking one way when really it's attacking in another. And none of their armor will matter.”
“That makes my build as broken as Solara and Podni’s,” Invia said with a touch of awe.
“I'd say so.”
Invia threw her arms around me. “You're the sexiest man I've ever met. Once we wash all the old bitch off your cock, I'm going to thank you.”
When we separated, I held up a box of matches. “Would you like to do the honors?”
She gleefully accepted and laughed softly to herself when the lamp oil caught fire.
In preparing for our next tower climb, I revisited a point of concern that had bothered me before.
My over-juiced stats made it difficult for me to realistically assess danger levels.
That had been a problem for a while now, but my recent dump of Loyalty Pledges pushed it to a new extreme.
Instead of continuing to agonize over it, however, I opted to accept failure.
If I couldn’t resolve that problem when it was relatively small, I had little hope of fixing it now that the issue had ballooned to absurd proportions.
I would still avoid putting my party in extreme danger, to be clear, but stressing over it wasn't productive. Instead, I decided to focus on strategies that would make a fuck-up more forgiving. For example, I originally planned to spend my virgin convent coupons on this Corpse Builder unlock:
3000 Levels - Create an exact shadow duplicate of your build to fight on your behalf.
That duplicate could accompany us on runs or remain in Sanctuary South to protect the city. I wasn’t clear on how intelligent the shadow duplicate would be, but I expected it to be able to handle basic commands like any other summon.
But if I really wanted to keep my party safe, I would be better off using this option:
1000 Levels - Duplicate an ability you own and transfer it to a target of your choice. They learn the ability automatically.
To give them this ability from my character sheet:
Devotion Reaper
Passive Ability
For every follower who has proven their devotion to the Silk Noose, increase the durability and damage negation of silk under your influence or in contact with your body. Prerequisite: Reward for the Loyal
With 20 Oaths, the damage negation Devotion Reaper provided felt like having a force field. I couldn't remember the last time I had been injured in a fight, actually. That was more a result of how quickly we ended encounters than the protection Devotion Reaper provided.
But still. That protection was incredible.
Invia could swing a sword at my chest, and I would barely feel it.
Damage negation nullified the force of the blow entirely.
A punch in the stomach might not break skin, but it could still do damage.
Punching into damage negation, however, was like reaching for your toes.
You can push and strain for a few extra millimeters but still not get much further.
I wouldn't be able to give Ashley the ability until I had more good-aligned levels, but I could protect everyone adventuring with me, and that benefit would only improve as our kingdom grew.
My harem growing in strength meant that I, too, grew in strength. If I wanted my soldiers to fight for me, it was in my best interest to arm them.
After all, we had a tower to climb.