Chapter 30 #2
“Have you tested it?” I asked.
Drae glared, and Stacey’s giggle sounded like an echo coming from inside a platemail helm.
“The armor is functional, Master,” Drae answered.
She yanked the sheet off of the other construct, revealing the exact same design except for a shroud of large beads covering it from head to toe and a centaur-like back half attached to its lower back.
But those weren’t beads. Every one of those little spheres was an Intoxicate+100 bomb, and the centaur half was filled with them as well.
When I added this construct to the dungeon spawn menu, I would use this version as the base.
Each time I generated one with the dungeon core, I would have all of the bombs removed–which was a simple and quick process, thanks to Drae’s design–and then the Byron bot could go on and serve its purpose.
Every time I spawned a Byron bot, I would add 125 Intoxicate+100 bombs to our strategic reserves.
“Excellent work, Drae and Stacey,” I praised. “Very well done.”
Drae bent over her workbench and lifted her tail. “Reward me, Master.”
I had too much on my mind to play this game right now. “Byron bot, fuck that demon until she’s unconscious. If that one,” I pointed to Stacey, “hasn’t gotten herself off 3 times by then, do the same to her.”
The hard-on-wielding construct did as I commanded and marched toward Drae. Stacey didn’t waste time and reached between her metal legs.
“Have fun!” I called as I made my exit and ventured to my office in the Grubiit dungeon. Thinking about how I had ignored my businesses made me feel guilty, so I decided an appearance was warranted.
Standing in my office, looking out over my bar full of adventurers, demons, and beautiful women, I debated my next move.
As soon as I cleared the tower, Byron bots would claim the plane of the angeli for me, the lowest of the 9 celestial planes.
We had already shipped more than 500,000 copies of Byron’s Blessing, Byron’s Bliss, and Penny’s Blessing through Arcturus, and he sold them to customers on every celestial plane, all the way to seraphim.
With that infiltration of the heavens still ongoing, the stage was well set for the Byron bots to deliver the coup de grace.
Adding the Byron bot to the dungeon core spawn menu would cost 2.5 million DP, and individual units would cost 250 DP a piece to spawn.
I intended to grow 10,000 Byron bots, so in total, this part of the plan would cost 5 million DP, bringing me down to 3,042,671.
Saving for the 10,000,000 unlock that gave me the ability to create permanent gates was still a priority, but with my daily DP gain of 21,988 and the costs of war, that goal only drifted farther away.
Advanced Transportation would help me solidify my place on the material plane, but it wouldn’t help me in a war with Abaddon the way soldiers would. Having an enormous reserve of DP that I could use to spawn thousands of units in the event of an invasion would be helpful, however.
Penny’s Bar and Bathhouse did its job every day by attracting high-level adventurers to my dungeon. Even better, my teleporter network allowed me to borrow adventurers from other dungeons as well, taking DP from those Dungeon Lords and making it mine instead.
I would always need more DP. Should I double down on attracting dungeon traffic, or should I invest in one of the other areas that generated DP? I couldn’t decide.
I mentally reviewed the criteria the dungeon core shared with me:
-Number of Adventurers
-Total Monster Levels Slain (Adjusted for Difficulty)
-Number and Quality of Heroic Deaths
-Volume of Adventurer Blood Spilled
-The Smoothness of Difficulty Curve
Spilling adventurer blood or pursuing “heroic deaths” worked against my goal of having more adventurers in my dungeon.
People couldn’t crawl my dungeon if they were dead.
I didn’t know how the core evaluated a dungeon’s difficulty curve, but the number of adventurers and total monster levels slain were simple enough.
More was better. Easy as that.
I already lured adventurers to the Grubiit dungeon with drink, drugs, and sex. What else would make adventurers choose to crawl my dungeon over any other dungeon in the world?
Having reviewed the few thousand unlock options stored in the core some time ago, one possibility came to mind:
Improved Monster Drops
Cost: 1,000,000 DP
Monsters in your dungeon drop larger mana crystals with a small chance of dropping rare magic items.
Adventurers would find that appealing, I believed, and they were likely to spend much of that bonus loot at one of my establishments. I would make more DP and more money at the same time.
I spent the DP to purchase Improved Monster Drops. The next unlock in that sequence appeared in the dungeon core menu, and I was intrigued:
Improved Mini Boss Loot
Cost: 2,500,000 DP
Monsters in your dungeon drop larger mana crystals with a small chance of dropping rare magic items.
If that progression continued how I thought it would, Improved Boss Loot would appear in that sequence eventually. That could definitely help as well. If I saw a return from Improved Monster Drops, I would come back and take Improved Mini Boss Loot next.
As long as my dungeon core hummed along, maintaining a military shouldn’t be an issue.
I had to plan to defend against Abaddon’s armies, but I didn’t have a plan for defeating him.
The best idea I had on that front was to create an absurdly powerful Podni bomb with Solara’s Absorb spell, but I didn’t know how I would actually get it near Abaddon.
Could I, perhaps, create a bomb powerful enough to destroy an entire plane?
If I could do that, how would I ever go about testing it?
Or maybe Solara could answer that question with math alone.
I made a mental note to ask her about that.
Going that route wasn’t out of the question, but my business partner, the Mistress of Covetous, might not appreciate my vaporizing the plane I promised to her. Yet, it was the best strategy I had.
So far.
Regardless of what the final plan ended up being, I believed that the good-aligned levels and resources I pillaged from celestials would give me an edge over my abyssal nemesis.
It would earn me the dark emperor upgrade from Corpse Builder, and then I could afford several city-scale upgrades as well.
The grand idea that won me this war was supposed to come to me along the way. No such inspiration had struck me, and I hoped it would soon.
If I didn’t use bombs, I could send Byron bots and silk soldiers to the abyss, taking on a seasoned military strategist who had centuries to prepare–and on his home field no less.
If I had constructs armed with an abyssal version of Solara’s Seraphim Slayer design, that might give me an advantage, especially with the Gol-Gol slime armor in the mix.
Whatever quest her Spell Forgemaster ability assigned, I was sure we could complete it to unlock the spell.
If the tradeoff logic of narrowing targets to increase the power potential of the spell applied, we could potentially go as far as to design a spell that only hurt elite abyssals, the ultra-strong members of Abaddon’s army most likely to pose a threat.
Those possibilities made me slightly more confident in my ability to win an all-out war with the King of the Abyssal plane, but the reality of launching an invasion was the same. Abaddon was likely to be far more adept at warcraft than I could hope to be.
I knew that Abaddon had a harem and that his first wife was a seraphim.
Sowing discord within his inner circle could destabilize the demon king, but that alone wasn’t enough to ensure my victory.
Even if two wives went to war with one another, it wasn’t like I could convince one of them to slit Abaddon’s throat for me.
I would still have to invade and kill him myself.
Given his history with celestials, I could, perhaps, offer one of the celestial planes to him as a means of brokering peace, a gift to precede a permanent treaty between our forces.
Of any potential offering, that was my best thought for what would actually appeal to Abaddon, but that created new problems, the least of which was having to acquire that plane in the first place.
If I gave him such a gift, he would have a whole new plane of resources to use against me whenever he desired, and Mammoni would be furious. If I could even get him to ignore a system quest in the first place, that is.
Fuck. All of my ideas were variations of two concepts: One, I magically became powerful enough to defeat him, or two, I bent the knee and begged him not to kill me.
Maybe I should return to the idea of poisoning him, as Podni suggested? That was more in line with my usual problem-solving methodologies, but the same concern I had then still existed now: How the hell would I ever deliver the poison if I somehow found something strong enough to kill a demon king?
Abusing a few followers might help me to clear my head, I thought. Yeah, when in doubt, rub one out. Dungeons and fucking had always worked for me. Blowing a load with 20 dicks had a way of centering my mind.
I was halfway to the teleporter for the statue garden, where many of my treasures were currently sunbathing topless, when I froze.
A thought occurred to me.
Could that work?
But it was absurd.
Or the absurdity was exactly why it could work.
By myself in my bar office, I laughed so hard that I cried.
I had my master plan. The first step in this new strategy: Unlock the antipaladin ability, Plague Bearer.