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The girls returned to the dungeon entrance to camp for the night and then began their journey again. This seemed to be their strategy. They would progress a little bit, learn all the tricks and traps, and then progress a little further. This method of dungeon running was certainly different from the previous team I had encountered. It wasted a lot of time, but I didn’t particularly mind that. My dungeon points were going up much faster this entire week thanks to their presence.
Since I had so many extra points, and they even had left the dungeon for a time, I was able to make purchases. I ended up making a few small modifications on level three and level four, just to keep things interesting.
The party got up in the morning and then began their seventh trek into the dungeon. They used the bridges they had constructed to quickly pass the first floor, and then when they reached the second floor, they encountered one or two rats. I figured it’d be unbelievable if they just encountered no rats from then on, so I acted like rats were still being produced but at a diminished pace. Either way, the number was low enough that they could knock them out quickly and then continue with their journey.
“Ah, was this here before?” The leader finally noticed the alcove with the tentacle monster inside.
“Th-that’s where I found the helmet!” The mage cried out immediately. “There is nothing else there!”
The girls gave her a strange look, causing her face to turn red, but they ultimately accepted her words and continued. As they passed the tentacle trap, the mage kept a wide berth, eyeing it uneasily. The tentacles wouldn’t come out of hiding unless someone was in the alcove, so the party had no way of seeing the monster, and without an item on display in the alcove, no one had any reason to push themselves into that space anyway. The mage only let out a breath as they finally headed down to the next floor.
Before they had left the previous day, the party had already surveyed and discussed how they wanted to tackle the third level. They didn’t decide on a boat like the last group. They hadn’t noticed the caustic nature of the slime yet. They just thought it was slippery, so they planned to treat the ice like they were going ice climbing. That was to say that while waiting at camp they used their available daggers and attached them with rope to create rudimentary pickaxes. They were only able to construct three, so they tied a rope around their waists to create one long chain, and then the people in front got the pickaxes. As they crawled, the stronger ones in front would pull along the weaker ones in the back.
The mage, being smaller and having the least strength, was assigned to the back, but her trauma from being left behind the day before seemed to surface, and she threw a fit about being last until the archer agreed to take her place. Like that, the group continued forward the leader in front, followed by the healer, the mage, and then the archer. Although the archer had more arm strength than the white mage, her somewhat impressive chest made her quite top-heavy, and the other girls didn’t want to drag her around.
“S-sorry…” She looked like she wanted to cry as the other girls glared at her. “I’ll pull my weight.”
The mage, in particular, seemed to be rather displeased while looking at her chest and comparing it to her own.
The result was that the women began their horizontal ice climb. Since they had prepared ahead of time, they were dressed in warmer gear than the previous party, and with the picks, they were able to have quite a bit of control. If even these guys could handle this pace this intelligently, I couldn’t think about how foolishly Misty and Diamond had challenged it back then.
“M-master…” Misty twisted slightly when she noticed me eyeing her. “Did I do something?”
“Never mind.” I shook my head, not wanting to offend her.
Unlike Diamond who deserved to be put down, Misty was far too pleasant to be around.
“Damn it.” The girl in the front began to curse in annoyance. “This goo is making it hard to hold onto the pickaxes.”
She had been moving ahead with ease, but as goo inevitably covered the pickaxes, the handles became slick and difficult to hold, making their progress slow down. At that point, the group came upon the split path. After some deliberation, the leader decided to keep going straight. I whistled. This was going to be a doozy.
“Eh… we’re going faster? Ahhh!”
After heading around the bend, the slope started to turn slightly downward. It didn’t require too much extra DP to just change the room’s elevation slightly. In this case, I made it so that if someone went down the wrong path, they would end up sliding the rest of the way. The entire party ended up slamming into the far wall, the dead end of that hallway, before they even realized they had gone the wrong way.
I realized with Misty that as soon as they saw the dead end, they would just turn back, making that last fifty meters of hallway practically useless. I thought about using a treasure chest to lure them there, but considering everything, I decided to make it a slope instead was the best way to maximize the hallway’s use.
“If it had been like this back when we came, we would have been likely trapped there for some time.” Misty couldn’t help but shiver.
For the wrong party, this trap would be enough to wipe them out, but on the surface, it wasn’t even really a trap, and wouldn’t register as one on the Dungeonco scanners. Either way, the Unbroken Bond wasn’t a party that would be trapped by this.
“This dungeon…” The White mage rubbed her butt which had hit the wall hard.
“Is it an F-rank dungeon?” The ranger couldn’t help but ask again.
“We’ve already gotten two magic items. As an F-rank group, what are the chances we’d be able to raise enough to buy a magic item?” The leader demanded.
The other girls looked away, slightly ashamed expressions on their faces.
“We were just saying… it’s hard.” The ranger looked a bit ashen.
“If dungeons were easy, then everyone would do them!” The leader glared.
“Why don’t we take what we’ve gotten so far and leave?” The mage asked. “It’s a good haul.”
“You want to give up like that?” The leader glared at the others. “There is more treasure! I know it!”
“I’m just… tired.” The mage looked down, not willing to show the embarrassed expression on her face.
“Alright, fine, let’s have a vote.” The leader declared. “Two magic items, if we sell them, we’ll eat well for a month. However, if we keep going, we could potentially find a complete set. The boots and the helmet match. If we had the whole set, they sell for five times the price of the individual parts. If we can find the rest of this set, then we can make enough to live pretty for a year!”
The white mage pulled the two items out of the sack they had them in and looked at them carefully. “Ah! Y-you’re right! The helmet and the boots do appear to match.”
I couldn’t help but scratch my cheek awkwardly. They technically matched in that they were all just part of the steel armor set. I did that because it was the only armor I could afford that also had hard enough material to easily transcribe. I made it all a set for aesthetic reasons. I hadn’t realized that a complete set went for more money.
“So then, raise your hand if you want to walk away with just this.” The leader pointed at the two items.
“I do…” The mage raised her hand.
“And who wants to keep going?” She raised her hand, followed by the other two. “Sorry, outvoted.”
The mage bit her lip but otherwise didn’t fight back. I took a breath of relief. I was worried that I had pushed things too far and that they would end their journey early. Thankfully, their greed was still enough to keep them going. The girls, used their pickaxes and managed to climb back out of the decline, then returned to the side path. However, rather than taking it, they took out a nail and hammered it into the ice, then tied a rope to it and returned to the beginning. It was clear they planned to use the rope to bring themselves there quickly the next day.
The party left the third floor and started back to the entrance once again. The mage girl, in particular, had her head down in resignation. When they passed the alcove on the 2nd floor, she stopped all of a sudden. Although they had removed the rope holding each other together, they still noticed this time.
“I… need to do something.” The mage spoke quietly, holding her arm. “Go ahead, I’ll be fifteen minutes.”
“Ew… you can’t wait until you’re outside? You have to do it in here?” The archer asked. “It’s like a twenty-minute walk.”
The mage’s face turned red. “I-I can’t! Please just go ahead.”
The girls made faces, but they continued with their walk. I was a bit curious, but not that curious. I knew that people had to do their business, inside of a dungeon or not. It just seemed like they might be misunderstanding her intentions. She waited until they were far ahead of her, and then cautiously turned back and walked over to the alcove. I frowned slightly, wondering if she was looking to get revenge. She was a mage, so a well-placed fireball could probably take care of the monster. They weren’t all that expensive, but it still would suck if she did it. I couldn’t help but tense.
That’s when something unexpected happened. She took over her clothing, stripping naked. Shaking slightly in the cold dungeon, she stepped into the alcove.
“P-Please, be gentle.” She whimpered.
My mouth fell open as the tentacles came out and wrapped around her. She didn’t fight them as they bound her against the wall. Even though I wasn’t controlling them, the tentacles still seemed to do roughly the same things I would have done, exploring her body before ultimately entering her insides. She kept her eyes closed the entire time, but she let out pants and moans as she let the tentacles violate her. This time, I remembered to collect the cumshot into a vial. I then took that vial and made it part of a treasure chest hidden in an alcove at the bottom of the decline.
That way, the next time someone fell in that decline, the treasure would keep their greed up, so they wouldn’t have that crisis of wanting to flee. The dungeon could waste people’s time, but it needed to have awards too to keep them interested. It was a whole balancing act that I needed to get better at.
Meanwhile, ten minutes later, the naked mage stumbled out of the alcove after I made the tentacles release her. Her nipples were swollen and puffy, her mouth was chapped, and her pussy was gaped and leaking. She quickly got dressed, and then gave a slight nod to the tentacle monster.
“Thank you.” her face cutely turned red and she turned and ran off to catch up to her party which was already on the first floor.
I couldn’t help but stare in wide-eyed wonder. Misty seemed to notice and so she spoke up.
“I told you, Master. Those who chose to enter dungeons are missing something. Wealth, fame, excitement, pleasure… these are the things that drive a woman to become a heroine. If you can provide even one of these, you’ll have a heroine for life.”
“Fame?” I blinked.
Her face turned slightly pink. “There are some dungeons that sport challenges, and some heroines gain titles for accomplishing certain feats in a dungeon.”
I metaphorically scratched my nonexistent chin. Her words had started to give me some more ideas. With the girls out of the dungeon, I started to make a few more changes. Let’s see what the audience thought of that.
The next morning, while the girls were putting their warm clothing from the day before back on, that was when they finally noticed there were holes in some of them. Since it was far thicker clothing than whatever Misty and Diamond had been wearing, it had managed to last the night, but it still managed to dissolve. The ropes were also partially dissolved, but it wasn’t obvious unless someone was specifically looking for it, and these girls didn’t even bother to check before heading back into the dungeon.
They reached the third floor in record time. As the mage past the alcove with the tentacle monster, she blushed slightly, but otherwise, she continued with the rest of the girls. They created their little climbing group again, and using the rope, they quickly reached the mid-section. She tied a second rope to the nail, likely to help them come back, and then they began their horizontal climb through the side hallway.
The leader was too focused on climbing to notice the treasure room, but the archer who was in the back and the lookout ended up seeing it. Her eyes grew wide as soon as she saw the treasure chest. It was a treasure chest and not Sandy. Sandy nearly died when it was Misty, and we didn’t want to take the risk. Plus, it was possible by now that Sandy’s death had already spread through Braile, so her appearance might be too suspicious. The archer looked up at the three climbing ahead, and I could see a flash of greed in her expression. Like the mage before her, she seemed to want to claim the treasure for her own. She carefully slid out of her rope binding, leaving her backpack tied to it so that there was still a weight there.
The leader at the front had two pickaxes, but the third pickaxe was given to her. The reasoning seemed to be that should a monster appear in front of them, she might need to retreat quickly by pulling them the other way. In some ways, it made more sense than their original setup where the mages were dragged along like an inconvenience.
Once she was free, she began to head down the short hallway into the treasure room. Although the treasure room was ice like the hallways, she was so used to crawling that she just kept doing it. She crawled toward the treasure chest quickly, intending to snag the treasure and return it before anyone saw her. She reached the chest and opened it, but as soon as she opened the chest, a mechanism triggered and the ground around her gave out.
She let out a cry, but she didn’t fall far, in fact, she fell onto something soft. Her knees and legs seemed to have fallen into a small alcove only about a foot deep. She seemed to have been expecting something more deadly for a trap. She didn’t even bruise her leg. Letting out a sigh of relief, she reached out to grab the lid of the treasure chest, but that’s when she stopped. Her legs felt like they were buried in molasses. She tried to pull out, and then she tried again, but her legs seemed to be jammed. She looked down into the small pit she was kneeling in, and it was filled with some kind of blue goo. That goo was very similar to the goo spread all over the ice.
Of course, although she couldn’t recognize it, she was kneeling in the source of all the levels goo. It was the slime that I had cut open, spilled the guts out of, and then allowed to heal countless times to create my slippery level. Although the slime couldn’t feel pain, I felt a bit bad for using it all the time and then abandoning it in a corner. I originally thought I had killed it, but apparently, it had just gone dormant from lack of nutrients. Misty had shown me that upon feeding it some rats, it was able to return to its previous state. The rat king had to sacrifice a few rats now and then to keep the slime healthy, but there were always more rats.
The archer was struggling more and more, finally realizing she was trapped, but that was when the second part of the trap played out. A door opened up, and a certain form stepped out. When the archer saw them, her expression turned white. It was a goblin! Goblins were about the limit for a group like hers. An F-rank heroine could probably defeat a goblin. That was about the standard. It’d be roughly an even fight. Except, she didn’t have her bow, leaving it with her backpack so she could move faster.
She recalled she had the pickaxe, but just as she moved to grab it, the goblin kicked it away from her. This was my one remaining goblin, who had mostly been cleanup staff. I decided to put him into the rotation as well. He was the only survivor of his tribe, and he had been turned into basically cleanup staff, so this was his boon.
“N-no…” The archer cried in disbelief. “P-please don’t kill me?”
The archer was so terrified that she peed right there, liquid leaking down onto the slime, which seemed to soak it up to my disgust.
“Gragaga…” The goblin spoke in gibberish before walking up to the archer.
He then grabbed her tattered pants and pulled them down, revealing her ass and pussy. A moment later, he had his little goblin dick out. No, my traps weren’t the types that killed you. However, that didn’t mean that by the end, you wouldn’t be fucked.
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