Demon Lord of the Swarm Chapter 3 (original chapter Chapter 86)

When the eighth day came, I woke up at the crack of dawn. I have no idea why, but I only seemed to require about four hours of sleep, six if I was feeling lazy, in this new body of mine. I wonder if it has anything to do with my new 'race' as an Archdemon?

The bed I slept on really was modest, in both appearance and function. It was wooden framed, with a creaky mattress and a thin duvet. My bed back on Earth Bet, at Dad's house, was comfier. Heck, the little pull-out cot at any PRT or Wards base was comfier than this thing.

'Note to self: find a way to upgrade my bed.' I thought absently as I got dressed.

Exiting my room, I also made a note to figure out how to make wooden doors so I could close my living quarters off from my throne room.

Item Added to Store: Crude Wooden Door!

I froze at that. Say what?! I could just think it and the thing would be added to my Store?!

Cursing myself for not think of this earlier, I made my way to my throne and plopped myself down onto it before checking my Mana and DP.

Mana Available: 17

Dungeon Points (DP) Available: 105

Not a tremendous amount by the standards of what my DP had once been at, but that couldn't be helped. DP and Mana was there to be spent, after all. I pulled up the description of the door that I had just mentally conjured up.

Crude Wooden Door: A door barely worthy of the name, it is badly made and creaks if the wind blows near it. Down in a dungeon, you don't have to worry about that, but this is only good to mark the boundary of the room's exit/entrance rather than a serious attempt at barring entry/exit. Can be improved. 3 DP to Purchase.

I had a large stone door that opened whenever someone walked near it. I knew this because I had gone out yesterday and inspected the rest of the dungeon in person rather than via [Dungeonsight]. Maybe it was just me it automatically opened for? I had no clue. Anyway, I had a door for people entering my room, but I didn't have one for preventing people running into my Chambers. I didn't exactly have any underwear for people to gawp at, aside from the bra and panties that I was wearing right now. Something else to add later.

Item Added to Store: Spider Silk Bra!

Item Added to Store: Spider Silk Panties!

…

I guess that makes sense, given that spider silk is the only material I have at hand at the moment that can be used to make clothes, but sheesh.

Moving on, I bought a door and placed it in front of the entrance to my Chambers. Interesting fact: it grew and stretched to fit. I then opened its upgrade menu.

Crude Wooden Door:

- Increase Door craftsmanship – 5 DP

- Increase Door durability – 5 DP

- Special: Camouflage door to prevent entry point to [Demon Lord's Chambers] from being seen – Free

I bought all of them in order. The door, which had previously resembled a ramshackle collection of planks crudely held together with wooden nails, flowed into what looked more like a proper door, albeit a thin one. Then it thickened until it was the thickness of a Fire Door back home. The last change was the coating of stone that covered it until it looked indistinguishable from the surrounding wall. No gaps whatsoever.

Walking towards it, the door swung back at my approach and returned to its normal place at my retreat. Cool.

One thing that I had been neglecting was my magic. I had two different types of magic; [Dungeon Magic] and [Insect Magic], and it would be a weakness to not know what I had and how to use them. Let's have a look at them, shall I?

Dungeon Magic:

Magic used by the Demon Lord of a Dungeon. This set of spells allows the Demon Lord to cast spells within the dungeon, even while it is being invaded, making it a vital tool for any Demon Lord.

You currently have not generated your spells.

Pay 5 Mana to do so?

Y|N

That…was troubling. I quickly did some research and discovered that I couldn't use the system to add monsters, traps and rooms if the floor in question had invaders in it.

I decided that getting the spells up and running just in case invaders came was a good idea, so I paid the five Mana.

Generating…done!

You have gained the spell [Dungeon Teleport]!

You have gained the spell [Dungeon Illusion]!

You have gained the spell [Dungeon Fear Aura]!

Each spell is limited to being cast once per invasion, so choose your spell and timing carefully! Dungeon Magic gains spells as the Level of the Dungeon goes up, so work hard!

Examining the spells, I could see that they'd be useful. [Dungeon Teleport] was a random teleportation spell. It let me send one randomly chosen invader to a random point in the dungeon, aside from the [Demon Lord's Chambers], the [Demon Lord's Lair] and the Floor Boss' Room. If I had multiple floors, then it would be restricted to a point on the floor that the invader was on.

[Dungeon Illusion] basically crafted an illusion to deceive the invading party. I could use it to create a large pitfall where there was none, or lengthen the apparent distance between a person and a monster or even craft an illusion of a monster down to the smallest detail. It could be seen through by a spellcaster of a sufficiently high level though

[Dungeon Fear Aura] was another useful little spell that could drive away people from places I did not want them to go. The place, item or monster that I cast this little beauty on struck fear into the hearts of those who approached it. Those who were not resolved enough were driven into flight. Those who were fearless were immune to this spell though.

[Insect Magic] was the same deal, except I gained more spells with it depending on how many types of insects I had, as well as the number of them I had in total. The spells I got after paying the five Mana cost were [Breath of Imhotep], [Insect Wings] and [Antlion Maw]. Each was pretty self-explanatory; the first let me vomit up a swarm of random insects like in the film The Mummy, the second gave me human-sized insect wings that let me fly and the last summoned the mouth of an insect monster called an Antlion to attack my enemies from beneath.

All three were useful for personal combat and thanks to my previous life as Skitter/Weaver, I didn't have to do any strange chants or gestures with my hands in order to use them. I didn't even have to say their names aloud; simply think them while flaring my MP.

'Breath of Imhotep!' I thought as I flared my MP and opened my mouth. A literal swarm of locusts emerged in seconds and slammed into the wall before vanishing. That was the pain about first level spells, at least according to the pop up; they were weak and needed repeated use in order to level up. Once they did though, they would get stronger. The insects spawned by [Breath of Imhotep] would stay around longer and longer after being created for each increased level it had until they would be permanently conjured, just as an example.

I stiffened as an odd feeling reached me. Something was here…in my dungeon…that I had not created.

Hurrying back to my throne, I closed my eyes and swept through the dungeon until the hole that was the entrance was visible to me. Standing there on the threshold was a tall man wearing steel plate armour, no helmet and wielding an enormous double-handed greatsword in a single large fist. He had close-cropped brown hair and brown eyes.

Behind him, three other people were standing awaiting something, an order probably. Two were women and one was male. The other man was short and thin, wearing a dull-black hooded cloak and dull grey and black clothes. In both hands was a pair of razor-sharp daggers.

The women were studies in contrast. One had an aristocratically beautiful face with yellow eyes, long red hair and wore equally red curve-hugging robes with a citrine sunburst pendant at her throat. A long staff surmounted by a red crystal was clasped in one hand. The other was demure, with a kindly pleasant face, blue eyes, blond hair and white robes that concealed her body well. A short mace was in one hand, while a thick book was in her other.

Huh…so we had a fairly balance party here, with one Tank/DPS, one Rogue, one Spellcaster and one Cleric. Damn shame that the spellcaster seemed to be a fire mage, as spiders were weak against fire.

"Are you sure this is the entrance to the Demon Lord's Dungeon, Cynthia?" the man in armour was asking the Cleric.

"Yes. The Lady Lumina is certain of it." The woman -Cynthia- answered serenely.

"Doesn't look like much." the redhead snorted. She had a brash, confident voice.

"How better to conceal it?" the rogue asked rhetorically. "Most would see this as a mere cave in the hillside and think nothing of it. Only a party with a priest or priestess, or a suitable powerful Mage, would be able to tell differently."

"'Rhet, that better not be a jab at my skill." The fire mage growled, her eyes flashing red for a moment.

"I'm certain that Garret didn't imply anything of the sort, Valerie." The priestess soothed. "Truth be told, I was sceptical myself until I laid eyes on it; the flow of magic is very weak. It must only be a few days old, a week at absolute most."

"What should we do, Damian?" Garret asked. "Report it to the guild?"

"Nah. If this Demon Lord is only a week old, then the Dungeon should only have one, maybe two rooms tops." Damian snorted as he hefted his sword onto his shoulder with a casualness that spoke of great familiarity with his weapon. "If that's the case, we can get in and kill 'em without much hassle. That'll earn us enough to advance to Two Star Gold-Rank Adventurers!"

"Supposing we survive." Garret said dubiously. "Even if the damn Dungeon is small and weak, the Demon Lord will not be a push over. The last Dungeon was destroyed over ten years ago and the Demon Lord who ruled it killed three-quarters of the fifty man party that invaded the Dungeon by himself before being struck down himself. Damian, this may be ever so slightly over our heads."

"Bah. Don't be such a freakin' worrywart." Damian scoffed. Was he a knight or a fighter, I wonder? "We can do this! A couple of rooms, a panicking Demon Lord and boom, instant success. We've been hanging around the Three Star Silver-Rank for over a year now! Any longer and we'll be stuck in a rut!"

"He has a point, 'Rhett." Valerie the Mage sighed. Evidently she didn't get on with Damian the Knight as she seemed REALLY reluctant to agree with him.

"OK, but I want you three to know that it's all Damian's fault if we get killed." Garret groaned in surrender.

"We've still got this quest to hand in, so let's do that, get all our weapons and armour repaired and then come back and do this thing!" Damian expounded with a smirk.

"If this gets me killed Damian, I am going to come back and haunt your ass." Valerie said flatly as she turned and walked away from my dungeon's entrance, swiftly followed by her party members.

Crap. A pretty solid party already? Dammit, why did this always happen?!

I noticed something on the system menu that brought me up short.

Available Mana: 12

Eh? Seriously? I got five Mana just from that Damian guy standing partly in my dungeon? OK, this is pretty cool.

The main question was, what could I do here? I needed information on the lands my Dungeon was on, as well as the structure of the society that lived there. Those guys mentioned star ranks in their party, hadn't they? I'd guess that silver would be a pretty high rank, with three-star being the peak of the rank to boot. Hoo boy.

Let's see…what could I do in this short timeframe to increase the difficulty of my floor…?

Well, I hadn't checked the Black Widow to see if she could be upgraded, so I could always start there.

Floor Boss – Black Widow Upgrades:

- Have three Poison Fang Spiders spawned at the start of the fight – 10 DP

- Have the Boss use the gargoyles as footholds for acrobatic and long-range attacks – 10 DP

- Increase the intelligence of the boss equal to the number of enemies it faces; anything higher than six makes the intelligence of the Boss start to rise – 10 DP

Well, I won't have to worry about the last one for the moment because I know that the party about to attack me is only four strong. I could leave that to one side for the moment. I bought the other two upgrades and checked on the Spider Puzzle Room.

Spider Puzzle Room Upgrades:

- Randomise the puzzles available every day – 5 DP

- Set time limits for each puzzle to be solved - 5 DP

Both of those were fairly simple upgrades and so I bought them.

There I bought doors for the rest of my dungeon's rooms as well. Lucky break; if you buy doors for one entry/exit point, you buy them for both. Plus they were all now [Sturdy Wooden Doors] rather than crude ones. The monsters in the room had to be killed before the doors would open once the invaders entered the room, although I didn't think that the doors would stand up to the greatsword that the main tank of that party had as his weapon. From what I could recall, he didn't seem to have a backup weapon either, so if that sword was somehow destroyed or damaged beyond repair, he would be useless as anything but a meatshield.

Mages were a tough one. The closest analogue that I had to them were Shakers and Blasters and there was no telling what this Valerie woman could do compared to them. The likelihood that she had a set limit to how many spells she could cast was rather high. I had no clue what those limits were, but bearing in mind that I was against the unknown, I would assume she was on the same level as Lady Photon in terms of offence.

The priestess was a bit of a concern. Clerics could heal and remove debuffs, if my limited gaming experience was anything to go by, with the truly higher-levelled ones being able to send out Shaker-like blasts of holy energy. I had no idea if a Cleric of 'Lady Lumina' could do that, but I was going to assume the worst.

As for the rogue…well, a bit of searching told me that concealment skills didn't exactly matter for me; in my Dungeon, I knew all. Only extremely high-level concealment magic or top-tier rogue skills could hide people from me, and I don't think this Garret guy was on that level. Still, he would be an irritant if I let him backstab my monsters, so I'd make sure to take care of him quickly.

What I was planning on doing was capturing at least one of them and picking their brains for information about the world. The mage, Valerie, was the best choice as one thing that the limited information the system had given me about spellcasters on this planet was that all low-to-mid-tier spellcasters required a wand, staff or cane in order to cast any spells. Plus, she likely had no physical combat skills that could harm me, so she was the better choice. All of the other three had weapons skills and could possibly fight barehanded if pushed to it.

Plan set, I picked up my sword and shield from where they sat next to the throne. I had discovered that for steel weapons, three enchantments was the absolute limit for what I could place on them. I had enchanted it with [Rustproofing] and a [Force Enchantment], while the buckler had all three lesser enchantments on it, just in case.

There was nothing to do now, except wait.

Soon enough, the party of four returned. I think it was about two or three hours from when they left. The armour on Damien was shining as if it had been freshly polished, ditto for his sword. All of the others simply looked refreshed.

"So we're really going through with this?" Valerie asked with trepidation.

"Yes, we are." Damien answered firmly. "We have a solid team here. I'm a Knight, you're a Flame Magus, Cynthia's a Senior Priestess and Garret's an Adept Rogue. We're in the top ten parties of the Stevensport Guild and I think we could get to number one if we take this place down. Now let's go and kill us a Demon Lord!"

This guy…oh, he was just asking to be made a pancake.

Treat me like a stepping stone will you? That did it. I was going to go easy on you lot, but guess who just stepped up to first place on my shit list?

The four entered my dungeon's tunnel and marched in. The Knight-Who-Shall-Be-Punished was first, with the others clumped behind him. Obviously, none of these guys have ever delved a dungeon before.

I smirked as the Knight blithely stepped onto the first Slime Trap and was sent careening forwards like an out of control Ironmongery advertisement, straight down a pit after tumbling down it ass over teakettle.

"Waaaaggghhh!" Clank-crash!

"Damien?!"

"Holy shit!"

"Language!"

The other three peered over the rim of the pit to see their friend splayed out on the ground, stunned, but alive.

Achievement unlocked: Watch Your Step! You receive 10 DP!

Achievement unlocked: This is the Pits! You receive 10 DP!

Hehehehehe…

"Damien, are you alright?!" Cynthia called out worriedly.

"Urghhhh…yeah…I feel like I just got hit in the back by an ogre on its way home drunk though…" Damien groaned.

"You mean like that time last week?" Valerie jeered.

"That was a half-ogre, Val." The Knight retorted as he staggered to his feet. "Now are you going to keep bitching at me, or are you going to help me out?"

"Don't tempt me." Valerie sniped.

It took a good five minutes to get Damien out of my first pit trap. During which time of course I was laughing my ass off. To see a big knight take a tumble like that and look so ridiculous while doing it would've been worthy of Candid Camera back home.

On the more serious side, he should have taken quite some damage from a fall like that in full armour like that. A broken bone at least. Yet here he was jumping around like nothing's wrong. Obviously a skill of some sort, or perhaps a quality of his armour.

"What the heck was that thing I stepped on, Val?" the Knight asked once he was hauled out of the pit.

A few muttered words in a language I didn't recognise later and Valerie scowled. "A lesser slime. A very low-end magical creation that naturally occurs in places of high magical density. Usually they're the first thing a Wizard or a Mage has to learn to get rid of because they're so prone to evolving into a proper slime at irritatingly awkward moments. This one was a Lesser Invisibility Slime, completely undetectable to sight and scent. And with the amount of magic in this damn place, magical detection is…improbable, to say the least."

"Lovely." Garret deadpanned.

The four of them set off again, still in the same formation. Jeez, these people will not learn!

I had set up two combo-traps in that corridor leading up to the first room. The first had been the Slime-Pitfall Trap. Now they were approaching the second, which was…

*PING*

*SPLAT!*

"WHOA! GLUB!" Damien yelped. Yup. The idiot had fallen for my tripwire and had fallen down into my Slime Pitfall. Enjoy the slimy swim, metal head.

Achievement unlocked: Enjoy Your Trip! You gain 10 DP!

Achievement unlocked: Into the Drink! You gain 10 DP!

Jeez, these guys were earning their keep in the DP department! What about Mana?

Available Mana: 25

Nice.

While I had been checking things on my screens, the Knight had managed to surface from the pool of slime and yell for help. The look of absolute disgust on his face made me cackle. Looks like the slime really did taste foul.

"Gaah! Blech! Get me out of this foul stuff!" he bellowed.

"That's a group of Lesser Pit Slimes!" Valerie said with a shiver. "Only about fifty slimes have a taste that's bad and those buggers are in the top ten foulest! Sucks to be you!"

"I don't wanna get that gunk all over my rope!" Garret whined.

"Get me out of here or I swear I'll bisect you!"

I was enjoying myself here! They hadn't even reached the first room and I'd earned over ten Mana and forty DP from them, plus I was getting free entertainment.

…wow, was I getting a bit sadistic or what?

After dragging the Knight out of my little pit of slimy doom, he knelt on the ground and retched a couple of times before regaining control of himself.

"That was the most disgusting experience of my entire life!" he swore.

"I can't believe you fell for a basic tripwire trap, Damien." Garret chuckled. "Sure, you're no rogue, but you've been around the block a couple of times. Surely you should have spotted it?"

"Not so. Behold." Cynthia pointed at the remains of the snapped tripwire, which was quite hard to spot. "The cord used is made of some manner of transparent thread. If you didn't know that it was there, I doubt even a low-tier rogue would be able to find it."

"True enough." Garret admitted. He examined the thread for a moment before nodding. "Right. This stuff won't deceive me again. I'll go first now, Damien."

"Go ahead...urgh, I want to throw up…I think I swallowed some of that stuff…!" the Knight groaned.

"Be blessed by Lady Lumina, Goddess of Light. Impurities, begone!" the priestess chanted, her book open in front of her. Interesting…

A glow started to form around Damien, but it flickered and faded almost at once.

"Uhhh…Cyn?" Damien asked cautiously.

"It appears that the rumours of Dungeons interfering with the connection the clergy have with their patron deity are true after all." Cynthia said with a small frown. "I can purify you of the slime, but it will cost me more holy power than I would ordinarily have to expend."

She chanted again and this time, the glow sustained itself before sinking into Damien's skin. He immediately spat up a glob of black stuff onto my floor. Gross! Don't spit on my floors, dammit!

"Urgh, that sucks." The Knight shuddered. "Val, can you burn that stuff up?"

"If you want the tunnel to be filled by noxious fumes, then yes." The Mage shot back dryly. "Burning Pit Slimes of any description is A Bad Idea, Damien. Seriously, I know you never paid much attention to magic things outside of possibly enchanted sword, but even a Copper One-Star knows this stuff."

"..shut up." Damien muttered.

After a few more quips, the four got moving again, a lot more cautiously now. I estimated that the likelihood of them falling for any more of my tripwire traps was less than nil from here on out. Not unless they were distracted by the melee of combat, anyway.

As they approached the door to the first room, I smirked. The Web Spiders and the Trapmaster Spider lay beyond it and I was looking forward to taking control of my monsters to see exactly how well these four fought against me.

"Is that a wooden door?" Damien asked in disbelief upon seeing it.

"Yep." Garret said easily. "Why so surprised? The Dungeon a decade ago had these too."

"Yeah, but that one had been growing for over a year before it was discovered." The Knight pointed out. "This one's a baby, practically."

"The capability of a Dungeon depends upon the skill, drive and intelligence of the Demon Lord which created it." Cynthia pointed out sensibly. "For it to have spawned those two traps earlier, so soon after being born, I would guess that this Demon Lord is highly intelligent if nothing else. Wooden doors aren't high-end either, so any modestly intelligent Demon Lord's dungeon has them."

"Great. A smart killing machine." Valerie drawled sarcastically.

Deciding not to give myself any more of an advantage, I changed my view to the inside of the next room. A long, plain and unadorned rectangle until I upgraded to the Spider Floor. Now there were stalagmite and stalactites scattered haphazardly over the floor and ceiling, with various rock outcroppings here and there.

The reason I hadn't added, removed or otherwise changed anything here, or anywhere in my dungeon, before now was that without invaders to properly test the place, I couldn't judge difficulty. Yes, this room was hard to move around in when I walked through it earlier on in the week, but that might have been because I'm still not used to my increased bust size.

I gently asserted control over my spiders and they froze for a moment before moving under my command. The Web Spiders busied themselves by tightening small imperfections in the webs that they had set up that I could see thanks to my panoramic view of the room, while the Trapmaster stealthily made its way around some traps it had made, even more difficult to detect than the rest. Plus, thanks to the webs all over the place, trying to find trapped webbing in amongst the rest of the webs would be worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

The door creaked open and no-one appeared. What, were they expecting me to have an eraser fall on their heads or something? Or a bucket of whitewash, perhaps?

..actually, those sound funny. I may do them once I have all the materials for them.

"All clear so far." The rogue, Garret, whispered. It may as well have been a shout in the quiet of the dungeon though.

"Let's go." Damien said roughly. I could tell that he was spoiling for a fight, probably to work out some frustration from the pitfalls he'd fallen into earlier. He stomped on in…and triggered a tripwire that fired an arrow at him a split second later, which smacked straight into his abdominal armour, staggering him.

"Gods all above!" he wheezed as he staggered back.

"Shit! An arrow trap?!" Garret cursed. "It's this damn webbing! Of all the damn monsters this floor had to be infested with, it just had to be sodding spiders! I can't find my ass with both hands in this muck, never mind tripwires!"

"Any damage, Damien?" Cynthia asked in concern as she entered cautiously, Valerie following her.

"N-No…my armour took the brunt of the hit." The Knight replied as he kicked the innocuous wooden stick with a crushed head that had attacked him earlier. "I think it made a dent though."

Indeed it did. Once my First Floor became a Spider Floor, I could update most wire, twine and bowstring in my traps to be made of spider silk at no extra cost. This upped the striking power of the ordinary arrow trap to a level that most would think came from a crossbow.

"Val, can you burn this stuff?" Garret asked.

"I can, but putting it out again would be a nightmare." The Mage sounded gloomy. "Not to mention it would piss off the Demon Lord. I remember reading that if too much damage is purposefully inflicted on a room, the Demon Lord can intervene more directly from their lair."

…Can I? Seriously?

My question was fortuitously echoed somewhat dubiously by Damien.

"If the book I read was accurate, yes." Valerie answered tersely. "Damien, you have to be more careful. With Garret and I all but useless at detecting the triggers for these traps, you are going to have to pick up the slack."

"Lovely." He deadpanned.

Hefting his greatsword, Damien advanced into the room, which, when I looked at it anew, did seem somewhat dark and dim. Should I have put in some luminous moss or something?

"Lady of Light, grant your priestess a beacon to dispel the darkness. Piercing Light!" Cynthia chanted, and the business-end of her mace started to shine with a silvery light. I was lucky that I wasn't looking at it with my real eyes; otherwise I'd have lost my sight for the few moments it took them to adjust.

"A bit of warning next time, Cyn?" Garret blinked furiously under his hood.

"My apologies."

It was at this point that I had my Trapmaster drop down on Garret, sinking its teeth into his shoulder before leaping off and away. The man's pained shriek made me wince.

"Garret!" Cynthia almost teleported over to him and started chanting a spell or prayer that seemed to ease the pain. "What was that?!"

"L-Looked like an Over Trap Spider." The rogue ground out through the pain. "A Tier Two monster!"

"Where'd the little bastard go?!" Damien shouted angrily, swiping at some nearby webbing with his blade. It cut through a dozen webs before stopping on one web that wrapped around it as soon as the edge of the blade touched it. "Shit!"

It took a lot of force and swearing for the Knight to get the blade out of the web trap, during which time I took the opportunity to attack with my Web Spiders. Sadly, Valerie was on guard and took care of two of them with a single spell.

"Spirit of Flames, grant me thine blessing. Pierce and scorch, Flame Needles!"

What was released by her spell was a pair of six-inch long needles that appeared above her hand and flew towards my poor monsters with a gesture, slamming into their heads almost simultaneously and, from what I could tell before I lost my connection with them, burning them from the inside out.

Damn. I could count the number of Blasters on Earth Bet that could launch attacks that precise on one hand.

Much to my surprise, once the flames extinguished themselves, the bodies of my monsters dissolved into motes of light and left behind…

…a spool of thread and several copper coins.

What.

"Loot!" Garret grinned. Cynthia had finished healing him by this point.

"It's only a few coppers and some thread." Damien said dismissively.

"Those were Weaver Spiders, First Tier Monsters." Valerie retorted. "If they gave us something really good on the kick off, I'd be deeply suspicious."

"OK, fine. Let's find the exit before we get more spiders attacking us." The Knight said with a frown.

"We won't be able to get through while there are monsters still alive in this room." Cynthia informed him.

"Urgh…right, I forgot about that." Damien winced.

Interesting…so there were some common traits that all dungeons shared. And knowledge of at least some of them was known by appropriately powerful parties, if these four were any indication.

The four tracked down and killed the last Web Spider pretty easily. This time it was Garret who killed it with a lazily thrown knife to the head. That was odd…ah, it was also heavily poisoned. One hit and any low-ranked monster would collapse.

Left with just my Trapmaster Spider, I manoeuvred it around to the far side of the room, keeping to cover as much as possible. Valerie spotted it and launched another Fire needle at it, but it missed and set fire to some web. Panicking a little bit, I tried to absorb it.

Magical Fire was absorbed! Error, item level too high to unlock any item. Perquisite items required.

Covert to 50 DP?

Y|N

Hitting the 'Y' key, I was relieved. I did not want to have to waste my Mana and DP on repairing my Dungeon's appearance.

"…Val. Did the Dungeon just eat your fire?"

"Yes…yes it did."

"Oh good." Garret said with a faux-calm manner. "I was wondering if I was just seeing things."

Despite a valiant effort, my Trapmaster was also slain by these four; this time by being cleaved in two by Damien's greatsword after Garret severed the web it stood on with what looked like a throwing star. The item it left behind was a Spider Silk pair of trousers.

"Why trousers?" Damien asked bemusedly as he held them up in one hand.

"Maybe because the Demon Lord thinks you'll need to change trousers after being subjected to the Dungeon?" Val joked.

"Aha. Aha. It is to laugh." Damien grumbled as he stowed the trousers in his pack. "Now let's get out of this room and move onwards!"

This actually surprised me. I thought he would have advocated leaving, especially considering his little dip in the slime pit. Was he really that reckless? Oddly enough, the rest went along with it. I guess that despite their knowledge of Dungeons, they never figured out that slow and steady was the way to go with most of them.

Against me though, this was the right tactic. I could alter things and improve things once they were gone, but I was completely cut off from the system while they were in the Dungeon. Oh, I could still buy things at the store, but other than that, I was on my own.

The fact that it was likely being used against me because of ignorance and pride rather than knowledge was something of an irritation.

The two traps that I had in the corridor between the first two rooms were both tripwire traps. One was a simple tripwire-into-a-pit trap that Garret steered them around, while the other was a tripwire-arrow trap. This time, Garret decided to cut it, just in case. This backfired on him thanks to the upgrade I had bought that made the trap the tripwire was linked to go off as soon as the wire was cut. It almost killed him, as it was fired from above, but he had excellent reflexes and all the arrow did was rip a hole in his hood as he jerked his head back.

"Holy Shadows!" he swore. "Tripwires that activate their traps if triggered or neutralised? That's not bad. Wasn't expecting that!"

"This is becoming more and more curious. Just what sort of Demon Lord are we dealing with here?" Valerie asked in worry.

"A dead one once we get to the lair." Damien growled.

I moved into the second room, which held my Spinner Spiders and the Thread Gun Spider. Let's see how well they dealt with being attacked from range themselves…

So, this is an interesting fic. One more chapter, then I'll move on to something else. All reviews appreciated. ^_^