My Dungeon Life: Rise of the Slave Harem

Chapter 1406

If one was expecting a place called an Infernal Hell to be a subversion of the name, I quickly found that wasn’t the case at all. The heat of the level we broke into was unbearable, and from that alone, it would not include just about any adventurer from Aberis. If it wasn’t for my dungeon skills, I also would have collapsed in minutes.

“Terra, are you okay?”

“My body already has a good resistance to fire. I was built to fight a dragon, after all. With the dungeon skills Master set, I am managing.” Terra responded.

She had dungeon skills that I could still alter, and while they weren’t as numerous as my own, they weren’t enough to give her Heat Resistance, she could at least get Fire Immunity. Considering a golem wasn’t likely to be Heat Exhausted, Heat Immunity wasn’t needed unless it was the temperature that she would melt.

“Alysia, how about you?”

“I’m also fine, Master.”

Since I had Alysia dig through lava, this was probably nothing. That wasn’t to say it wasn’t hot here. There was lava lining the path, and a careless step would send you falling into a lava moat. The very air seemed to shimmer with heat.

“What is the plan, exactly?” Terra asked.

“Remember Widow’s Dungeon?” I asked.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“When the miner’s punched a hole in the side of it, monsters kept falling out. Every time a miniboss left the floor, the dungeon expended mana to produce a new one. In essence, it created a mana leak in the dungeon. The Infernal Dungeon has a history and depth I can’t contemplate. Even the mobs here are likely more than we can handle. It grew so deep that it reached Twilight’s prison and allowed her to influence the surface from down here. We need to make a dungeon capable of keeping her from reuniting with this dungeon, and since we only have a week to do it, I’m going to use the Infernal Hell against itself.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Is it dangerous for a flea to bite a dog?” I asked. “Our size is nothing compared to it. That’s why I’m doing it this way. If I tried to declare war on the Infernal Dungeon, we would be destroyed in an instant. However, a mob falling through a hole is something different. The mob falls through, gets weakened through our resetting traps, and then falls to its death on the spikes below. Then, the plant boss eats it and provides the mana force for our dungeon. Boom, a continuous source of mana.”

“Then, what are we here for?”

“You need to make sure that hole does heal. Use your metals to create a stent. As for me, I’m going to set an attractant.”

Terra nodded and I helped her open up the hole and bit more as she placed pieces to keep it open. A dungeon like this might be able to heal such a wound in only a few hours. I needed it to last days, at least. It did open up a direct path from the Infernal Hell to my dungeon, which was a security risk, but that was why I had included so many traps as well as the fall.

If the monsters near the bottom of the Infernal Hell were powerful enough to make it through my traps, and fall a 30-foot drop on spikes, and then still manage to fend off the absorptive ability of the plant, then I also had a failsafe there too. One of the other things I had been doing was converting the dungeon to be collapsible. I had a feeling in the fight to come that we might have to retreat to more strategic positions, and so the boss room and this hallway would all collapse. We had to do whatever it took to survive.

Chapter 1407

Before we could let this mana collection system I devised run, there was one other thing I needed to discover. I needed to know what monsters were on this level. I didn’t know how deep we were, but I would be shocked if it was under 150. I knew that the space in dungeons didn’t necessarily always reflect the space outside of dungeons, so it was really hard to say when it came to this dungeon. I didn’t know its shape or how it was organized, so we might not even be at the bottom of the dungeon, but somewhere in the middle.

I had read in a book once that a larger dungeon could take a branching path. The lore behind them became so complex that it became like a choose your adventure, sending people down different paths to follow the story from different points of view and different directions. I had never experienced such a thing, but I did recognize that this could just be one of the paths of a much large complex. Well, considering that I dug south from Esmore, and with only a few weeks of walking I ended up under Hell’s Dungeon, which was supposed in the Demon’s land nearly six months travel north of Esmore on the other side of the continent, one could understand just how strange space was in the deep.

Either way, what animals existed on this level would influence how successful my plan would work, so before I started summoning them down my trap, I needed to be certain that the trap would work. Thus, I had my Map out and was using sense life to try to find a monster. It didn’t take long before I located one.

“A squirrel…” I spoke in disbelief.

After seeing a monster around the corner, I had carefully tried to catch a peek at it, using the reflection of my sword just in case. I wasn’t using Alysia for that. She was too large, and it would defeat the purpose of being sneaking if I was sticking out a massive blade from the corner. Ultimately, after taking every precaution, all I saw was a fiery red squirrel. It was different, the tail was a blazing fire, but at the end of it, this was just a squirrel.

“M-maybe… this is what the main monster of this level eats?” Alysia offered.

Technically, a dungeon monster didn’t need to eat as long as it was provided miasma from the dungeon. However, that didn’t mean there weren’t instances of ecosystems being set up with prey and predators. It allowed the predators to be even stronger since they got to practice against the prey and consume their miasma.

As I was thinking about it, the squirrel suddenly turned its head around, its eyes immediately locking on my blade. It had seen it? A moment later, the squirrel disappeared. It was just there and then it wasn’t. Was this one of those invisible creatures that could only be detected with Sense Life? It made sense. I was just about to bring up my Map to track it when my arm felt a thud, following by the banking of metal.

I looked at my arm to see that the sword, made from deep dwarven steel, was broken in half. The top of the blade had uselessly fallen to the ground like it had been cut in a second.

“Master!” Alysia warned.

I looked up to see a squirrel hanging from the wall. It was chewing on a small fragment of metal, and it was staring at me with glowing red eyes.

Chapter 1408

“I don’t wanna die!” I cried, racing down the hallway back to the hole.

“He’s attacking! So fast!”

“Ahhhh!” I fell as my leg was suddenly gone.

A blur that was the squirrel had shot through my leg, cutting it off just like that. I collapsed to the ground, spinning around in time to see it a few meters away, sitting on top of my removed leg. I let out a scream and threw another blade at it. My throw was perfect, but just as the blade reached it jumped up. I swore it walking along the blade as it passed before harmless landing back on my leg. As for the blade, it split in two right down the middle flying off into two pieces behind the squirrel.

“Why are you so powerful!” I cried out.

“Master, what is going on?” Terra cried out, looking around the corner.

I wasn’t far from the hole and had already made it back halfway before I was hit by the squirrel.

“Terra, run for your life!”

Terra cocked her head, looking at me without a leg, and then the squirrel. “It’s… a squirrel?”

“Watch out!”

The squirrel jumped again, and this time I tried to hold up my hand to block it. My arm went this time.

“Master!” Terra’s eyes widened as she finally grasped what was happening.

Terra immediately ran to me and picked me up, turning and running. She did it in a way I was facing behind her. Lifting my hand, I started throwing out spells, anything I could to delay the squirrel. It dodged and danced around them, seemingly playing with me. It launched another attack, and I tried to protect Terra with my leg. It took my leg and Terra’s leg too. Terra didn’t fall as I had done. Instead, she immediately began hoping with one foot.

The squirrel looked up at us, and I swear in smirked. Was I going to die from a squirrel? Wasn’t that far too pitiful?

“It’s coming again!”

Terra jumped forward just as it blurred again. However, we reached the hole, and I saw it fly just over our heads as we fell into the hole. No… it had been aiming for our heads! We’d be headless had it succeeded in that attack.

We collapsed into the hallway, and Alysia took her human form, grabbing both Terra and me and pulling us down it. I watched in horror as the squirrel jumped down and landed in front of us. It leaped forward, clearly not happy at its failure to behead us. A blade trap launched, but it easily avoided it. Then, there was a sticky trap, which slowed it for a moment, but it quickly got out of it. Meanwhile, Alysia was pulling us back desperately to the end of the corridor.

She reached the end. Other than jumping down and being impaled on the spikes below, there was no escape. The squirrel jumped again, and an ice trap triggered. This came out in a freezing mist. The squirrel froze, its tail blaze going out, and then it landed a few feet in front of us with a thud, its body not moving. We stared in wonder as vine came from behind us, grabbed the unconscious squirrel up in its fine, and then began to consume it. It turned out the squirrel was extremely vulnerable to cold.

“We-we need more ice traps,” I spoke shakily.