Dungeon Desolation (The Divine Dungeon Book 4) Read online

  DUNGEON

  DESOLATION

  Book Four of THE DIVINE DUNGEON Series

  Written by Dakota Krout

  © 2018 Mountaindale Press. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by US copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About Dakota Krout

  About Mountaindale Press

  Mountaindale Press Titles

  GameLit and LitRPG

  Fantasy

  Appendix

  Sneak Peek

  Acknowledgments

  There are many people who have given a huge amount of encouragement to me. An extra special thank you to Steven Willden, Nicholas Schmidt, Samuel Landrie, Justin Williams, Blas Agosto, Andrew Long, Dennis Vanderkerken, Andrew Reagan, Fred Lloyd, William Merrick, Mikeal Moffatt and all other Patreons for your support! You not only help me make better stories, but you are great group of people that have become my friends.

  To the amazing individuals who have given their all to help me get where I am – beta readers, street team members, and regulars on my social media – thank you for your support and promotion of my work. You make my life fun!

  Thank you to my wonderful wife, who not only encouraged me to write but joined me in the terrifying leap of self-employment. Now we work harder than we ever have, but I’m so blessed because I get to spend every single day with you and our beautiful daughter.

  Lastly, a heartfelt thanks to you my reader. I could not have done it without you and I hope to keep you entertained for years to come!

  Prologue

  “I’m not happy, Dale.” Princess Brianna of the Dark Elven nation barged into the meeting room, the anger in her voice causing all other noise to cease. “Do you know why I am unhappy?”

  Dale was sitting at the head of a long table that had been expressly designed for the council. The sharp words being directed at him - singling him out though the room was full - grated against his overstressed mind. It showed in his snappish response. “Please, allow me to guess. Nothing would make me happier than playing games right now. Could it be you are unhappy because nearly every human government has been toppled at the same time? Would it be the fact that the necromantic army now controls almost all of the surviving humans and we don’t know what is going to happen to them? Perhaps your unhappiness is because the High Elves were able to push our foes back and we were not?”

  “You can’t believe that the general population would hold that against us.” Tyler - the only non-cultivator on the council - looked around nervously at the important people filling the space. “We aren’t even a full fighting force! This was a dungeon for beginners… what? Only a few months ago?”

  “I’m still in shock that we lost Frank.” High Mageous Amber sighed and leaned back into her chair, though it was impossible for her to get sore from remaining seated too long. “He was the only reason we didn’t have high-ranked Guild leaders sniffing around looking for scraps.”

  Dale nodded at that. “I am already having trouble dealing with the Guild. The main branch is trying to send a replacement and is demanding to have a vote on my council. I gave Frank that position because he earned it, not because of his Guild membership. Now, I saw Frank’s final moments and am still surprised that a single, chantless invocation was enough to kill him. I had it on good authority that he was in the A-ranks, but now I am hearing conflicting reports.”

  Putting his face into his hands, Dale continued speaking, “Apparently, it was ‘well-known’ that he was in the B-ranks? I even knew that at one point, but I remember being told very specifically that he was in the A-ranks nearly the first time I met him. Does anyone know what his actual cultivation was? If he was A-ranked, are the individual steps in each rank that much more potent? If not, I thought that their equal power levels would make it much harder for one of them to gain the upper hand. Can anyone explain what happened?”

  “I’m sorry, did you say equal power levels? In the A-ranks, that is not a ‘thing’. Even at the same rank, the power levels vary wildly.” Madame Chandra, the A-ranked cultivator who owned the Pleasure House restaurant in town was frowning at him and had a slight tinge of pity bleeding through her tone. “Dale, do you remember when I told you that I trained Frank for almost a decade?”

  Chandra leaned forward, making sure he was focused on her. Dale nodded sharply, and she continued, “Frank was a B-rank Mage. He was not a High Mageous, or he would have held a much more important position in the Guild, a position far too high for what was a backwater dungeon like this. Who told you that he was A-ranked?”

  Dale thought back, his eyes narrowing when he finally remembered. “… Hans. Of course it was Hans. I’m going to kick his-”

  “It’s likely that he was trying to ‘wow’ you, Dale. What would the difference between A and B rank be for you if you were in the F-ranks? Don’t be too hard on him, just understand where your confusion comes from and rectify the issue.” Chandra sighed and pulled another report toward herself. “Also, I’d still like to learn how you got back into town. I know that portal collapsed, and by all accounts… you died. Are you finally willing to explain yourself?”

  “I’m not,” Dale firmly announced his decision. The other people in the room, including scribes, couriers, and even the servers who
had brought lunch, all slunk back into their normal positions or started walking again. This was a rumor that all of them had heard, and each had heard gossip wilder than anything they could imagine to be true. To be fair, only one of them was overly imaginative, and he was pretty close to guessing correctly. “How are we progressing on talks between the various races? Do we have any information on how to arrange a counterattack against the necromancers?”

  “Excuse me!” Brianna lightly rapped her knuckles on the table, leaving a small dent. In reinforced marble. Dale rolled his eyes; that was the fifth time that had happened. He’d need to get an Earth Mage to come over and fix it yet again. “Did we forget the reason this conversation is happening?”

  “Please, Brianna. Tell us why you aren’t happy.” Dale tried to placate the B-ranked Assassin Princess.

  Speaking in a loud voice, she took a moment and tried to lock eyes with all the members at the table, “It’s been three weeks since the battle. Not only have we not made any progress in finding a base of operations or launching a counter-initiative, do you know what I saw when I looked off of this floating island? Ocean. Ocean! We are no longer over the continent, Dale. The dungeon is running away.”

  Chapter One

  I felt the need to fix a problem, but none of the beings around me could provide ideas or results fast or varied enough to help me. They still needed to sleep, for celestial sake! Since my mana concept is an amalgamation of all other principles of mana, I decided to try my figurative hand at using a bit of ‘creativity’ mana. If I hadn’t found out that there was a higher tier at the last second, it would have been my top pick. So why not explore it? My thoughts were along this line: why should I be the only one who comes up with the ideas all the time? I could just be the one who creates the being that comes up with a solution for a change!

  I first tried making the screaming rocks a bit more imaginative, but that just made their screams more varied and expletive with mixed reactions that were hard to replicate. From there, I found that the Bashers did not take well to creation mana altering their structure since they had no intelligence in the first place. On an unrelated note, they did start growing mohawks, braids, and other colored patterns in their fur. After that, I tried on a willing Bob. Sadly, after a hefty dose of creativity, Bob just wanted to paint the dungeon walls, and then he cut off his own ear… who knew creativity could be so hard to manage?

  Since the main issue was that I didn't want to have to actively devote attention to listening to speeches made by all of the various sources of bad ideas, I created a quill which could write by itself! After a few failed attempts where it would just endlessly draw a picture of itself drawing itself - it seemed to enjoy recursion - I finally got it to start writing words instead. Nothing on its own, but it would write out anything spoken in the area around it. Progress.

  “Cal? Cal! Pay attention to what I am saying!” Dani was shouting at me. I ‘blinked’ and looked around. Had I just been… dreaming? Or was that a vision of some sort? I don’t dream; I don’t lose focus like that. Something was going on. “It is time for an intervention!”

  I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I thought it was harmless fun. Our newest addition, a tiny Wisp named Grace, was zipping around the dungeon driving the Cats wild. Take the susceptibility of normal cats to moving lights, add on the alluring power of Wisps, and you might have an idea of what we were dealing with. Combine that with a limited ability to order the Mobs to play with her…

  “She just led over a dozen Cats into two different adventuring parties! They were slaughtered! She shouldn’t see that sort of thing at her age!” Dani was turning from purple-pink to purple-red, showing me that she was becoming actually angry instead of playfully angry. “Are you ignoring me in there?”

  I clarified for my lovely bonded Wisp. She was so funny sometimes! Sure, she was more empathetic now, especially since each day wasn’t a struggle to gain enough Essence to survive on, and she was a parent now…

  “Cal.” Uh-oh, she was now e-nun-ci-a-ting, and I knew for sure that she was serious. Time to get to work.

  I ordered the Cats back to their rooms, then pouted a bit when Grace looked around and saw all of her friends wandering off without her. Her light dimmed, making me feel like a lousy Core. She couldn’t speak yet, but her emotions were easy to understand just by looking at her. Since I knew that Dani wasn’t looking, I generated some air-aligned Essence and sent it into the tiny ball of light, knowing that it would tickle her. I couldn’t do this very often because it had a similar effect on her that candy did on human children. Sure enough, soon the Wisp was zipping around the lower level at high speeds. Leaving her to play, I turned my attention to Bob. My Goblin Shaman was busy working on a multitude of projects for me, and it was time to see what was working.

  “Great Spirit?” Bob was now sensitive enough to the fluctuations of Mana around himself to be able to detect when my full attention was resting on him.

  I looked at what he was working on, a map, and was impressed by the level of detail shown on the vellum rendering.

  “Decent, and by that, I mean that we are getting close.” Bob pointed at the map, where tiny golden lines were traced out. “There is a spot here where we should be getting a large amount of Essence due to ley lines converging and expanding, but instead, we are only getting a trickle of power. As you know, I am not entirely certain what is there, but I do know that this is an issue that needs to be fixed. We need to find a way to scout ahead; we could be moving toward something that could swat us out of the air like a fly.”

  I looked over the map a bit longer, doing a double take when I saw that the golden lines had expanded a tiny bit.

  “Ah, yes, this is actually enchanted to update as your ‘ley lines’ expand. Thank you again for access to that book of Runes; all the Bobs have been able to make excellent progress on various utility and war Inscriptions.” Bob gestured at the map. “For instance, this map is not hand-drawn. We are taking an image through a Core and having the map update based on what we know and can see. The less well-detailed areas are what we have taken from various standard maps, and those areas change as we go along and gather data.”

  I tried to think about any other use for this map but decided to leave it to him and went to work on other projects. I had been tinkering with and altering a few of the floors as we flew, and what were currently the bottom two levels were coming along nicely. They were platforms connected by various paths, and each platform had a guardian based on the concept of Mana represented by the connections that led to each platform.

  There were multiple ways to arrive at each guardian, denoting the myriad ways to attain each combination of Essence, the knowledge of which would allow for more natural ascension. Whew. That was a mouthful. Simple terms: follow and measure a path, try to have that ratio of Essence in your system when ascending to the Mage ranks. Simple to say but not really easy in practice. I hadn’t expected that there would be such a strong reaction to such a simple setup, but people had been stampeding to the lower levels for a chance to document my structure each day.

  The amount of people not attempting to descend to the lower levels had increased to the point that I made Inscriptions that blurred the space between the paths and platforms. If they wanted to learn the secrets, they would need to work for it! More specifically, they would need to fight for it! People
had been sitting on the sidelines and drawing out of the reach of the monsters! Drawing! I was still grumbling about that.

  Changes to the levels were twofold. First of all, I had been working to upgrade my golems with the new materials that Bob had nearly died researching. These components allowed for more Mana and corruption to be imparted to the golems, making them stronger, faster, and overall deadlier. Lots of ‘-ers’. I needed to incorporate multiple types of minerals and alloys into their creation; otherwise, they became fragile and brittle. I was trying to shore up their weaknesses but needed more time to experiment so that the changes were Mana-cost effective. The second significant change on the bottom floors was traps and wandering monsters that were placed merely to keep non-combatants away or punish them for coming in the first place.

  The people I was specifically referencing were those who stayed on the outskirts and hung around the reward kiosks especially thickly. When I had first made these floors, higher ranked cultivators were getting rich by charging a fee to lower rankers for taking their tokens to lower levels to redeem them for higher quality and more expensive gear. So many of the weak people were slain that the few adventurers that were strong enough were able to charge a premium. This system worked well… except abyssal Hans kept showing up at the kiosks - having completely avoided the Mobs - and used a bunch of tokens whenever he was sure that Dale had gone to sleep and wouldn’t yell at him for risking himself. He threw off all of my calculations and tended to frustrate me to no end.

  I was startled to hear a chiming tone, and, speak of the little…! There he was, throwing a handful of gold coins into the air and letting them shower down on him as he closed his eyes and danced! I yelled at him, knowing he couldn’t hear me.

  Looking around for the Cats that were supposed to be guarding against this specific annoyance, I found that they were distracted by playing with a small bag stuffed full of… mint? No! Catnip! I absorbed the bag and its contents with a *pop* which caused the Cats to become confused… then angry. They looked around for Hans, as did I so I could send them after him, but all I saw was the shimmer of a closing portal.