Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 16

“The Many Trial Rooms is considered a non-standard dungeon.” The Adventurers Guild worker told the small gathering of Adventurers, plus Kay, a few Sentinels, and Darten. “Mainly due to two features, the non-continuous nature of the dungeon’s rooms as opposed to the significantly more common floored layout, and that the dungeon actively divides parties into smaller groups across a majority of rooms. The Many Trial Rooms also occasionally pits individuals or groups from different parties against each other, which is also a non-standard feature but one that is more common than the first two. Thankfully, we haven’t had any reports of rooms that make opposing adventurers fight or kill each other, and various questionings and investigations have found that the likelihood of that having happened and the survivors not informing us is unlikely.”

The introductory speech continued, covering topics that Kay had already learned about for the most part, either through having already gone through the dungeon or just chatting with Meten about the dungeon. The Adventurer’s Guild gave free introductory lessons about local dungeons at every branch that had any dungeons nearby; there was one back in Avalon for the rock-themed dungeon they’d found. Technically, the lessons weren’t mandatory, although the guild did heavily encourage them. In reality, the only people who didn’t attend at least one of the lessons to get a good sense of what a dungeon new to them was like were the ones who usually ended up dying in one of the dungeons they visited. A cocky adventurer who assumed knowing one dungeon meant they’d be safe in the next one was probably going to end up dead sooner rather than later.

For the Sentinels, Blood Guard, and anyone else who worked directly for Avalon and wanted to go dungeon delving, the lessons were mandatory, and Kay had used his power as ruler of Avalon to make the lessons mandatory for newbie adventurers who wanted to go into the rock dungeon. Officially, the Adventurer’s Guild wasn’t happy with his high-handed declarations that ignored their standing policy. Unofficially, guildmaster Gemglass had given him a large platter of expensive pastries during the next meeting they’d had together and had smiled widely the entire time she “tried to convince him” to undo his decision. Adventurers who learned were adventurers who lived longer on average, after all, and dead adventurers didn’t make any money for the guild, ignoring any moral quandaries like wanting to save people’s lives and all that.

After the short class wrapped up with some questions from visiting adventurers. Kay gathered up his temporary party and headed for the entrance to the Many Trial Rooms. He had a pair of Sentinels and Darten with him. One was a human man named Edgar, who wore dark brown colored scale armor with a sword and matching shield, who was going to be their tank when it came to group fights, thanks to his Expert Defender Class. The other Sentinel was Kyriel, a gnomish woman with the Expert Trapmeister Class who was going to be their rogue archetype party member. With Kay’s healing abilities and the damage he and Darten could put out, they had a decently balanced party, if not a “traditional” one.

“So Meten said he bullied you into putting more effort into tiering up?” Kay mentioned to Darten as they waited in line.

“Yup,” Darten glanced down as he shrugged, “I lost my excuse of having too much work that couldn’t be set aside to do any fighting since the ministry has recruited so many new people, and David said it was fine for me to take some time off when Meten showed up and bugged him about it.” He looked a bit glum as he sighed. “I realized I don’t really like fighting, and I do like building things, but my uncle’s right that it’s better to just get all the leveling I need with my combat Classes done early so I can combine into a non-combat tier five Class when I want to instead of just waiting till I had to go fight if I ever wanted to hit tier five. I want my combined class to have my Earth Magic and Earth Manipulation Skills in it, so…” He trailed off, then gestured toward the dungeon, “Back to fighting for a bit. At least I don’t have to deal with all of the arguing about what the ministry is named.” He added, “That’s been getting really heated.”

“Stop.” Kay held up one hand, “What do you mean? There’s been actual arguing about what the ministry is called? David told me that was just him messing with me.”

“Huh? No, there have been groups of people arguing about what we should name the ministry ever since we started recruiting new people. A lot of it is about whether ‘building’ or ‘construction’ is better, although there’s a faction that says we shouldn’t include either because that would make it seem like Avalon doesn’t allow private construction, which isn’t true. But we are still building the roads and other national projects, so it’s not like taking ‘building’ out of the name would make any sense.”

Kay very lowly facepalmed. “You’re the Vice-Minister; why haven’t you told me about this before?”

“David asked me not two. He’s a fantastic architect and city planner, but he’s not the best people manager. He didn’t want to seem like he couldn’t do his job or handle his subordinates, and it’s really only been some internal bickering, so I kept his secrets. We’ve been getting all the projects done; there’s just been some extra paperwork when people started changing the headers on documents.”

“What’s the name of the actual ministry?” Kay demanded.

“We’re still the Ministry of Planning, officially. People just keep changing what it says on paperwork, and by the time David actually noticed it was happening, he’d already submitted too many reports during official meetings with you, so he’s just been rolling with it the best he could.”

“Wait, so there haven’t actually been any official changes to the name?”

“Not that I know of. I think Amanda would have gotten involved if anyone tried anything like that.”

“It’s just an issue of getting David to start smacking people down for messing with his reports, then?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Kay said with a relieved sigh, “It sounded like the actual name of the ministry was still being changed around. That would be an organizational nightmare. I’ll just have a private meeting with David and tell him to start laying down the law with people. What would happen to our budget or our resource planning if the name kept becoming something different all the time.”

“Oh, it’s not even close to that bad,” Darten told him, “As far as I know, it’s only been his documents for official meetings that have been slipping through. David’s been working hard at making sure all the projects that he’s directly overseeing are going well, and he ends up memorizing all of his briefings for you and for parliament, so he doesn’t really pay attention to what the headers say. So he doesn’t notice until he’s in the meeting, and then it’s too late. He’s been an absolute hardass about the documents he finds that have been changed; he just doesn’t pay attention to his briefing materials.”

“Who’s fucking with his briefing materials? Doesn’t he write those himself? This sounds like a lot smaller of a problem than I thought it was a minute ago, but it’s still an issue if people are deliberately titling documents with the wrong name.”

“No, his assistants work on those mostly; he’s too busy to write them himself.” Darten frowned as he thought, “But you’re totally right that it’s something to deal with. I’d thought David had already sorted it out, to be honest. He told me it wasn’t anything to worry about anymore and that all the arguing was just people being annoying at this point. If you want, I can be part of the meeting when you talk to him, and I’ll help sort it all out.”

“That sounds good, thanks.”

After that conversation, they moved a few spots forward in line, and it was getting close enough to when they would enter that Kay started talking to the temporary party all together. “Right, we know from my experience and the Adventurer’s Guild’s lessons that there’s almost always a safe zone in each room that you have time to strategize in before throwing yourself into danger. When we get separated into individuals, we should obviously use that time to plan things through to be as safe as possible, and when anyone gets put together, we’ll plan out how to tackle each challenge or fight. Since we don’t have a ton of experience fighting together except for the last couple of days of practice, our first goal is to do things safely over anything else. If we fail specific challenges or don’t get any extra loot the first few runs, that’s fine since we’re using these to get ourselves into the groove. Any questions that haven’t been answered yet?”

Darten and Edgar shook their heads while Kyriel gave a thumbs up.

“Alright. Everyone got their supplies? Emphasis on healing potions and first aid supplies. Hell, we’ve got time to spare until our turn; let's go over everything one more time.”

They all had more than enough supplies on them, with Kay having a secret stash of extras stored in his Inventory just in case. The special storage Skill hadn’t turned into a game change just yet, but it was useful enough to be worth the price he’d paid for it.

After a rundown of supplies and a quick discussion on group tactics in certain potential conditions they’d heard could happen inside the Many Trial Rooms, they made it to the front of the queue and got waved forward to enter. Kay paused just outside the door and gave a confident nod to his detachment of bodyguards who were waiting off to the side. Telling them they had to stay so that they weren’t going over the recommended number of people in one party in the dungeon hadn’t been difficult, but they weren’t pleased about it. Of course, pissing off the dungeon by flooding it with a ton of people in one group was a good way to die, so they followed orders and sent one group ahead to wait at the other end of the dungeon for Kay to come out.

One step into the dungeon’s entrance, Kay was suddenly in a closet-sized room with a door in front of him. I guess part of the dungeon getting more power is that we don’t have to walk through pitch-black curtain rooms anymore? Or was that a few rooms in? It’s been a minute, and I don’t actually remember all the details.

The door was unlocked and led him to a much larger cubical room that was completely covered in deep forest green tiles the size of his head, with thin borders of bright blue around the edges of each tile. With a loud slamming noise, the door behind him shut on its own, and when he glanced behind, there was a solid wall with the same tiles as everywhere else where the door should have been.

A flash of light drew Kay’s eyes to the center of the room, and where there had only been empty space was now a floating silver sphere at chest height. He cautiously walked over to it and started examining it, but as far as he could tell, it was only a featureless floating ball of metal. Very carefully, he reached over and poked it once. A change in the corner of his eye had his head snapping in that direction, and Kay saw a small portion of one of the tiles was now colored silver.

“Okay…”

Further experimentation revealed that the orb worked like a computer mouse, and the room was basically a paint program. Spinning the ball moved the “cursor” and tapping it in certain places made bigger or smaller areas of the walls, floor, or ceiling change to silver. When Kay eventually found a small spot that didn’t change color, no matter what he did, he started figuring out the puzzle.

“Alright, the goal is to make the secret image appear. Knowing what I do about this dungeon, there might be more than one right answer, actually. Guess it’s going to be trial and error until I get to move to the next room.”

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