Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 953: Dungeon Selections

Then she turned on Scarlet.

”And you were pretty happy sitting there holding her hand while she got railed from behind, cheering her on and calling it art.”

”I was drunk,” Scarlet said.

”Tipsy at best.”

”Wait.” Scarlet’s head came back around and the grin was all the way returned. ”Wait, I remember you clearly now. You’re the one who runs her mouth like that all day and then gets folded in half the second Kaiden-”

”Hah?!”

Luna was on her feet.

Calypso had laughed so hard that she went over the back of her folding chair, and she stayed down there, because the angle turned out to be interesting.

Alexandra was giggling behind her palms.

”Alright, that’s enough.” Aria spoke up, cold authority overriding her usual honeyed voice. After all, she wasn’t speaking to Kaiden now. ”Luna, sit down. There are people in here who don’t have to love you.”

Ms. Rook, who had not stopped aligning her pages once through any of it, set the stack down and squared its edge against the table.

”I am not troubled, Miss Levander,” she said. ”I did my research. I knew what I signed up for.”

Doug had heard none of it. Doug was three forms deep into what a second SSS-tier registration did to a guild’s insurance schedule, and nothing short of the tent coming down was going to reach him.

”...Okay,” Luna muttered, and sat. ”I might’ve gotten a bit carried away... Guess you’re not a lesbo with a supreme flaming tongue technique.”

”Good to know,” Scarlet said, delighted.

”For now. Need to collect more evidence.”

”Luna...” Aria growled.

”Okay mom, sorry. I’m done.”

”...”

The folio came open on the map table. Inside it, twenty dungeon registry numbers, twenty tier gradings, twenty locations, and a column of figures down the right-hand side that Doug reached for before Vespera had finished sliding it across.

Twenty dungeons of their choice, owed since the competition and still sitting there.

When the global dungeon break event occurred on the tenth anniversary of the Mana Apocalypse, all dungeons broke, their monsters emptying out. But the dungeon cores remained. So long as one didn’t enter and destroy the core, or kill the final boss - which required said final boss to also venture out, which was a rare occurrence only happening a few times, such as with Calypso - the monsters would slowly respawn, the dungeons fully usable as before.

Furthermore, it was observed that a few new dungeons had arrived as well, indicating that dungeons would keep spawning as before.

”Let’s hear our options,” Kaiden spoke up.

It took a little under five minutes, and the tent did not survive the first ninety seconds of it.

”Stop. Stop, go back, number nine.” Luna was off the cot and at the table with her finger on the page. ”Ninety percent lightning domain, B-rank, four hours from here. That one’s mine. That one has my name on it. Look at it. Look how much it wants to be mine.”

”These dungeons are for our guild members to grind,” Bastet said, without hope.

”Our guild members can grind elsewhere.”

”Nine’s one of the best training grounds on the sheet for our new high-tiers and you want it for drops,” Nyx said.

”Yes.”

”At least the gremlin’s honest,” Calypso said warmly, upside down over the back of a folding chair, because Calypso had lost interest in the paperwork thirty seconds in and was now conducting her own investigation into how far the chair would go.

Doug, meanwhile, had found the column of figures and gone somewhere else entirely.

”Guild leader.” He turned the folio ninety degrees toward himself without asking anybody’s permission. ”Nobody at this table has read the right-hand side of this page, I’d wager, and you need to understand what that column is before I get too excited and you people start sending me weird glances.”

He tapped the top of the sheet. ”The Association flew survey drones into the entry levels, took whatever visuals they could get before the feeds died, and left. What we have is the initial areas.”

”Go on.”

”Number seventeen.” His finger came down on the line and stayed there. ”Ore-bearing strata in the walls of an entry corridor, respawning with the stone. Normally we’d have to lobby the association with billions to land such a dungeon...”

He stopped, which for Doug was a whole paragraph.

”And there is gold in it. I would like to be understood precisely here. Not a figure of speech. Gold, on the entry level, sitting where a drone could photograph it on the way past. That is the first corridor. Nobody has seen a single thing below it.”

”So you propose we mine it,” Kaiden said.

”I propose we go and look, and mine whatever is in reach while we are looking.” Doug was writing again, fast enough that the writing had stopped being handwriting. ”We put pickaxes in the backpacks of whichever awakened team we send in. It costs us nothing.”

”And the number in that column? What are they meant to show us?”

”The number in that column is mine.” Doug’s eyes shone. ”I built it out of one drone pass and what comparable strata have paid out elsewhere. I have no idea how deep it runs or what is between the door and the bottom of it. I would not put this page in front of a bank.”

”But you’re hopeful.”

”I am.” Doug’s glasses caught the lamp. ”And if the first expedition comes back anywhere near what I hope for, we stop treating extraction as something our fighters do on the way past and stand up proper harvest teams, people whose entire job is pulling material out of the ground while our awakened combatants stand guard over them.”

He looked up, giddy, having just found money in a coat he already owned, and the giddiness had been beating the caution for several minutes by then.

”That is revenue inside days. Potentially. Combined with our new sponsor deals, this is exactly what we need to continue our shopping spree of promising awakened combatants trained at the expense of our competitors- I mean, eh.” He shrugged, not even bothering to correct himself.

”Three of them are useless to us,” Ms. Rook said, without looking up from her tablet.

The tent, which had been enjoying Doug, turned.

”D-rank and under. There is nothing in any of them worth an afternoon of our people’s time.” She scrolled. ”But with our numbers, we don’t need twenty. We can rent them out, at approximately four times what they were worth a month ago.”

”...Why four times?” Bastet asked.

”Because the dungeon breaks and the events in the mountain range competition killed a great many other guilds’ rookies.” Her voice did not move at any point inside that sentence. ”Nearly every mid-tier guild in the state is trying to level a green intake at the same time, and safe low-rank ground is the scarcest thing on the board.”

She scrolled again. ”Two of them have already written to ask about access, and we have not published a single selection yet.”

”That’s a bit grim,” Alexandra said quietly.

”They are our competitors, Miss Seren.” Ms. Rook looked up for the first time. ”I would prefer they stay in a position where they have to ask and overpay.”

Kaiden discovered he was truly happy with the staff his mother brought over with herself. These people were true savages.

Just how he loved it.

”Then that’s what we do.” He looked at the page a moment longer. ”We send our guys into seventeen with pickaxes in the bags, rent out the three, and put the rest to work training our guild members, and ourselves.”

The argument over what to do with the other sixteen restarted before he had finished the sentence, and every person at that table had a different plan for them.

Kaiden left them to it and stepped out of the tent.

The compound had gone quiet the way construction sites go quiet at night, and the scaffolding ticked somewhere above him as it cooled.

He stood in it for a while and let himself enjoy it, because he had earned that much.

Then he noticed Pebble.

The disaster on four legs was under the north scaffolding where he always was, and he had not lain down. His head was level. All six amber eyes had come off their perimeter sweep and settled together on one point past the fence line, out where the access road ran out of floodlight, and they had been sitting on it long enough that nothing about him was moving at all.

Kaiden followed the look.

There was a road out there, and a treeline, and the ordinary dark that sat on everything past the last lamp.

”Pebble.”

Six eyes stayed exactly where they were.