Chapter 53 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

As the weeks went by, I was surprised by the fact that there were so few territory disputes that ended up in violence. The main reason turned out to be overpopulation. None of the waystations were now owned by individual organizations because so many neutral adventurers or different shadow guilds had to occupy the same waystations.

It turned more into a political game, but everyone could see the future. When more rooms opened up, I think things will get a lot more interesting.

I also liked seeing how the tactics for fighting my monsters changed because now they were silver rank or close to it and were able to use skills that were quite strong, or they had many of them. Getting the proper balance was a bit difficult, and I kind of liked that I had a smaller area for the testing because there were some changes that I needed to make.

One of the more important lessons that I learned was if the creature was big, it needed defensive skills; otherwise, their large body would just become a huge weakness, especially against longer-range attacks.

Earlier, this wasn't that big of a problem, but in the silver ranks, even melee fighters had some skills that gave them longer range while still keeping their attacks incredibly deadly. Another thing was speed. I would have to say it was one of the deadliest aspects a creature could possess.

I had already lowered the speed of smaller creatures, but giving a larger animal just a little bit more speed was incredibly deadly. One of the moose, for example, in one of my playrooms, developed a charge skill. It was able to rack up quite a kill streak before it was ambushed and killed by a mountain lion.

When I decided to pattern it into a monster and elevate it to silver rank, it was able to use the skill to boost its overall speed by about 10%. That amount of mass moving even slightly faster, combined with the proper charge skill, meant that the monster soloed an adventurer party. I basically had to lower the skill to the D rank before I felt it fit the current danger level of the 16th floor.

I also had to limit poisonous, venomous, and toxic monsters, as most of them had their own unique versions of those substances. This meant only the very best healers were able to deal with the kinds of variety the monsters could give.

Now, I didn’t want to remove these kinds of creatures altogether, but I did stop using patterns that worked extremely fast at killing adventurers. I tried to standardize the kinds of substances so there would be only a few for a large section of the dungeon rooms.

Like that, the alchemists and healers would be able to make specific cures for those substances, and the adventurers would also know what to expect in a given area they were in. Now, I could keep everything completely random, but that felt wrong, like I was purposely trying to kill them.

I didn’t want to kill anyone on purpose. They were here because they wanted to get stronger or for some other reason. They were willing to risk their lives to gain those things. I didn’t want them to die because they didn’t know the risk. I wanted them to know the risk and be willing to face it.

Water and air creatures were difficult to get right. Air creatures needed speed; otherwise, they would be incredibly easy to fight against. Yet, if they had too much, they would be one of the hardest fights in the dungeon. For that reason, I didn’t use them much and usually just as distraction, opportunity attackers, and ambushers.

Well, there was a fourth kind, but that was a singular small bird species that liked to collect shiny things and take them back to its nest. It got incredibly good at it in the playroom, and it was incredibly fast, and its steal skills were quite good.

So, whenever adventurers in a large room would fight more intelligent creatures who dropped coins and not meat, it would swoop in and steal some of the coins. Oh, how the adventurers hated it, until one got so angry that he decided to track the bird down and found a nest full of coins. Nowadays, it's one of the most celebrated monsters in my dungeon, and adventurers have spent hours looking for the nest for the extra coins they can get.

Water creatures present a completely different problem. Most adventurers can't breathe underwater, and they are quite bad at fighting there as well. I have made a few test rooms that are half submerged or completely submerged, and basically, they would need to fight monsters two floors up from their current one to make it a reasonably fair fight.

Fish can use their environment incredibly well; they're fast, they know much better how to fight in a three-dimensional space instead of the two-dimensional space most adventurers are used to. Just for training purposes, I would like to add more of these kinds of areas, but they really aren't that good for ranking or skill development because adventurers can't fight fish that are on their rank.

I won't even discuss fish that use skills because they could slaughter multiple adventurer parties quite easily. Honestly, I'm actually quite concerned about how dangerous waters are getting in the playrooms, as many of the land creatures have learned that even drinking water has become a dangerous necessity.

Fortunately, fish fight each other even more than other creatures, and the same species is quite happy to eat its own kind. I did think that I might have a solution by using more passive fish, yet for some reason, they have developed quite deadly passive skills. If I used the non-skill variety, they would pose no challenge at all.

My core always started to hurt a bit when I tried to find a solution to this problem, and perhaps a more direct approach to designing water monsters was called for. But that would have to be pushed back to the next breakthrough, or even beyond that. I didn't have time to deal with that right now.

If I hadn't decided to work on all my previous floors that weren't expanded with my skill, I would have had plenty of opportunities to deal with interesting problems like that. But I felt it would be good to get this done with, and I only had four more floors to complete.

The 16th floor also wasn't finished; I hadn't even completed the space expansion. It looked like it was going to become quite an extensive floor that would be incredibly cold all the time. I honestly couldn't wait to see all the different evolutions, and perhaps I would give some of the Arden Goblins a chance on this floor as well. It would be interesting to see how they would develop in this kind of environment.

Their civilization was coming along nicely. It was good to see them start working with more metal and begin to develop proper farming. It was slow-going, but what was more interesting was how their technological development, and more importantly, how the magical side, differed from the ants.

The ants developed their technology faster than their magical use, which is why I think their current technology seems so different from the adventurers. That being said, magic seemed to have finally caught up because they reached the limit of what they previously managed to think up.

The Arden Goblins, however, seemed to follow a path more similar to what the adventurers went through. This made me want to, perhaps in the future, give new civilizations a chance to find some lost knowledge that's way ahead of their time and see how that changes things.

Just thinking about that makes me want to have a breakthrough to get more space to test everything out. I got nice and comfortable and continued to work my ass off to get everything done that I wanted. I do enjoy all the different sayings I have learned from the adventurers.