Dungeon Tour Guide ch. 163

Nora

The king’s security measures triggered immediately.

Whatever spell had been cast to check for unauthorized intruders only activated when they left. That didn’t make all too much sense to Nora until she spent just about forty seconds running from the tower.

The ground roiled in waves like a stormy sea. Terrain became impassable in instants, and it was only thanks to her potion that she was able to kick away the spikes that grew beneath her feet, trying to impale her.

Walls rose out of nowhere, trying to hem her in, and she used her glued-together mass of crates as a club to break through them.

It was a strangely familiar sight, but Nora didn’t have time to dwell on that. The soil beneath her fell away with every step, dropping into a deep darkness that she couldn’t see the bottom of.

She managed to find her way on top of a short wall during a lull in the madness, but the churning earth wouldn’t stop crumbling in on itself.

The king really wants me not to get away with this.

That meant that it was utterly imperative that Nora lug the crates away with her.

Nora had her hands full with the crate conglomerate, but she was a level 15 [Alchemist] now, and she’d gained the ability to [Remote Access] her solutions. She popped a [Quick-Fix Barrier] from her bag onto the ground beneath her and activated it. White gas streamed out from it in a circular pattern, and she hopped over it as it rapidly set into a material as durable as concrete.

It would hold for a bit. Hopefully.

She thought her situation over in the few seconds of peace she had on the oasis she’d temporarily found.

This scene of the ground acting more like a liquid than solid was familiar to her. Why?

Well, now that she had a free moment to remember, it was simple. Although the last dozen or so days of her life had been spent running, fleeing, and otherwise watching her world turn upside down, she’d just spent several weeks in an area that acted just like this. It had been less hostile to her, but she knew that any enemy that walked within would see a sight just like this—a constantly shifting mess of land, shaping itself to slay its foes.

These were the actions of a Dungeon Core.

And at that, Nora finally put two and two together, cursing herself for not getting it earlier.

The message had even spelled it out for her, but in her rush to focus on the king’s imminent arrival, she’d missed the forest for the trees.

In the dozen crates she’d shrunk and bound together were Dungeon Cores. Each one of them had been filled with at least a hundred of them, which meant she had something like a thousand Dungeon Cores.

Yet that thousand was only a pathetic drop of water in the bucket that had been the tower.

The king was mass-producing Dungeon Cores, and it looked like he’d already started putting some of them to use.

Nora frowned. How is he using them?

The spheres she’d seen in the tower had seemed wholly inert, and she hadn’t seen any sign of activity from them while transporting the bunch, but here, right under her feet, was evidence that the king had managed to set some of them live.

That was a question for tomorrow, she decided. Priority one was surviving today.

To her surprise, the wall she’d made camp on hadn’t disappeared entirely. Sure, her concrete solution kept it going for a while, but the wall beneath it should have been affected by the power of whatever Dungeon Core had been buried underneath the ground.

She realized why soon enough.

“Oh, come on,” she groaned. “Goddess, can I catch a break?’

The reason her single island was still standing was that the entirety of the land around it had dropped at least fifty feet. Nora could barely see the bottom, but she could see that the same thing had happened for the entirety of the land almost a mile out—right up to the edge of the desert.

That alone wouldn’t have been a problem. She could always brew up more [Feather Falling] potions, after all. Unfortunately, the thing with Dungeon Cores was that they didn’t only control the land.

They also spawned monsters.

Nora had seen a monster horde just before everything had gone to complete shit, and back then, it had been an assortment of relatively high-power monsters that she was still pretty sure she was capable of taking. Their threat had come from their sheer volume, not their individual strengths.

This Dungeon Core, though, spawned a far more familiar enemy. One she’d spent quite some time fighting against, actually.

The stench of rot and decay hit her even all the way up here. Nora knew what she would see when she looked over the edge of her temporary island, but she did anyway.

Maw-mouths. Gorey, amorphous blobs made of corpses, roaring their ever unsatiated hunger to the heavens.

The type of monster the Omen had been.

Nora crawled back to the center of her island.

Implications of the king utilizing Omen monsters aside, this was bad. It was possible that the influence of the Dungeon Cores didn’t reach all the way to where Nora was, which would explain why none of the monsters beneath her were trying to reach her and her island was still intact, but the pseudo-concrete wasn’t going to last forever.

She couldn’t fly. None of Inquisition’s strategies had ever involved it, so she had never bothered to try learning how to make a potion of flight. Those were dangerous and expensive to make, anyway, so she hadn’t been too broken up about it.

But now, her options were limited. She could try to use more [Quick-Fix Barrier]s and make a bridge for herself, but she wasn’t deluded enough to think that she could make it all the way to the edge of this pit of maw-mouths with what resources she had left.

Fighting was out, too. She had struggled to kill even one of them with the help of her entire party. Alone? It was impossible.

Nora sat still and waited for a miracle.

[Nine times out of ten.]

[Nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand.]

[This should be where your story ends.]

And somehow, one came for her.

#

Tuyu

[Divine Intervention] was a far trickier spell to use than most thought it was. To an outside observer, it was simple—she asked, and the goddess answered.

To the [Archbishop], it was much more than that. It was the culmination of her dedication to the goddess. It was decades of faith brought together and actualized as power.

She hadn’t expected it to work. Tuyu had turned her back on the people that mattered to her for the goddess, and then she had lost faith in the one she’d betrayed them for. Even if the one who ruled all had not explicitly told her to stay put, Tuyu knew that she was breaking the spirit of what their pact had been.

This final usage of [Divine Intervention] would be her last. If she somehow survived this day against all odds, she would no longer even be an [Archbishop]. She knew not what her class would become, but she could not call herself the goddess’ greatest servant.

Tuyu was the worst kind of person. A traitor to both sides.

As the goddess’ will lifted her to her destination, though, she knew it didn’t matter. For a few, shining moments, she would be the righteous hand of the goddess once more, wielding all the power that came with it.

She flashed into existence atop a flower of stone and concrete. Below her was a pit of death, and she wondered for the briefest of instants whether the goddess had decided to play a cruel joke on her.

Then she saw Nora, the [Alchemist], and she knew she was in the right place.

Nora’s eyes widened. Tuyu knew that she must have been alone for a long time.

My fault, she thought. Her struggle is my fault.

Tuyu wished she had more time, but her clock was running out. She would not be infused with divine power for much longer.

“Grab onto me!” she said, extending a hand.

The silver lining of Nora’s predicament, as it turned out, was that she hadn’t had contact with the others. She didn’t know that Tuyu had become what she had once sworn to destroy, and so the [Alchemist] didn’t even hesitate before grabbing onto her.

“What—”

“My [Divine Intervention],” Tuyu answered smoothly. “Everything will be okay. You are in safe hands.”

The words came to her so easily that she almost convinced herself of it.

“[Divine Radiance],” Tuyu whispered.

This was another spell that the goddess herself had granted her. This would protect the ones she carried from harm, though not herself. She had gained it when Tuyu had seen the goddess for the first time, shortly after failing to save half a town from plague.

O great goddess, she had begged, Show me how to save those in pain. I would lay down my life for theirs if I could, yet all I can do is watch.

She had received exactly what she asked for. Tuyu sacrificed her own lifeforce and power to infuse others with it. In an instant, she dropped from level 23 to 22, but that drop ensured that Nora would survive what came next.

The [Alchemist]’s connection to the goddess had been weakened greatly. Tuyu forced herself to lose another level, [Empower]ing her with the connections she needed to connect again. The exact mechanics of her spell were lost to her—somewhere in the middle, she let the goddess take the reins, hoping that her transgressions would not be taken out on another.

If Nora’s eyes had been wide before, they were saucers now. “You fixed my interface!”

“Do not waste this gift,” Tuyu said, and then she took [Flight], carrying them both.

If this had been another day, another Tuyu, she knew that she could have used the resonant remnants of the [Divine Intervention] to send them both teleporting away, bringing them to where they were needed most.

Today’s Tuyu was lost, broken, and weak of faith, so all she could do was fly. The radiant energy she had left had to be repurposed into increasing the strength of the flight spell, enabling her to carry another passenger and her cargo.

It was enough.

Although the presence of the abominations below sucked her very life from her as she flew by them, none of them had the range to escape the bounds of the beings that had created them, and more importantly, it was only Tuyu that suffered. Nora was safe, bound tightly in the layers of protections that Tuyu had fashioned from her soul.

No further attacks came to them as they flew. Tuyu’s [Sight Beyond Sight] was still active, and she could see the king converging on their position, but that was a fool’s errand for him now. The goddess did not take half-measures. She would not have allowed Tuyu to make use of her power if it changed nothing.

They reached the boundary of the pit in under a minute, and Tuyu continued traveling.

“Nora,” she said. “Are you well?”

It was a pathetically ignorant question to ask. Nora was not well, and it was her fault.

“I’m fine,” Nora said. “Great, now that we’re out of there. I have a lot to say. Aren’t you seeing my messages?”

The [Alchemist] had seemed to slip in and out of reality while Tuyu had flown them through the devastated land, and it was only then that Tuyu realized why.

She no longer had access to the ARI, and she could only see it if she truly focused on it with her [Sight Beyond Sight].

“I am not a good woman,” she told Nora.

“What?” The [Alchemist] made a gesture with one hand, then yelped in panic as she almost dropped the conglomeration of steel crates she carried. “What are you talking about? You just saved my life. Did I miss out on something?”

Tuyu opened her mouth.

“Scratch that. I definitely missed out on something. It’s been a while. Look, I don’t really care what you did, but we need to get this to Centerpoint ASAP. I think I have an idea of what the king wants to do, and given how dead this world is looking, I don’t like where it’s going.”

Tuyu closed her mouth.

She had saved a life, after all. If Nora proved to possess the information she claimed she did, she could even thwart the next step of the king’s plans.

Even if it was only to rectify her own mistake, Tuyu had done one more good deed.

“The others will explain,” she told the [Alchemist]. “They near our location.”

“The others?” Nora repeated. “And what do you mean by that? You make it sound like you’re not going to be here.”

Barring extraordinary circumstance, I am not.

The Pallbearers and Starfall found them two minutes later.

They were almost four miles out from the tower, now, but that did not preclude the possibility of the king finding them and taking back what was his. Tuyu was glad to see them. They would be able to ferry Nora away faster than she could.

“Drop the hostage!” a voice she recognized as the [Astral Monk] Sarah’s shouted.

“I have a shot,” the [Storm Sniper] said quietly. Even at a distance of a hundred feet, Tuyu could hear him. She had always been blessed. Ironic.

Tuyu lowered herself to the ground, setting Nora and her absurdly bulky cargo down gently.

“Hostage?” the [Alchemist] said, confused. “I’m not a hostage! Why are you pointing weapons at her? Aren’t you part of her party? She just saved my life!”

“Nora,” Tuyu said with as much warmth as she could muster, “go. They’re not going to hurt you.”

“Tuyu,” K’lon said. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

“No,” Nora said. “No. We’re not supposed to be fighting each other!”

“I already have,” Tuyu said. “I am not the hero of this story.”

She saw the moment the realization took hold. Nora was a smart girl, Tuyu knew, and when the pieces fell into place, they fell hard.

A complicated mix of emotions played over her face. Tuyu could imagine what she was feeling. Disgust, hatred, anger, confusion. The [Archbishop] deserved all of that and more.

And yet the [Alchemist] didn’t leave.

“You saved my life,” she said quietly. “That still means something.”

Tuyu just shook her head sadly.

She did not deserve her charge’s sympathy. This was one final cry of defiance in a life torn between her duty to those she loved and her goddess; she had failed at both, and now it was only fair for her to reap the consequences.

The other party warped to her location in an instant, their movement spells outclassing anything Tuyu could manage.

“Nora, the king is coming,” Tuyu said. “Do not delay yourself any longer.”

“Tuyu,” Charles cut in sharply. “You have betrayed humanity. Your actions have led to the deaths of tens of thousands. What do you have to say for yourself?”

The [Archbishop] had no eyes for Starfall. Though she had grown to work with them, it was the Pallbearers that she had truly spent time with.

Ashley had come into her own as a powerful, independent young woman. The fire that burned within her could rival the stars.

Thorn was a genius. He never stopped learning, and he never would.

K’lon was not, but he was dedicated, hardworking, and the most loyal friend anyone could ask for. He was nothing like her.

She had sought to eradicate them from this world. Influence of the goddess aside, it had ultimately been Tuyu’s choice, had it not?

“If I had to do it again,” she whispered, “I would have picked you.”

Charles’ expression twisted with disgust, and he shot her in the gut. Tuyu barely felt it, though she could see the red on her hands when she brought them up.

“You deserve worse,” he said.

“No!” Nora shouted. “We can—Lucas would have forgiven her! We can still use her power!”

No, you cannot, Tuyu couldn’t bring herself to say. I am nothing. I am less than nothing.

“I am not Lucas,” Ashley said, walking forward, “And some crimes are unforgivable. Tuyu Laurel, you betrayed our trust. You killed so, so many, and even now, a million lives ride on your shoulder. You lied to us.”

“I’m sorry.” Tuyu’s voice was barely audible.

“For what it’s worth,” Ashley said, igniting her sword with the [Phoenix’s Feather], “I am, too.”

[You did well, blessed one.]

I don’t care, Tuyu thought, and she realized it was true. I should have stayed.

The sword came down.

Tuyu died with the taste of regret on her tongue.