Evil Avalon - Volume 1 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Into the Dungeon

The dungeons had appeared unexpectedly in the early 1900s as entrances to another world.

People could travel in and out, but no light or radio waves could pass through, so the portals separating this world from the dungeons’ were pure black. The space they connected to was abnormal, another dimension.

After the initial discovery, people’s fears painted the dungeon as Hell itself, a source from which demons sprung, or a paranormal spot responsible for mysterious disappearances. Upon learning that slain monsters dropped magic gems that could generate energy, Japan mobilized its armies to the dungeon, prioritizing this more than war.

The first expedition into the dungeon’s depths equipped its soldiers with bayoneted rifles. As the teams descended, the awaiting monsters proved impervious to bullets, and the military suffered heavy casualties. After reaching a certain depth, the expedition stalled entirely.

This setback didn’t deter Japan’s leaders from their desire to acquire the magic gems for energy generation and any other undiscovered resources. The government redoubled its efforts and invested huge sums from its treasury into research and development to enable further conquest of the dungeon. To bolster the army’s numbers, the government embarked on a recruitment drive of ordinary citizens who would become the first adventurers. The state trained these citizens and helped them level up. They drew up new legislation, opened educational facilities, enacted administrative reform, created the Ministry of Dungeons... Later, they launched the second expedition with the full weight of the country behind it.

Conflicts and civil wars scattered refugees across the globe as countries fought for control over the dungeons to secure the energy resources within. Fortunately, Japan didn’t need to fight for a dungeon—only one had appeared within the country—and no other nation tried to invade, giving them unfettered access to its resources. The magic gems extracted from the dungeon eliminated Japan’s reliance on imported energy, and several world-leading magic-gem energy companies sprang up. Japan became a net exporter of energy, which led to a surge in economic growth.

Up to this point, Japan and the rest of the world had retained some sense of normalcy.

That all changed fifteen years ago when a French private company announced the successful temporary generation of an artificial magic field. The physical enhancements gained from leveling up only occurred inside the dungeon or within a hundred and fifty meters of a dungeon portal. However, this invention made it possible to activate the physical enhancements anywhere.

With this, the world entered a new era. I want you now to imagine a world overrun by superhumans impervious to bullets, who could slice through boulders with a single slash of a sword, and sprint hundreds of meters in seconds. AMFs certainly brought economic benefits, particularly to the agricultural and construction industries. But terrorists, politicians, and religious organizations naturally took advantage of the technology for their evil ends. Things came to a head with the assassination of a US president.

His host of armed bodyguards hadn’t been enough to keep him safe. People sat awestruck in front of their televisions as shocking footage played of a lone terrorist slicing through the president and all his bodyguards with nothing more than a sword. States and organizations keenly observed the spectacle and found inspiration from it. They hired adventurers and dispatched them to fight their wars. The presence of adventurers as spies and assassins changed the parameters of war and diplomacy. Around this time, mercenary forces with various political and religious ties took center stage, spelling dire consequences for national security in every country.

The UN assumed management of the dungeons and enacted strict measures to prevent the misuse of dungeons and magic fields. This did nothing to quell the flood of crimes committed by adventurers, possibly because of the existence of other dungeons not yet known to the public. The authorities were constantly on the back foot.

***

I closed the adventurer’s manual, which contained a lot of useful information about the history of the dungeons.

Most of this had happened over the last ten years, and things seemed awful. I’d come across some of the info browsing at home, but I never would’ve guessed that a US president would be among the victims of AMFs. While playing the game, the history of the world had taken a back seat to the enjoyment when I was storming through the dungeons like a badass or winning the hearts of the heroines. Looking back, I should’ve spared some time to notice these details.

“Now that I think about it,” I said aloud, “wasn’t one of my classmates a foreign agent in the game?”

A female student in Class E had progressed DEC’s story by acting as a trigger for an event where the player fought against spies in a local war. If the player teamed up with her, followed her storyline, and completed the story events, they would receive a reward that made raiding the dungeon easier... I wanted to stay well away from that mess, though.

This train of thought discouraged me, so I wiped the topic from my mind and focused on my dungeon raid.

The main building of Adventurers’ School was an enormous facility with ten subterranean levels and eighteen aboveground floors. The middle school, high school, and university subdivisions all used the same facility, which additionally housed private and research organizations. The dungeon portal was on the first floor of the school building. In my original world, this spot had been inside a hill. The builders here had hollowed it out and constructed their colossal building around the portal to maximize the usable area of the valuable magic field. Japan’s government clearly hated wasting any of the dungeon’s resources.

One also needed to scan a special terminal or Adventurer’s Pass at multiple scanning machines in the public square outside the Adventurers’ Guild. It was similar to railway ticket barriers, and I could use the wearable terminal the school had given me.

Tens of thousands of people passed through the square each day, so the space was rowdy with adventurers.

“Looking at all these people, I feel underdressed,” I remarked.

The adventurers with plain clothes wore light leather armor. But the occasional extravagant ones donned shining suits of armor, colorful robes, or long capes while sometimes carrying huge weapons. This was a modern world, but its inhabitants belonged to the realm of fantasy. I must’ve looked like an amateur with my bat and tracksuit...and I was the odd one out!

I passed through the ticket barrier into the building, then joined the slow-moving queue until I arrived in front of the portal. The portal was large, ten meters tall and wide, and its surface was pure darkness, owing to the impassibility of light, a bizarre sight. A slimy sensation enveloped my body when I walked through, so I shut my mouth and halted my breathing. Playing the game hadn’t taught me about this sensation.

After a few seconds, I was through to the other side. I was in a space about one hundred square meters in area, and thick cables connected several communications systems to the outside world around the edges. These cables fed into a single bundle, which led back through the portal. Radio waves couldn’t penetrate the portal, but wired transmissions made communication to and from the outside world possible. The intent was most likely to allow terminals to function inside the dungeon.

There was an area for resting adventurers and even a shop, but the seats were all taken. It was surprisingly busy here, making me wonder what the point of resting so close to the portal was. Why not go back outside to rest?

Still following the queue of people, I proceeded along the path that no longer branched. This part of the dungeon was a large cave. The ground was level, but the rock ceiling and walls were uneven and bumpy, like in a coal mine.

It was bright inside, despite the lack of any obvious light source. The walls weren’t emitting the light, as it appeared light passed through them.

I looked around for monsters but did not find a single one. I wagered that nearby adventurers had overpowered and cut down every spawning monster. There were just too many people here to have a good fight against a monster, so I continued pressing farther into the dungeon.

After an hour of walking, I was about two kilometers away from the portal. I had veered from the main path, which led to the second floor, instead heading to a less populated area. I’d crossed several forks in the road up to this point, but the GPS and automatic mapping software on my school terminal ensured I wouldn’t get lost on these early floors.

Having come all this way, I noticed that the dungeon had the same structure as in the game. My future dungeon raids would be much easier to plan with that knowledge. I hadn’t counted on it taking an hour to get here, though. There were too many people, and I groaned about how I might have to wade through the crowd every time I came down.

As I slowly walked on, planning the logistics of my future raids, a dark mist appeared before my eyes. A monster was about to spawn. The mist dissipated, revealing a twenty-centimeter light-blue blob, a slime.

Monsters could not move for the first few seconds after spawning. Using that immobility to my advantage, I swung my bat down at the helpless slime, which burst like jelly on impact into a rain of smaller blobs.

After ten seconds, the blobs evaporated into mist, leaving behind a magic gem about the size of a fingernail. A gem this size would be worth around ten yen—an abysmal return on time invested, but that was what one could expect given how busy the dungeon was.

Slimes had a monster level of 1. Because I was also level 1, that meant that I would receive one hundred percent of the available experience points for slaying it. Defeating monsters beneath my level would reduce the amount of experience points received. Meanwhile, slaying monsters above my level would grant me bonus experience points. That was as long as the system worked the same as the game.

I would have to slay at least one hundred level 1 monsters to progress to level 1. I’d hoped I could farm the monsters for experience and reach level 2 in no time, but waiting for monsters to spawn would take longer than I’d initially planned.

“But,” I said aloud, “the slime room should be just a little further.”

The slime room located northeast of the dungeon’s first level was small. If you could get three slimes inside the room, they’d merge into one large, special monster. This was good for two reasons: larger monsters were worth ten times as many experience points as a regular slime, and it had a monster level of 2, meaning I’d get bonus experience points. Most of DEC’s strategy guides recommended farming this merged slime at the start of a playthrough.

I walked on for another thirty minutes, finally arriving outside the slime room. A few slimes had scattered around the area, with no other adventurers present, and that did wonders for a slime’s life span.

Slimes were passive monsters, meaning they wouldn’t become aggressive unless attacked. I would have to pull their aggro* toward myself and lead them into the room.

*TIPS: Aggro is a measure of hostility a monster builds toward a player. Monsters will attack the player that has built up the most aggro. As such, parties must pay attention to aggro levels during boss fights to prevent monsters from attacking support characters.

Let’s give it a go! I thought.

I pulled the aggro of three slimes and leaped into the slime room as I’d planned.

“Yes!” I said. “They’re starting to merge.”

The aqua-blue slimes gathered into one big slime, and a few seconds later, the color changed to a dark blue. It would be quicker now. I’d have to be more careful with this one since merged slimes were active monsters and would attack on sight.

The original slimes weighed two or three kilograms, while the merged slime weighed closer to ten and was twice as big to match. It would attack by bouncing at its target’s stomach at tens of kilometers per hour. A direct hit would leave its victim writhing on the ground in agony. In my case, my stomach fat might absorb enough of the blow for it to be painless.

I was cautious, taking my time observing its attack patterns. Thankfully, it followed the same simple pattern as the merged slime in the game, lunging straight toward its target. The next time it did this, I judged its trajectory and shifted my stance to avoid the attack, then hit it with my bat as it passed. Regular slimes would perish after a single hit to their core, but this one needed at least one more strike. That was no problem because it was an easy foe. I was confident I could keep this up and reach level 2 by the end of the day.

***

I spent the next several hours using the slime room to farm merged slimes, taking breaks between fights. During my breaks, I walked around the area and didn’t find other adventurers hunting merged slimes. In DEC, players loved to hunt these monsters as they were easy to kill, unlike other level 2 monsters. Maybe nobody knew about them?

“Woo! A rare drop. Lucky me!”

One of the slain monsters had dropped a brown slime ring that glowed slightly and granted its wearer two extra points to their vitality stat. The resulting HP increase was barely noticeable, but it would still prove useful in the early levels. Despite it being too big to fit on my fat fingers, magic items resized to fit their wearer once equipped, so I had nothing to worry about.

I continued slaying merged slimes, and when I’d killed ten, I leveled up at last.

It was a rather unpleasant process, as I felt my whole body heating up like I had too much to drink and wondered whether I’d made myself ill. But the feeling had subsided, and my body felt light. The movements of my arms and legs felt brisker. My stats had probably risen, though I wouldn’t know until I checked at the Adventurers’ Guild’s measurement office or at the store in the hidden room on the dungeon’s tenth floor. Measuring my stats at the measurement office would update the stats in my terminal, so I preferred avoiding it to keep my quick leveling a secret. Although, I doubted whether anyone would bat an eyelid if I went up by just one or two levels.

“Leveling up feels great,” I exclaimed. “I feel unstoppable and could get used to this.” I then checked the time on my terminal. “Whoa, where did the time go?”

It was already 7:30 p.m. My legs were weary and my stomach empty, so I called it a day and hurried home.