“Why did so many enter the dungeon?” I asked. I had entered because I didn’t have a choice. Was it the same for the others?
Eventually, they started showing people surviving their encounters. A man with a broadsword cut through a group of floating eyeball things. A group of 10 people, armed with shotguns and bows and arrows, took down a nightmare pile of mouths and eyeballs and flesh. A Borough Boss, the screen said, the first one defeated. It quickly showed all 10 of their mugshots and listed the contents of their Silver Boss Boxes and their Platinum Weapons Boxes they’d received for the achievement. They’d all received magic tomes and enchanted ranged weapons.
Next, they showed a girl about 13 years old with a pair of rottweilers. I guessed she might be from South America somewhere. She wore an oversized soccer jersey that was yellow with a thick blue stripe running across it. The girl wore an angry, determined expression on her face
The dogs ripped a cow-sized spider to shreds. Later, the same girl held a mace in her hand and had a full set of glowing, silver armor. She’d kept the soccer jersey, wearing it over the armor like a tabard. One of the dogs wore what appeared to be a chainmail sweater. The other had gained the ability to shoot lightning when it barked.
We were shown her mugshot and both of the dogs. Her name was Lucia Mar. The dogs were Cici and Gustavo 3.
I still wasn’t sure about the naming conventions. I guessed since I was the first Carl in the dungeon, I didn’t have my last initial after my official name. And since this Gustavo was a dog without a last name, he had the three because he was the third Gustavo to enter the dungeon without a surname.
After that, it showed a quick rundown of several of the mobs, the images flashing by so quickly I could barely see any of them. I recognized goblins, scatterers, rats, and dozens of the monsters shown in the earlier scenes.
And that was it. The announcer said something about staying tuned for a rundown of this season’s rules and surprises and then something else about placing bets, but the screen snapped off and returned to the leaderboard image.
We just stared at the board for several moments.
“That’s it?” Donut demanded, breaking the silence. She looked at me, incredulous. “After that epic battle with Hoarder, we received no screen time. This is unacceptable!”
Before she could rant further, an announcement came. It was the same woman who spoke when the gates first closed.
Good job so far everyone. We had 15 borough bosses taken out and over 1,500 neighborhood bosses killed. A pair of crawlers even came across a city boss, but that ended as you might expect. Losses are right on the projected track.
You’ll be getting these announcements after each episode. A couple quick patch notes. The Fire Fingers spell should be safe to cast now. We’ve fixed the hallway bathroom bug. So, if you open the door, and someone else enters, they will no longer explode. Sorry about that. Reminder, however, hallway bathrooms are personal spaces, and they can’t be shared. We also fixed the unlimited toilet paper bug. Now you’re only getting one roll per floor, so if you waste it, you’re on your own. We have a long list of fixes with the new inventory system that we’re working on. For right now, the two big ones we’ve already patched are that you can no longer transport mobs to your inventory in order to kill them. Also, any momentum an item might have while it entered inventory will no longer be preserved. It’s now safe to extract items you put into inventory while moving at a high rate of speed. Remember, this inventory system is a privilege, and it’s not meant to be used as a weapon. While we love and admire your creativity, any unintentional exploits will be patched, so if you find something that has an unintended feature, don’t get too comfortable using it.
We are now populating the staircases down to level 2. Remember, everyone. Only go down the stairs early if you absolutely have to. Once you descend to the next floor, you can’t go back up. Also, we’re trying something new this season. If you prematurely descend, you are held in stasis until the collapse. So those of you working on your social numbers, keep that in mind. Viewers tend to lose interest quickly, and you’ll shed favorites if you’re not accessible for a couple days before the floor above collapses. We recommend descending to the next level no earlier than six hours before the scheduled collapse. If you descend during that window, there will be no stasis involved, and you’ll actually get a head start over those who came before you. Good luck. Let’s have a great 30 hours until the next episode tunnels!
Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!
“Obviously we need to find one of these city bosses,” Donut said. “That’ll guarantee a feature the next episode. That’s what we need to focus on.”
I remembered the borough boss from the show. It had taken a group of ten well-armed crawlers to take it down.
“No,” I said. “We need to find an exit.”
I pulled up my map, hoping to see a stairwell appear somewhere in the neighborhood. There was nothing. I remembered reading once that the earth was just under 200 million square miles. There would be 75,000 entrances down to the second floor. If these staircases were distributed randomly, we were fucked. Even if the first floor was just underneath the landmasses, and not the entire planet, we were still screwed. I was no math wizard, but I knew that meant the stairs would be hard to find.
Mordecai had said the staircase, like a safe room, would appear on the mini map, even if we hadn’t explored that area yet. But even zoomed out, the map only encompassed a little more than a square mile. And when it was in normal mode, down in the corner of my vision, the map was a fourth of that. I couldn’t just walk around with it zoomed out because I wouldn’t be able to see anything.
We had three and a half days to find the staircase. We needed to cover a lot of ground.
15
Time to Level Collapse: Three Days and Two Hours
“We’ve been here before,” Donut said as we turned down the main corridor. “This is where we came into the dungeon.”
After having explored much of the area, I was starting to see a distinctive pattern to the hallways. My apartment had been a little more than a half mile from the coast of the Puget Sound. The entrance I’d gone through appeared to be the very western edge of the map. The whole area was a giant grid of equal-sized squares, with the large, wide passages acting as the borders. While the interior halls and tunnels were twisty and maze-like, each section was still a perfect, giant square. And within each square, there appeared to be four neighborhoods.
The Hoarder neighborhood was in the southeast corner of one of those squares. Directly west of that was the goblin neighborhood, right where we’d entered the dungeon. Across the hall was the domain of the llamas. Mordecai had said these first few floors weren’t really covering the entire planet, and I could see now that he was correct, at least here. The dungeon was really just a condensed version of the city directly above, but more organized. I wondered what it was like in the more rural areas, if there were any entrances at all.
It appeared mobs didn’t respawn in a particular neighborhood once you killed the boss, though mobs from adjacent neighborhoods had started to creep their way in. Also, the level two rats were just everywhere, though I never saw one in the main hall. They were nothing but a nuisance now. They’d see us, charge, and I’d either kick them or stomp them, killing them with a single blow.
Near the northern edge of the Hoarder’s neighborhood, we started to run across a new type of mob: slimes.