Blacksmith vs. the System

I spoke almost five minutes later. "Nothing out of the ordinary with the enemy?" I asked, breaking the silence.

"No, their soldiers have pulled back, and the beast army has settled almost twenty miles away. My guess: they'll only move after the arrival of reinforcements."

"Good news," I said. "It gives us time to continue talking about important things. You told me that we're free from the risk of being attacked by Horizon," I said. "Any details on that?"

"Unfortunately, no," she said. "The messages I can receive have been very limited, often one or two lines."

"How do you receive them?" I asked, curious.

"Usually as a part of the orders that every town receives from the cities, sometimes in other documents about dungeon discoveries sold by other organizations, or similar structures. They are encrypted in various parts of the document."

"Code word, or algorithm?" I asked.

"Code word," she said. "I wouldn't trust an algorithmic method, not with Intelligence being so common," she said. "It's begging to be reversed. Even with the code words, it's a one-time use."

"Good," I said. It was a method that was far from foolproof, but at this point, it was convincing enough. "It means some of your bosses managed to survive and are doing their best."

"That's the hope," she replied. "There's also evidence of their success. My information is limited, but I know they are doing their best to prevent heretics from taking hold. If they were around, we wouldn't be facing the army outside. Too bad their enemy is still our enemy. We could have used a friend through transition."

"Yeah, they don't radiate a sense of trustworthiness," I replied. "Anything particular about their capabilities?"

"Not much, I'm afraid," she said. "I just know that they have their own web of connections providing them with resources that should be exclusive to Horizon."

"Like that external skill blocker," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Excellent bluff, by the way. You are truly full of surprises."

"I'll try my best," I said. I thought about asking more about their capabilities, but first, I had a more important question. "You have told me something about having a strong soul? What is that about?"

I already had a general idea of how it worked, assuming it was the same thing as my hidden variable, but there was no harm in asking. "Unfortunately, surprisingly little. I did my best, but guilds and city lords kept the particulars of it very tightly hidden. Trying to get that information is not easy."

"Give me what you know," I said.

"I know that people have souls of varying power, and the stronger the soul, the easier it is to upgrade skills naturally. It also seems to affect leveling speed past a certain point, and external skills consume a certain amount of soul power, but that's it."

"Alright, that makes sense. It's roughly aligned with my own observations."

She paused. "And, how did you achieve that?" she said. "I know that there are methods to measure soul power, but they are hard to find, and even harder to use."

"Good old scientific method," I said, giving her a very brief summary of my approach with surveys. "It's probably not perfect, but it gives a good baseline to operate at least." Experience more tales on My Virtual Library Empire

"So that was why you were making people fill forms every day. My subordinates were unable to understand it."

"Any way to enhance it?" I asked.

"Not as far as I could gather, no," she said. "To avoid any attention, I always kept a low profile, only sneaking into the less popular dungeons to level up."

"Couldn't have been easy," I commented.

"It was not," she said. Considering she had been very happy to use that modified spear as a dagger, I didn't doubt it.

"And ascension?" I asked.

That question earned another shrug. "Nothing about its mechanics. I know several trustworthy contacts for handling it, and I put Maria in contact with them, but they were very careful about keeping the details hidden."

I closed my eyes, focusing on the dungeon for a moment to sense its reserves. It was nowhere near full, but it was not at the edge of a disaster as well, which was the best I could hope for. "Your answers are frustrating," I admitted. "They are spawning more and more questions."

"Good," she said vindictively, her smile genuine enough to trigger one of mine. "You deserve some suffering of your own. Imagine how panicked I was getting all those reports of disaster. Strong soul or not, a mere blacksmith shouldn't have been able to do everything you have done, certainly not in such a short time. How did you manage to get the Mana Forge skill? Anything to do with mana variant skills, city lords doing their best to monopolize. It's even worse for production skills."

"And, you're sure that Maria didn't provide it to me."

"No. If she had it, she would have auctioned it before purchasing the dungeon rights. It is both precious and risky. She wouldn't have wanted to risk an assassination."

"I see," I said, her offhand remark fitting to my own understanding when it came to the power balance between cities. "Maybe I shouldn't have let those guards go and spread the news?"

She shrugged. "What's done is done. Also, it doesn't matter. Not with the defenses you set up. Enough mana alloys to cover the floors couldn't have been explained any other way. Such information couldn't be kept hidden forever."

"On the subject of information security, you're the expert," I said, glad that my impulsive decision wasn't as much of a disaster as I had feared. "The next topic. What's this about fully realized dungeons?"

She sighed. "Finally, a question I can answer properly," she said.

"That's not a secret?" I said. "Then, how come Maria didn't warn me about it, then?"

"It's not exactly a secret as long as you're operating within the correct circles," she said. I curled an eyebrow questioningly. "Jumping between dungeons is a good way to deal with … problematic individuals."

Assassinations, I realized. An ugly word, one that I would have reacted badly if it wasn't for my kill count long stepping into three digits. Four digits if I count all the people who died due to my incompetence. "And, how does the strength of the dungeon make it easier to breach?"

"Because it gets easier to find them," she said. "The dungeons are not fully in the physical plane."

"Yes, but what does that mean?" I said. "Are they some kind of alternative dimensions like some physics theories predicted, or —"

"I have absolutely no idea," she cut in. "Nor do I care. What I know is that the stronger the dungeon, the easier it is to discover its location. Probably not helped by the fact that its borders get … fuzzy once it starts to grow and change. With the correct set of items and spells, it's possible to breach it from a nearby dungeon, but it's not a preferred method."

"Why?" I asked. "Sounds convenient."

"Because it's easiest to breach into the lowest floor. Any dangerous direction, it's not exactly a good idea to step directly on a floor crawling with boss monsters."

"I see," I said. It was easy to imagine how inconvenient it would be to deal with a bunch of assassins in an ordinary dungeon, but not in mine, where I had a lot of advantages. In my case, I much preferred them to approach that way than from the surface. "That's a risk, but not enough to evacuate the dungeon, right?"

"It would have been, if that was the only risk. But, the dungeons are mutable, and it's not exactly unheard of for the dungeons to … overlap."

I didn't ask her to explain what that meant, at least not immediately. The concept of overlap was self-explanatory, and the more technical questions could wait. "And, you fear that they are capable of weaponizing such a thing."

"Not for certain, but I didn't think they were capable of actually moving a dungeon before they somehow brought the perfect dungeon to deal with Maria to your footsteps," she said. "And, if they are capable of it, they might be capable of creating an overlap forcefully as well. Especially with your dungeon getting stronger, making it easier to discover."

"Yeah, that doesn't sound good," I said. "So, we need to evacuate."

"There's no choice. You're not the only one who decided to turn a dungeon into a defensible base. It doesn't end well."

"Noted," I said. "How should we do it? Emergency exit, or surface."

"I recommend the surface. Maybe even moving the second gate even deeper into the mountain," she said. "That way, we can keep the secondary gate a secret for as long as possible while we turn the peak into a true fortress. Assuming, of course, you can produce as much metal as you promised."

"That's the easy part," I said.

"Good," she replied, falling silent, letting me process the information dump I had to deal with, some just as I had expected, others completely revolutionary. Still, the idea that only by pure luck I wasn't captured by some kind of mysterious cult, which, for all intents and purposes, wanted to destroy the world was a nasty realization.

Well, luck, and enough fashion sense to hate a pure gold watch.