The marketplace was different now. It wasn’t the greetings — Talnier was small enough, and I was personable enough that I’d already met most of the people that shopped here regularly. It was a sense of deference. Before, I’d been one of them but now I was set apart, a Noble in fact, if not in name.

People still came up to me, but now it was as supplicants — or future supplicants in most cases. No one really knew what they wanted out of the new regime, or what I could do for them, but they knew I was important. So they gave me little gifts, or discounts at the stalls I shopped at, hoping to curry favour.

It was nice… better than nice, if I’m being honest, but I needed to stop it. It made me feel like a mafia boss wandering through his territory, and I felt that if I let it continue, that’s what I would become. Rewarding my followers with power and maintaining a power base through patronage and bribery.

I wasn’t sure of the best way to handle it, so I just politely refused the gifts and tried to… connect with the people who came up to me. I tried to re-establish the relationships I had with these people three days ago.

It certainly gave [Charm] a workout, but I got almost as much use out of [Memorise]. Remembering their names, their family members, the topics of conversation from the last time we’d talked… hopefully, it made a difference.

Is this what politicians do? I wondered. I was a politician now, after all, so despite my distaste for the role, I’d better lean into it. Better a politician than a mafioso after all.

With all that going on, my simple morning food run turned into an hour and a half of schmoozing. Which led to breakfast being late, and our first dungeon trip for a while getting delayed.

“If you knew that was going to happen, you should have sent me shopping,” Felicia pointed out as we moved through the forest.

“It was my turn, and besides I didn’t know,” I replied. “I thought there might be something different and I wanted to see what it would be like.”

“Then you should have sent me shopping and focused on politicking.”

“Then I wouldn’t have gotten any breakfast,” I groused. “If I hadn’t had that excuse to leave, I might still be down there.”

“Is this going to be a full-time thing?” Cloridan asked. “Are you going to give up on Delving?”

“I don’t think I can afford to,” I answered. “I still want to level after all, and the XP from social combat is terrible.”

“True,” Felicia agreed. “But we won’t be able to take up Guild Master Koenig’s offer if you’re stuck here in Talnier.”

“Aaah, you’re right. I’d been thinking that we could check out Dorsay’s dungeons when we reported to the King, but we’d need a contract to get in, won’t we?”

“The Guild's dungeons, yes,” Cloridan said. “You could try your luck getting in the King’s dungeon.”

“Or a Noble’s,” Felicia put in.

I sighed. Just one more thing to worry about.

“Well, for now, we’ve got this delve, let's focus on that and worry about the future tomorrow.”

The delve was… OK, I guess. Maybe Rhis’s rants were getting to me, but I was starting to see his point about just rolling the dice for your dungeon design. We hadn’t taken Rhis with us. Not only would he have complained incessantly about the dungeon, but we weren’t sure what would happen if we took a dungeon core into another dungeon.

By ‘not sure’, I mean we had a bunch of likely scenarios, all of them horrible. From another dungeon break to the two cores trying to eat each other. None of my group had ever heard of such a thing, and the consensus was that if it had been tried, it hadn’t ended well.

I’d made a note to revisit it after we’d had a chance to visit the Monteminers and talk with Marie. As a dungeon herself, she might be self-aware enough to say what would happen. Unfortunately, that was on hold due to the soldier shortage. Private use of Griffins was suspended until the King’s troops arrived, which wouldn’t be for a little while yet.

I really wanted to visit and find out what had happened, and how they all were. You’d think that my new position might free up just one quick flight, but no. The Griffin Riders answered to the military commander, and as he had not arrived, they weren’t listening to anyone.

Getting back to the dungeon, or the Forbidden Laboratory (as no one called it), it continued downwards for just one more level further than we’d already gone. Just like the others, it consisted of rooms linked together in a maze. It kept using Chimera’s, but naturally, they were bigger and tougher.

A couple of traps spiced things up, but the monsters were the real threat. Random combinations each time meant you couldn’t really predict what was going to come next.

“I think I want to call Roachquid as the new worst,” Kyle said as we finished up. He’d been right in the thick of the fighting, so he was covered in goo and… ichor? I wasn’t sure what you called insect blood.

“No way, the Centipig was way worse,” I said with a shudder. That had been an arena fight, so there’d been room for the fifteen-meter-long abomination. Centipig had been the System’s designation, it didn’t seem to care that it had only consisted of about thirty double-sized pig halves.

“Are you really going to complain about all that free bacon?” Kyle asked incredulously.

“It was creepy as fuck,” I said, “And we couldn’t carry nearly enough to make it worth it.” Pigs weren’t an alchemical ingredient, as far as anyone knew, so the meat had been just ordinary pork.

“Well, that won’t be a problem if we get the right reward, right?” Felicia put in, bringing us back on track.

The Chimera dungeon mostly dropped monster parts as the rewards - there were potions for the floor levels but little in the way of items. The exception was the final level, that we’d just reached.

“Hoping for the bag?” I asked. It would dramatically increase our earnings from this dungeon. All the known rewards from this level used some form of spatial magic, but the bag was easily the most generally useful.

“I’ll be really annoyed if we get something like the shelter,” she agreed.

“Well do you want to do the honours?” I asked pointing at the chest behind the giant Roachquid. Getting to it would mean wading through a few inches of what was covering Kyle, but I hadn’t noticed Felicia being particularly squeamish.

She gave me a look, but just said, “Fine,” and lifted up her skirt to her knees to trudge through the muck. When she got to the chest, she took a deep breath and opened it.

“Huh,” she said. Not the bag then, I thought. She pulled out a ring.

“Oh, that one’s not bad,” Cloridan said. “We’ll find a use for it, but it will sell for a good price if we don’t.”

“Yeah, you want it Cloridan?”

“I think our gallant and gorgeous leader should have it,” he said, managing a bow in my direction. He was pretty clean — he’d been on top of the Roachquid and had gotten good at avoiding the blood spray from his strikes.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want it — think of all the knives you could hide,” I said. “Or Kyle could use it for his armour.”

The ring didn’t hold as much as the bag - maybe only half a cubic meter from what I’d heard. But unlike the bag, you could add and remove items just by thinking about them. With a bit of practice, Kyle could store his armour and equip himself directly from the ring.

“That’d be neat,” Kyle admitted. “But you don’t need to don armour quickly when you’re delving. You always go in prepared.”

“You’re the one that is getting into situations where you need to hide evidence or bring in tools without people seeing,” Cloridan explained. “It’s nice for any of us, but vital for you.”

“Well, I don’t want to say no but… don’t people check for spatial rings?” I asked.

“Hmmm, if only there was something an [Illusionist] could do about that,” Cloridan said wryly.

“Okay, point,” I admitted. “Give me the ring.”

Felicia handed it over and I put it on. It gave me a strange feeling of… slots. Empty spaces that weren’t really spaces. I thought about putting my daggers in them, and the daggers disappeared, leaving me with an equally odd sensation of two of the spaces being filled.

“This is a very weird feeling,” I said, bringing a dagger back into my hand. “Is the Core around here somewhere?”

“You’re not going to take this one as well?” Kyle asked, alarmed.

“I just want to look at it,” I assured him. It took a little searching, but we eventually found a hidden door that opened to reveal the glowing blue orb.

“This Dungeon doesn’t have a master, does it?” I asked while studying the intricate mana flows.

[Mana Sense] Level 4 acquired through use

For gaining a skill level you have been awarded 1 XP

Well, this was the most complicated mana construct I’d studied. Even my own Dungeon core was simpler, probably because it wasn’t operational.

“I don’t think so,” Cloridan said.

“Why not? Mandel seems pretty happy with his Dungeon.”

“Well…” Kyle said. “No one really knows how it works. Maybe Master Monteminer got some instruction from somewhere, but what most people know is that if you touch the core, either you take it and kill the Dungeon, or you disappear.”

I blinked. “I’m glad I didn’t know that in Oakway.” I thought about it for a bit. “So that must be what happened to Rhis? And Marie? They became Dungeon Controllers and got… sucked in.”

“So if there’s already a Controller, you’re safe and can become a master?” Felicia speculated.

“Not quite. Rhis was worried about me displacing him, so that’s clearly something that can happen.”

We all stared at the orb for a bit.

“So…” Felicia eventually asked. “Is there a Controller in there?”

“Rhis was complaining that this Dungeon was very unimaginative,” I said. “Could be there’s no actual intelligence behind it.”

“So you’re not going to try Mastering it then?” Cloridan asked.

“Not today. I’ll talk to Mandel about it, see what he knows.” I said.

“I guess we’re putting in for another slot next week?” Felicia asked. “Keep going until we get a bag?”

“Sure,” I sighed, “More random monstrosities for a while.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that you’d be so eager to move onto the Ogre Temple,” she said. “Or have you gotten over killing humanoid monsters?”

“I got over it back in Oakway,” I said. “I’m not happy about sentient creatures being turned into killing machines, but I’ve accepted I can’t do anything about it.”

“Really? Acceptance? That’s not like you.”

“Well. After having conversations with a God… Either they would like to undo Ashmor’s work and can’t, or they want this situation to continue. Either way, I’d have to be more powerful than a God to do something about it.”

“Oh, that would be ambitious,” Felicia said smiling. “You’d have to subvert the [Status] to your will, bring down the Gods and change the laws of the universe.”

“Why does it sound like you’re making me a to-do list?” I protested. “I just accepted that it was impossible!”

Everyone laughed, the traitors. Grouping up, we triggered the return teleport and returned to the surface.