《Experimental Dungeon Novel》Frog Prince of Chests

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Stumbling up from the not-very-deep pit within a pit that acts as the connector between the first and second floors of the dungeon, the slime slaughtering creature from below blinks at the light emitting from torches which most certainly weren’t there back when it had dropped down into the dark. It was a welcome change to be sure after all the shiving it had been doing; it didn’t have any way of seeing without light, and had been feeling its way around in the dark. That worked fairly well, excepting when the thing being felt was one of the dangerous varieties of slime, at which point the only information gleaned from the action was pain.

Locked off center of the room, between the pit at a giant stone door which most certainly also was not there before the jaunt down below, was the simple wooden chest that it had tossed the interesting gemstone into. Adorning the front of the object was a dial. Three rings of stone set on a plate of copper, with a few lines on each, and a couple notches on the copper around the edges at regular intervals. From the invader’s unconcerned perspective, it didn’t look very complex, but it was at least not a simple riddle.

“Not to criticize your design choices, but isn’t making the lock more difficult to open somewhat counterproductive when your objective is to have me open the chest and remove its contents?”

“What do you know! My reasoning is most subtle and complex! Also try it, I want to see if I got the mechanism to work.”

Pressing weakly against each of the rings, absolutely nothing of interest happens. Deciding that reasonably the voice out of nowhere would have set some way of moving them, the creature focuses on the outermost ring, attempting to move it around through telekinesis, to the same results.

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“Here’s a hint, there’s something on the back.”

With a flip of its tail, it rotates the box around. The thing stops halfway around its arc.

“Sheesh you’re weak. I’m not exactly the strongest person in the city, but even I’m able to turn a box around.”

“I think I may be detecting a slight bit of hostility there. I mean, I haven’t been commenting on the fact that you managed to kill yourself by dropping a cave on your head, then jumped into a ridiculous attachment with the resulting hole in the ground for reasons you have thus far been unable to adequately explain. Speaking of which, where’s my ‘box’ you promised to fix for helping out with your slime problem?”

Inside the box, Avery feels a chill run through her gem. Other than making an extreme holy nightmare of a floor, she hadn’t actually put any thought into what to use this newly unlimited source of power for. Since she had in fact promised to recreate the object, and she had access to the mana, it was probably about time to see if she could bring the arrangement to an equitable conclusion. Repairs for repairs, and a box for a body. Out of the dungeon before she was even out of the tutorial. That’d be a new record, for sure, if records were a thing. On the other hand, it would need to be on a lower floor, since she couldn’t modify the one the invader was going to be standing, even if every other creature posed no issues.

Underneath the chest, gem, and invader, Avery fills the second floor with torches. Pools of water, no longer an unstoppable tide threatening to demolish everything in its path, flow languidly into the necromancers deconstruction trap to be converted directly into wood and metal. Fairly quickly, an old design is unveiled on the second floor, directly under the pit trap’s opening and as far from the water as it could possibly have been created. It wasn’t that the very concept of water was going to somehow be anathema to tools functioning correctly, but rather that more often than not water, when associated with tools, was then further associated with the word ‘damage’. More pressing than the potential damage and the not insignificant amount of mana expended on recreating the mithril was the fact that the insects spawned in the correct location within the box would each take a point of mana regeneration

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Clearly this was not great.

On the one hand, the invader suffered no ill effects from getting out of the dungeon, so his object would most likely not have required strenuous upkeep, but on the other the thing was now an object, and monsters, of the necromancer’s dungeon. At least once Avery got her part of the bargain, the logistics would be entirely not her problem.

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