***** Bud’s POV *****

Good call Tracey! I’m glad you insisted on improving our defenses before we restarted! I said as we shifted our attention to the front entrance of the dungeon.

“Thanks! I’m glad that you’re glad, but I’m not glad that you’re glad, or that we haven’t gotten around to installing any of the doors yet.”

Yup, we definitely need to reboot after this. I only barely understood that. Good thing I remembered to move your quarters to the new core room.

“Yes, and you’re rabbit trailing again. Now be quiet, I want to focus on what they're saying.”

Standing just outside of the entrance, we saw seven men dressed in mottled black and dark grey leathers with knives and various other weapons secreted all over their persons. Something about the way they were moving made me think that they were from the Assassins Guild, and if they had come here, then they were probably after The Prince. Assuming that to be true, it was also rather clear that these were not outfits that they expected to be seen in. The weapons and other things I could see on them were placed and secured with an eye for silence, ease of access and comfort, with very little thought given to concealment.

This is when I noticed that each of them had an aura around them that extended a few centimeters away from their bodies, and expanded to cover all of their gear where necessary. Six of them had the same sized aura, which extended a little less than 3 cm from their bodies, while the seventh had a slightly larger one at just under 5 cm. Looking back, everyone that I had encountered in this new world had one including Broohn and Zona. Admittedly, Broohn and Zona's auras had been somewhere around 15 cm once they started recovering, and The Prince’s was somewhere down around 2cm when last I saw him. My intuition said that a person's aura was directly connected to how much magic power they had coursing through their veins, which would imply that these guys weren’t all that tough. I made a mental note to ask Tracey after the reboot. Between the intruders and us being so worn out, this didn’t seem like it was the right time to ask.

“Oy, Tracker, what’s the hold-up?” asked the guy with the bigger aura. He sounded like he was an older man who might have been elvish, but it was rather hard to say for sure with his hood up.

“Magic interference from the ruin ahead Leader,” responded the man I assumed to be Tracker. He was either a very skinny dwarf or a rather short and slightly squat human. “It appears that our quarry heard something behind him and turned to look at it, then bolted into the ruin. Whatever ambient magic the ruin possesses has covered the trail starting about half a meter from the entrance, so I have no idea where he went other than inside.”

As he said this, he gestured straight down the path that The Prince had followed when he ran into the doorframe, which told us several things. First, it confirmed that they were after The Prince, but we still didn’t know for sure whether they were friend or foe. Second, it told us that they thought our dungeon was a ruin of some kind, implying that there were actual ruins scattered around the forest. Third, it told us that if I hadn’t widened the doorframe, they might not have even tried to enter our dungeon. Neither of us was quite sure how to feel about that last one.

The rest of the men met Tracker’s comment with some general grumbling that was too quiet to make sense of which stopped immediately at a glare from Leader.

“You know the drill. We stick together in the big rooms, then split off into teams for the smaller rooms, searching the place until we find our quarry or proof that he is dead,” said Leader. “If we split up, Team 2 goes to the left, Team 1 goes to the right, and I’ll go with Team 3 up the middle. Move out!”

“Yes Leader!” the others chorused in unison, clearly not happy to be there but following his orders anyway. As they entered my dungeon, I noticed that my mana regeneration increased by 571 per day. Presumably, this is what Tracey was talking about with my mana regen increasing when I had outside visitors.

As they searched the Hall of Heroes, the Memorial of the Fallen and the Entrance Hall, I woke up the kobolds and had them hide near the Van de Graaf generator room. That way they could ambush the intruders when they got shocked by the Van de Graaf.

“Wait, why didn’t Broohn stop them?” asked Tracey when I refocused on the intruders.

For several reasons. First, dragons in general, and Broohn in particular, are rather grumpy if you wake them up early. Second, he and Zona are currently having their first day off together in about a month. He’s not exactly paying as much attention as he could be at the moment, and I’m not about to interrupt that unless I have to.

“So he’s otherwise occupied. Gotcha.”

Yup. Besides, he’s not yet used to me needing protection from random people walking up to me since I’ve always been a spaceship until recently. Also, this is an excellent opportunity to test what defenses I do have.

While I was briefly distracted talking to the kobolds and then Tracey, the intruders each pulled out some sort of crystal that was glowing in the infrared spectrum as well as some goggles that presumably let them see that light. It wasn’t very bright light, it was only about as bright as a really small lantern, but it was better than nothing and it was invisible to almost everyone else. More importantly, it was dim enough that they wouldn’t see the kobolds at all if they were more than three meters away.

Sure enough, once they were done with the first three rooms which I hadn’t put anything in yet, the intruders split up into three teams, which is when the two smaller groups stopped being as methodical as Leader had told them to be. To be fair, there was nothing to be methodical about when it came to the hallways, they were still just empty stone rectangles. The only reason that they might have wanted to be methodical in the first three rooms was the sheer size of those rooms and the dimness of their light crystals.

But that wasn’t the only change to their behavior. As they split off, each group activated some sort of stealth skill that made them much harder to see. I don’t know why they hadn’t used it before now, limited power supply maybe, but that wouldn’t help them at all against most of my defenses. It might have helped them against the kobolds, except the Van der Graaf generators wouldn't care if they were slightly invisible.

Team 1 was two of the unnamed assassins who sprinted down their hallway, clearly fed up with Leader’s methodical pace. Team 2 was Tracker and another unnamed assassin who couldn’t go quite as fast as Team 1 because of Tracker’s short legs. Even so, they would still reach their first room shortly before Team 3 reached theirs. Team 3 was the last two unnamed assassins and Leader, who insisted that they continue being methodical and slowed them down considerably.

Before any of them reached a room, the other guy on Team 2 muttered to himself something about being glad that the Assassins Guild had sent so many of them after such a powerful mark. Even if he had been severely poisoned, he was still one of the strongest adventurers in the land. All he got in response from Tracker was a nod of agreement and some out of breath huffing as Tracker struggled to keep up with his longer legged teammate.

Yup, that confirms that they’re assassins like I thought. These guys I didn’t mind killing too much. Don’t get me wrong, life is one of the most sacred and valuable things out there, and generally speaking, I don’t like killing people, even if it is just scum-buckets like these. However, these guys were assassins. They made their living murdering people for money. I don’t care who their targets are, murder is murder and it will NEVER be allowed in any area under my control.

Besides, they were going to try to kill The Prince. Killing is not murder if it is in self-defense or defense of another, and I’d say this counts as both. I'd try to capture them if I could, but at the moment I don't have the resources to even think about capturing all of them.

Meanwhile, Team 1 was headed for the room with the Tesla coil. Unfortunately, Tracey had vetoed my original plan for the Tesla coil as being far too dangerous and not giving adventurers any warning of the danger. That plan had involved warding the entire room such that there couldn’t be any ionized air within 3 cm of anything except the business end of the Tesla coil. These wards also disallowed ionized air in the first 2 m of the hallway in front of the room. Since non-ionized air has an infinite resistance to electric current, the Tesla coil would have reached its maximum charge and then just sit there humming quietly to itself.

Instead, I had covered the floor in pressure-plate runes that would increase the power output of the Tesla coil such that it's range tripled whenever someone stepped on a rune. In response to Tracey's gripping about my original plan, I left enough room between the runes that you could tip-toe between them if you were careful. Once I had time to build this room properly, I'd make it into a proper puzzle, which would include a way to turn the Tesla coil completely off. This would have to do until then.

Unfortunately for Team 1, they were rather impatient and trusted their stealth ability far more than they should have. Sure, they paused on either side of the doorway and checked the room for signs of The Prince, but then they charged ahead anyway. In their defense, it was good enough that between their stealth skill/spell thing, their high agility, and a little bit of dumb luck, they managed to avoid tripping any of the pressure-plate runes.

None of that helped them when they stepped into the outer range of the Tesla coil. Sure, they were farther away from it than the electricity had been visibly arcing, but their conductivity was much higher than that of the air the electricity had been traveling through. To put it simply, electricity always follows the path of least resistance, regardless of the distance that path covers, and they offered themselves up as an easier path.

ZAAAAAAP!

And that was the end of that.

Tesla Coil 2, Assassins 0.

If they had been cautious the way that Leader told them to, one of them probably would have escaped. Alas, they were far too impatient and tesla coils have no mercy for the foolish.

This gave me some very mixed feelings because, on the one hand, I felt bad for killing them even if it was in defense of The Prince, but on the other hand I got a rush of 700 mana out of their deaths. At the same time, the boost that I got when they entered my dungeon dropped by 140 mana per day. Normally, I would be intrigued by this kind of thing despite its lethal consequences, but in my current mental state, I didn't have the mental energy to spare.

Switching my attention over to Team 2, Tracker seemed to be concentrating on something that was tickling me, but I had no idea what he was doing. I'd have to try to figure that out later.

In the meantime, Tracker’s teammate appeared to be chafing at the pace that Tracker was holding him to. Just like Team 1, he also trusted his stealth skill to hide him and charged straight into the first Fighting room.

This is when I noticed that instead of placing one Van de Graaf generator over here as I had planned, Tracey had placed two of them, one on either side of the entrance door. The fact that I hadn’t noticed was even more proof that I needed to reboot. Anyways, unlike the Tesla coil, the Van de Graaf generators weren't instantly lethal. To the best of my knowledge, they cannot harm people without extenuating circumstances. What they do is they generate the same type of spark that you’d get from rubbing your feet on a carpet then touching something metal.

So they’re essentially 1.5 m tall carpets.

Regardless, Tracey’s twin generators did exactly what I had hoped they would do: shock the first assassin into dropping his stealth skill and swearing loudly. At which point the kobolds turned on the chest and head-mounted LED work-lights built into their shipsuits and attacked the assassin.

Since they were still beginners, Broohn hadn’t given them any edged weapons or even an unloaded gun. What he had given them was a quarterstaff and a set of blunt-edged throwing knife substitutes. I don’t know how the assassins goggles worked exactly, but they didn’t seem to offer much in the way of protection from the LEDs pointed straight at their faces.

Caught completely off guard, blinded and shocked as he was, the unnamed assassin never stood a chance when Porthos swung the quarterstaff at his head like a baseball bat. Unsurprisingly, that’s all it took.

Luckily for him, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, the kobolds were both so shocked at how quickly he went down that they just stood there gaping at him. Since I didn’t get a sudden surge of mana and my passive regeneration remained unchanged, I knew he wasn’t dead, just unconscious. Once the kobolds managed to pick their jaws up off of the floor, I told them to strip him down to his underwear and tie him up thoroughly. I’m not entirely sure what I was going to do with him, but I’d figure something out.

In the meantime, Tracker had just opened his mouth to tell the other assassin something as the Van de Graaf generators discharged. When he saw his teammate get one-shot by several bright lights that came out of nowhere, he did exactly what I would expect an assassin to do: book it back towards the entrance hall.

Meanwhile, Team 3 had finally made it to the very special bridge in the first Courage & Trust room. Despite the bad lighting provided by their crystals, they noticed that there was something very odd about this bridge. After conferring briefly, they decided to pull out some actual lights and see just what it was that they were dealing with.

At this point, my exhausted brain finally remembered that this was the one room in the dungeon that I had installed lights in, but I hadn’t turned them on yet. After all, Tracey and I don’t need them. Since this was a preliminary test of the bridge, I wanted to see what their reaction would be upon seeing the whole thing, so I politely turned the lights on for them.

“Who turned on the lights?” asked Leader quietly, looking around frantically to see how they had been spotted.

In response to his question, I quickly made a fake set of activation runes on the floor behind them that looked like they were connected to the lights. Fortunately, drawing a rune cost me almost nothing even with the penalty for building something during an intrusion.

“Hidden runes Leader,” said one of the still-unnamed assassins.

A disgruntled “Hmpf!” was the only response he received.

Then Leader noticed my bridge. “Wait, what the blamzoof is that thing?”

Wait, why did it take him so long to notice the bridge? I guess he was distracted by the lights or something?

“I don’t know Leader,” chorused the other assassins as all three of them stared in confusion at my bridge.

Actually, given that it spirals like a squashed DNA helix on its side, I’m not even sure it qualified as a bridge, but I didn’t have a better name for it. When I built it, the very first thing I did is turn the room into a tessarect, making it six times longer and three times the original height and width. The exterior walls of the room were now a perfect cylinder parallel to the bridge, allowing me to customize the gravity field of this room to be away from the center of the spiral. This made it possible to walk down the inside of the spiral. The spiral itself was currently made out of the same alloy as the ball bearings, but I wasn’t sure how long it could take this level of stress. I had plans to upgrade it so it could take this level of stress and then some soon, but those would have to wait.

As it stands, the bridge deck is about 2.5 meters wide with 1.25 meter high railings along the sides and a 1-meter thick layer of support struts running along the bottom. The inner diameter of the spiral (where people are going to be walking) is 6 meters, which should be enough to keep most people’s heads out of the null gravity zone running down the middle of the spiral.

There was only one significant hazard in this room: falling off of the bridge. The gravity was roughly the same strength as normal from the center of the bridge to 1 meter past the support struts. However, after that, it rapidly increased in strength so that by the time you hit the floor the gravity had ramped up to 16 times normal. Considering that the Terran astronauts experienced only half of that level of acceleration on the space shuttle, this was more than enough to make falling off of the bridge lethal. Well, back when they still used space shuttles that is.

“Leader, is there any reason that we have to go through this room?” asked the same assassin that had noticed the runes earlier. He seemed to be using his brain for something, so I decided to call him Thinker.

“Leader!” interjected Tracker, who had just come running into the room. “I finally got my tracker skill working in here! Our quarry isn’t in here at all. I found tracks from where someone picked him up and carried him back out.”

So that's what he was doing that tickled! He was trying to get his tracking skill to see through whatever interference I was causing!

“Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?” demanded Leader.

“I told you as soon as I knew,” Tracker replied. “Also, I think this is a dungeon. Mutterer just ran into some sort of trap I’ve never seen before and then got ambushed by something I couldn’t see clearly. Whatever it was, it took him down in one shot.”

Presumably, Mutterer was the name of the assassin that my kobolds had just finished tying up.

The resulting “Oh, I’m an idiot” expression on Leader’s face was priceless, even if he recovered quickly.

“Right. In that case, let’s grab Team 1 and get out of here,” Leader ordered. “Dungeons are not a good place to hang out in when you’re not prepared for them, and we are most definitely not prepared.”

“Leader, I think Team 1 is dead. Their trail is fading far too fast for them to be alive,” said Tracker.

“Why am I not surprised? In that case, let’s just get out of here. Lead the way Tracker.”

Without any further ado, they all left my dungeon. As soon as they stepped outside, the invader feeling went away and my mana regeneration boost dropped to 70 mana per hour.

Huh. It would appear that prisoners don’t count as intruders.

“I guess not. I’ve never heard of a dungeon taking prisoners before, so this should be interesting.”

Yup. Give me a moment to warn Broohn about the incoming assassins, then we need to reboot.

“Agreed. I know I wanted to have an adventure, but having so much stuff happen in less than a day is just ridiculous!”