The Dungeon Fairy: Two Choices: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (free e books to read .txt) 📗

ram it open from the staircase side, and then tried to do the same himself by sticking his relatively tiny fingers under the small gap that separated the trap and the floor of her dungeon and pulling.  The Bridge was a foot thick and without something touching the inner surface and pushing, it wasn’t going to budge.  Trying to destroy it with a weapon might eventually work – because almost anything could be technically destroyed if enough force were applied to it – but hopefully someone wouldn’t try that.  The stone itself was also immune to spell damage; while it was a trap that could technically be disarmed, it just made the bridge inert and wouldn’t move from either side, in that case.

When she was done and happy with it, she altered the face of the Rotating Stone Bridge so that there was a carved pictogram of some stairs leading upwards on it; no words, unfortunately, even though she wanted to carve “EXIT” into it – because that could definitely be construed as communication, which was against the rules. Shale wavered between approval and disapproval, but after staring at it for a few minutes and looking at it from different directions, he just shrugged and said it would be acceptable.

Not that Tacca needed his approval, but she didn’t want to have to fight with him over it.

After that, another few hours went by as she added additional exit traps to each of the other rooms except the first, as that already had an exit: the entrance itself.  When that was done, she noticed that she acquired a whole 6 CIPs from placing the traps, which brought her a tiny bit closer to her goal.  There wasn’t much time for anything else, however, because dawn was breaking over the horizon outside – and there was already a group outside climbing up to her dungeon.

Ready for some more visitors?

Chapter 4

The first few days of her dungeon being “open” were relatively slow in comparison to how Tacca hoped it would be, but overall it wasn’t too bad.  The first day after it was evaluated saw two groups appear at her dungeon, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  Both Raider parties were filled with teams that were probably a bit over-Leveled for her defenses, but they didn’t seem to care overly much that they didn’t benefit from it other than obtaining the rewards left behind by the killed creatures.  From the conversations that she overheard as they delved through her dungeon, they just happened to be nearby when word spread that there was something new to check out.

Basically, she was an unusual novelty in the sphere of dungeons around the world, so they wanted to say that they had been one of the first to see it.

  That was fine with Tacca, of course, because all told she received 3 CIPs from their presence.  What perturbed her, though, was the fact that neither group investigated her exit staircases, nor even seemed to know they were there.  She couldn’t blame them too much, because they were seamlessly incorporated into the walls, so they were easy to overlook; that, and the exit on the surface wasn’t exactly obvious, as she had placed it about 50 feet away, around an outcropping and out of view of the entrance.

The two groups also seemed to know exactly where everything in her dungeon was, down to where the creatures would emerge from their hiding places to attack.  The traps were – for the most part – bypassed or disarmed, including the Soil-covered Pit Traps; this was beneficial in a way, because it meant that she didn’t have to pay to reset them afterwards, but it also meant that there was virtually no possibility that anyone would die from an unexpected surprise trap.

“Ah, that would explain it.  See those parchments?” Shale asked, after watching the second group make their way through without any trouble.  Tacca could tell that he was talking about the bundle of parchments that one of the Raiders seemed to be carrying; every once in a while, he would pull it out and glance at it so quickly that Tacca couldn’t get a good look at it before it was rolled up again.

Yes, I see them; are those maps of my dungeon already?

“As far as I can tell, they are.  From what I remember of my Mentoring, Raider groups would be able to purchase these maps from their Clans, making their delve through the dungeon much safer for them.  My guess is that the investigation team from yesterday has already made copies and is selling them; since the exit staircases weren’t there before, they weren’t recorded – so no one knows to look for them.”

Shale was right; since they weren’t there before, there was no reason for these groups of Raiders to look for them now.  Regardless, Tacca was sure that eventually they would be discovered – perhaps by a team that didn’t have a map to her dungeon.

The next few days saw very similar results, with one or two groups of higher-Leveled Raiders coming to visit the dungeon, delve through without any issues, and then leave with their rewards.  One thing that they all had in common was their pleasure of seeing multiple species of creatures being utilized, as crazy as that sounded to Tacca, as most of them were used to only 1 or 2 different types of “monsters” inside of a dungeon.  The variety and uniqueness was obviously a welcome addition and challenge, which as she had learned at DAPS was one of the keys to understanding how Raiders tended to think.

Her month came and went without increasing her Core Improvement Level as she had predicted, though she did manage to bank 500 CIPs from what she had acquired from Raider visitations, her re-creation of her creatures, and an additional 382 temporary traps in her