John grabbed the pebble that was his current Jack replacement and threw it down the hallways of the demonic labyrinth they were currently in. Not only did he do that to check for traps, he also used that pebble as a staging point to then throw Shardbounds at the thin chicken legs of the local monster variation which he spied around the corner of the crossroad. They were disturbing beasts, bloated bodies and legs like stilts but thick arms and heads that were just one giant eye socketed directly into the neckless torso.

They were called Chyclosts, and they came in different colours that showed what magic they could use. John only watched out for certain colour combinations in the groups they encountered, because these demons were very much capable of coordination. On their own, the strategy was easy. They were fast but had easily vulnerable legs, so something like a Shardbound quickly took care of that. This time was no exception, the attack hit it at the ankle and slashed straight through, causing the monster to drop to the floor as it couldn’t support its weight anymore.

“Here I go, go, go!” Sylph chirped as she then did her part, flying in. An eyebeam attack flew at her, but she moved literally faster than that eye could see. Her job wasn’t to hurt the Chyclost, she just needed him to look into another direction, as Salamander and Siena then came around the corner and jumped on the immobilized foe. By the time Aclysia joined them, it was already dead.

Metra was not accompanying them, not because she was still annoyed over their discussion at dinner two weeks ago, but because they had very quickly found out that she was a great addition for Wave and Assault style dungeons but not so much for Floors, where staying together was the only real way of doing things and her duelist nature got the better of her. Basically, she either ran off on her own, got annoyed when other people helped her in fights or was just generally not that great of a help.

She had suggested to tap out herself. After two days of trying to fix her teamwork, it had become obvious that it just wasn’t happening. That was pretty annoying, but what where they supposed to do? She just wasn’t a great team player. It’s not like she hadn’t tried to get along with how they fought, but it was just incompatible. A talk on the matter had concluded that that’s how that had been with all of the people she had ever served under, doubtlessly because of how her abilities dictated her engagement style. Metra was now helping Rave train, which was as good as a way to spend her time as any.

John followed up after everyone made sure there were no other enemies around, then he picked up the loot with mechanical movements. As he unmade his Possession of the pebble, he checked his character screen to look how much inventory space he had left and where his exp bar was at this point.

‘Mhm, I have 9 Self-devouring Blood,’ John thought as he went to closer inspect his inventory. ‘Just one more and I am done, hurray!’ The item in question was one of the ones that he could use to build the Transport Station.

Over the last 14 days, he had ran up and down the list of Floor based dungeons. He hadn’t spent all that time in search of those items; for the first week he had more been after money and first kill bonuses.

In the second he had concentrated his efforts some more, going mostly into the Demons dungeon to farm the Self-devouring Blood, of which he had already 6 at the time. As was usual with games, the moment you actually chased something, the drop-rate plummeted, and so he was unsuccessfully smashing his face through the Tier 22 version of this dungeon. He did have the level to access Tier 23, but that was the last Tier on the current page - a core floor. In other words there were other unique monsters there, which wouldn’t give him the item he was after.

It gave good money, but John couldn’t help but feel that he was wasting his time somewhat, purely because he only got seven levels out of this deal so far where he was certain he could have gotten fourteen if he had done Assaults instead.

He occasionally had done some other dungeons in the tier that also dropped items that could be used, just to not lose his mind to the 10+ hour shifts he was doing every day, before the Baelementium creation breaks came in.

‘At least I am playing like a proper completionist,’ John thought, making a quick stroke on a piece of paper he carried with himself. If asked, at this point, if he would kill for a minimap that automatically tracked what he did, John would have asked if there were special conditions to the kill because he didn’t trust the world to give him something that nice.

The reason why he was drawing these plans was because he was searching for special rooms. He had found a total of 3 Secret Rooms so far, but he only had a key for one, throwing him into a mini boss fight that dropped a unique upgrade to his Guild Hall at the end, increasing the mana provided by the Guild Heart (or just the Core as he liked to call it) by a whopping 50. Yes, just 50.

The assumption was that this was a collectible from other Secret Bosses, so, as sarcastic as he was about this, it would stack. It was just the kind of minimal bonus collectible that John both loathed and felt like he needed to have.

Currently he had another key, so at least there was that. Treasure rooms were even harder to find than Secret Rooms which, in John’s opinion, was grounds to sue Gaia for misnaming things. In his lifetime, he had seen none. Trap Rooms, the third and most common type of special room, he found quite regularly. Hell, the room he had found Nathalia in had been a trap room, mixed in with something of a special event because it had brought something in from the outside.

Thankfully, Trap Rooms were incredibly nice most of the time. For a start, the reason why John found so many of them in the past two weeks, compared to before, was because he was actively scrubbing dungeons clean of every single mob he could find. In other words, they didn’t really spawn on the way to the boss and were also rather easily identifiable. That was another factor why it was taking him so long to get through them.

The argument could have been made that he would have gotten more out of this if he just concentrated on getting to the boss and re-making the dungeon, but so far, he had found it to come out roughly equivalent in time spent, at least from a ‘looking for certain loot’ point of view. If he had been hunting experience or just money, he definitely would have just rushed for the boss.

Speaking of loot, while Trap Rooms themselves didn’t tend to have loot, they either spawned in some sort of mini boss or a bunch of mobs with items to drops. So that made them kind of worth it, even if they were a pain to deal with.

John knocked on a part of the wall that he imagined to look suspicious. It recoiled at the touch, being made from bricks of flesh, which should have disgusted anyone, but he just went ahead anyway and ripped out the stone. Not only was he used to worse, he had also spent the last few days here. It was very hard to shock him.

The reason why he thought this wall was suspicious, despite everything being made from sweating, moaning, fleshy brick stone, was that he had tracked a rhythm on his map. Crossroad, T-split, crossroad, corner, crossroad, T-split, that was how this was generally organized, stairs and holes notwithstanding. 3D-mapping on paper was a pain, but that was beside the point. This was a T-split after a T-split. Something was off.

John tossed aside the bleeding brick and looked into the gap in the wall. Behind it he found a thin membrane, through which he could see another room. “Bingo,” he mumbled and then stepped aside to let Aclysia and Gnome do the heavy work of tearing the wall down. Eventually, one of Gnome’s body slams caused it to cave and her to stumble in a shower of minor gore.

Like a proper lover, John’s first concern was to help her up and make sure she was fine. “It’s ewwww,” Gnome was too grossed out to even be shy about it. A quick shower in the shape of Undine summoning some water fixed it. A waste of mana, sure, but he didn’t want her to feel disgusted with every step.

‘Well, those alone are halfway worth finding this thing,’ John thought. He then looked around in the room. The walls here were made from golden bone, three chests standing on each of the other walls. “We actually found one… now,” he pulled the pebble from his inventory and threw it at the first chest. Nothing happened. He went up to it and looted it. It contained twenty million dollars, which was more than appreciated.

He repeated the throwing game for the second chest, the one in the middle. Still, nothing happened. Inside that bone-crafted box he found a single item.

Well, that would be good for something eventually, so it went to his inventory to later be stored in the Guild Bank. The menu, which he could only access inside the building, granted him a 100-slot inventory that people in his guild could also access. If, and that had taken some time to figure out, he granted them a role with the rights to do so. For now, he had made it so that everyone inside Collide had access by default. It would be with the Federation and how they shared his systems that this would take a more interesting turn, he felt.

He turned to the last chest. Everyone was tense as he raised the pebble and threw it at the chest. Nothing happened. “Okay, no Mimic,” he exhaled in relief. He hadn’t run into one of those yet, but they were a classic and the chances for one of them to not turn up in his life was zero. Just a matter of time.

He checked what was inside that last chest, and he wheezed, “Are you fucking kidding me?” There were ten of the Self-devouring Blood he had been chasing. Now he had nine more than he needed. “Fucking typical,” this annoyed him so much he actually swore twice in a row.

“Sh-shouldn’t you be happy?” Gnome carefully asked. “We got it just in time. We get the Baelementium done today. You can even quit earlier now.”

“I am ecstatic,” John said in the voice of a gamer who was screaming how much fun he was having being spawnkilled. “Really, having a great time… but I HATE RNGesus.” He slammed the chest shut. “Let’s murder the boss and get out of here.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

He left the barrier in the evening. The boss, the head of a demonic crossbreed of chickens, eyes and bad acting, had been a pure damage sponge spamming AoE abilities. Not the hardest of bosses, as long as one kept running and their defences ready. Shifting Momentum came in really handy in that fight.

He then spent an hour creating the last bit of Baelementium, and then he was done. Two pretty eventless weeks of a whole lot of work. Having deposited what he would need later in the Guild Bank and selling the rest on the Auction, he got the rest of the group gathered together.

“You know how this pains me?” John asked as he opened the GP store.

So, sex with Gaia was off the table for the moment; she didn’t seem to be in the mood and had removed the (rather drastic) price reduction. Which had moved on to percentual Endurance.

“What’cha thinking about?” Rave asked as her boyfriend was staring at the window for a much longer time than was necessary to buy one Room Slot.

“The sunk-cost fallacy in relation to opportunity cost,” he told her. “I really want to get that extra Max Class Level, but if I miss opportunities like this one on the way, is it worth it?” He bought the Room Slot, that’s what he wanted in the first place. After a moment more of thinking about it, he decided against purchasing the cost reduced Endurance. More HP was really nice, but he could get that without spending a randomly acquired resource that could be used to buy something otherwise unobtainable.

“Okay, here I go then,” John said, placing the Transport Station between the I.D. Gate and the Harbour. It had the appearance of an octagonal pavilion of dark wood, with a ceiling made from Baelementium covered tiles. The floor held no tables or chairs like normal pavilions, just a blue floor that was currently dull and dark, the appearance of a light that was switched off.

John looked around himself. This random assembly of buildings was everything but aesthetically pleasing, especially as the floor was just simple stone and a chunk of a planted forest. He really needed to expand the borders of his Guild Hall to be centred around the statue, which was mockingly pointing her right shoulder at him from the outside. Once that was done, he felt like actual design work had a purpose; anything he did here, the edge of where he actually wanted to be, was temporary and thus a waste of money and resources.

Going back to reality, John checked his menus and quickly found what he had wanted. “Available teleportation points zero out of one,” he read out loud.

It was time to get into the city.