Dungeons Are Bad Business

With practiced professionalism, the two agents from the union packed away their cards and notebooks and stood up in unison. They walked over to where Vee sat, shook the [Dungeon Master]’s hand, and congratulated him on a successful circuit.

They also offered “advice” about keeping his temper during future runs, which – on account of the stern tone with which it was delivered – had the unmistakable smell of a thinly veiled threat. Vee nodded and smiled, promising to do as they said, which he’d of course planned to do anyways.

Once the agents were gone, Vee waited for Alforde to come up to the office with the day’s earnings, summoning Cecil while he waited for his friend.

He rubbed his chin and looked outside. There was still a crowd of adventurers down in the streets below. They mingled in small groups traveling to and from the lobby to get snacks and refreshments, a temporary mass of people that would disappear entirely in the next few days. By next week there’d be no sign of them at all.

That was kind of weird to think about.

He smiled at the armorsoul when Alforde opened the door and deposited the chest filled with fleurs.

“Tough break on that [Thunderlord] fight,” he said, trying to test the waters to see how Alforde was feeling. “You fought your best.”

The armorsoul rolled his pauldrons. “It’s alright. After that warning you gave me I wasn’t expecting to win that one, and honestly I think I did better than I was supposed to against the rest of the adventurers.”

He paused for a moment, then added, “I’m going to focus on leveling up my [Glaciernaut] class from now on, though. I think there’s a lot of potential there that I haven’t even started to unlock. I don’t think it would have changed the outcome of that fight, but it’ll be better in the weeks and months to come.”

Vee nodded, glad that Alforde didn’t seem overly distraught about his last loss. He was similarly pleased when the armorsoul expressed the same level of excitement at the prospect of adding another book to his collection as he did for the idea of taking a few days off.

“As much as I’d like to just leave this for a few days and come back to it later, I guess we really should go ahead and get this all counted up and totaled,” Vee said, summoning Cecil and directing Alforde to spill the chest onto the desk. “I don’t want anything hanging over us when we come back to work, you know?”

“Agreed!” Alforde nearly shouted, hoisting the chest like it weighed nothing and opening it over the desk. Perhaps as a result of his exuberance, or for some other reason, the pour was stronger than normal and the bright jingling sound of coins hitting the floor filled the office.

Cursing, Reginald hurried to pick up the fleurs that had gone bouncing or rolling, and Vee started the laborious process of counting up the ones that had not. Even with the mess, there were far too many to keep track of easily, so the [Dungeon Master] first stacked them into towers fifty coins tall. Thankfully they were all bronze or silver fleurs, which made the process a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Extremely rarely, adventurers would pay for their run with a gold fleur and ask for change, which was a huge pain in the butt.

Like the rest of the circuit, business had been good that day, and after far too long Vee had the day’s total fleurnings, which he added to the rest of the circuit’s before starting to go through and analyze its composition.

He started with entrance fees. All told, one hundred and eighty two adventurers came through Crestheart as part of the Dungeons of the Future event. Every single one of them had paid to challenge all three of the dungeon’s regular floors and Alforde himself, which meant that they’d grossed twelve thousand, five hundred fifty eight silver fleurs in total. Of course, they didn’t get to keep all of them: more than two hundred and fifty went to taxes and others went to paying for repairs and minion replacement like they always did. There was also the costs of replacing the rewards for adventurers who’d beat the dungeon.

Unfortunately, Vee didn’t have a super clear idea of how much those latter costs were going to be; his [Budgeting] skill was less accurate these days than it had once been in regards to Crestheart.

He suspected that was in no small part due to the fact that many of his replacement costs were being brought in-house – like the ghosts and slimes – or essentially rendered nonexistent in the case of the skeletons. Heck, even the costs for physical repairs to the dungeon itself, like the ones for tiles and walls, were coming down on account of improvements made by Do and the rest of the [Dungeon Maintainers].

All those things taken together meant that Vee had a tougher time estimating how much to “set aside” for upcoming expenses, so he decided to do what any proper [Accountant] would and err on the side of higher expenses than not. As such, he set aside thirty-five percent of earnings to hopefully cover whatever the final number ended up being, and added the rest to the dungeon’s still-recovering general fund.

That didn’t account for all the fleurs Vee had counted. In addition to the entrance fees, there was also the revenue from potions sold during the runs. Unfortunately, the out of town adventurers hadn’t been terribly interested in bolstering themselves with potions, and the entirety of the circuit had only brought in five hundred and twenty two silvers that could be attributed to those sales.

When totaled, Crestheart had added nearly eight thousand five hundred silver fleurs to its coffers, which was a great amount for just four days of operation. After all, a quick check confirmed that Crestheart normally netted only around a thousand silvers on a normal day, and Vee had yet to meet the business that would turn its nose up at doubling its daily earnings.

Of course, with that said, eighty golds wasn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. It would cover the next payment to Sacre and help grease the wheels of the next one, but didn’t pay off the rest of their debt by any means. Vee hadn’t been expecting it to, but it was still somewhat disheartening to realize that after so much work and effort he’d only bought himself another week to keep grinding away.

He reminded himself that there were some other sources of income too that he had yet to count – fees from Torres from the dungeon guides, a share of the lobby’s profits, and the earnings from the sale of dunpla figures – but Vee didn’t expect those to be big enough to meaningfully change his financial position.

Although, the dunpla earnings might actually be significant since they’d sold out completely. That was definitely something Vee wanted to scale up in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Still…

“It’s kind of disheartening, isn’t it,” he said quietly. “All that work to improve the dungeon with the advice of the [Bellwethers], all the stress and long nights to get it done in time and it’s over in less than a week. Can we really afford to take time off?”

“It’d be irresponsible not to,” Reginald said firmly. “We’ve got the next few repayments in the bank, right?”

Vee nodded. “We’ve almost got three payments worth between the vault and the bank.”

“Good. Then we’re definitely taking time off. You should take a good look at yourself when you get a chance, boss. Your skin is all pale and your eyes look deader than some of the ghosts in the dungeon. You need to rest and recharge.”

“He’s right,” Alforde chimed in. “You pushed yourself really hard to improve the dungeon over the past couple weeks and it took a toll. If you try to keep going you’ll end up with Burnout.”

Vee shuddered. There were few status effects across the continent as feared as Burnout, which could cause months to pass without even a whiff of productivity. He definitely didn’t want that to happen.

The mood somewhat more somber, Vee turned his attention to the dungeon’s shard of chaos earnings while Alforde went over to his favorite corner to read and Reginald hurled colorful and mostly playful insults out the window at some of the adventurers below.

Thanks to his aggressive use of [Boost Drops] and the, ahem, eagerness of most participants, a lot of minions had been destroyed during the circuit. In total, they’d collected sixteen of the strange blobby stones that seemed to whisper sometimes when he touched them, which meant that they had nearly forty in total. They were still a long way away from being able to afford adding another floor to the dungeon, but Vee had planned to use some to buy higher tier minions which also required some so that wasn’t a big deal.

When he finished counting and checking Cecil’s tables to ensure that he hadn’t made any mistakes, Vee directed Alforde to deposit half the fleurs and all the shards of chaos into the dungeon’s vault. The other half was destined for the bank, from where Vee might be able to find some other more productive ways to use it. He didn’t necessarily want to go speculating, but having the ability to do so as an option if their financial position deteriorated further and they became desperate for fleurs was (maybe?) a good idea.

The back of Vee’s neck tickled as the vault burped closed, and he cast a nervous glance over toward the door. An awareness of something ominous washed over his senses, punctuated by heavy metallic footsteps clanging their way up the stairs.

Alforde straightened up, his eyes growing wide and glowing with a strange light.

“That sounds like –”

He never got to finish, because the door slammed open and a shouting voice that Vee hadn’t heard in months but never could have forgotten filled the office, followed a moment later by a woman and an armorsoul.

“VICTORISSIMO VALENCIAN VALES! YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE YOUNG MAN! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW WORRIED I HAVE BEEN ABOUT YOU?! MONTHS AND MONTHS GONE AND NOT A SINGLE LETTER?! I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!”

Vee gulped. He cast his eyes down in shame. Suddenly the strange moments of feeling like he was being watched over the past few days made a lot more sense.

“Uh…hi mother. I’m, uh, really sorry about that.”

“Gawain’s balls,” Reginald said with a bit of a whistle, looking up, down, and up again at Emma Vales. “How’d such a pretty woman end up with such an ugly son?”

Main Character Sheets (Unchanged):

Vee Vales

Primary Class: G-h-o-s-t M-a-e-s-t-r-o? (Locksmagister University), Level 33

Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 24

Tertiary Class: Guy-Who-Takes-Things-WAY-Too-Far (Self), Level 7

Might: 15

Wit: 41

Faith: 25

Adventurousness: 7

Ambition: 16

Plotting: 19

Charisma: 18

Devious Mind: 29

Leadership: 22

Guts: 14

Intimidating Presence: 11

Citizenship: 24

Public Relations: 8

Determination: 7

Persuasiveness: 6

Bargaining: 4

Patience: 3

Competitive Spirit: 1

Pragmatism: 1

<3<3 Infatuation <3<3

Alforde Armorsoul:

Primary Class: Hammer Specialist (Self), Level 6

Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vales), Level 18

Tertiary Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), Level 18

Additional Class: Glaciernaut (Sacha Silverblade), Level 11

Might: 58

Wit: 15

Faith: 28

Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vales): 9

Endurance: 33

Intimidating Presence: 15

Heart of a Champion: 14

Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 9

Vigilance: 11

Vanity: 2

Single-Mindedness: 1

Reginald:

Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???

#$&Q#$)(@#$#@#$%!@#$##%#%()@#$**@@##

Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 43

Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vales), Level 21

Additional Class: Announcer (Vee Vales), Level 14

Additional Class: Hyperthymesiac (Self), Level 5

Might: 1

Wit: 37

Faith: 17

Ambition: 28

Greed: 24

Deceptiveness: 27

Manipulativeness: 42

$#&*!@!!: !!!

Loyalty: 47 (+1)

Patience: 11

Irritability: 25

Remorsefulness: 17

Expository Prowess: 23

#%$Pragmatism*#$: @#61$5

Hop@#!! @#$@!@#

@#$@%%^

#4^5#*&_!+++#(@$#

Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 9