Homesteading in a fantasy world

We walked into a relatively small classroom. There were five rows of desks. Adam and Luana sat in the second row, right in front of the blackboard. I picked a spot in the third row, right next to the window, and Arabella chose a seat in the third row as well, but closest to the exit door. Horus walked towards the blackboard and wrote in large letters: "Ruin of Lost Ages". Then he began to lecture.

"Ruin of Lost Ages is one of the oldest dungeons known. It has been verified to have reached maturity during the fall of the orcs, but many believe it reached maturity even before the goblin wars. It is a rank two dungeon from start to finish, but around the first 30 floors it will only have first ranked opponents as a norm. Although their numbers still make those encounters second rank.”

“There are in total five escape chances. The first is at level 25, the second is at level 50, the third is at level 75, the fourth is when you reach the core at level 100, and the fifth chance is one month into the delve no matter where you are inside the dungeon. Technically there is also a sixth chance, but that's not optional. If you make it to two months inside the dungeon, you are instantly kicked out and that is also why two months is the maximum amount of time we told you about and we offered Rich and Arabella to join us.”

“As you can already tell, this dungeon is quite special amongst the great dungeons. It has many more special features. One is that there are many different ways to descend to the next level, but they are never fixed and no party has been able to use the same way down as others. The floors also change, but they do so slowly. Mapping out the entire dungeon is quite literally impossible. There are, however, quite good maps for the first quarter of the dungeon as there have been many efforts to try to map those areas.”

“Those results, however, have been erased over time as the dungeon continues to change and the sheer immensity of every floor honestly makes the manpower spent on it quite useless. The first floor alone is around 10 square miles and every floor just gets bigger after that. No one even has a clue how large the later floors can be, but fortunately, it doesn't mean that we need to explore everything. As I previously stated, there are many ways to get to the lower floors.”

“This dungeon doesn't limit how many people can enter it, neither does it have instances. The chances are quite low that we might run into anyone else, but if we do, every party that enters are technically our allies. Although no one can actually find out what's going on inside the dungeon, so contact should always be conducted carefully and we should always be prepared for anything. Also, we should try to get away from anyone as quickly as possible as the dungeon doesn't really like larger parties inside the dungeon.”

“Now for the environment. As the name would suggest, you can find basically every type of ruin inside. That means that the environment will sometimes be an even bigger challenge than the monsters inside.” It was at this moment that Horus took out a huge book and showed us the title: 'The Myriad Ruins of the Dungeon Ruin of Lost Ages'. He then started to show everything we needed to watch out for. There were even certain stone patterns that we needed to watch out for as that would indicate what kind of traps we might run into.

This continued for quite a while and I was both fascinated and bored at the same time. There was a stupid amount of information to go through. Some of the ruins were quite interesting and I couldn’t wait to see them for myself, although, as I understand, the chances were quite low we would end up in the section that might have the more interesting types of ruins. When we were finally done with that book, Horus took out a second one called 'The Inhabitants of the Ruin of Lost Ages'.

Somehow this book was even longer, but there was even more valuable information here. Inside were all the monsters that we might run into and the number was truly staggering. The writer even wrote at the start that she thought that this was only about 50% of the monsters we might run into. What I found most interesting is that fallen races were actually included. But of course, along with them were mutated animals, creatures from horror stories, and a lot of your more standard fantasy creatures.

When we were done, my head was barely working from all the information I received and to make things worse, it looked like others were able to understand or at least didn’t look like they were having as much trouble as I was.

Perhaps that was understandable as two of them were mages and I was quite certain that Arabella was some sort of a noble. The sun had long set when we finally left the classroom, but I was quite glad it was finally over so I could go to sleep and hopefully my brain would be able to process all the information I received.

Arabella and I were taken to an inn. But when I started to walk up the stairs, I heard Arabella exclaim quite loudly, "What do you mean there isn’t two rooms? This is unacceptable!" Her loud voice made my headache worse, so I walked closer to the person she was arguing with as Horus tried to calm her down.

"We can understand your reluctance, but we don’t have any other available rooms. But the one you are going into does have separate beds." The moment I heard the person who had the keys explain the situation, I simply grabbed the keys before she understood what happened and started to walk upstairs, silencing everyone there.

I honestly didn’t care, I just wanted to sleep. I looked for the room number on the key chain and when I found it, I saw that I only had a few more steps to take before I was able to go inside the room. I tossed the keys onto the nearby table and then just picked one of the beds which was long enough for even me and even without removing my armour, I just laid on the bed and went to sleep immediately. My ears did pick up someone entering, but I didn’t feel any direct danger, so I just fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up and felt a lot better. The information I got yesterday also seemed to have sunk in. I did a few quick stretches to get the kinks out that sleeping in armour causes, but it wasn’t that bad as the bed was soft and this was a good way to get used to wearing armour 24/7 for possible the next two months.

I did notice that Arabella was sleeping in the other bed and I was quite disappointed that she seemed to have removed her armour and was sleeping unprotected. In the dungeon, we were going to face intelligent monsters and anyone intelligent will know that the best way to attack someone is to attack them when they don’t know you are going to and the best time to do so is when someone is sleeping.

I probably pissed her off yesterday and the question was, was I going to do it again? She will need to learn this soon enough and why not start when this is relatively safe. Why I wouldn’t count this completely safe but that was because I didn’t know how she would react.

Nevertheless, I pulled out one of my throwing knives and threw it at her shoulder. Immediately after my knife left my hand, her eyes popped open and she was able to get away from the attack, but barely. And she was incredibly angry, but before she could do anything, I spoke up.

"That was an easy throw. Anyone more serious would have been able to hurt you or even kill you. If you were wearing armour, you would have been a lot safer. We are about to go into a very dangerous area where we need to be constantly ready for a fight and while your reaction was acceptable, you currently don't even have a weapon to fight back with." At my last words, she somehow managed to get my knife in her hands, to which I gave a solid nod. At least that was something.

She threw my weapon back and without saying anything else, I started to walk out. She had calmed down quite a bit, but before I could exit, she spoke again. "I just wanted one last good sleep without having to worry about my armour." I continued walking out but answered her, "It's better to be prepared so you can have many good sleeps after the dungeon, instead of this being your last."