NOVEL WEB Chapter 11 – Designing the second floor
I got back to the dungeon about an hour later as I was already quite close when I came across them and had rushed the rest of the way without stopping. I made a room on the side of the path going from the portal room to the first encounter room, turning one of the tree trunks into a door that only I, or anyone I trusted, could see.
Inside the room I placed a bed of moss and a wooden table, then I placed the human onto the bed before materialising a sterilised needle with some thread and carefully sowing the head wound closed. I checked over them again but I couldn’t see anything else that was wrong with them so I decided to let them rest while I got started on my next floor, there was no point in just watching them 24/7.
To start this I thought ‘Start construction of the second floor’ and the system immediately started its task as a blue screen popped up in front of me. Five minutes later and 22500 metres squared of void had been turned into a barren wasteland that was the start of my second floor. Now it was time to find out what biomes I could choose from.
Looking over the possible choices I was thrilled to see Volcano as this is exactly what I wanted to make my next floor. I was planning on using the Magmin and a volcano is where they are most at home. I confirmed my choice and let the system do its work and ten minutes later the barren wasteland had turned into a crater filled with lava. It wasn’t quite ready as it needed to expand until the lava lake had grown fifty percent larger which took the rest of the day.
It was getting late so I checked on the mystery person and fed them some soup that I had materialised. It was hard to get them to swallow and I didn’t really know what I was doing but after a bit of trial and error, making sure they didn’t choke, I managed to feed them. Once that was done I made my own room across from them and went to sleep.
Once I woke up I went down to check on the second floor and it was extremely hot, even though I was the dungeon I still wasn’t immune to the heat. The lake was much bigger in person than I thought it was going to be but considering that it would be the whole floor it was big enough for my goal.
I made a pathway of igneous rock that went from one side of the lake to the other before turning back on itself. Every time the pathway reached the edge of the lake it turned back again until it ran out of room to go. I made sure the pathway was at least 10 metres wide while the lava that separated neighbouring sections of the path was also 10 metres wide.
This meant that the path was more than two kilometres long and turned back on itself ten times before reaching the end. Doing this cost me 215 DP as every ten squared metres of rock cost a single DP, leaving me with 445 DP currently available. I knew that some people would be strong enough to jump the gap so I made it so that if anyone tried a plume of lava would shoot up from the lake, killing them.
With the main part of the path done I widened the path near the end to make a platform that was twenty metres wide and fifty metres, this was going to be where the boss fight took place, the path then goes back to being ten metres wide before extending again. This time it created a twenty by twenty metre platform that was going to house the portal to the next floor. This platform is mirrored at the other side of the floor where delvers will enter the floor from.
I didn’t want the path to just be a boring straight line that just turned sometimes so I widened some sections while tightening other sections. This was done completely randomly and I hoped that it would make the floor look more natural. I wasn’t too worried about it since I was making a dungeon and it didn’t have to look natural all the time. But I didn’t want it to be monotonous.
I planned for each floor to have a theme that would teach my delvers a lesson. I was here to help train adventurers after all. The theme for this floor would be about staying aware of your surroundings and expecting danger everywhere you go. This was done by hiding the Magmin in the lava river as they were immune to its heat.
I knew that the adventurers would warn each other about where the encounters were hiding so I made the Magmin move through the lake and attack the adventurers randomly. No matter how many times they came through this floor they wouldn’t be able to know exactly when the encounter would start.
Now that the floor had been shaped it was onto placing the Magmin themselves. I only had enough DP for five Magmin as they cost 80 DP each so I placed the first encounter down, a group of three Magmin that will attack the party near the beginning platform. This may be a small group but it is to introduce the delvers to the theme of the floor.
They wouldn’t attack as soon as the delvers entered the floor, keeping at least ten metres away from the portal, as I wanted the start of every floor to act as a safe room. This was because I felt like attacking the divers while they were going through it and were separated was cheating.
As I didn’t have enough DP for the next encounter I left for the day to rest and look after the rescue. The next day I came back and placed the next encounter, a group of three Magmin that were a bit further up the path, around the second bend. This time I was completely out of DP so I went back to my room and just practised my martial arts as the time passed.
Three days later the mystery person woke up and I told them how I found them and they thanked me but they didn’t trust me quite yet so I just went back to making my second floor while they got to know me. I didn’t blame them as if I had been saved by a random stranger that I didn’t know I would also be a bit wary of them.
It took another ten days for me to finish placing all the encounters, it would have taken longer but luckily three more parties turned up in that time and cleared the first floor before moving on. I was also getting an extra 50 DP a day from the person I had saved since they technically counted as a delver. In total the floor had eight encounters, including the floor boss, and I had already placed the first two encounters.
I didn’t want to just use Magmin and one of the elemental slimes I had gotten were attuned to fire so they would be a perfect addition to this floor. They weren’t completely immune to fire so they couldn’t be placed directly into the lava but they could latch onto walls without burning. I used three of these in the third encounter by placing them on the side of the path that the delvers couldn’t see as they were walking through the floor. Joining them were another three Magmin.
The next encounter was slightly different, I decided to use the slimes as bait so I placed six of them on top of the path where they could be seen and then another three Magmin inside the river. The plan was to have the Magmin wait for the party to engage with the slimes, swim behind them and attack from behind in a pincer attack.
This encounter marked the halfway point so I placed a loot chest at the next bend. It bugged me that the chest was wooden since it would burst into flames instantly if it wasn’t in a dungeon but there was nothing I could do for now.
The next encounter would just be four Magmin without any fire slimes and the sixth encounter was four Magmin and three fire slimes, using the same trick as the third encounter. The last encounter would be the toughest fight so far as I placed five Magmin and five slimes together except I split the group up so that two of the Magmin and a fire slime would attack the delvers by themselves.
Then when the adventurers almost win and let their guard down the Magmin will run away by using [Shed Skin], if the adventurers chase after them then the rest of the encounter will jump out of the lake and quickly surround them. I doubt this trick would work more than once but I thought it was still a good lesson to not get overconfident. As this was the fight before the boss I placed another chest on the next bend that turned into the boss’s platform.
This just left the floor boss to place and I had just over 600 DP to use on it. While watching the other parties go through the floor I realised that Meg’s fight had a big flaw. This was that she was the only damage dealer in that fight. To remedy this I made this boss have a lot of underlings that it could command in the fight.
This was eight fire slimes that would act as the frontline and two Magmin that had both been levelled up to five that would act as the targeted damage dealers. The boss was also a Magmin except I raised him to level six before turning him into the boss so that he ended up being level eight. The extra levels gave it the [Minor Fire Magic] skills so it would be even better at fighting from the back.
With the boss placed I checked over the floor to see if I wanted to change anything but I was pretty happy with it. Each encounter was tougher than the last and they all used different tactics that would hopefully keep any adventurers on their toes. I was about to tell the system to open the floor when I remembered that I needed to add an ecosystem to keep the Magmin alive without relying on my mana.
I wasn’t really sure what the Magmin ate but after a bit of thinking I found some fish and iron snails that both used magic to survive in lava. With that done I finally opened my second floor which caused me to receive a notice from the system.
It had slipped my mind that I would be getting these each time I opened a new floor, each instance would let an additional party delve into each floor at once, which would be very helpful in getting more DP. Not to mention that by expanding the dungeon I would be able to absorb more DP from the Leyline each day.
The reward made me excited but I had spent two weeks going over this so I was really tired and wanted to rest. Before that though, with my current project finished, I decided it was time to see if the rescue was ready to talk.