Dungeons and Dalliances

Natalie leaned against the wall, panting. Sweat slicked her brow, which she wiped away. She’d set a brutal pace for clearing the last six encounters, and while everyone had held up—and no one was complaining—it’d taken a toll on each of them.

Natalie was in the worst shape. The last fight had degraded the worst out of any, each of them exhausted from the previous five. She had caught a lizard monster’s sharp tail directly into the stomach, and it’d sank a good several inches in, her HP only managing to mitigate rather than stop it.

It was the reason a healer was a core archetype for a team’s composition, but still. It’d been a nasty injury, the worst Natalie had taken today. The kind of hit that could maim or kill a normal person. Gut wounds were no joke.

With a healer, and a health potion, she was as good as new. Still, it’d been a chilling reminder. For all of them, not just Natalie. Though, rather than concerned for her own well being, Natalie found herself more annoyed that it’d made her look bad. With this being the team’s test delve, she’d been hoping for a squeaky clean record. The slip at the end had spoiled that, even if they had made, from Natalie’s perspective, incredible time. The fast pace would have been a great way to end the delve on a high note, if she hadn’t slipped up.

Jordan was mad at her, Natalie could tell. She wasn’t saying it now, but would, later. But what did she want Natalie to do? They’d needed to set a quick pace to have time to explore the resource-rich cavern and make it back before curfew. Though, maybe that brutal of a pace hadn’t been needed. Natalie might have gotten a bit caught up.

Natalie pushed off the wall, her dizziness having steadied. She cleared her throat. “So. We’re good to take a look around, then.”

She received a collection of worried looks—except from Ana—but nobody protested. It hadn’t been deadly close, but a stab into the stomach was a good reminder what profession they’d chosen. Natalie thought the worry somewhat ridiculous. One-hit kills were rare in their business, besides when tackling over-leveled monsters or particularly difficult bosses. Or certain traps. Or … other exceptions. So maybe not that rare. But not from equal-level, run-of-the-mill monsters.

And honestly, Natalie was just relieved she was the one who got to be hurt, and not her friends. The idea of Jordan being the primary target was significantly more discomforting. As long as she did her job right, her friends would be fine. Natalie had never been especially weak to pain or nauseous at the sight of her own blood, but seeing Jordan battered … the few times it had happened in the past, Natalie’s composure had been much harder to keep hold of.

With the cavern cleared out, and everyone recovered from the last fight, it was, as Natalie had suggested, time to pick through the cavern for resources.

They split up. As large as a stadium, the cavern would take time to search, even with the effort split five ways. Beyond the raw resource gathering—ores, plants, and whatever else—there might be hidden passageways, rooms, or loot chests. There almost certainly were, in fact. A room this large, that had taken this much effort to clear, would have rewards beyond the superficial.

Natalie beelined to the streaks of rust she’d noted earlier. She scanned the ground and wall for traps—unlikely, but possible—then appraised the ore deposit.

***

Ore Deposit - Iron

Quantity - F

Yield - F+

Difficulty - F-

***

Natalie unhooked her folded-up pickaxe, a mundane piece of equipment provided by the mining guild. Though she hadn’t made it a priority to learn the ins and outs of mining, Tenet forced their students to spend two hours after class attending extracurriculars. That meant she’d picked up the basics.

Mining—the dungeoneering sort—wasn’t the same as real mining. Namely, not as difficult. She still needed to break up the rock, extracting the deposit into manageable chunks, but doing so didn’t require as much elbow grease as it would on the surface. Indeed, getting straight to the process, Natalie swung her pickaxe into the wall, the clink and crunch of metal-on-rock echoing through the room, and the wall crumbled easily, the surprisingly delicate vein of iron falling in chunks to the ground.

As Natalie worked at extracting the material, muscles aching from previous adventures, but swinging diligently either way, she mused on the process. Pound for pound, ore extracted from the dungeon was many times more valuable than its mundane counterpart. Even ‘F-‘ yield could be refined at drastically more efficient rates.

The mining guild had mentioned in passing that regular surface ore—ignoring complex other factors—could, on average, be turned into about half-by-weight iron. So, ten pounds of average quality iron ore would result in five pounds of metal. In the dungeon, though, even F rated yields started at the seventy-five percent mark or higher. When you got up to the E, D, C rank yields? Or higher, such as the sort of ore top-rankers might drag up? Ten thousand percent. More. A thousand times yield by weight.

Which, of course, had been a fascinating point the enthusiastic boy had gushed about. One three-pound chunk of ore might turn into three thousand pounds of high quality refined iron. The impossibility was interesting in the abstract, but less to Natalie than probably other people. The dungeon was filled with all sorts of impossibilities. A chunk of ore expanding into rows of metal ingots? Well, sure, it was interesting, but not nearly as much as the gushing mining guild member had made it sound, in her opinion.

And those sorts of yields were for top-rankers. Low- and mid-rankers could still drag up impressive amounts of resources by themselves, compared to a mundane baseline, but not literally tons of metal from a single vein.

***

Gathering subclass earned: [Mining - Lv. 1]

Accept?

***

Natalie had been wondering when that’d happen. Pretty fast, then, as she’d been told. She hadn’t worked halfway through breaking the ore vein into chunks.

Naturally, she accepted. While she could only have a single gathering subclass, she could also reject it at any point. Which would reset her back to level one in whatever she picked next—including if she returned to mining—but it meant the decision wasn’t permanent. And gathering subclasses weren’t that important, anyway. Mostly, they acted as a gatekeeper to gathering valuable materials. If she wanted to drag up those mythical veins of ore deeper in the lower layers of the dungeon, then she had to work toward it from the ground up. Couldn’t just do it, if she hadn’t spent her time mining the weaker ores in the upper floors.

Fifteen minutes or so passed. Natalie worked steadily away. The rich, rusty veins embedded into the wall turned into chunks, clattering to the floor after each loud impact of her pickaxe. Seeing the tough rock yield so easily was odd.

Soon enough, she’d finished. Natalie observed one of the darker, clearly-higher-yield chunks of stone, nudging it with her boot.

***

Iron Ore Chunk

Yield: 88%

***

Some of the other chunks weren’t as laden with the material. Natalie would still be collecting all of it. Or, anything with five percent yield or higher. She’d leave the literal scraps, the ones in the single digits that were almost entirely stone.

She popped open a pouch hanging at her belt, then fingered around and plucked out a tier one monster core, a fruit of their previous adventures. Leaning over, she scooped up a thick chunk of the raw iron ore, then, curious—since she’d never done this before—she pressed it into the monster core.

The chunk of ore wobbled, then, in an astoundingly strange way, was sucked into the monster core.

She inspected the orb.

***

Monster Core - Tier 1

Holding: Iron Ore (3% Capacity)

***

It was an awfully convenient feature of the magical orbs. While only items and other dungeon-related resources could be stored inside—not mundane supplies, like a tent, for example—it still made delving blessedly less complex when it came to logistics. A multiple day delve could result in tons of loot, literally, much less resources such as logs or ores, and so storing those resources in a neatly portable manner was a downright requirement. Monster cores facilitated it. Resources, especially, could be stored easily, with a single core accepting mountains of the material. Items, though, required a single each. Still better than lugging around a metal breastplate or two-handed sword, obviously.

Eying the rubble scattered around her, muscles sore, Natalie muttered to herself in annoyance at the task ahead of her. Stuffing each piece of rock into the core was going to be annoying, tired from both the delving session, then swinging her pickaxe. But she got to work. She was hardly unused to tedious, unwanted tasks. She was a delver.