ALL NOVEL Chapter 32 – The fifth floor
After Shonu had given me my new quest I spent the rest of the day just walking around the settlement and looking at all of the construction sites. Not much had changed during the emergency quest but it was still nice to see the progress they had made; I even had a few conversations with some adventurers and builders that went pretty well. It had made me very anxious, as I expected it would, but I wanted to be a part of this community and part of that is talking to strangers so I worked through it.
The next day I decided that I had had enough of a break so, since Val was still resting anyway, I started building my next floor by thinking the usual thought. It went the same as it usually did except this time the notification was slightly different. It asked me if the floor would be a raid floor, I immediately confirmed my decision as I had thought about it extensively and new text appeared on the screen as it slowly got larger.
None of the options were ideal for what I had planned but the hills biome was closest to what I wanted so I chose that one, causing the notification to disappear before the system then continued the three hour process of creating and terraforming a new floor. Since the floor was bigger due to being a raid floor it already had more space than I could properly use so for the first time I didn’t increase the size of the floor past what the system made it.
Once it was done I teleported into the centre of the floor and was immediately surrounded by a large expanse of rolling green hills. Seeing this sight made me want to scrap my plan as I didn’t want to get rid of such beautiful scenery but it was too late to turn back now so I went ahead with the plan anyway. I didn’t want to spend weeks making enough buildings to cover a kilometre squared area so instead I created two templates that I would just copy all over the town.
Once I was done placing them all I would then go over them again while tweaking them so that they weren’t carbon copies of each other. The first building was a standard house that had a medium sized kitchen, a big dining room and a huge living room on the first floor. On the second and third floors there were a total of six decently sized bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house also had decently sized garden connected to it but it was barren at the moment as I was planning on adding plants later.
With the first building finished I moved on to the other one, this one was about the size of a convenience store except, like the houses, it was made out of a white metal that was stronger than steel and wouldn’t decay even after thousands of years. Inside the convenience store I created a bunch of aisles whose goods had decayed into practically nothing millennia ago. It was simple at the moment but it would be getting a lot of tweaking later.
I then spent a long time going over the town randomly placing buildings, making sure to keep a large area in the centre of the city clear. Most of the buildings were houses, a few were stores and even fewer were miscellaneous buildings like restaurants, hotels or a clinic. In-between some of these buildings I added natural parks of various sizes that made the city more colourful.
I then designated the area around where the portal would be as a safe zone that I wouldn’t touch for now before going around and turning the city into an overgrown jungle. I did this by picking random plants that I had either seen on one of my journeys in my new life or something I remembered from my old life and planting them all around the city.
I then made them grow until they covered pretty much everything, the parks became impassable, the houses now contained plants and flowers taller than I was. Even the pavement was invisible under either moss, grass or some kind of weed. The only reason the city was still traversable was because I had made sure to not go overboard with the plants and even then it would take a lot of hacking to get through them.
While I did this I also randomly placed twenty chests around the floor which was a lot but it was intended to be split amongst five parties so each one would only get four chests if they found them all. Once I was done I returned to the safe zone and did some minor, less apocalyptic, tweaking.
The first thing I did was go through each of the ten houses and add more décor, the living rooms got some random plants, a couple of sofas and a bookshelf with a bunch of books. The kitchen got a working oven/hob and plenty of workspace although the surface and storage units were made out of different material for each house.
All the dining rooms got large tables that would comfortably support eight people although the design of each table was different. Finally the bedrooms all had the most variety as, although all the beds were double, all the beds were different, they had different layouts, some having a wardrobe, some having a desk with a mirror on it and other things.
I then took the four convenience stores that were inside the safe zone and added proper contents to them that reflected what kind of store they were. The first was a grocery and so contained a wide variety of foods and drinks, the second type of store was a garden centre containing a variety of plants in pretty much every stage of life.
The third kind of store was a department store that contained everything you could imagine needing for a project, although I could only sell stuff that had been invented in Nero. The final store was a general store that sells any normal supplies that wouldn’t be in any of the other three stores. Each store also contained two clerks, one goblin and one kobold.
There was one last thing I wanted to add before the floor was complete and I could move on to placing down my monsters. That was a giant, circular tower that I placed in the centre of the floor that I had kept clear previously. The tower contained nine floors with the first five getting smaller than the last before the next four got bigger each time.
Each floor looked like it had been the site of a massive battle, they contained bodies of both goblins and kobolds in various states of decay, there were broken bits of metal scattered around each floor and finally weapon marks were everywhere, on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. There was a spiral staircase on the edge of the tower that went into each floor and you would have to cross the room to get to the next set of stairs. In the end the whole city and the tower had cost me 12k DP.
Once I finished the tower I could tell that I had been working for a while so I left to check on Val and have a rest before returning the following day to place all the monsters. The floor being a raid had multiple effects, I already mentioned that it made the floor twice the size it usually was and that it allowed five parties of up to six people to join forces to take the floor down.
But it had two more effects, firstly it doubled the DP I could use to create monsters from the 24k I would normally be able to use to 48k and secondly it let me have either one huge floor boss that was ten levels above the floor cap or two floor bosses five levels above the level cap. Either way the raid boss would then be forcefully evolved to the next stage in its chain, even if it didn’t meet the minimum level requirement they would usually need to evolve.
Before I placed any monsters I wanted to have a look at the goblin and hobgoblin patterns I had unlocked as I haven’t done that yet. The first up are the goblin warrior and archer.
The stats looked good, if a little more physical focused than the kobolds, but I was more interested in the skills. They both had [Sneak] so I looked at that first [allows the user to stay unseen in shadow easier for a mana cost per second]. That was interesting as it meant that the goblins were more adapted to ambushing their enemies than kobolds, I would keep that in mind when placing them.
I already knew what [Quick Shot] did so I moved on to [Frenzy], [Temporarily moderately increases strength but forces them to focus on only one target]. This is a very situational ability but I could see it being used if the timing was right. Now to look at the Hobgoblin pattern.
Hobgoblins also had [Sneak] which I was interested to see in action as they were so huge but they also had two more skills. Firstly [Command] [makes a nearby ally’s next strike stronger] and next [Adaptable] [lets the holder of this skill move up to ten percent of a stat into another one as long as they are in the same type]. These two abilities seem to make the hobgoblin a good all-rounder which I assume is on purpose as the pattern isn’t specialised.
I was confused about the Adaptable skill so I did a bit of digging through my knowledge and found that it just meant that the stats can only be moved from one physical attribute to another one or a mental stat to another one. This meant that if the hobgoblin was focusing on ranged attacks it could move 1.8 points from strength to dexterity but if it was focused on melee attacks it could do the opposite.
Also as long as the total points being moved is a whole number then no stats are lost, but if there would be a non-integer then it gets rounded down to the nearest whole number. With the goblins’ patterns looked at I moved on to placing the monsters. Each half of the floor would be the territory of a different monster, one half being kobolds and the other half being goblins.
I started with the eastern half of the floor by creating twenty squads of kobolds that were duplicates of the inner city one's from the previous floor before then placing them randomly and telling them to patrol around the area they were placed. Then I moved onto the tower and placed a squad of kobolds on each floor except the top floor.
These squads each contained one level 10 kobold leader with six level 8 kobolds under its command, three warriors, two archers and a single shaman. On the top floor I placed the first of the two bosses, a level fifteen kobold that, thanks to the system, evolved into a high kobold. Kobolds always strived to be like dragons and even had some dragon essence in them, this meant that each time a kobold evolved it got closer and closer to a true dragon.
This manifested in the boss kobold being double the size of a standard kobold, having wings that could be used to fly in short durations and the ability to breath fire, making them look half dragon-half kobold. I gave it ten kobolds to command, all level ten and evenly split between ranged and melee, before leaving it to get used to its new body and moving onto the western half of the floor and the goblins.
If you compared kobolds with goblins at the same level, one on one the goblins would always be stronger. The system mirrored this by making the minimum level that I could summon one level four and making them more expensive to both summon and level up. Due to this the goblins would have fewer members in each squad while also having just one less squad.
Each squad would contain one hobgoblin that was level ten, the minimum level I could summon them at, and six goblins, all level six, three archers and three soldiers. I placed them similarly to the kobold squads before then moving on to the tower where each floor would contain a squad of a single level ten hobgoblin and five level eight goblins, this time consisting of three archers and two warriors.
Finally I moved on to the boss, this would be a level fifteen hobgoblin, evolved into a bugbear, a slightly bigger goblinoid that was covered in orange fur, that commanded six level ten hobgoblins. I wished that I could make some of them specialised archers or warriors but I couldn’t risk fighting any to bring back their parts so it would have to do for now, maybe when I had earned enough money I would commission the guild to find me some.
That didn’t mean that I couldn’t give half of them bows and the other half longswords, they just wouldn’t be as strong as they would be if they were specialised. During the process of placing all of the monsters I quickly ran out of mana due to how much it needed so it ended up taking forty eight hours. I ended up giving the goblins better equipment similar to the kobolds and all the elite squads in the tower got the best equipment I could make at the moment.
This meant that almost everything was done for me to open the floor, the only thing remaining was to set up rules for my monsters outside the safe zone to follow. Firstly each city squad would patrol in a fifty metre radius around where I placed them and secondly if they came across any monsters of the other kind, while there were delvers on the floor, they would fight without killing each other until one was forced to flee.
This meant that any group that went through the floor essentially had three paths to the tower that they could choose from. The first was to go through the goblins who were the tougher and more spread out of the two. However, each encounter would consist of fewer monsters so they would be easier for the front line to control so the backline could focus them down one by one.
The second path would be to go through the kobolds who were more plentiful and would place down lots of traps, meaning anyone choosing this path would have to constantly keep an eye on their surroundings, but they were weaker so if a party had AOE abilities or had an easy time multitasking this would be the way for them to go.
Then there was the third, middle, path to go, this was the most chaotic as you could never be sure what you would find since it would be in an area contested by both the goblins and the kobolds but the monsters would have been weakening each other so if you did well in chaotic situations then this was the perfect path for you.
After thinking about it I made another rule that included the tower monsters. The rule was that if a raid came that would easily blow past the floor then the kobolds and goblins would work together instead of fighting. This was so that even higher level adventurers expecting an easy time would have to worry about being overwhelmed.
That was all I had left to do so I did my final checks of the floor before taking a deep breath and opening up the floor to the outside world. This caused the portal to appear in the middle of the safe zone that I had placed directly south of the tower. It also made another notification pop up that had something I wasn’t expecting.
Firstly, I unlocked Loot deposits that meant delvers could gather stuff like herbs from the first floor or gems from the third floor as long as they had the necessary skills. Second was Tier 2 elemental slimes, these were still the same tier as ones I already have but they are attuned to the second tier of elements.
The magic system in this world worked with two different categories, there were the schools, such as the nature school I used, that has a general source that it gets its strength from but can use any element as long as it went with the school. For example I can use just Nature mana to create my arrows but plants can also be used in medicine so I can use light mana to heal people.
The second category is split into multiple tiers, the first tier are the four base elements that I have gone over but then there are higher tiers of magic that can be unlocked. Tier two elements are ones that are stronger than tier one but can’t be created by combining two elements or by advancing a tier 1 element. These are light, death, force and psychic so by unlocking tier 2 slimes I can now spawn slimes of these four elements, although they are slightly more expensive and start at level 10 instead of 2.
