Don't Put Ships in My Dungeon (2)
[Dungeon entrance that looks like a wriggling blood sausage]
Fuck, why only me.
I even have to send Supers in there, and those antennae or tentacles or whatever at the entrance are just wriggling and thrashing around.
Grotesque as hell.
A multiverse, huh.
It was a structure that ran the concept of brain-breaking absurdity straight into the ground. Players were running into things I'd never once seen back when I was still playing the game — other guys having to physically enter the body of some living creature just to get inside their dungeon, and worse.
Whatever trial was coming for me, the only thing I could predict was that I wouldn't be able to predict a damn thing.
But while I was buried in rear-line admin work with Jessica, scrolling through the gallery and gawking at the users' grotesque proof shots, my excellent fleet and Super companions finally managed to track a dungeon down for me.
"Commander! We've discovered a dungeon!"
"Oh, yeah?"
At Ignis's report, I ordered every remaining scout fleet to converge on that point, then opened a fresh channel back to her with a follow-up question.
"Ignis, what's the dungeon look like?"
"It's an asteroid, sir! There are various abandoned factory-type facilities on the exterior!"
An asteroid — and one with a base built on the outside, no less. Compared to the players getting sacrificed to pure brain-rot, this was a perfectly reasonable level of weird. Figuring we could sort out the details once the rest of the kids got back, I was about to tell Ignis to hold position for now when—
"Ah, right, Commander. There's something I nearly forgot to report."
"There's more?"
"Yes, sir. A massive volume of biological signatures is being detected inside the asteroid we just found!"
Between Ignis's follow-up and the sight of whatever those unidentified bugs or monsters were crawling across the asteroid's surface, the urge to open fire the moment the rest of the fleet assembled hit me hard.
Of course, that urge stayed an urge and nothing more.
"Commander, you couldn't possibly be thinking of just blowing up that delectable treasure trove of knowledge, could you?"
That was Griyanaar, lounging against her impressively well-grown pet tentacle as she lobbed the question my way.
"It does not appear to be something our Queen created, yet if we were to deliver them to Her Majesty, I suspect the results would be quite satisfactory."
Oxianor, natural-born monster that she was, didn't seem to care in the slightest whether the things were grotesque or not.
"Mrrrow, for some reason burying myself in there looks like it'd feel really good, nya."
"Hey now! Equating something that wild with the Cradle I poured my heart and soul into is a sin!"
Smeragi was flushing and looking delighted at the vague shapes visible inside the asteroid's craters and the base interior, for reasons I preferred not to examine. Griyanaar was not amused.
"Ufu fu fu~ Using things like that could be quite fun, too♡"
And then there was Pashtura, the busty lewd nun living up to every inch of her reputation, her face broadcasting exactly how filthy her imagination had gotten.
Four of the Supers I'd sent out on recon looked ready to tank their affection meters the second I so much as mentioned orbital bombardment, which made casually floating the idea extremely difficult. And even if Belial, Ignis, and Partia had all joined the bombing party for a full seven-person consensus, it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
[Proof shot of a system message: the moment the fleet attacked, the dungeon regenerated in an identical form at a random location]
I already knew this and had contingencies ready in case it vanished, so I'm mostly posting this as a heads-up.
If a small-scale dungeon isn't to your taste and you haul a fleet over to thrash it, you gain absolutely nothing. You just waste more time hunting for another one.
Oh, and once you enter and seize control from the inside, the dungeon itself goes invincible under system protection. Lore-wise it's some ancient empire barrier tech or whatever.
For reference, mine's about the size of a small apartment complex, so I'm running it with ground troops.
Just in case my memory was off, I searched the gallery — and the tip post from a veteran player that popped up confirmed it. Even if I turned the full firepower of every ship assembled here on the dungeon, all I'd accomplish was resetting its location.
Bottom line: hauling a fleet over to beat the dungeon senseless was off the table. Once the Supers and the fleet had finished gathering, I decided to dig into the detailed intel and figure out how to handle the place properly.
Naturally, a rough profile of the dungeon was available through the deep scanners mounted on every ship in this setting. And the moment those scanners locked onto it, a quest window complete with dungeon info popped up right in front of my eyes with a cheerful little chime.
"Hmm…"
Maybe it was because we were dealing with a dinky little asteroid only a few dozen kilometers across, but the hard cap of three Supers instead of the full roster had me sinking into thought over who to send.
Well — three on paper, but really I only needed to freestyle two of the slots. The whole point of this event was to find the laboratory inside the dungeon and claim the rewards waiting there. And as the word laboratory itself hinted, there was a little easter-egg secret bonus baked in.
If you brought along a Supporter-type Super — the kind every player tended to have at least one of by this stage of the game, the ones who parked themselves in the base lab and buffed research points — you got a modest extra reward. Following that logic, I'd already locked in Griyanaar as a fixed member of the team. She was the best fit for everything I'd just outlined.
So one slot was done. The question of the remaining two started to weigh on me — chosen, of course, from the other five after automatically cutting our lewd-nun-slash-trigger-happy-human-cannon Pashtura from consideration.
While I was sitting there agonizing over it, Belial raised a hand on the comms screen and requested the floor.
"Commander, if I may say something."
"Hm? Sure, go ahead."
"The fact that a large volume of life signs has been detected inside suggests this is not an ideal environment for me to enter early on. My doctrine is built around large-scale puppet unit deployment."
"…Hmm."
"Even looking at just the corridors the scanners have picked up, a force of one or two people might manage — but large numbers of regular troops like my puppet units would only get in the way."
"Hmmm."
Contrary to what I'd expected, Belial's reaction was essentially You should send someone else, and while I kept a serious face on the outside, I felt a flicker of genuine surprise underneath. That said, her point was perfectly sound from a lore standpoint too. In terms of actual performance and operational fit, a command-type Super like Belial only got slotted into small-scale theaters like this when you literally had no one else left to send.
I nodded at her frank assessment and accepted it.
"That's not wrong. All right — we'll do it that way."
"Thank you, Commander."