Dungeon Design (13)
The moment I stepped into the dungeon for the test, the scenery around me flipped like a page being turned.
A quiet, stately manor house.
The scene spread out before my eyes exactly as I had imagined it.
The paintings hanging along the walls. The heavy atmosphere that formed naturally from the dim lighting. The echoing reverberations that rippled outward and returned each time I moved my feet.
All of it pleased me so much that the corners of my mouth curled upward on their own.
The Dungeonology professor said I'd be shocked when I saw it — and he was absolutely right.
Stepping into a dungeon built by the Academy and stepping into one I had designed myself felt nothing alike.
Walking down the corridor with my heart fluttering, savoring the sounds around me, I heard Halbae let out a surprised, slightly raised voice.
"Remarkable. How in the world did you look at that drawing of yours and conjure something like this?"
'That "drawing" wouldn't happen to be the dungeon background I sketched, would it?'
"Why ask what is obvious? I speak of that picture, drawn as if by a five-year-old child smeared across a patch of dirt."
'A five-year-old couldn't even draw something like that!'
My art skills aren't exactly anything to brag about, but I'm still better than a kid who'd just run around scribbling without a thought in their head!
At the very least I know what perspective is! And foreshortening! And detailed description too, thank you very much!
Fine, I don't know them in any real depth, and I can't actually put what little I know to use — but that doesn't mean you get to lump me in with clueless toddlers!
"A certain child I once knew mastered the depiction of light and shadow entirely on their own at the age of five."
'...That person was just a lunatic genius, though?'
"Be that as it may, it remains true that you paint worse than a five-year-old child."
'If you're going to use that person as the standard, then most of humanity counts as worse than a five-year-old!'
Arguing back against Halbae's shameless nitpicking, I committed the dungeon's scenery to memory.
Now that my irritation had settled, the fine details started coming into focus.
There were a few things that fell a bit short in terms of detail.
Especially the year inscribed beneath this final portrait — that becomes one of the clues later on, so it has to be accurate.
I'll note it down in my memo pad so I can request corrections afterward. After walking the corridor for a few minutes like that, a dead end revealed itself.
I approached the empty cradle set against the wall and picked up the paper resting inside.
To escape the maze, you must find the exit.
The moment I finished reading that line — the kind of line someone would nod along to with a dry well, it is a maze — the manor crumbled away, and something else took its place.
Where the carpet had been, bricks sprang into being.
The crimson walls dissolved and scattered, revealing a training ground that could belong to any fortress in the land.
And where the portraits once hung, the faces of countless soldiers had been carved into the stone.
The background transition is seamless, too. It really feels like you've been transported to a new space. Any student seeing this for the first time would definitely let out a gasp of admiration.
Heh heh. I can't wait. I'm absolutely asking Joy how it felt afterward.
"Hey! You there! No time to stand around daydreaming!"
I was in the middle of picturing Joy flailing about when, far in the distance, a rough-faced knight raised his voice.
"Do you think you're the only one taking today's trial?!"
As his voice rang out, a soldier materialized before me.
Intimidating muscles honed by punishing training. Calluses carved into the hand gripping his spear shaft. A raw, unpolished ference seeping through between his every movement.
Anyone could tell this was a soldier of considerable skill. The moment he took his stance, the knight in the far distance bellowed again.
"We begin at once!"
'Um, excuse me...'
"Hey. You big-mouthed, blockheaded knight. What trial are you even talking about?"
"If you've already forgotten what I told you moments ago, you'd be better off simply failing! Figure it out yourself!"
Perfect. The tutorial is exactly as I designed it.
I love that unfair touch — announcing a trial but refusing to explain what it entails.
No matter what, that knight will never reveal the contents of the test. Which means anyone who comes to clear this dungeon has to figure out the trial's conditions for themselves.
I was ticking off each little detail, nodding to myself in satisfaction, when the soldier standing before me flashed a smile.
"Is that so. Ready, then?"
'Yes. Of course.'
"Why would anyone need to prepare to deal with the likes of you? Come at me. Surely you won't tell me you're hesitating over a little girl."
Clicking his tongue, the soldier charged — and I drew my shield from my Inventory.
The spear hurtled from far away, sharp enough that one careless blink would leave a hole where my heart used to be.
But the power underpinning that sharpness simply isn't there.
Blocking that spear requires no grand technique whatsoever.
Holding out my shield is more than enough.
CLANG! The spear tip struck the shield, failed to pierce it, and ricocheted upward.
And with that, a gaping opening yawned across the soldier's body.
Hmm. Tutorial or not, isn't the opponent a little too weak?
At this rate, who's going to bother figuring out the trial's conditions? They'll just smash the soldier to paste and walk on through.
A tutorial is supposed to teach you that you must uncover the gimmick to break through. This doesn't do that at all.
I'm going to have to tell them to raise the difficulty.
Having reached that verdict, I dashed toward the bewildered soldier's eyes and smashed the wooden plate mounted on the right side of his armor.
"The first trial is complete! Splendidly passed!"
At that, the knight who'd been shrieking indiscriminately from the start proclaimed the trial's end.
I've only just set foot in the entrance of the dungeon, but the broad strokes seem properly constructed.
With just a few detail corrections, it should reproduce the dungeon in my head exactly as I envisioned it.
"Then we proceed immediately to the next trial!"
The tutorials that followed differed little from the first.
The gimmicks themselves were functioning normally, but the soldiers were far too weak.
I know it's a dungeon meant to be cleared by first-years, but isn't this a bit too easy even so?
It's at the level where you'd suspect the dungeon's creator of looking down on first-years.
'What do you think, Grandpa? Too weak, right?'
"Weak they most certainly are. At this level, anyone could smash their way through with brute force alone."
'Right? My standards aren't too high, are they?'
Once the dungeon run finishes, I need to go straight to the Dungeonology professor and tell him the tutorial difficulty has to go up.
As it stands, this tutorial can't even do a tutorial's job.
"...Congratulations. You have overcome the trials required to become an adventurer."
The moment I finished the tutorial by smashing the bellowing knight to pieces, the scenery shifted once more. This time it was a gloomy, lightless cavern.
Air so thin it choked the breath from your lungs. The only light source the faint glow bleeding down from the ceiling.
I loved this sinister landscape so much that I was wearing a satisfied smile when a sound from behind made me turn my head.
Red eyes set within the cavern's darkness — so enormous they might well be the size of my hand. Threatening fangs that looked ready to punch clean through steel. Coarse fur like it had been spun from iron wire. Claws raking the stone cave floor as if it were loose dirt.
Taking in a scene that would strike terror into absolutely anyone, I found myself breaking into laughter.
Ah, seriously.
Don't make this thing so well-crafted.
At this rate I can't stay calm because I'm too busy anticipating whatever's waiting beyond it.
Originally, I planned to focus on QA rather than clearing the dungeon myself, but my mind's changed.
With my heart pounding like this, there's no way I can examine all the little details with a careful eye!
So first — I clear the dungeon!
Then I'll come back around, take my time, and fill in the details!
Having made up my mind, I hauled the corners of my mouth upward and gripped my mace tight.
"No! Professor! You can't make me rewrite that entire paper from scratch!—"
Margen, the Dungeonology Department graduate student who had barely clawed his way out of a nightmare, let out a long sigh of relief when he realized it had only been a dream.
Truly horrifying. A dream in which the professor ripped up the paper he'd written and ordered him to start over because a thing like this doesn't deserve to be called a paper.
If that ever happened in reality, he would have smashed the window and hurled himself out of it on the spot.
Wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, Margen stretched and looked around.
Here and there and everywhere, people lay sprawled about like corpses.
Every one of them had pulled consecutive all-nighters to build the final exam dungeon and simply collapsed.
Margen — until moments ago one of those corpses himself — slowly recalled how things had come to this.
It had all begun with a dungeon created by a young lady of House Aln by the name of Lucy.
The dungeon she had produced was beautiful enough to draw gasps of awe from anyone who majored in the discipline of Dungeonology.
The first time Margen laid eyes on it, he'd actually felt a stab of jealousy toward whatever talent Lucy Aln possessed.
But the graduate students' chorus of admiration died instantly the moment their supervising professor opened his mouth.
"Now then. All you have to do is build this dungeon yourselves. What do you say? Aren't you delighted to bring this work of art to life with your own hands?"
A dungeon beautiful enough to make scholars weep was, by that same measure, a preposterously ornate and demanding dungeon to construct.
We have to build that? Within two weeks of the final exam?!
To hit that schedule, it wouldn't be a matter of skipping the occasional night — they'd have to forfeit sleep for the entire production period!
Every graduate student who heard the professor's words screamed internally, yet not a single one voiced a complaint to his face.
After years of graduate school, they had long since grown accustomed to being worked like slaves.
And so they shut themselves in the lab, living off a single hour of sleep a night and getting scolded for even sleeping that much — how many days did that go on?
Then, yesterday, the graduate students finally completed the dungeon, handed it over to the professor, and collapsed as one, as if a switch had been flipped.
Let's see. What time is it now... four in the afternoon?
I've been out for almost half a day.
So why do my eyes still keep trying to close on their own?
Yaaawn. The young lady of House Aln who designed the dungeon said she'd clear it herself and identify the parts that need fixing, so QA is going to take a while.
Which means it's fine to sleep a little longer.
The very moment Margen decided to sleep straight through until tomorrow morning and shut his eyes again —
"Wake up, graduate students. You're worth less than slaves."
The door burst open, and a voice — vivid, beautiful, and unbearably loathsome — seeped into Margen's ears.
"I checked just how thoroughly you losers managed to transform my magnificent dungeon into garbage."
...Already?
She's already finished checking the entire dungeon?!
Considering the dungeon's difficulty, there's no way QA could be done by this hour!
"For dogs who can't even write a proper paper, I suppose that's effortful. Not that it changes the fact that you're all utter trash, does it? Lucky for you, sweet, kind little me is going to tell you exactly what needs fixing — so carve it into those pea-sized brains of yours."
The instant Margen saw the triumphant gleam in Lucy Aln's eyes, tears spilled down his cheeks without his permission.
It seemed he would have to suffer for several more days before he was granted a proper night's sleep.