The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3) by Jonathan Brooks (the false prince TXT) 📕

Overnight on the 4th day that the Raiders had returned, which was still slow because the scheduling hadn’t needed to be extended to nighttime delving yet, Tacca made some changes.  Nothing of the environment or traps were changed, but the routes through the second section were redone with differing Raider Levels in mind.  The first route, which was for the lower-Level groups that challenged her second section, would be led through a series of rooms where the creature Levels ranged from 3 all the way up to 10, which was a new Werewolf Warrior – essentially the same, just easier.

The second route through the new section would be a bit harder, with creature Levels ranging from 8 through 17, which would challenge the stronger, higher-Level groups that delved through her dungeon.  It would be slightly more difficult than she had originally planned, but would offer more Rewards for those who chose to brave the increased difficulty.  Fortunately, as she had essentially made mirrored copies of the rooms on either side of the new section, it was easy enough to differentiate the two without them overlapping – except for her Boss Room.

Solving that problem was a little more involved, but it was eventually solved by hollowing out 2 small rooms adjacent to the large, tree-filled Boss Room, placing one of the Werewolf Bosses with their respective Wolves inside, and then closing it off from the main room with a Rotating Stone Bridge.  When it was decided which difficulty it was going to be, Tacca would open up the trap and allow the correct team inside.

So how was she supposed to figure out which difficulty it was going to be?  Well, that was the tough part; she couldn’t determine the Raiders’ Levels beforehand, obviously, so there had to be another way.

“Why don’t you offer them a choice?  You already did it outside the entrances, so why not do the same thing down here?”

Simple and easy – I like that.  In the first room at the bottom of the entrance slide, she carved a single stylized skull over two of the left-most entrances leading to the easier part of the new section, and 2 skulls over the two right-most entrances leading to the harder part of the section.  Simple, elegant…yet it left one entrance right down the middle that she had as of yet left alone.  Before, it had been just a relatively empty room acting as another route to get to either the left or right halves of the mirrored dungeon sections, but when they were split, it belonged to neither.

“Maybe you can just close it off for now, because you really don’t need it.”

Shale was probably right, but Tacca felt as if it was a waste – it was a room she created to use, after all.  What to do, what to do?  She thought about putting a Healing Paralysis trap inside, sort of a safe room that Raiders could backtrack and visit if they needed it, but vetoed that quickly as it would be quite inefficient and a waste of time.

Then she figured it could be used as a display of some kind, where she could show off her burgeoning artistic prowess with a variety of pretty metals and gemstones set into the walls, giving it a look that would wow and amaze.  She quite liked the job she had done with her Core Room with all of the gold ore and gems, and thought it might be fun to play with that a little more.

“Yeah, and then you’d have hordes of people rushing in here to destroy it and then steal it all away.”

Tacca couldn’t refute that, sadly.

She was about to simply close it off, leaving it unused, but a quick look at her available Control Limit gave her an idea.  How about I give them a little taste of what’s to come?  A practice room, if you will.

“What do you mean?  Practice against what?”

Against the creatures I have inside of my new section.  That way, they could have an idea of what they are up against without it being too dangerous.

She was waiting for Shale to say it was a bad idea, because it just wasn’t what dungeons did, but he surprised her with a head tilt.  “I’ve never really thought of that before, but I can see it working out pretty well.  Since your goal isn’t really for them to die, rather to spend as much time as they can within your dungeon, it does two things; keeps them here even longer, while also giving them a leg up on what they will be fighting against.  I like it.”

Therefore, the practice rooms were born.  She divided the room up into 6 different portions separated by a simple stone barrier, easily accessed by a central corridor, and then she placed Level 1 creatures inside those portions, representing everything they would see inside.  Most sectioned-off portions had 2 or 3 different creatures, including those with their “synergy” partners.  They would be dangerous only to those who shouldn’t even be in that section of her dungeon, and provided a glimpse into what they could expect going forth.

With that, she was done.  Or as done as she could be at the moment.

That didn’t mean she could just take a figurative step back and relax, though; managing the new section, making sure everything was operating properly, ensuring that the creatures and traps she had placed were balanced for their intended Raider Levels, was a whole new process.  Then there was the initial assessment of her changes, which took a little time for the Raiders to figure out, but after a day they had figured it out.

This time, from both the reinitialization of groups of Raiders running through her dungeon and her recent