Dungeon of Chance: Even Odds: A Dungeon Core Novel (Serious Probabilities Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (interesting books to read TXT) 📕

“Oh, heavens, no.  The indication could be as simple as an obvious rearrangement of your non-monster fern plants in the first room, or as complicated as an entirely new collection of monsters and environmental objects.  To make changes without these indicators can sometimes be good to keep the Heroes on their guard, but it is usually disliked and not really beneficial for either party.”

So, no changing things unless I let the Heroes know there is something new to expect.  Got it. 

“Well…not necessarily.  You can make some small changes and adjustments to balance the difficulty of a room if it proves not to work quite right; these changes may not even be noticed by any of the Heroes, but they could have a significant effect on the outcome of a fight.”

Oh, no…I feel something else that I have to learn coming up…

“Oh, yes, but this will be easy enough to learn,” Dwight said, smiling sadly at his core with her little dragonling lips.  “I’m here to teach you, after all, and I’ve already failed once; I’d rather not have that happen again.”

Clay felt like he should assure her that she hadn’t failed him, but she didn’t give him a chance.

“Now, you may have noticed that the monsters in the first room did quite a bit of damage to the Heroes.  This is normal, especially since they were Classless Tier 0 Heroes without any experience. Fortunately, they also got lucky that they identified the dangers in the room quick enough that no one died.  It’s poor form to kill a Hero in the first room, as well as being a waste, because they won’t have their Health Bands yet; that’s why I suggest you change the Elemental Resonance in your first room’s monsters.”

Elemental…Resonance?  What is that?

“Well, take a look at your Rats and Ferns in the first room.  What do you see as relates to their Elements?”

1 Bilge Rat★

1 Flare Rat★

1 River Rat★

1 Stone-tipped Fern★

1 Shining Fern★

Clay looked at them again, but didn’t understand what he was supposed to see.  Yeah, I see their Elements…what of it?  They are all different.

“Exactly.  There are different Elemental Resonances you can achieve with the monsters you place inside of a single room.  If you…hmmm, how to explain this…back out of your vision of the room and look at it as a whole, you’ll be able to see what I mean.”

The Dungeon Core tried to do what she asked, but couldn’t really grasp it right away.  Trying to look at the room as a whole seemed impossible, because he could only look at specific things.  After a few minutes of trying and encouragement from Dwight, he nearly gave up…and then figured it out.  He had been trying so hard to move his vision so that it encompassed the entire room, but when he nearly gave up and relaxed, his vision expanded ever so slightly.

It was almost like letting his eyes go unfocused when he still had a body, just relaxing them and sort of letting his mind and vision drift away wherever they wanted.  With his Core senses, however, what his mind and vision wanted to do was expand so that he wasn’t focused on just one thing, but on all of his awareness, instead.

When he had finally relaxed enough, his expanded vision now encompassed his entire dungeon – all three rooms and his BOO, as well as the hallways.  He found that he couldn’t manipulate anything while relaxed like that (probably because he wasn’t actually focused).  Nonetheless, he could immediately see what the baby dragonling was talking about. Around the second and Boss rooms, there wasn’t anything of note; around the first one was a barely visible aura that encompassed the entire thing, and when he concentrated on it (which was hard to do, since he needed to stay unfocused), he learned what it was.

Elemental Resonance: Multi-Element Burst

(Have at least 5 monsters with different Elemental Affinities)

Damage +10%

Health +10%

Speed +10%

Skill Effects +10%

He understood what it was saying, but all he really took away from it was that there was now something else that he needed to think of when he was placing monsters inside of a room.  As if there wasn’t enough to consider before.  And I’m sure there is even more I don’t know about, but hopefully that will wait until I’ve gotten the hang of all this new knowledge.

As if not hearing his thoughts, but recognizing that he had finally seen the Elemental Resonance of the room, Dwight went on.  “As you can see, by having 5 different Elements in the room – which I’m assuming was done completely by accident – you inadvertently increased the danger for Heroes coming through,” she said, before pausing again for a moment.  “Now, this normally wouldn’t matter for the first room, as you have all Common 1-Star monsters inside – which was why I hadn’t mentioned it before – but seeing as all of these new Heroes are ill-equipped to handle anything more than the bare minimum, it would probably be prudent to change the Resonance so that there is none.”

Clay thought it through for a moment and tried to figure out how to do that.  I just need to replace the ones that are there so that they aren’t all different, right? 

“Essentially, but then you have to make sure you don’t create another Resonance.  If you replace just one so that there are 2 of the same Element, though, you should be fine.”

What are the other Resonances?  It would probably be good to know for later, so he could either intentionally make one or get rid of one that was already there.

“Well, you now know about the Multi-Element Burst, which is 5 different Elements, but there are 2 other basic types.  The first revolves around having a single Element for all of