"You have three class slots?" Akane asked.

"A facet of House Vega's bloodline," Nicky said. "There's some secret to it I'm not familiar with, but I don't terribly care. I don't intend to take any classes beyond Paladin, anyhow."

"I don't really plan on becoming anything besides a Wizard, myself," Akane admitted. "But... well, knowing we're up to parity in a way does make me feel good about using that second Class Slot Unlock. Although, uh. We probably should've just sold it, honestly. Someone out there actually wants that thing, and we kinda didn't."

"Anyone who can afford the market price of a Class Slot Unlock can afford to book three hundred zero-revenue delves in a Level 6 Growth Dungeon," Roxy said. "We would've saved someone the hassle of contracting some low-levels to come grind with them, and paying them with all the other treasure that the Dungeon spat out. A month's work, really."

"Wait, does every high-level Guilder delve as rapidly as you do?" Nicky asked.

"It's complicated," Roxy said. "The Guild's regulations state that eight delves per day is the maximum allowed while on contract, and also stipulate that the maximum delve time when doing multiple daily delves on contract is four hours. These pretty much only occur when it's a high-level delving a dungeon several levels below them."

"Why eight delves per day?" Akane asked. "And four hours? We did eight delves per day at twenty minutes a delve for two hours and forty minutes a day."

"Yeah, that's for our very specific case," Roxy said. "Generally the average is around thirty minutes a delve. Multiply that by eight and you've got four hours. Which is itself a thinly-veiled admonishment: if you're going to be dragging low-levels through a ton of boring delves where they don't get to do anything just to manipulate the odds, you don't get to waste more than half an hour of their time per delve if you want to maximize efficiency."

"I wouldn't say we were bored, necessarily," Akane said.

"Yeah, well, most delvers don't have sex inside dungeons," Roxy said. "Generally regarded as bad practice. I'd suggest maybe, uh... not doing that, on any future delves you go on, with other people."

"Eh," Akane shrugged. "Our contract ended two days ago. If we were gonna leave, we probably would've by now, wouldn't we have?"

"Debatable," Nicky said. "Having a contract lined up for literally the first day we were eligible to take one was a very strong sign of industriousness; finding a new contract usually takes longer than that, and no-contract freelance delving is inadvisable without a full party including a security expert and a proper healer. Which would be easy to form, given we just graduated a month and a half ago... if we were still on-level with our peers, and if we had been better at maintaining friendships with people we did not literally live with."

"We had friends besides each other," Akane protested.

"Oh really?" Nicky asked. "Without checking Grindr, tell me the name of a Cleric or a Druid in our graduating class."

Akane opened her mouth, paused for a moment, then shut it bashfully.

"Of course, that all is a moot point," Nicky said. "We don't want to form an on-level party and go freelance dungeon crawling."

"You probably should, though," Roxy said. "Like, go down to the guild, contract a security expert and a healer who just graduated, and then carry them up to Level 7 just like I did for you. Maybe suppress your own levels down to 3 and do a few practice runs in a Level 3 Dungeon first, though. Make sure they're building good habits, and pass on the tactical training I gave you. And then, include in your contract with them that, after you've carried them up to Level 7, they have to separate from you and go carry a new warrior and mage up from Level 3 to Level 7."

Akane and Nicky stared at Roxy in silence for a moment.

"Look," Roxy said, defensively. "Paying it forward is an important part of Guild culture that I am adamantly in favor of, and which you two have directly benefited from."

"We can suppress our levels?" Nicky and Akane asked in unison.

"Why didn't you just do that instead of hiring us?!" Nicky asked.

"Why did you need anyone to drag the average party level down?!" Akane added.

"Look, it's very simple," Roxy said. "A Level 14 contracting a pair of Level 3s to delve with her gets to pay for delves in mana potions, which I can make a basically unlimited quantity of for free. A Level 14 suppressing her level down to Level 6 to delve on her own has to pay a hundred gold a delve slot, adding up to on average thirty thousand gold in expenses for every Class Slot Unlock item. And despite being Level 14, I am not actually terribly wealthy. I own a small house in a major city, sure, but before Ariel Ironborn's time, a Level 14 would be living like a duke, or maybe a king. The society we live in has received a massive boost to quality of life as a result of Ariel Ironborn's actions, and that's an unambiguously good thing, but the downside is that high-level crafters and producers are a lot more common, and the prices they can sell their goods for have fallen, along with their profits."

"So, the fact that Akane and I now have about 65,000 gold between us..."

"That is still a hell of a lot of money, yes," Roxy said, nodding. "Especially because usually, delvers spend all the money they make. On room and board, on potions, on new gear, on transportation, and especially on delve slots."

"Where does all that money go, anyhow?" Akane asked. "Dungeons just... make stuff, including money, right? Where does it all go, so that we aren't swimming in it?"

"Well, among other things, money can be burned for mana, basically," Roxy said. "The Guild does that with delve slot fees, to power the Dungeon Gates. All their actual revenue, with which they pay their employees, comes from selling shit to people. Whether it's their auction commissions or their in-house supply shops, or their inns that they market towards delvers, they're a very good one-stop shop for delvers... which is kept competitive by the fact that they do not have a monopoly on high-level crafters and producers, and those are very desperate to capture some of the delver market for themselves."

"...Huh," Akane said.

"Like, that's the thing," Roxy continued. "When your magic professor was talking about how matter was a solidified expression of energy, that was not a metaphor. That also wasn't a loose-ish interpretation of a weird, arcane principle of magic that applied only in certain situations. Matter is solidified energy. And money is solidified mana, solidified in such a way that it is basically a more solid type of mana potion that's usable as money because only some crafters actually have any way to use the mana you'd get from money."

"Yeah, but they use that to make things," Nicky said. "Where do those things go? What takes them back out of circulation to keep the supply from inflating to the point that... well, someone like you has so many Level 20 spears they're just giving them away in an effort to tidy up the house?"

"Well, things break and dissolve into nothingness," Roxy said. "That's a major one. Repairing stuff? Crafters still need materials for that, even though they aren't making anything new, and are simply extending something's life. That's another major resource sink. There's also the fact that people die in ways that more or less destroys their stuff- sometimes a delve party just completely wipes, and the Dungeon dissolves, along with everything in it. It's less common here, but it happens plenty in other countries. Anyhow! I do think that, generally... it would probably be wise if the two of you found something to do more-or-less without me for the next, like. Month or so. Because I am going to be hyperfocusing on the Dungeon Master class I just unlocked, and I will be basically locked in my basement while I futz around with it."

"What about Lisa?" Nicky asked.

"Ooooh, is there a thing that Familiars have to be near their bonded people, and she's gonna have to go into seclusion with you, and the time alone will give time for the passionate lust to become actual romance?" Akane asked.

"Nah, Familiars can go wherever the fuck they want, even if it's on the other side of the planet from their bondmates," Lisa said. "I'm going with you two to provide gear and advice and whatever else for whoever it is you recruit. If you go that route, anyway. If you don't, then whatever, we'll just hang out."

"...Oh," Akane said.

"I'll still see you two in the mornings and evenings, if you spend those here," Roxy said.

"Ooooh, we could take the recruits through your new Dungeons!" Akane said.

"You absolutely cannot, without costing everyone involved their membership," Roxy said. "Guild regulations are extremely clear that, until a Dungeon Gate has been thoroughly tested by the Guild and certified to be safe and meet their standards, it is not to be entered by anyone at all who is not at least six Levels above the Dungeon's. The only exceptions are for the creator of the Dungeon Gate, the creator's Familiars, and the Guild personnel sent to test it, but only after their preliminary testing phase is complete."

"How do they test it if they're not allowed to enter it?" Akane asked.

"They set up some automatons to walk in, wait in the first room for some length of time, then walk back out. The automatons being able to walk back out is how they tell that it's stable enough that what goes in can be brought back out. Anyway! I'm gonna go downstairs and make my very first Dungeon Gate, and hopefully it won't immediately go up in a particularly noisy Magic Smoke Decompression Event!"

---

"Alright," the lead Guild inspector said, stepping out of the Dungeon Gate, still writing on her clipboard. 

"Anything I need to fix?" Roxy asked.

"Everything seems to be in order so far," the inspector said. "We've done a hundred delves so far, and everything seems very well in-order for a Level 1 Normal-Type Dungeon. I'm confident enough in these results to give it a Silver Certification for now, but if you're wanting to rent out this Dungeon to people outside your immediate household, we can work out the schedule for the next nine appointments we'll need to get this up to a Gold Certification."

"Silver? Gold?" Roxy asked.

"It's a new classification system, we started doing it a few months ago," the inspector explained. "So, the Gold Certification is just a one-to-one match with the old certification; every Dungeon Gate that was certified under the old system automatically has a Gold Certification. And that means that a team of Guild inspectors went through a thousand delves of the Dungeon, and confirmed that it behaved within expected parameters for all one thousand delves. The Silver Certification is something Ariel Ironborn implemented as a way to improve the rate at which the Guild trains up new Dungeon Masters- that only requires a hundred delves to get, and allows the Dungeon Master, anyone living in their household who's lived there for at least a month, and anyone under contract with the Dungeon Master to delve it."

"What about Familiars?" Roxy asked. "I got one about two weeks back, so..."

"Familiars are treated as equivalent to their bondmates for a lot of things, this included."

"Okay, cool, so I can take my Familiar on a delve in my brand new Dungeon. What kinda loot did it drop, by the way?"

"A bunch of rusty copper daggers and chainmail shirts that've had chunks ripped out, mostly," the lead inspector said.

"We mostly just left it where it was," another inspector chimed in. "None of us wanted it, and it helps cut down on the cost of powering up a Dungeon Gate if you don't take any loot out of it."

"Yeah, that's fair," Roxy said, shrugging. "Honestly, I'm pretty used to disappointing drops at this point. Fuck, I was running a Level 6 Growth Dungeon for a month and a half, with a pair of freshly-graduated Level 3s. And they were ooohing and aaahing over every last piece of Level 6 loot at first, and I really had to stop myself from rolling my eyes at them, because that really might've been the first time they got to hold a Growth sword. I mean, we were all Level 3 at some point."

"Heh. Sounds like a story. So, that Gold Certification?"

"Eh, fuck it, we don't need another fucking Level 1 Dungeon," Roxy said. "I'm gonna be testing this for my own purposes, and then tearing it apart and building another Dungeon Gate."

"In that case, we better get going. Good working with you, Miss Updyke. Now... which way was the exit, again?"

"Ah, right, right. Up the stairs, take a left, and you're on a straight shot to the front door."

"Got it. Thanks!"

Roxy waited for the Guild inspectors to leave, and then stripped naked, pulled two bottles of beer from her inventory, and downed them both in quick succession, tossing the empty bottles to the side. She pulled out a third one, and began to sip at this one slowly, making it about halfway through the bottle before she started to feel the oncoming buzz. She kept going at the same rate, and entered her Level 1 Dungeon once she was properly drunk.

The Level 1 Dungeon was precisely as pathetic as it sounded; it was of such a threat level that Level 1 delvers, who had never been in a fight before, would only be reasonably challenged by the experience. For a Level 14 delver, it was an absolute cakewalk, with Roxy casting exactly one spell- a custom-made area-of-effect radiating from the caster, which she'd named [Faceroll]. It killed monsters, disarmed traps, opened chests, and put loot in her inventory, all without thinking about it. It only really worked on things at least 10 Levels below the caster, but... well, for a Level 14 Wizard in a Level 1 Dungeon, it worked very well, even if Roxy ran out of mana to power it right after killing the boss- a particularly large rat- but before the chest spawned and could be auto-looted.

Roxy jerked herself off onto the chest, just for good measure, before opening it to find something she'd never seen before:

A Slotless Incubus Class Unlock.

"Huh."