Not that Jim was against preserving the past, but he very much was of mind that it should stay exactly that, the past. This settlement, so close to his own town, was attempting to bring the past into the present and that wasn’t going to work. Even if all the pre-system hot weapons were still around, they would soon be meaningless if only because without some kind of mystical energy in them, even the most basic shield would have an easy time blocking them.

Though Jim almost half hopes someone managed to keep one of the big bombs around. If only because it would be really interesting to see someone take one to the face and laugh. Too bad that with time, something mystical would leak into them, otherwise you could set one off in the middle of a field and the grass wouldn’t even be hurt.

Jim wasn’t certain who had said it, but some minor testing had proved that one of the things stuff like mana does is reinforce reality. So without mana, an item will have a hard time even affecting an item with it. In fact, Ace suspected that was why a dungeon’s core is so sturdy. The crystal material itself isn’t necessarily all that tough. Rather, by their very nature a dungeon’s core is packed full of some sort of power so dense that Jim didn’t even know where to start.

It was going to take a lot of leveling before anyone got even close to being able to break the thing. Not that Jim had any plans to even try. Hell, he would actively work to prevent someone from doing so. The dungeon is sort of a core feature of their town, after all. Jim laughs to himself at the accidental pun.

He isn’t laughing an hour later. Jim’s group had managed to find Ben’s office quickly, but that was where things stalled out. Ben wasn’t there and apparently hadn’t bothered to show up in the last week or so. Though what did the settlement’s ruling council expect? Once the cat is out of the bag on how much of a figurehead the guy was, he didn’t take it all that well. Worse for Jim was that the council didn’t want to meet him.

Sure, Jim’s job was as simple as just telling someone in an official capacity, but that meant doing more than just shouting the news at them. He needed to get an actual meeting with someone at the top. Ben would have worked if he was in his office. Sure, his words were ignored by everyone except his few trusted followers, but he was technically the one listed as being in charge.

Now though, the fool abandoned his post and so Jim wasn’t able to do this the easy way. He shakes his head as he didn’t really want to shove the council’s noses in how strong his people were. Because there is an easy solution. Just break into a council meeting and tell them that way. Except that would involve completely ripping the mask off.

Jim didn’t want that mask to be ripped off in such a low-impact manner. As it was, the council controlled things and without something to shake things up, that was likely to keep being the case. A situation that Jim very much did not want to continue. To have such a backward settlement as the figurative gateway to Wolf’s Rest was an “accident” waiting to happen.

Not that Jim feared that the council would manage to get Ace or any of the other founders killed. Rather, it is a lot easier to be in the common people’s good grace if you haven’t just mowed through all their young adult men. After all, war was quite the popular hobby for old men sitting behind the front line.

No, what Jim wanted was a more pyric realization of how reality now worked and he wanted it to be delivered by someone not from Wolf’s Rest. After all, right now, the settlement basically approved of what the council was doing. Sure, a few people realized that the good ol’ head in sand method wasn’t going to work, but most of those types aren’t here anymore. In fact, most of them are back at Wolf’s Rest, which is how Ace had been getting most of the more public knowledge about what was going on in the settlement.

So Jim was left with only a few reasonable options and the two at the top of the list were waiting for a meeting and finding Ben and dragging him back to his office. Well, not literally dragging, they did want to keep things peaceful-ish for the moment. Though that was the option he was leaning towards. After all, the last time Ace had sent a diplomat it had taken over a week to meet the council.

Jim sighs, Ben wasn’t a complete idiot and hadn’t left any indication of where he was going to be hanging out. Sure, he was still in the settlement, a nifty fact confirmed by the system, but this was a literal city. Not the biggest city, mind you. It, however, was still big enough that Ben and his people could be hanging out in some random building and no one would be able to tell. There are way more houses empty than there are with inhabitants despite this place becoming quite the important crossroads.

Just thinking about the trouble this might end up being causes a headache for Jim. Sure, he knew how to track things. In the wilderness. There was some crossover, but the skill he had was specialized for a natural environment. That meant he would have to actually talk to people if he wanted to get anywhere. An action which would alert the council.

Not the worst thing, but if Jim had his way, they wouldn’t even know that he was in the settlement, let alone that he wanted to meet with someone in charge of the place. He shakes his head and turns to the person who was keeping Ben’s office clean. In theory, they should have been one of the council stooges.

The reality of the situation, however, was that Ace had managed to get his own man into place. A fact that sadly meant they didn’t know where Ben was as he had reasonably expected the guy to spill the beans. This all led back to Jim having to both line up a meeting with the council and attempting to find Ben. After all, if he could do the hopefully quicker option without the council finding out, might as well lay it all out on the table.

So within a day, the entire settlement knew that Jim was both in the settlement and looking to deliver some kind of message to whichever power would listen to him first. This, however, did not give the council a kick in the butt to hurry up and schedule him in.

After all, they were the important ones here, right? There was no way something one of the “savages” that had taken up refuge around “their” dungeon could possibly know that was important enough that they didn’t already know it. Though as Jim thinks that, he does backtrack on the mental scare quotes for the savages bit.

Not that he considers their town a bunch of savages, but rather that everyone else does. It is kind of a sad situation, but even those who get what their new reality is about are looking down on making an entirely new town. The fact they are making it around a dungeon of all things doesn’t help either. After all, there are not just one, but two perfectly fine cities right nearby.

Nevermind the fact that at this point the two cities are monster ridden death traps. Hell, the two cities are even more dangerous than the dungeon at this point. Not that the council believed this at first. After all, once you lose in power to a group of people, the obvious answer is to try and settle right next to them, right?

Anyway, that foolish attempt ended with only about ten people dead. For some reason, likely a certain pack of wolves charging through their territory, a large family of very venomous snakes had taken up residence in the two old cities. From what Jim had seen, they decided to stay there because the powerless building materials couldn’t get in their way. A useful feature for the snakes as it let them create so many ambush locations by simply poking holes into every building.

Even Jim didn’t want to hang out in the place alone. Sure, Wolf’s Rest was still extracting things from the place, but now it was more of a matter of materials instead of items. After all, while the furniture and stuff had managed to stay relatively intact for a long while, at this point every ceiling and floor had at least a few holes to let the rain in.

Jim shakes his head and focuses back on the present. Reminiscing wasn’t the worst thing to do, but escaping into it instead of dealing with the upriver settlement’s politics would just mean having to be here longer. Though it does remind him of something else to tell Ben if he is the first one Jim meets. After all, if a few snakes managed to make two cities uninhabitable, well, there were more than enough uninhabited buildings here for some monster or another to hole up in. So maybe they should consider knocking the worse ones down.

As Jim spends his time searching the pre-system buildings, back at the dungeon Doyle is working on a new floor. After Ally had done some more research, Doyle was mostly certain that while he wouldn’t be able to have a boss every five floors, putting another boss on the tenth floor wasn’t the worst plan.

So far Doyle had created the tenth floor and filled it in with stone, but he wasn’t quite certain what the design for the floor should be. Yes, he could make the boss first and design the floor around them, but he was half hoping that the floor’s design would do the reverse and help him figure out what the monster should be the boss.

Then, as Doyle is taking a look through his previous floors, something jumps out at him. The ninth floor basically looked like one giant passageway. That passage should be going somewhere, right? So taking that idea and running with it, Doyle begins to design the floor. Though first he takes a second to recheck the system message to remind himself of how many points he had to work with.

{Tenth floor dimensionally anchored

World Energy cap +6700 [Constitution(67) * 100]

tenth floor spending limit set to 33480 [Previous floor’s limit(27000) + Intelligence(54) * 120]

Monster level cap updated

Quintessence debt paid back by 5}

Seeing the new spending limit Doyle can’t help but shake his core. Just the boost from his recent path alone added a little over a thousand points, nevermind the fact his Intelligence score had risen by ten since the last time. He was beginning to wonder if there was a point where monsters started to cost more or if every dungeon just ended up with the most sprawling of floors covered in absolute hordes of monsters.

Though thinking back on his short time in Flisle’s dungeon, Doyle couldn’t really say that hadn’t been the case. The floor itself was massive beyond compare after all, and it wasn’t like they would have let their monsters wander around near the tutorial takers. That would just increase the amount of time it would all take. After all, you can’t really learn much beyond the first time of being killed by monsters multiple magnitudes stronger than you and even that first lesson is more along the lines of knowing not to get in the way of stuff clearly out of your reach.

Akhier

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