Broken Lands

Chapter 388 – Offer Allegiance

Sophia expected nothing to happen when she selected the Unified Realm to see if there was any more information hidden inside the category and was pleasantly surprised that there was, in fact, something there. It was a relatively short list, but it seemed fairly comprehensive, at least for the things the Guide was likely to care about. There wasn’t anything about trade, but Sophia guessed that could be covered in Register Treaty.

Spoiler

Empress Sophia

(Imperial sigil)

Kestii Imperium Foreign Affairs:

United Realm

Register Treaty

Not Available

Register Alliance

Not Available

Offer Allegiance

Available

Declare Hostilities

Not Available

End Hostilities

Not Available

[collapse]

It was not a surprise that most of the options were marked Not Available; that made sense, since there was no way to reach the United Realm. The surprise was that one of the options was actually available: Offer Allegiance.

Sophia chuckled, then shrugged. There was really no reason to try it out, but there was also no reason not to. She would be happy to throw this mess onto her father’s plate if it let her step back and not deal with the Broken Lands once she left.

Somehow, she didn’t think he’d let her completely get rid of the responsibility. It didn’t take much imagination to know that he’d want her to at least have a plan, even if that plan was nothing more than acting as a protector while allowing local rule, the same way he did for most of the Unified Realm. 

He was strong enough to take on that role. She wasn’t, but maybe they could figure something out once she had contact with Earth again. If nothing else, they could find out which dragons were best suited to the  Broken Lands and see if there were any who wanted to settle in a new universe in exchange for acting as a deterrent. 

Sophia dismissed the concern about how those dragons would handle dealing with the Guide instead of the Voice. That was something they’d have to figure out if they wanted to actually implement that option. Sophia wasn’t confident that would happen, so she could ignore it for now.

Sophia went ahead and triggered it. She couldn’t think of anything truly bad that using it might cause, so why not? It would give her something to laugh about with her father later, especially if she could send a note along with it.

There was no option to send an offer or set any sort of conditions, but the display seemed to hesitate for a moment, almost like it was asking if she was certain. Sophia’s grin widened at the thought that even a mental interface had popup confirmation boxes. While she didn’t see it, she knew exactly what just happened.

The note that said Available changed to Pending.

Serenity pushed forward and sank his ax into the chest of the ten-foot-tall jester demon. Fire flared around him, then faded as the demon slumped in place. He nodded with a grin, then looked up to let the dungeon know he was talking to it. “That was a good one. Right on target for sixth tier; above-average striking power, but that means it’s a good place for tactics, and it was a bit slow. I liked the phase transition, but you need a distraction; you don’t want him to be a punching bag for that long. A set of four of the animated stone doves that guarded the entrance would be a good addition; they’d help tie the fight in, and it would make the delvers choose between fighting them separately from the jester or taking them on with him but injuring him during the transition phase.”

“That’s an easy change,” the dungeon said eagerly. “Can you help me with the next floor, too? I want to start it with a race, where you’re fighting the other teams to come in first place. You don’t have to beat them up, you just have to win the race. They’ll be fighting each other, too, because the winning team gets something. I haven’t decided what it’ll be for the dungeon monsters, maybe something that helps them in the next race.”

Serenity smiled and shook his head. He thought he knew what he was doing when he started helping nervous dungeons figure out how to expand, but sometimes he wondered if he really had any idea what he was doing. Earth’s dungeons had a flavor that was all their own; they were just as likely to pull from popular media as they were from history, and that meant that the scenarios they wanted could be ones he’d never quite seen before.

“If you lose, you have to leave or start over. If you start over, you get a little time to rest and that’s all, but that’s also all the other teams have to do. Oh! And to keep the teams together, you’re doing it while riding on a giant mecha tank, and so are all the other teams, and that’s actually what’s racing; you have to get your mecha there, not just your team. So you can fight the opposing teams or you can attack the opposing mechs or you can protect your own and try to get there first. Any of those should work. I think it’ll be fun!” 

Serenity shook his head. “Not today. You’re nowhere near adding a seventh layer. When you are ready, let me know and I’ll get you added to the list for the Adventurer’s Guild’s exploratory team. You’re going to need a team to test that, and I think you can start off with a low-threat group of opposing teams and start using it immediately. That doesn’t mean you need to make the race itself easy, just make the opponents less dangerous than you normally would. Aim for … hm. Monsters from the fifth level sounds about right, or you could even make mixed teams that use monsters from all of your levels, as long as you keep the overall offensive ability to no higher than what we discussed for an on-level swarm. You can adjust it up later if it’s not high enough, but I do expect a lot of teams will try to take out everything to win.”

Serenity suspected he was setting the initial difficulty a bit low, but it was better to be safe than find out he’d given advice that got people who did everything right killed. There was a process in place for dungeon levels that weren’t yet finished; only the exploratory teams or Serenity were supposed to enter and the exploratory teams would have high-quality protective talismans. Using them always meant a closer look from the local Guildmaster; most of the time, it also meant the dungeon needed to tone down its encounters.

If he could have, Serenity would have insisted that everyone who entered a dungeon had a talisman. Serenity even tried that once, in a couple of Adventurer’s Guild Halls. It didn’t work out the way he wanted. At first, they were being used on every delve, as if needing to use a talisman was the sign of being done, which even Serenity couldn’t afford. They tried setting it up so that they only cost if you used them, which meant that entirely too many groups pushed too deep because of the safety net and then didn’t use the talismans because they put it off “until they had to” and ran out of time. The best balance seemed to be having them available in the Adventurer’s Guild shops, just like they’d been before the experiment.

“You could add a Withdraw button that makes you drop out of the race,” Serenity suggested. “Then have the mecha either freeze or walk to the beginning of the race so they can exit. The other teams, the dungeon teams, could continue on to the end and get whatever reward you settle on. You might need to make the race unavailable after that until they leave and reenter, though; there’s probably a way to exploit it.”

“I can make the prize for the winning team bigger if they withdraw then challenge again, or even give all of my teams a prize for making them withdraw. Yeah, I like that. Hmm. Maybe the earlier they withdraw, the more I boost the monsters in the next race, unless they leave?” The dungeon didn’t stop long enough for Serenity to answer the question. “Yes, yes, I like that. Aren’t you going to collect your reward?”

Serenity stopped and turned towards the chest he hadn’t bothered to open on the way out. “I thought you might want to save that for your next challengers.”

Serenity already had the Etherium the dungeon awarded; that was one of the things he’d implemented in almost all dungeons a few years earlier. Etherium rewards were automatically granted, rather than having to be pulled out of a chest and manually divided. It led to a not entirely surprising, if fortunately small, decrease in the number of dungeon deaths almost immediately.

As for the rest of the reward, Serenity definitely didn’t need more trinkets. He already knew what the reward was going to be, too: a small figurine of the monster he’d just fought. It was magical; if it was broken, it would cast a spell on the person who broke it based on the monster. Since he’d defeated the sixth floor jester demon, it was probably something related to the jester’s transformation, like a boost to his strength. Things like that were both collectible and useful, which made them some of the best dungeon rewards. They were common enough that some people used them regularly, while others sold them to improve the take from the dungeon.

Serenity opened the chest anyway. The dungeon obviously wanted him to have the figurine. He could figure out what to do with it afterwards.

Only it wasn’t a figurine. It was a pair of small plushies of the jester demon. One was the jester before his transformation, while the other was the demon he became.

“The jester is a utility plush,” the dungeon explained. “Well, really, they both are, but the jester demon can sort of fight. The jester can wear your clothing or armor and clean it while it’s wearing it. A full cleaning takes ten hours, but it’s a fast way to take armor off or put it on. You have to supply the mana for it to work. The jester demon is exclusive to this level and is set up as an alarm; if you set it at a threshold, it will defend that threshold loudly if anyone you don’t say is allowed to enter tries to get in. I’m planning to add similar plushies as rare prizes on all of my levels, scaled by tier of course; they’re a bit harder to make than the normal figurines but no one’s doing any mining so I have the resources to spare.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Serenity told the dungeon. “There are some similar items out there, but I think they’ll be popular. You can-”

[Serenity? There is a request from the Kestii Empire to become a member of the United Realm,] the Voice interrupted. [I would normally wait until you checked in at a nexus, but the request came from another universe and the person making the request is Empress Sophia.]

“What?” Serenity took a moment to register what the Voice said. He could only think of one person in another universe who might make that request, and it was the best news he’d gotten in a long time. Amaia said his daughter still lived, but that was all she would tell him. A relieved smile spread across his face. “Empress Sophia? That’s great. Tell her yes; we’ll figure out what it means when we can actually talk.”

The dungeon seemed to take the fact that Serenity was interrupted in stride and returned to telling him all about the new prizes it wanted to add to the lower levels.