No Really, I'm Not A Necromancer,Chapter 21: Stranger Danger,book card

  “I’m not one to belabor a point… but I did try to tell you this might happen.” Mr. Sinclair said with fake diffidence, though there was definitely a smugness to his wooden face. “Yes yes, you told me so, I got it” Xander replied with a mix of irritation and rising panic. “So what do we do about it? I mean we haven’t gotten to any of the information on how the dungeon operates yet, or what I’m supposed to do in case of… well, in case exactly this happens!”

  “Well the first thing to remember is not to panic. Even if these interlopers manage to kill you this time, you will resurrect. That’s not to say that you should let it happen, since there may be subsequent parties on their way and you can’t afford to be lax in your duties. Also, there are greater rewards for you in defeating the intruders.” When the treant said ‘defeat’ Xander could clearly hear that he meant ‘killed’, and the thought made him very uncomfortable.

  “Wouldn’t defeating them and killing them sort of defeat the whole purpose? I thought you said the point was to make everyone stronger?”

  “We can go into the mechanics and reasons for it later,” Mr. Sinclair said dismissively, “But the short answer is no, killing them isn’t a problem.”

  “It is for me.” Xander disagreed. “If I manage to knock them out and kick them out do I still get the rewards?”

  “Mmmm… technically yes, though that is both more difficult and more dangerous for you, so I wouldn’t suggest it. Don’t let the morality of your previous life hold you back.”

  Xander frowned unhappily but didn’t want to argue right now. he thought to himself as Mr. Sinclair continued talking.

  “The biggest concern you have right now isn’t your immediate survival, like I mentioned before. What you need to focus on is making sure that they don’t find this hidden core room. If they take or destroy the core cube, then you die for good and this dungeon will perish as well.”

  “Uhhh, sure…” Xander said slowly, “But I still really really don’t want to die again if I can help it. You know, because of all the pain and then the whole existential crisis aspect to it?”

  “Yes, well, you might not have much of a choice in the matter this time,” the little treant said looking through an information disk of his own, “These intruders aren’t exactly on the level of Heroes or anything, but they’re certainly much higher level than you are. Oh look, they’ve taken out five of your dungeon monsters already just in the time we’ve been talking.”

  “That sounds… less than good,” Xander gulped, “Do I really have to go out there and fight them?”

  “Yes, you do. It is not only your responsibility, but it is also safer than having them wander around and poke their noses into places they don’t belong. An empty throne room will be searched much more thoroughly than one where they kill the boss and a treasure room opens.”

  “Fine, alright…” Xander said reluctantly, “I’ll go and fight them I guess. But is there anything that I can use to help me or slow them down? And I need some minions at least.”

  “They should be slowed down at least somewhat by the dungeon itself, this place takes its form from both your subconscious and from your class abilities. There are a number of active dungeon monsters, but also a variety of traps. You seem particularly fond of pit traps for some reason. And then of course, there is the most dangerous trap in your arsenal, your toxic mushrooms.”

  “Oh yeah, I kinda forgot about that spell,” Xander said, “Is it really that strong?”

  “It is,” Mr. Sinclair chuckled with an edge of malice, “And your dungeon certainly didn’t forget about it. I have to say that your use of bone will make adventurers heavily misunderstand the nature of the danger you pose. They will bring bludgeoning weapons and life magic to defeat the ‘necromancer’ only to find that neither poses much danger to your minions. As a brief overview, your dungeon is designed as a slog to slowly wear down your foes and grind away at their ability to fight. It does this in two primary ways. The first is through a great number of weaker dungeon monsters that while individually inferior still take time, energy, and resources to defeat. The other is much more insidious.” The D.I.E. sounded positively gleeful.

  “The toxic spores?” Xander hazarded a guess. “Indeed! Each of your dungeon monsters has those mushrooms inside, hiding underneath the flowery vines. Blunt weapons are needed to crack bones efficiently, but they will also do a bang up job of crushing the mushrooms and releasing their spores. The spores also increase in danger as they accumulate more.”

  Xander was a little unsettled by the idea of poisoning people slowly, but then again, was it really any worse than stabbing somebody with a spear? He sighed a little and then shook himself free of any misgivings that he had. These intruders had come here to kill him, and Mr. Sinclair seemed to think they had a pretty good shot at it, toxic mushrooms or no. “Well… I guess I’d better be off then. I take it you are staying here?”

  “Indeed, on both accounts. I’ll manage the minions and traps as best I can in their current state. Can you use those ‘art’ projects you were working on for your own personal minions?”

  “Oh yes,” Xander said, a grin of his own forming, “I absolutely can.”

  —---------------------------------------

  Leaning against one of the walls, Tor closed his eyes for a moment and tried to catch his breath. They had destroyed dozens of the dungeon monsters outside without significant trouble, collecting a small sum of coins. They were sort of over-leveled for this dungeon, which reduced the rewards, and grade G3 coins were nowhere near as valuable as the G5 and G6 coins they usually harvested, but these were the silver of F rank coins instead of the usual copper, which was odd. Still, there was no good reason that he and Delsa should be wiped out like this after only an hour or two of fighting. Kord seemed mostly fine, though even his brother had slowed down somewhat.

  They were at least inside the building now where the monsters didn’t randomly pop up and assault them unexpectedly from every direction. Part of the problem was that they didn’t make as much noise as the skeletons he had fought in the past. They didn’t moan or clatter their jaws like other skeletons, and even their bones didn’t creak or grind. Luckily, they were also laughably weak; even a surprise stab bounced off of his group’s magically enhanced armor harmlessly.

  Delsa puffed heavily as well, half squatting in place with her hands on her knees. After recovering for a minute, she brushed at the powder caked on her trousers with some irritation, but the stuff just started caking on her hands. Tor’s eyes narrowed, and he finally did something he should have considered a while ago. He brought up his character disk and immediately spotted the problem.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “You have been poisoned by Fungal Spores. Your Strength, Agility, and Resilience have been lowered. You have partially resisted Fungal Spores.”

  That window was repeated dozens of times, and he stared at them dumbstruck for a minute before dismissing them to look at his stats. All three of the named stats were below half of where they should be, and he suddenly found that he was nowhere near as confident about this dungeon. It pissed him off. “Delsa!” he barked, and she half jumped, turning around to face him, a frown growing on her own face.

  “What?” she asked sullenly.

  “Quit brushing at that shit… it’s fucking toxic and dropping our stats… this whole dungeon is screwing with us. You got any of those cleanse candies left?”

  “Yeah of course I do, even though you never gave me the money to replace the ones we used back in the-” she started but Tor cut her off. “Great, just pass ‘em out, you want to live right? We can figure out about the money later.” She scowled, but it would have been stupid not to hand out the cleanses. Kord just pocketed his for now, seeming to be less affected, but both Delsa and Tor popped theirs into their mouths right away. In just a few minutes, the magic had cleansed over half the spores from their bodies.

  “Stay or go, brother?” Kord asked in his quiet way. It was a valid question. Their assumptions about the difficulty of the dungeon had been partially disproven, but with the insidious spores being cleared up, they would soon be back to nearly full power, and all the previous arguments for treasure and power held true.

  “We go on to wealth and glory.” Tor said with a grin that wasn’t quite as sincere as it had been a few hours ago. Five minutes later, they fell into the first pit trap.

  —--------------------------------

  Sitting on the throne made Xander even more uncomfortable than usual. The impending fight was bad enough, but that wasn’t the real problem. It wasn’t even because he knew he was sitting on a mid boss level skeleton either. No, it was his stupid clothes. He hadn’t done much sitting in this world, generally running back and forth and trying not to die, and thus had almost no experience with how to sit in a dress. Part of his down time had been used to experiment with modifying the various plant based clothes that Mr. Sinclair had provided him with, but the D.I.E. had been insistent to the point of belligerence that he should dress appropriately for his first battle as a Dungeon Lord.

  Thus, while Xander wore his bone armor chest plate, greaves, bracers, and a new bone helm, he was also wearing a flowing skirt that went past his knees. The leafy garment had flowers growing from it, most of which were red roses. Besides making him constantly worry if his underwear was showing, though thank god he actually had underwear now, the plant based garment was also talking to him.

   Xander thought back furiously,

   the skirt responded with far too much eagerness. Xander put his knuckles to his temples and focused on trying to drown out the connection. There was a lot that he didn’t understand about this world, and one of those topics was how talking to plants even worked. Okay, so it was magic shenanigans sure, but surely not every single plant could be intelligent enough to hold a conversation. The question had come to mind more than once, but he had never had time to consider it any further before. Then again, he was just sitting around waiting for people to barge in and try to kill him, so why not?

  “Hey Mr. Sinclair, you can hear me, right?” he asked the air around him, tempted to look up even though he knew the D.I.E. was actually below him. A small system disk opened to one side of his vision.

  Notice: You are now connected with Mr. Reginald Sinclair, sound only.

  “You have a question, Lord Xander?” The cultured sounding words of the being sounded like they came from the hovering system disk itself.

  “Yeah… I know you’re busy and it might be a stupid question, but… what’s the deal with the talking plants? It’s dryadic magic to be able to talk to them, I get that, but why do they have such strange personalities? Or personalities at all really. They’re not actually sentient, right?”



  “Is this really the time?” came the mildly exasperated voice of his ‘helper’. But before he could compose an answer to either entity, Mr. Sinclair snorted slightly and continued. “No, they aren’t sentient. In fact, the vast majority of the plants you will ‘talk’ to do not possess souls as you would think of them. They have life force, but no thoughts of their own.”

  “Hmmm… okay, so if that’s the case, then why is this skirt giving me BDSM vibes? It’s not the only plant that has been a little unhinged either.”

   Xander studiously ignored the plant’s voice, then thought better of it and with more than a modest effort of will finally closed the connection entirely so he could focus on what Mr. Sinclair was saying.

  “Class features are designed to increase your power in some way. Your Voice of the Woods feature is designed as an information gathering tool that gives you access to data that others might not have, such as using it to track someone. The System needs a way to convey that information in a way you can understand, so it randomly assigns a personality matrix to make the interface more user friendly.”

  Xander snorted “This one is a little too friendly.” he muttered under his breath.

  “Was that all?” Mr. Sinclair asked with some impatience, “I’m still working on slowing down and weakening the fools who are coming for you after all.”

  “Sorry,” Xander replied with a grimace at the reminder, “It’s just that I’m really nervous and nothing about this situation is particularly appealing or comfortable.”

  There was a pause, and then Mr. Sinclair’s voice came back with less snark. “I understand Lord Xander, but as I have said before, even if they beat you, this will not be your end. Just do your best to be intimidating, and survive if you can. Now, I have much to do, so I will leave you to prepare yourself for the fight.” The System disk disappeared without waiting for a reply, leaving him alone on the throne.

  Alone except for a small army of minions that was. He had over a dozen of the generic humanoid shaped plant minions, all curled up cozily inside skeletons. Xander had been mildly concerned where the skeletons had come from, but apparently they had been grown from the remains of Stabitha and Swordthony. His own Sculpt Bone couldn’t have done that yet, but it was no problem for the dungeon itself. Speaking of his two lost minions, he had basically recreated them as guards that now flanked his throne, and those two were larger, more powerful, and more menacing than the rest. He had decided to rename them Wendy and Carl Jr., which he had been informed would show up on any kill notification.

  Along with the minions, there were several pit traps built into the floor in various places, and a carpet of vines that he could take control of. One of the pits in particular held a nasty surprise, and Xander couldn’t help but be proud of his creation. It was what he had created during his day off, an expression of his art based on the dangers this world had shown him combined with his own grim ideas. Finally, he gripped what looked like a long necromancer’s staff topped with a skull. A skull which was paper thin and would crack away easily to bare the spear tip within. It should be a nasty surprise since they wouldn’t be expecting him to have any melee capability. Now all he had to do was wait.

Chapter 21: Stranger Danger

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