Swarming Sovereignty

Chapter 152: Defeating a Dungeon

As Lia had suspected, the dungeon wasn’t just a series of rooms in a line. The very next room had three different exits, and this time she actually had a pretty good idea of what the room had in store for her. After a bit of looking, she had settled on combining the corpses of the fish she had killed earlier and some ectoplasm some of the ghostly members of the swarm had kindly donated, and the result had been these odd ghostly fish-goblins.

They were a little slower than she would have liked, but they were stealthy, a trait that made them ideal for scouting like this. Peering through their eyes, she was able to easily see what the next room was like; it was a small square room that housed only two large statues. And, as expected, those two statues were both golems, likely set to animate when a person entered the room or got too close or something.

Regardless, this was the easiest room so far; all Lia had to do was stand slightly outside the room and coat them with modeling wax from a distance, and the problem was taken care of in no time. From there, she could really start making progress in the dungeon, sending out her scouts to cover a lot of ground very quickly.

Now that there was a fork in the path, she didn’t have the luxury of clearing each room as she came across it, at least not if she wanted to finish the dungeon in a timely manner, so she needed to be careful and make sure her monsters didn’t get spotted and killed while she mapped out the dungeon, not until she had replacement scouts ready to go.

Fortunately, it wasn’t like the scouts were completely defenseless; they had some combat capability, meager as it was, and Lia could cast some spells through them if things got dire. Furthermore, she had a total of twenty-three of them, so she was able to send them out in packs of seven or eight at first, the numbers in each dwindling slightly as the groups split when paths branched.

Given how she was trying to preserve these monsters, she took things relatively slow, stopping groups when they got to new rooms and only navigating one group through a room at a time. She was able to breeze through six rooms, one in each direction, before she encountered her first major obstacle; a seemingly empty room.

She couldn’t just send her monsters into the room, because there was almost certainly in there, but attempting to do any sort of Skill-based scan of the room would require an uncomfortable amount of Mana and Stamina. She debated her course of action for a moment, then decided to go ahead with the scan; she was relatively safe, and she was sort of wasting Mana anyway. After all, she wasn’t regening any resources if she was full on them, and if she wasn’t using them anyway, then being half-empty would be fine.

Her choice was immediately vindicated; the floor itself in the next room seemed to be an enemy, and analyzing it revealed that it was a mimic, much like the walls in the first room she had been through. Fortunately, this path had yet to branch, so she had a large group to deal with this, and could afford to lose one or two. Given how the wall-mimics acted, Lia guessed that it likely wouldn’t activate unless something stepped on it, and the ghost-fish-goblin-things she was using to scout floated, so she tentatively sent one hovering into the room.

As she had hoped, the mimic didn’t do anything. She had filled the scouts up with modeling wax before sending them out, and she debated having them attempt to cocoon the mimic, but eventually decided against it; they probably had enough, but it would probably leave them nearly empty, and she didn’t have a good way of collecting the cocoon anyway.

So, she decided against it, split the group to go down the different exits of the room, then turned her attention to the next group. This went on for a few rooms more, until she hit a room where her scouts were immediately attacked upon entering. The monsters there seemed to be some sort of wormlike thing, and were likely using senses other than sight and smell to detect enemies, so Lia was forced to either go over there herself, or attempt to deal with the monsters remotely through her scouts.

Fortunately, the worms didn’t pursue the scouts too far past the room, so Lia had time to think. She went back and forth on it for a while before eventually deciding to go herself. The three rooms on the way were relatively simple, and, more importantly, had more monsters she could make into scouts.

By having one of the scouts come back and float at the top of the room for use as another point of view, she was able to get line of sight on the entire room at once. When the scout was only half a room away, the tax on her Mana for remotely casting a spell was minor, so she was able to blitz through the rooms by multi-casting spells to dump modeling wax on the rooms’ inhabitants.

She was only able to multicast eleven spells at a time, so she did have to dodge a couple of attacks in one of the rooms, but other than that there was no issue whatsoever getting through the rooms. Clearing out the worms was likewise easy, and once she had finished, she began going through rooms again as she walked back to the first branching path.

She took a break momentarily once she got back up on the cliffs in that room to set her newest acquisitions converting, and then got right back to her

She had her defensive monsters take the brunt of its assault, but its size and the sheer difference in stats resulted in the thing’s attack sending them flying. Fortunately, though most had very, very low HP after the attack, they hadn’t been killed outright, but that was an indicator that Lia would need to do a lot of the heavy lifting herself.

She hadn’t really expected the dungeon monsters to be more than cannon fodder against the boss, but she hadn’t expected them to be ineffective. So, she took a deep breath, commanded all troops to start up their most powerful attacks, then activated the Stairway to Heaven.

Power swelled within her as she took her first steps up the radiant stairway, looking down on the grotesque boss with contempt. This was, in a sense, cheating; the boss was barely over level one hundred and fifty, and here she was, using a Skill normally reserved for people who had hit level three hundred. Still, as powerful as the effect was, it used a proportionately large amount of her Mana and Stamina, so she could only keep it up for a minute or two.

A minute or two was enough. She started by manipulating the benefits the Stairway gave, debuffing the boss whilst buffing all of her allies. Rose liked to use it to buff and debuff people at seemingly random moments, keeping them on their toes, but for monsters that was much less necessary, and the straight debuff would likely work nearly as well.

She took the next six steps, shaped them into spears and slammed them down into the creature’s legs and wing, pinning it to the ground and rendering it immobile as the buffed attacks of nearly fifty monsters slammed into it, gouging huge chunks out of its HP as Lia watched from her perch above.

She conjured a step more and shaped it into a sword of light, took a deep breath, then jumped off of her step. As she fell, she grabbed the sword and brought it down towards the creature’s head with the finality of an executioner, charging that one attack with as much energy as she could muster.

She impacted the floor moments later, the boss nowhere in sight. Matthew said.

“Yeah. The rest of the swarm here is being sent back to the World Tree, right?”

There was a quick wrenching sensation, and then Lia found herself back in front of the hot springs in the Dimension of Discounts. “Yes.” Matthew said, then motioned to the unconscious beast beside him. “Your spoils of war.”

Lia laid a hand on it and began to secrete modeling wax, giving Matthew a nervous smile. “So…how’d I do?”

“You pass.” Matthew said, giving her a confident smile in return. “I’m glad you’ve been paying attention to my lessons.”

“I definitely could have improved, though.” Lia said. “What are your suggestions?”

Matthew tapped his chin thoughtfully. “You should have activated your detection Skill earlier in the first room, for one. And I know you have some other cocooned monsters in your storage, why didn’t you use those?”

“Ah, sorry.” Lia said. “It felt like a waste, those are hard to get and I’ve been saving them for special situations. I figured I could get whatever I needed from the dungeon instead.”

“That’s fair.” Matthew replied. “Other than that, you were a bit too cautious in the boss fight; if you had opened with the Stairway to Heaven, you could probably have stopped there being any casualties. But, those all are minor things, and were I to give you a letter grade, I’d still give you an A. Good job.”

The boss’s cocoon finished forming, and Lia put it in her storage. “So…what now?”

Matthew pulled out a phone, turning on the screen for a moment before putting it back in his pocket. “Now I send you home. Next time, I’ll be taking you out to grind some levels. We’re going to get you on a fast track to evolution, and when you do evolve, my part of the training will be put on hold for a while. I have work to catch up on, so I’ll be handing the ‘main teacher’ role back to Willow for probably a year or two while I finish with that.”

“Does that have to do with the strength test you mentioned around when we started this training?” Lia asked.

“Sort of.” Matthew replied. “It is to do with strength test, but I have dozens of planes to test and I’m running a bit behind schedule on a few.”

“Oh, right, I forgot it wasn’t just…us.” Lia said, blushing slightly. She always forgot that the gods didn’t just govern plane, and every time she was reminded, she couldn’t help but be embarrassed. It just felt so…self-centered to think that everything revolved around her plane.

“Don’t worry about it too much.” Matthew chuckled. “Most people tend to forget that their planes aren’t the only ones. There’s just usually not a lot of reason to be thinking about other planes. Anyway, anything else you need from me tonight?”

Lia shook her head. “No, thank you, Matthew.”

“It’s been my pleasure!” Matthew replied, waving as he teleported away.

Once he was gone, Lia left the Dimension of Discounts herself, emerging out into her living room.

“Lia!” Amelia said brightly, standing up and walking over to give her a hug. “How’d it go?”

Lia ducked out of the way of the hug. “Not now, I’m all gross from the dungeon. I’m going to shower and we can hug.”

Amelia teleported behind Lia, catching her in a hug anyway. “No, I want hugs now.”

Lia sighed dramatically, turning around in Amelia’s embrace so she could hug her back and give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Fine, you win.” She said. “And it went great. After this, Matthew is going to take me level grinding so I can evolve soon. How are things on your end?”

Amelia pulled Lia into a kiss on the mouth, letting it last for a few moments before breaking away, a satisfied look on her face. “Mostly the same. Gallus’s army is still moving north, we’ve been harrying them a bit. Just an hour or two ago though, we got word that a member of the swarm was teleported deep into the Sapphire Empire. So, tomorrow morning we’re going to go destroy that research lab.”

Rose scooped Lia off of her feet, planting a kiss on her forehead. “I’m glad you’re back and that you passed.” She said, holding Lia close. “And, yes, we’re going to raid the facility tomorrow. As we discussed before, I also called up Astrea and Emily and had them begin to move forward with converting their kingdoms. They’re getting more paranoid about letting ‘minor’ monarchs like Emily and Astrea learn critical information like the location of the lab or the exact movements of the armies anyway, so we’re just going to press our advantage.”

“I still need to shower, you know. I’ve been in the dirt all day.” Lia said, wriggling about in an attempt to escape Rose’s iron grip.

A refreshing sensation swept over Lia, and she suddenly smelled something akin to perfume. “There.” Amelia said. “All clean. Now, I want to snuggle a bit, and then I need to go to bed. You can shower after, okay?”

Rose sat down on the couch, placing Lia down beside her. “I’d like that as well.” She said, resting her head on top of Lia’s.

“Fine, fine.” Lia said. “I suppose, if I to, I’ll spend some quality time with my beautiful lovers.”

“Me too.” Connie said bashfully, stepping into the room.

Amelia, who had sat down next to Lia, gave her a big smile and patted the seat next to her. “The more the merrier.”

Connie sat, and for a while the four of them just sat there, not saying a word but just enjoying the moment. But, all too soon, the moment ended. Rose and Amelia were going to bed so as to be well rested in the morning, and even if she had been cleaned via magic, Lia still wanted to take a proper shower. So, she took the shower and then crawled in bed alongside Amelia, Rose, and Connie. The excitement of the day finally caught up to her and then, all too soon, she was asleep.