The Mad Rat’s Lab

Still with a sullen face, Ricard is now walking a few steps behind. There have been a few more wall changes since the first one happened, so I’m a little worried about him. 

Though I’m not exactly worried about him. What I’m worried about is him ending up on the other side of a wall that could appear between us at any moment.

Also… you’re the tank! Walk in front! How are you going to protect us from behind?

So I must play the martyr here and ask a question that should never be asked… I haven’t opened my mouth and I’m already regretting my decision…

*Sigh* “Hey there, Baldy. How are you doing?”

As I look in his direction, I can see him with lowered shoulders. His walking is unsteady, and he’s looking at the ground. Maybe he hasn’t heard me? Or is he just ignoring me? He doesn’t react in any way.

“Hey! You still there?”

Still, no answer.

“Hey, Ricard! Are you ok?”

“...Yes, I am.”

After a short delay, he finally answers. It’s incredible that he is like this only because of a name. And I’m sure that he’s going to completely change his attitude after I ask him the question. *Sigh!* I’m sooooo going to regret it…

“So… you know. You still haven’t told us about your champion... Can you tell us about your champion’s build?”

As if it were a magical spell, when Ricard hears the words ‘champion’s build’, he immediately stops and raises his head. His eyes already gleaming. Oh my god! Please, somebody, save me!

A little side note here, Laura also twitches at the magical words ‘champion’s build’, but because of a whole different reason. And that reason is… Because she knows what’s coming upon us… Though she doesn't try to stop me (or Ricard), so I’m sure she takes Ricard’s feelings into consideration.

An instant later, I can feel Ricard’s champion putting his hand on top of my shoulders.

Wait a moment… How the hell did you get here so fast!? Did you teleport!? I didn’t see you moving at all, and the only one who’s supposed to have a teleportation skill is Laura!

I shudder. Ricard can be really scary when it comes to this kind of situation. And without further ado, he starts to talk about his champion.

“It’s nice that you asked, my friend!” Is it just me or his tone is incredibly annoying right now? And he’s right next to my face! I suddenly feel this urge to punch his face… “As you already know, my champion is the tank of this team. And as such, I have several survival options! Hahaha! Also, I’m the one with the highest leveled champion here!”

“First of all, my champion is a Death Knight. With his innate skill, Essense Siphon, I heal every time I deal damage. Now for the other skills! The first one is Weakening Aura, which reduces the damage close enemies deal. Don’t worry because it only works on enemies. Hahaha!”

“To save you in case of need, or simply to prevent enemies from attacking you, I have the most classical tank skill: Taunt!”

“Then it’s the Whirlwind skill to deal lots of area damage in close range, and the Dark Grab skill to deal single target damage and also force an enemy to move right next to me. And for both defense and damage, I have the Frost Shield skill. It works the same as your Lightning shield but can immobilize enemies and it deals ice damage. The only difference is that I’ve leveled it to level two so mine’s better!”

“And finally, I also have the Soul Feast skill, to help with self-sustaining. In this dungeon there are almost no units that count as being ‘alive’, so it isn’t going to do a lot, but I still keep it because I want everybody to get used to our current builds. Changing skills now and then would defeat the whole purpose. And also to prepare for the tournament, because we won’t be able to change skills after registering, so…”

After explaining his build, he then starts to talk about every skill in detail. And I mean IN DETAIL. Examples of how to use them in every possible situation, when they can be combined, where they shouldn’t be used… And after finishing with HIS skills, he starts to talk about OUR skills and how to properly use them!

Yeah. I already knew I would regret asking this… Somebody, kill me, please! My champion, I mean.

Oh, during our dungeon exploration, as Ricard keeps talking alone, we encounter lots of the same kinds of enemies. They’re called Prototype 1. And by this I mean the name the dungeon owner has given them, like when I called them ‘Braindead Mob’.

They are weak, slow, and short, just a little over a meter. They kind of remind me of the Stitched, because they too are slow and weak. But the appearance of both units is very different. 

The enemies look like a lot of junk metal parts put together. Yeah, as if you went to the garbage dump, picked a few random objects, and then glued them together in a vaguely humanoid shape. They aren’t disgusting, because all of the parts are metallic, but they do look dirty.

They aren’t very strong, if I had to say, they would be as strong as a 100 cp unit. But like most weak enemies, a group of them can be dangerous. What they do have is lots of HP. Enough to survive the damage from a Chain Lightning cast.

 

Finally, after an undetermined amount of time, we find something different from the rest of the dungeon. Until now, the annoying moving walls kept interrupting our path, and we had to retrace our steps several times... I’m sure we passed through that one spot where the first wall appeared and almost isolated Ricard more than ten times. How annoying!

“This is a very long corridor...”

As Laura just pointed out, this is a very long corridor. About 100 meters? Maybe more? Until now, we’ve been wandering around, randomly turning when we encountered a split. But it’s the first time we see a corridor like this one.

“What do you say? Should we try it? Until now we haven’t made much progress… This might take us out of this labyrinth with moving walls. Or at least lead us to another part of it.”

Decent reasoning, if I do say myself. Though it’s from Ricard, the game expert, so it should be expected. But didn’t he already know what we would encounter? I decide to ask him to be sure.

“Hmm… It’s fine by me. But tell me, Baldy. Didn’t you look at the dungeon before coming?”

“Take a look? Oh, you mean read about how the dungeon works? No, I didn’t. The best way to improve is to face challenges, so I thought it was better that none of us knew about the dungeon’s gimmicks beforehand. But I did make sure that the dungeon was rated very highly!”

“Noooooo! My dreams! My dreams of having an easy dungeon dive have gone down the drain!” I shout after putting my hands on my head.

“Don’t worry, brother! I’ll protect you from any danger!”

“Ahaha…” I’m glad that you want to help me, Clara, but you aren’t the tank, you know? And I have higher stats than you, so it should be the other way around…

“Don’t worry, Andreu… I mean, Mad Rat. She can’t protect you, but if you are in need, I’ll make sure to heal you so you don’t die!”

“You can’t, Lily! I’m the one who will protect my brother!”

“But you aren’t the tank! Let me heal and protect him in your stead!”

“Nooooo! I’ll be the one protecting him…”

“Guys, can you stop for a moment, please? I’ll protect myself, ok!? Also, the one that should be protecting not only me but everyone is Ricard, so leave him the tanking role and stop fighting!”

I feel weird. How come it’s me, the one who usually causes the trouble, the one that must stop the trouble now!? That shouldn’t be possible!

“Hey! Can you stop fooling around!?” Annoyed for being ignored and because nobody offered to protect or even heal him, Ricard returns the topic to the original one. “So, do we take this corridor or not?”

“As I said, it’s fine by me.” I say.

“Yeah, I don’t care, so let’s go!”

The one that says this can only be my sister. I mean, why are you so carefree? This could be a trap, you know?

“I don’t know… It clearly looks like a trap. But also we haven’t found any other path… I think we should risk crossing this corridor even if there’s a trap. Otherwise, we might be stuck in this labyrinth forever!”

The only one taking this decision seriously other than Ricard is Laura. It looks like her experience as GM in TRPGs is showing here.

“Then, let’s go!” Says Ricard as he takes the lead.

He’s the tank of this party, so if somebody has to get hurt, it should be him. Fufufu! Get hit by all the traps for me so that I don’t have to take a single point of damage! Hahaha!

 

It happens when we are around the middle of this long corridor. From Ricard’s position, we can hear a *Click!* sound. He then turns around with an ‘I’m sorry’ face.

“Hahaha! It seems the passage was trapped, after all…” He says.

“I knew it…”

Angry because of his mistake, Clara bashes him on the head with one of her hand… eeeeh tentacles? Well, she bashes him with whatever you call that thing. “Baldy! What have you done!? If we die it’s going to be your fault!”

“Don’t blame me! Look, the whole floor is the trigger! It doesn’t matter where we stepped, we would have triggered the trap!”

Oh, wow! It’s true. It’s almost as nasty as some of my dungeon’s ideas! But mine are indisputably nastier! And I won’t tolerate anybody who says otherwise!

At the same time as we blame Ricard, there’s a change on the walls on both sides. Small holes have appeared there, and without further delay, something passes near our position.

*Swish!* Is that an arrow? No, it’s too small. It kind of looks like a dart. *Swish!* Another one strikes Laura this time.

“Huh, the darts have poison, guys. Though the damage is very low so it can be ignored if it’s only one. But if too many hit one of us…” It seems like she looked at her status window to see what the dart’s effects were.

The darts are being shot randomly from the holes. I’m not sure yet, but it feels like the shooting cadence is increasing over time.

“Let’s run towards the end of this corridor so that we take as few hits as possible!”

We follow Ricard’s lead and start running.

“Hahahaha! Poisoned darts coming from the walls. Who could have guessed it!?” I say in a sarcastic tone. “As if it wasn’t the most cliche trap ever! Hahaha!”

As if in response to my taunting, the passage’s floor starts to change too. Soon, the floor is full of small holes, suspiciously similar to the holes in the walls.

“Don’t tell me…” As I try to complain, *Swish!* a dart strikes me from below. “Aaaaah! Why did I have to jinx it!? Fuuuuck! Now’s my fault! Why couldn't I shut up instead of saying unnecessary things!?”

Luckily, the holes are small enough that they don’t disturb our running speed. So even if we are now assaulted from both sides and below, our speed doesn’t decrease. The only thing that changed is that now we are taking more hits.

“Hahaha! Don’t worry, brother! At least they aren’t coming from the ceiling too! Ahaha!”

NOOOOOOO! Why did you have to say that!? Do you want to jinx it too!? Hmmm… Wait a moment… I can’t see any darts coming from the ceiling… So maybe it’s ok?

When I’m relieved that Clara didn’t jinx it yet again, something strikes my head. I raise my hand to touch it and find something long and pointed.

Is this… a dart? I could swear there were no darts in my head before… Not usually, at least.

“Aaaaah! They are coming from the ceiling too! Why did you have to say it, Lemon!?”

“Ehehe…” She only laughs as she sticks her tongue out.

A tongue? Did your champion have a tongue? With your horrendous appearance, I would have never guessed. So many tentacles… TOO MANY! Maybe that thing is a pink tentacle shaped like a tongue…? Then she should be able to stretch it as far as she wants… Imagine all the possibilities this gives you!

Focus, focus, Andreu! Now isn’t the time to think about stupid things! You can think about stupid things later, but you must survive this situation first!

Side by side with Ricard as we run, he laughs as I complain to my sister.

“Hahaha! You know, Mad Rat… It could be worse. At least… Hmmmf, nnnnmmgh!”

Luckily, this time I’m close enough to forcefully close his mouth shut before he can finish the sentence. 

“What are you doing!? Do you really want to see us all killed!? You already jinxed it once. Do you need to do it again?”

Ricard is still trying to talk even as I’m forcefully closing his mouth. He has an evil expression on his face, I’m sure he’s trying to take revenge for the nickname and our previous indifference. “Hmmm, nmm mmmmfff!”

“Hahaha! Brother, you look anxious. Want me to jinx it again? Hahaha!”

“Nooooooo! Don’t do it!”

“Run, you fools!” From some distance ahead, Laura admonishes us. She has the Blink skill, so every few seconds she can teleport some distance away. She’s the one who’s leading right now. And by a wide margin. “If you have spare energy to say stupid things, focus on running instead!”

“Aye, aye, sir! …I mean, Madam!” I say before I shut up.

A short while later, Laura adds something else. “Also… what about my turn? When do I get the chance to jinx it?”

“NEVER! Don’t even joke about it!” I shout.

 

“Haaaa… Haaah… This was a little bit too much…” I say as I look around.

What a disaster. About half of our support units have been killed by the poison darts. And the damage we ourselves took isn’t negligible either.

The one who had it the worst was me because the stitched are so damn slow! From the six Followers and one Kidnapper, only two survived. Of course, one of them is the Kidnapper because it has the God’s Intervention skill. But the true godly intervention was for the other stitched… almost not a single poisoned dart hit him.

When we reached the end of the corridor, the fucking slowpoke still had a long way to go. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that close to none of the darts hit the stitched. It looked as if it was twisting space around itself to avoid getting hit.

I believe Clara is in a similar situation to me, but I don’t even want to look at her mobs if possible, so I’m not that sure. And Laura had a few losses, but I think her Imps still have some kind of poison resistance skill from the time she dived into my dungeon because it's weird so many of them are still alive.

“Yeah… It’s thanks to your poisonous mushrooms that they survived. I forgot to swap the skill for another one before coming here. But it turned out to be something good! Hahaha!”

When she notices I’m looking at her minions as I think about something, she confirms what I already suspected.

And the one who suffered the least, as expected, is Ricard. I mean, his skeletons are resistant to poison damage and his specters resist any non-elemental damage. So… he only lost one skeleton. And the two specters following him… it’s almost as if nothing happened to them at all. By the way, the specters are different from the ones he used last time and have another set of skills.

“Haaaah! This could have gone better! But we still have a lot of support minions alive, and our HP wasn’t reduced that much, so we can still continue!”

Yeah... Ricard’s always positive when it comes to games. Here I am, thinking about throwing the towel when he thinks this is only a ‘little setback’.

We decide to settle down for a while and recover from the trap for one or two minutes.

 

I’m sitting on the ground, meditating about very important things. Things like how my little sister sees when her champion has no eyes… when a noise catches my attention.

*Bip!*

Bip?

*Bip, bip, bip, bip…*

“What the hell’s that noise!? Who left the alarm clock activated?” I shout as I look towards where the sound is coming from.

It’s coming from a tiny construct near my foot. The construct is round and has four tiny legs. Its height might be about 20 cm? And it’s currently shaking uncontrollably as it makes those annoying sounds. 

 “Oh, no! Shit…!” But it’s already too late.

*Booooom!* an explosion hits me and throws me toward the labyrinth’s wall.

“Ugh…”

I’m not sure why, but I have this deja vu feeling right now… Did something like this happen to me before?

 

“A good trap is going to be a lot more memorable than yet another monster fight. Just think about what would fit your dungeon theme, and try to surprise the invading players with ingeniously placed traps. Though you must keep in mind to not put too many traps in your dungeon, especially the very dangerous ones, or the players are going to complain a lot about the dungeon being unfair.”

- Fifth point from ‘10 things to do to improve your dungeon’.