Worthy Core

Matters settled and the slime boss back on her feet, the warrior heads on to the next room, stopping to check out the two treasure chests inside. The first contains a handful of coins, a healing potion, and an enchanted iron necklace, all of which vanish into the warrior's 'Item Box'. She opens the second, and cautiously pulls out a bottle of pink fluid. "Is this...a potion?"

Lollyp smirks and gives an awkward chuckle. "That's the uh, challenge mode bonus. Slime lube, haha! Goes for a high price on the market if you don't want it."

The item vanishes as well, with the warrior muttering a barely-audible "Nice." as she takes it. Standing up, she turns towards the hallway out. "Third floor, huh? Heard no one's been here yet."

"No spoilers! Gotta see for yourself."

Nodding, the woman proceeds on to the floor's first chamber which Xenia had taken to calling the 'Step Room', as each row of giant tiles gave the appearance of being a gigantic set of steps. The warrior looks first at the proper stairwell down at the end of her current row, then at the drop to the next row immediately to her right.

"This isn't that big a jump? Why would someone keep going back and forth down all these rows when it's like ten times faster just to hop down?" The slime simply smiles and shrugs, to which the warrior shrugs back and jumps down to the next row. Upon landing, the tile below immediately shatters, causing her to fall an additional five feet onto a row of steel spikes. Once again though, brute force wins the day as the spikes simply bend where they impact her armor. "...Oh, that's why. Well, whatever, I'm not that patient." Climbing out, she immediately hops down to the row after that, at which point a blobby slime suddenly slams into her back, knocking her down yet another 'step' and into yet another spike trap. The rabbit-eared slime hops down after her, but is cleanly bisected with a slice of her sword before it lands. A groan drifts up to Lollyp, still several rows above. "...Okay, I see how this is going."

From there, the woman continues to shortcut her way through the room, but with just enough caution to avoid falling into more traps, or get slammed by more Blobbities. Ten minutes later she finally reaches the end, with Lollyp quickly catching up thanks to her trap-immune status. The slime is also a foot taller by then, thanks to her Boss-level regeneration. "So, what'd you think?"

The warrior looks back up at where she started. "Hated it. Which I guess means you did good? The slimes with the rabbit ears are real cute though...do you guys offer pets as loot?"

Lollyp has to stop and think on that one. "...Ummm...no, I don't think we can do that right now. There are monster-taming and summoning spells, but we don't have those yet. Feel free to send one our way if you find a scroll or a Summoner you don't like very much, though!"

"Heh, will keep that in mind." The warrior makes her way into the next chamber, pausing at the first green-colored, slightly-oozing spiderweb blocking the path of the narrow hallway. She pokes it with her sword, watching as it grips onto the surface of the blade. "...Not acidic or anything, not picking up any debuff effects from it. Is this just supposed to make a mess?"

Lollyp's eyes go wide. "Oooh, shit, I should write those down!"

"...Right, shutting up now." The delver makes her way down the hall, avoiding the webs where she can, but with only limited success. In several cases they block nearly the entire passageway, giving her little option but to push right through them. Eventually she reaches the first Slime Spider ambush, and steps back as the creatures scurry over her armor. "Gah! More spiders, y'just trying to, heheh, bug me to death?" She easily smashes the creatures flat with her fist and boots, but each one she kills only makes a further mess, splattering her with brightly-colored goo. With some of it now on the bottom of her feet, it makes her steps noticeably slower, or at least for a bit. Once the warrior adjusts and starts putting more strength into her movements, she's able to resume her normal pace.

"I guess this sort of counts as a 'slow' debuff, huh? Gods, I hope there's somewhere to clean this off later."

Her slime 'tour guide' considers her response. "I probably shouldn't spoil it, but we do have a healing fountain at the end of the floor. Guess we haven't really tested its effects on slime-cleaning much, but it's something."

"A healing fountain, huh? That you put in all on your own? Yeah, that's a twist. The monster lairs I'm used to would just put all their effort towards, y'know, more monsters." As she reaches the end of the chamber, the warrior is interrupted as a quartet of orc skeletons attack her in the final room. The copious amounts of slime do little to hinder her strength, and the main effect caused by all that goo is simply to make orc bones stick to her blade as she annihilates the creatures one by one. "...Not that you're going light on the monsters, either."

"First dungeon, huh? Though I'm definitely confused where you got all that fancy gear and upgrades if you've never been to one before. Like, even if you bought them from crafters, you definitely learned how to fight from somewhere."

The warrior shrugs. "Just a bit different where I'm from, I gue - whoa!" As she walks down the next set of passageways, the woman is taken by surprise as a transparent, yet gooey red tentacle snaps out of the stone wall and wraps itself around her sword arm. "Gah! Gah! Get it - get it off!" She waves her arm fiercely, easily ripping the the ghostly limb to shreds, but has to take a moment to catch her breath as the portion holding on to her arm slowly dissolves. "...That...that was a mental effect, right? That was...fuck."

Seeing the more-or-less desired response, Lollyp chuckles. "Was it? Or maybe the big, badass knight lady is just afraid of a little tentacle?"

The knight lady chuckles in response, however. "Nah. That's how I can tell, actually. Normally every time I see a tentacle monster I have a hard time not giggling about it instead."

"...Guess there's no accounting for pervs, huh."

The woman straightens her back. "No! They're just...funny, okay? Ugh, movin' on." She continues to make her way down the labyrinth, but it becomes more and more clear that the warrior's build is certainly aimed towards brute strength and not agility. She fails to dodge even a single tentacle ambush, and has to pause for a number of seconds after each one to collect herself. She is at least clearheaded enough to not continue rushing down the hall, setting off traps, but neither is she resistant enough to mental attacks to simply shrug off the effects of the ghostly monsters. Eventually she reaches the crossroads at the center of the chamber, standing opposite of a wooden door which is emitting faint sounds of moaning.

"...Oh gods, I'm going to regret this, aren't I?" The woman opens the door gingerly, sword at the ready, and is faced with the sight of a true dungeon. Pinned to the wall directly opposite her in an 'X' position is a nearly-nude succubus, squirming at her bindings. To the left sits another, strapped in a straddling position to the top of a triangular-shaped bench, which she for some reason moves around on as if it were a bucking mount. Finally, to the right an incubus half-stands inside a pillory, his bare ass and dangling demonhood turned to face anyone walking through the door. Just as gingerly, the woman closes the door. "Nope. Nope. Unh-huh."

Lollyp pouts. "What!? You can't just not check it out! There's probably some cool loot in there! Not to mention the booty..."

"I am immediately performing a self-amnesia on the last thirty seconds. What were we doing? Oh, let's go this way!" With a forced cheerfulness the warrior picks another direction and steadily marches on, this time barely even reacting at all to the next few fear-inspiring tentacles that latch on to her.

Eventually she makes it to the last standard room of the floor. A simple square chamber in shape, but with the floor divided up into many more squares where each grid section is separated from the others by bright blue barrier spells turning on and off. As she watches, hopping slimes around the room leap from pressure plate to pressure plate, sometimes causing barriers to activate or deactivate, sometimes triggering flamethrower and lightning traps to go off, filling a blocked-off section with magical death. "What in unholy heavens is this supposed to be?"

Lollyp waves her arms. "Puzzle room! Can you figure out the patterns to...uh...what's that?" As she watches, the warrior apparently pulls out a new bracer from her Item Box and straps it to her left arm. Placing a hand on the nearest barrier, the woman utters a single word.

"Dispell." The bracer glows blue, and the barrier cracks into nothing, opening the way to the next square. "Good, that works. Hope you don't mind me shortcutting, this one looks really annoying."

"What!? No! You have any idea how long it took to train the Hippity Blobbities to get the timings right!?"

"The Hippity...? Uh, sure, sorry. It does look really fun, if you're into that kind of thing? Not really for me, though." With that she continues her pattern, busting down barrier after barrier with a single word, avoiding those grid squares with active-firing traps. In all it takes her only about two minutes to cross the room, all without needing to slay a single slime. "Glad I had that thing fully charged. Ah, and hey, the fountain! Isn't there supposed to be another floor boss or something first?"

A much-grumpier Lollyp sighs. "Still in progress...we are really close, though! Um, not that I think we've got much that could really slow you down, considering. Honestly you might be one of the highest-leveled people I've ever seen. You realize no one's ever soloed this dungeon before, right? Even before we had a third floor!"

"Eh, I do alright. Won't deny I really geared myself to the max for this trip, though." The woman takes her time at the modestly-sized fountain, wiping the slime from her armor. At this tier the healing it provides is minimal, but the warrior wouldn't be likely to notice that, given that she's received absolutely no injuries throughout the entire dungeon. "Alright! Core time! This is what it's all about!"

Her tour guide suddenly grows nervous. "Uh, wait! I thought you said you weren't gonna mess with the core!"

"Easy, slime-stuff, I just wanna take a look." Opening the final doors into the core chamber, the warrior takes her time to examine the surroundings. The furniture layout is much the same as it was since before the chamber was moved down to this floor, and the room was even re-aligned to still fit the old windows into the walls of the mountain's internal abyss, although iron bars do now fill them just in case a certain demon were to consider using them to hop into the dungeon master's bedroom. The warrior however is more taken by the obvious clamshell statue, and makes her way over to it. "Let's see, there was supposed to be a trick to this, right?" She scans the rest of the room, and soon spots the nearly-invisible pressure plate hidden on one wall. Utilizing the same telekinetic force spell she used against the bats and spiders in the elevator shaft, the warrior presses down on it from a distance, holding the spell long enough for the clamshell to open.

"Well, well, well. So there you are, Xenia. Rather beautiful, I suppose, though I always admired craftsmanship more practical than gemstones and whatnot myself."

Lollyp's head tilts. "You know her name? ...Well, I guess she did spill it once or twice. Still, why did you want to see her core so much?"

Rather than answering, the warrior begins to work on removing her helmet. It's not a simple task, as at least three different enchantments on her armor noticeably extinguish before she gets to the point of actually removing it from her head. Underneath is revealed a woman rather past the prime of an adventuring life, well into her forties at least, and heavily scarred. A mass of burn scars cover the right side of her face, while a trio of claw marks trace their way down her left cheek. Her short dirty-blonde hair, clearly trimmed to fit the requirements of the heavy helmet, allows Lollyp to spy even more minor scars and wounds tracing along her neck. Still, despite all those marks of an extremely hard life, a genuinely bright smile graces her face as she gazes down on the core with her clear green eyes. "What can I say? Wouldn't be right to pass through the neighborhood and not check in on an old friend, would it?"

"Old...friend...?" Lollyp trails off as her eyes dart elsewhere in the room, as if she were listening to someone only she could see. "Eh? What do you mean? Wait, what? That's..."

The slime turns back to the woman now glancing in her direction, her eyes growing wide. "...BEATRICE?"