Chapter 40

  The party woke up as a group outside of Eli’s house. In the backyard, near where the portal had arrived when they’d agreed to enter the dungeon in the first place. They had all received a notice that they were getting another mandatory rest period, and that this one would return them to the surface.

  Some of them were hoping this meant that they would have an opportunity to dissolve the party and pretend that this nightmare had never happened.

  Others were annoyed with the delay, having grown addicted to the crawl.

  Everyone was looking forward to their shower. Eli volunteered to wait his turn as he examined the rewards from the last floor, even though the argument was made that since it was his bathroom he should go first. Instead he sat in the yard, looking at the Greater Haven Token and Greater Guild Creation Token.

  He didn’t have the Preferred Contribution Store Customer Tokens, those had automatically vanished, but when he pulled up his menu he noticed that he had gained a title called “Preferred Customer.”

  He spent a few minutes examining his status. His health still hadn’t returned to one hundred percent after his wound suffered on floor eight, but that was true of everyone who had been injured in the ambush.

  Eli closed his eyes, trying to focus on his gains, but instead he found Asty’s face looking back at him. He opened them, then shook his head.

  “He wasn’t real,” Eli said. “He was just summoned by the dungeon. His eyes were white, I’m pretty sure that means that he was just …”

  Eli sighed, because he had no idea what that meant. He went inside to get his laptop, then returned to the patio where he sat at the table and searched the internet.

  He checked the main stream news first and found that it was a dumpster fire. Depending on who was talking, the government was either a few days away from returning things to normal or completely incompetent. Everyone was blaming the president or their world leader of choice for the crisis. The solutions being presented were universally to escape to a shelter, either one formed by the government or a “Haven” formed by the dungeon returnees.

  His team was late in returning to the surface compared to many of those who had done so thus far, but there was a clear pattern. Delvers who had gone in on easy mode had returned in a day or two and were locked out for a week. They’d be going back soon, and the details on that were unclear. Normal mode returnees were beginning to trickle in as well.

  From what Eli could understand, one of the rewards that all Delvers got for clearing floor ten was a Haven Creation Token, which apparently did a few things. It created a mana dense zone, allowing the returnees and high level defenders of the surface to regenerate after using their abilities and use their abilities more effectively on the surface. It also supposedly stopped monsters from spawning within a certain radius.

  Normal Mode challengers reported that they also got a Guild Creation Token, although the drop rate wasn’t one hundred percent and many had returned without one. In fact, the rate seemed to be around five percent.

  Eli hadn’t seen mention of the word “Greater” attached to either of these items, and he thought there was a reason for that.

  Sighing, he got depressed reading the main stream news and checked TitanSystem.app, where he got a very different picture of the situation. The early adopters of the system were designated with a title. There was a verification process now, one which was supposedly automated and anonymous which would verify your holographic interface data. The reward for verification was an Asterisk next to their posts and access to a variety of boards that weren’t available to the public.

  Eli verified his data without giving it too much thought. He was tired in more ways than one and his instinct was to go all in. If the Webmaster was going to screw him over then he was already screwed, but meanwhile millions of people had already verified so what the hell.

  He was about to start browsing the forums when he noticed a sudden message. It was from the guy from SoCal, the one who had reached out after Eli had first posted about his enchanting abilities online. Eli quickly checked it.

  “Hey man, glad to see you’re still alive. How was the dungeon?” the anonymous internet person said.

  “Hell,” Eli sent back. “I was an idiot and went in on hard mode. We almost wiped on floor eight and I’m lucky that we didn’t lose anyone. How did you do?”

  “…”

  The internet stranger, who was using the screen name “Fantastic Flamingo,” actually sent just a “…” in response to his first message. Then he followed it up with a much longer one a few minutes later.

  “Bro I think you might be one of the first teams to emerge from hard mode. I’m not certain whether you should hoard the details or let everyone know right away, because there’s a lot of speculation about what you get and what it’s like. A few teams have been reporting that the system locks them into the delve after floor five and after that they can only withdraw if they receive fifty percent casualties or more. I heard that it’s brutal, with kill counts ten times or more higher than what normal mode requires, and elites all over the place, and that the rewards aren’t worth it at all, since the returnees are all about the same level as normal mode delvers. Seriously bro you are a crazy bastard to risk it all like that.”

  Eli blinked as he read the wall of text. He spent a moment formulating a reply.

  “I’m not going to hide it,” he said at last. “But I’ve got to figure out a way to tell my party that we were in there on hard first. I sort of made the decision unilaterally.”

  “You crazy bastard!” came the immediate reply. “Seriously WTF that’s not cool.”

  “My familiar said that it would be important,” Eli responded. “That we’d be a step ahead of everyone else who started on normal mode.”

  “Your familiar is a crazy bastard. Let him tell your party, since he’s the one who convinced you.”

  “No, it’s my responsibility,” Eli said, sighing as Flamingo typed a response.

  “At least tell me it was worth it. If the only difference between normal and hard is like a slight experience buff but much higher kill counts I don’t think that I can live with that. My friends and I were talking about challenging hard mode but decided it wasn’t worth risking our lives.”

  Eli sighed and began to type.

  “To be honest I just got back and haven’t had a chance to investigate what the normal mode rewards are well enough to tell. When we solved a puzzle the rewards were something like four times greater than when we just powered through a level, and right now I’m level twenty-five, but I don’t know if that’s normal,” he sent.

  “Aside from that we got some random loot and Contribution Points, but I think that the biggest reward is the Greater Haven Creation Token and the Greater Guild Creation Token. Everyone is talking about them on the MSM to the point where some of the reporters are encouraging the government to incentivize people to delve just to get those tokens.” He clicked the send button again.

  “And aside from almost dying on floor eight, we weren’t even that—”

  He was interrupted in his typing by a message.

  “I’m sorry, did you say you’re level twenty-five?” the message sent.

  Eli paused, deleted what he was typing, and sent a confirmation. “Yeah, why?”

  “I just checked your profile and it’s pending verification, but if that’s true, then you’re in like, the top 1% bro,” Flamingo sent. “Among the civies at least. Who knows what the crazy government bastards are doing in the dungeons. And I’m sorry but did you say greater Haven and Guild Tokens?”

  “Yeah. Greater. It’s very specific in the name that they’re not lesser.”

  “Okay, so here’s what you do if you’re planning on sharing this information,” Flamingo said. “If you want anyone to believe you, you need to do more than just verify your status and profile. You need to talk to the devs of the site and have them verify your claims. There’s a process for this. You need to open a ticket.”

  The next message explained the process for getting in contact with the website devs, which Eli noted down, but he figured he had a leg up on Flamingo since he had the Webmaster’s contact information.

  “I’ll do that,” Eli sent to the stranger. “Thanks. Good luck on your next delve.”

  “If I can find a group. Two of my party members backed out and everyone I can find that wants to go is level one.”

  “Well, good luck,” Eli sent, and the message chain ended there.

  Eli sighed and spent a few minutes browsing the forums before he dialed in the number he’d saved for contacting the Webmaster.

  After a brief moment of the phone ringing, it connected. A stranger’s voice answered the connection. It was a woman with a pleasant voice. “Eli Mathews?”

  “Who is this?” Eli asked.

  “I’m a friend of Miguel Phelps. He said you might know him just as ‘the Webmaster.’ He put me in charge of handling you in the event that he was incapacitated when you returned from the dungeon,” the voice said. “I’m sorry to say that has come to pass, but pleased to say that he’s been returned to us. Stay where you are, Eli. We’re moving guards into your location to handle your security.”

  “What are you talking about?” Eli asked.

  “The government wants to talk with you, Eli,” the woman’s voice said. “And if Miguel’s experience is anything to go by, it’s the sort of talk that involves pliers and car batteries.”

  Eli blanched. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “At this point the government is scrabbling for control. Unfortunately your contact with Erandius has put you in the cross-hairs. You predicted the dungeons, and that’s where all of TitanSystem.app’s cred is coming from at the moment. They don’t care that you’re innocent, they likely don’t care that you’re just a kid, they’re just desperate for some way of asserting the control that they’ve lost.”

  Eli swallowed nervously. “Thank you for the warning.”

  “It’s not just a warning. We weren’t certain that you’d appear at your house, but now that it’s confirmed we have a security team en route. They’ll handle the government, Eli. But it would help if you could contact Erandius again. If we had something to offer them, then maybe they’d back off.”

  Eli nodded. “Okay. I wasn’t really the one who contacted him in the first place. It was my familiar, and he’s been acting funny lately. On the last few floors, he’s been...I don’t know. Weirdly quiet.”

  “Do your best,” the woman said. “I’ll call you with any updates that I have. In the mean time, stay safe.”

  “Right,” Eli agreed.

  He hung up the phone, then sighed. Taking out the Toga that Gabri had dropped when he’d unsummoned himself, he held it out and pushed on that part of himself that was connected to Gabri, forcing mana through it until he felt a pop and the naked faerie was there again.

  “Get dressed,” Eli said. “Then you’re going to tell me why you’re so weirded out.”

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