Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Eighty-Three. Rising waters.

"Zero percent," Dave reported happily.

"Just in time, too. We've got maybe thirty minutes before we start seeing monsters from the other Dungeons show up," Mike added.

"Let's head up to the Freedom and maneuver over to the next one. We can take a couple of hours to grab some sleep, a hot meal, maybe even a shower before we drop down on the next one," Bob said.

"Which one are we headed toward next?" Amanda asked.

Bob pulled up the screen from his armband and looked at the map. "Well, we've got a choice. We can either head to the mainland and start working through those, or we can head into the ocean."

"How many Dungeons are under the water again?" Dave asked.

"It looks like twenty-five of them," Bob replied as he tapped his screen.

"I wonder why the System didn't reposition them all to land like it did with Earth," Amanda mused.

"I'm guessing population," Bob replied. "Earth had seven billion people. I'm not sure how many people were on Url, but based on their level of scientific advancement, I'm going to guess and say not that many."

"So we're going to end up underwater at some point," Dave sighed.

"I think we save those for last," Bob said. "We need to see what we're working with in terms of actual population, and we might need some of them to move around. At the moment, I'm kind of leaning towards closing the Dungeons that are under the water and reseeding them on land. Maybe give the largest two dozen cities an extra Dungeon."

"What about sanctions?" Amanda asked.

"I'll submit an anomaly report with each one," Bob replied. "It gave us a quest to save the Urlinad, and if we left a third of the Dungeons under the water and fucked off, it would end up being a waste of time, as they'd have to deal with overflows from Dungeons they can't reach." He frowned. "At least I don't think they can reach them. I didn't ask them how well they could swim or if they had submersibles."

"I don't think they have much of a maritime tradition," Amanda said. "The weather on this planet is just that nasty. I wouldn't be surprised if they routinely lose coastal settlements to hurricanes and typhoons."

"Their chief deity is the Queen of Storms," Bob agreed. "Gualla, the High Priestess, was quite adamant about getting her hands on weather magic."

"That would make sense," Amanda nodded, gesturing toward the ocean where dark, heavy clouds were massing, lightning flashing to illuminate them. "According to the drones, that storm is bringing seventy-mile-an-hour winds."

"Which is our cue to get back up to the Freedom," Dave said.

"But I don't want to stay in here all day!" Laura complained.

"You can't go outside, there are monsters," Lara explained again.

Bob had warned them that they would be stuck in his inventory for eight to ten hours while he moved to another Dungeon and cleared it. He'd told them that once he was done, he would bring them out, and they could start delving that Dungeon to increase their skill levels.

Her Poison Blast spell was already level four, but Bob had told them that until it was capped at level six, she shouldn't level up.

"Mom," Laura complained. "It's too dry in here, I'm getting itchy."

Lara sighed. Her daughter was a blessing, but she was at that age where everything was a trial.

"I'll ask Bob if there is anything he can do about the dryness," she promised.

Bob had demonstrated his power after they had exited the Dungeon for the last time, taking only a few minutes to grow hundreds of pounds of vegetables and greens from the earth at the edge of the jungle. It had taken everyone from his team as well as Gualla and Lara a quarter of an hour to harvest the bounty, which Bob had somehow directed into the coldbox in his inventory.

That meant that at least they wouldn't go hungry. In fact...

"Why don't we have something to eat," Lara suggested.

"There isn't anything to eat," Laura pouted. "I can't believe they eat flesh," she shook her head in disgust.

"Bob grew us some greens," Lara smiled. "He said he was putting them in his coldbox for us, so why don't we go see?"

Laura raced to the coldbox with Lara following behind. She smiled as her daughter threw open the door and gasped at the neatly labeled clear boxes that were stuffed with fresh produce.

The variety was incredible and included many things she'd never seen before, although Bob had assured her that they were perfectly safe for her people to eat.

She wasn't sure how he knew that, but everything she'd sampled had been fine, although some of it had been quite spicy.

Laura grabbed a box that held broad courijal leaves and then stacked a box with juicy hyaouil on top of it, carrying them both to the counter.

Courijal wraps were one of the few things that Laura was allowed to make by herself and were one of her favorites. She opened the box of leaves and lifted two of them out, laying them on the counter. She replaced the lid carefully and carried it back to the coldbox. She then took a pair of hyaouil out of the other box, returning that one as well. She carefully sliced the fruit lengthwise into quarters before laying it in the leaves and rolling the leaves into a tube, securing the firm yet tender fruit within. Courijal leaves had a rough texture on the outside that caused them to cling to themselves, which held the leaf in place.

She rinsed off her knife before carrying her snack back to the table, where she sat down and began to eat.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Lara asked.

"Whastat?" Laura mumbled around her food.

"You left hyaouil juice on Bob's counter," Lara replied, pointing at the offending streaks.

Laura swallowed and then rushed back into the kitchen, where she used a towel to wipe up the juices.

Lara once again reflected on the similarities that Bob shared with her people. If he was truly an alien being, wouldn't his home be much more different than her own?

Instead, it was eerily familiar, almost as if he had taken his home from Url and then improved it. His coldbox was wonderful, staying cooler and more consistent than her own cellar. His kitchen was laid out much as hers had been, although not having to heat water was a blessing. On that note, he had shown them his bathroom, and Gualla had fallen in love with the shower. She was still in there, basking in the hot rainfall.

She paused for a moment. It had been rather steamy when she'd emerged, and she could only imagine how much steam must have built up with Gualla having been in there for so long.

She looked at Laura and smiled. If her suspicions were correct, she might be able to do something about Laura's dry skin without having to bother her host.

"I swear that thing is like eighty percent mouth, yeah?" Jessica said as they looked at the screen, which showed the entrance to a Dungeon where what looked like ambulatory mouths regularly poured out.

"You know the monsters are nasty when they bother the Aussie," Dave agreed.

Bob could only nod. The monster might best be described as a cross between an emu and a crocodile if you imagined the crocodile's head connecting directly to the emu's round body without the benefit of the neck. The whole thing was scaled, and the powerful legs were much thicker than seemed necessary, although supporting that massive head might explain some of it.

"This is one of those moments where I'm really glad I'm not a tank," Amanda muttered.

"Strewth," Jessica agreed fervently.

"We're going to need to move fast," Jack said. "We've got another storm coming from the north that's going to crash down on this place in fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside."

"What is it with the weather here," Wayna grumbled.

"We'd have to import a meteorologist to answer that question," Bob replied. "I don't know if we should be introducing Earth to Url or vice versa, so I've been going with the prime directive for the moment. Honestly, the System itself will provide most of the advancements that we could while not requiring them to undergo an industrial revolution at the same time."

"First step is to finish the quest and save them, once we've done that, we can worry about how much further we want to take our responsibilities," Mike said. "To that end, let's drop down on that Dungeon."

Bob nodded and opened a portal at his feet, falling through it and into the skies above the Dungeon. The dark flames of his wings grew out of his armor, holding him in place as he summoned a pterodactyl for each of his friends, save those who had their own methods of flight, which was actually a surprising number of them. Amanda had summoned her own giant eagle, while Eddi had summoned a pterodactyl of his own, with Wayna shapeshifting a hawk. Bailli and Erick both took on the form of air elementals, which made them the fastest and the most maneuverable of the lot.

Once everyone was ready, which took less than half a minute, Bob dove down toward the Dungeon.

New Quest!

Jupryal has been overrun by monsters! The Urlinad have retreated to the storm shelters, praying to their gods to save them. Unfortunately, their gods are not real, but the monsters are. It falls on you to save them.

Kill the monsters, 0/80,468

Locate the Storm Shelters, 0/82

Protect the Urlinad.

"Bloody hell, that's a proper load of monsters," Jessica said from behind him as he looked around the Dungeon.

"Eighty fucking thousand monsters?" Mike shook his head.

"It's like the System knew Bob was coming and made Dungeons just for him," Bailli grumbled.

"I just hope we aren't on a timer again," Dave said, the worry clear in his voice.

Bob nodded.

The city ahead of them was much more impressive than Meluben had been. It also wasn't built around a mountain, instead resting on level ground.

He tapped his armband and pulled a drone out of his satchel, unfolding its propellers and holding it in his palm as the rotors sput up, and it lifted into the air, barely shifting from its course, despite the rain that was falling from the darkened skies.

"Let's see what we're dealing with," Bob suggested.

He'd kicked himself for not using a drone last time. While they'd managed to save all of the Urlinad, they could have easily scouted out the temples.

Mike had joined him in his self-recrimination.

He tapped the command to link the video feed across the armband network, and everyone watched their screens as the drone rose to two hundred feet and began to move over the city.

It was immediately clear that the monsters weren't congregating anywhere as they roamed the streets in packs of twenty or so. He could see temples in the center of the city and wondered why it was that people weren't hiding in them this time as well.

That's when everyone let out a nearly synchronized gasp as a tornado appeared, touching down toward the rear of the city for nearly a minute before falling apart.

Bob looked up at the stormy sky apprehensively. "That's new," he mumbled.

"Look, I'm just saying that we've already seen environmental hazards," Dave argued.

"The lava didn't spring up at random, we could see where it was and avoid it," Jack replied.

"Well, I, for one, am grateful that we have a priest of Slyph," Mike said, nodding his head toward Erick, who smiled serenely.

It turned out that while he couldn't impact the weather without using ritual magic, keeping the group safe from a tornado was well within his capabilities.

There didn't seem to be a pattern for how the tornadoes appeared, but they were frequent enough that they'd been hit four times so far, and they were barely getting started.

The Emators, as Jessica had dubbed them, were fast, strong, and could really jump. They attacked as a pack, leaping seventy feet forward at devastating speeds.

They had nearly buried Jack during the first fight, and the two beacons had started to stick together more closely to make sure neither of them pulled too much of the Emators' attention. The aura they projected was, unsurprisingly, one of intense hunger. It somehow allowed them to bite more deeply.

Only having a force multiplier of twenty versus the thousand auras that had stacked together to press against them when they'd defended the temples of Meluben was a relief.

Bob checked the quest.

New Quest!

Jupryal has been overrun by monsters! The Urlinad have retreated to the storm shelters, praying to their gods to save them. Unfortunately, their gods are not real, but the monsters are. It falls on you to save them.

Kill the monsters, 6,080/80,468

Locate the Storm Shelters, 7/82

Protect the Urlinad.

The Storm Shelters were huge stone domes, low to the ground, with no windows or doors. It was immediately obvious that they were built to protect from tornados. The quest stated they had only found seven of them, but using the drone had revealed all eighty-two of them. He suspected he needed to actually see them for the quest to update.

What he hadn't found was a way inside, although he strongly suspected it was through the aqueducts that crisscrossed the city. He had popped into his inventory to ask Gualla and Lara, but neither had known, both of them having been born in, and never leaving, Meluben, where the concern was hurricanes, not tornados.

He'd also discovered another oversight.

Neither Gualla nor Lara had completed the quest to enter a Dungeon at a higher tier. The System was apparently fine with them being in his inventory, but it wasn't willing to let them leave it, at least not to enter the Dungeon. It had offered them the option to exit and appear outside the Dungeon.

Bob wasn't sure if someone had made it a habit to kidnap people into an extradimensional space and then bring them into a Dungeon or if the System was preemptively cutting that nonsense off at the pass. Given the nature of the System, he had a suspicion that it was probably the former, which was disturbing on an entirely different level.

"Well, we're about seven percent done," Bob said.

"Great, that'll make this a twelve-hour grind," Mike replied. "At least we don't have to deal with the civilians."

"Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell this is," Dave shook his head. "I mean, the monsters aren't clawing at the domes to get to them, so where does the saving really come in."

"I just wish it would quit raining," Amanda muttered.

"Oh shit," Jack gasped. "The fucking rain!"

"Follow me," Jack said as he rushed back the way they had come, coming to a stop at the railing of a bridge that went over the aqueduct.

"I could be wrong, but I don't think I am," Jack said grimly. "Isn't that water level higher than it was when we started? I only have two major cities under my belt from a project planning perspective, but if it keeps rising, I'd be that those domes will flood."

"Fuck," Mike grumbled. "It looks like this shit is timed after all."

"And we just spent the first hour taking it slow," Bob agreed grimly.