Chapter 342: Tower Dungeon

A shout from the forest informed them that there was danger to the teams, and everyone pulled their weapons as a pair of rogues ran back into the small clearing.

They had been scouting, so something had definitely happened, and everyone hoped that it wasn’t another faction coming to claim the dungeon. While they did have plenty of heroes here, it would be a brutal and bloody fight when they didn’t have proper defensive fortifications.

Those really were the key to Marimgar’s advantages in every trial up to this point.

Without the walls to keep enemies out and give them time to fight, there was no way that they would have made it through the insect hordes, no matter how strong their weaponry was. The creatures would have run rampant through the city and torn it to pieces.

The Earth Mages and plant mages worked together to clear a spot in the swamp, and turn it into a solid clearing, with stacks of freshly cut lumber that could be used for firewood.

Not that they needed wood for heat or cooking.

It was just a primal human urge to have fire, and sitting around a campfire after a hard day was somewhat of a universal tradition, especially when you were in a wooded area.

Once the base was done, Kalli went through her previous purchases, and slightly modified a watch tower to be an extra story taller, so they could see over the trees more easily. Enemies might make it right to the walls, but the tower itself was the primary defensive structure, and the walls would at least slow most enemies.

Unless it was monkeys.

The thought popped into Kalli’s mind, and she smiled at the thought of waves of feral monkey monsters swinging into the fortress from the trees.

As usual, her response to her inner monologue concerned the heroes around her, but once she began to speak, everyone began to laugh.

"Man, I hope this is a crocodiles and snakes sort of swamp and not a monkeys and spiders sort of swamp."

Crocs or gators seemed more likely, as they had already seen the six legged monster version, known as the crocolisk, near Marimgar. Esmeralda still rode one into battle, and the creatures were fierce, but they were also easy enough to deal with, and you didn’t have to worry about them coming flying at you.

If a Crocolisk could fly, Esmeralda surely would have found a way to do it by now. She loved her scaly zombie gator.

Honestly, if they were tougher, she would love to have another. This one was mostly just her mount, because her zombies didn’t level up with her. They remained the level they were created at, so she needed to continually replenish them as she levelled up.

So, keeping her beloved mount was a true waste of potential combat power, but she hadn’t found another mount that was better than it.

If there was a dead moose or something that was close to her level, she would totally pick that, but she didn’t have a skill to upgrade the corpses to her level.

At least, not yet.

There was some hope that once she got past level twenty, it might become an option, but the locked skill tree was holding everything up, and she didn’t have any more skills to choose from at the moment.

{Tower Location Invalid. Dungeons cannot be enclosed if they were formed outdoors.}

Well, that was an easy fix. Move the tower over a few metres, and the portal with the shrine was in the yard.

Done.

Kalli got right to work upgrading the tower, and the interior, adding a set of four laser turrets for safety, but placed on the walls of the tower, where they oversaw the compound, which was where they were most likely to be needed.

Things outside the walls were a secondary concern, and they didn’t need to blast every single bit of wildlife that approached.

Just the ones that tried to get into the tower’s yard.

With that complete, and a set of lawn chairs set up by a fire pit in the yard, the new dungeon was ready to go. The only drawback was that it was not actually inside the tower.

At least now she knew that it was an actual system restriction, and that there were defined rules for what could be done. That might be why the shrine was built around the portal. You couldn’t put it indoors, but you could block it from sight.

And if they had continued building a village around it, nobody would ever see the portal.

It was very similar to what Kalli had done, but there were more permanent residents next to it before the humans arrived. For now there would only be a single team on watch detail living in the tower for a few weeks at a time.

Though, this time it would be heroes who could do the dungeon in their off time, so they didn’t have to return to the city to finish the rest of their tasks.

Easy.

Kalli updated the route for the utility speeders, instructing them to add this as a stop in their route, from the Frost Giant dungeon, as there would be far more people coming here than going there.

So, if you went from Marimgar here, then to the Frost Giants, you could make a small detour on the return trip and save a lot of time in the air. Then, they would add a route running through the farmlands and the watch towers, with a stop at the Frost Giant dungeon, which was much closer to the city and would still need supplies.

That way, you could get to everything quickly, and even their less frequented locations would get regular supply runs.

It was a bit like running the logistics numbers at her old job, looking for inefficiencies in the dispatch code. She didn’t actually have to interact with anything, just input the data and let someone else sort it out.

In this case, the City Council.

Who simply went with her routes, and assumed that the Coordinator had thought them through, since they didn’t see any obvious mistakes.

Seconds after she finished her creation of the tower, the threat that the Rogues were shouting about finally appeared. Mutated pythons nearly as thick around as Bert, and the teams were looking at them like they had found a new delicacy.