The first couple days of the trip were mostly the same. Each encounter with beasts and monsters was quick, though they also began to happen with more frequency.

  The young man from Shane’s team, whose name they finally learned was Rudy, did try to speak with Angie and Lindsay every chance he got. Outside of that relatively minor annoyance, he didn’t attempt to do anything more than that.

  It was clear to the entire group that each time they ignored him; the rookie came a little closer to acting out. However, that was a matter for another day.

  At the moment, however, they were in the middle of something else that, to their estimation, was far more important. They were currently standing in the slime dungeon, watching as the last few seconds of the timer ticked down.

  Nate and Aura had been through this several times already. But it was Angie and Lindsay’s first time experiencing what went into the last step of conquering a portal.

  The timer reached zero and began to flash. Right afterward, a now familiar message appeared on the expanded wrist computer screens each of them had set up beforehand. The initial message was the same. While the number of options being offered was somewhat less than what Nate and Aura had seen with the beast dungeon. As they had discovered with the later dungeons that had been conquered, Aura’s presence had indeed made a difference to the options.

  ‘The dungeon has completed taking control of the portal at this location. The portal and dungeon will now be sealed until a decision has been made regarding their future status. Available options for this location will now be presented.’

  1. Be Done with This Location – Erase the Portal and Dungeon.

  2. Keep everything as it is – No Change (All future contributions to the shared pool will be significantly decreased.)

  3. I Like the inhabitants – Enhance the properties of the portal and strengthen those that come through it.

  4. You ALL Shall Pass – Permanently change the portal and allow for dual-transference all the time.

  …

  12. The Best of Both Worlds – The purpose of this dungeon changes and a mild form of mental compulsion is used to enhance the intelligence of lesser beings and to create a community among all who enter.

  When they had performed this process on the first dungeon, they had been presented with twenty-five options. Each time since it had only been twelve.

  Nate couldn’t remember all the options he had been presented with at that time. However, he and Aura had a theory that at least some of the missing options had been related to the intelligence of the beings that came through the portal. That meant, if they were able to conquer a dungeon with properly intelligent beings, they might be presented with more options again.

  At the moment, it was a theory, and nothing more. For the foreseeable future, it would remain that way as well.

  The balls of jelly-like slime that inhabited the dungeon were interesting. There were several different varieties of them wandering about, from the typical acidic and metallic types Nate had seen in his past life to others. He had even seen a few of them combine into a larger, stronger version that also seemed to have some semblance of intelligence. The initial jelly-balls appeared to be nothing more than a mass of instincts. When enough of them combined, a brain-like core formed in the center of their mostly transparent body. As such, they gained some intelligence, no matter how unformed it may initially be.

  It was based on their mostly -not exactly peaceful nature, but more uncaring- that he decided to create a second community around their portal.

  As such, he had already decided to select option twelve.

  Immediately afterward there was a flash of light, and he was ejected from his avatar form. The next thing he knew, he was rolling out of his bed above the cab of the truck the next morning.

  He probably didn’t need to be inside the dungeon when he set about performing the final step. Still, it felt natural to be inside it for some reason. He looked around, quickly noticing that the thin door to the room at the back was closed. That likely meant that Lindsay and Angie had been ejected at the same time as him.

  That was good. It was something that he hadn’t even thought to worry about until that moment.

  He would work on putting the new community together during the day while they were traveling. Moreover, maybe he would ask Lindsay to explore the area around it a bit to learn where specifically it was. Nate had a basic idea of where all the dungeons were. However, it was harder to pinpoint those that were somewhere in the wilds.

  The slime dungeon in this case was in Montana, more specifically near the Idaho border. But that was all he had been able to tell when he placed it.

  At the sound of his feet hitting the floor, the lightweight door at the back opened and Lindsay came out. She was dressed in a long shirt that covered a pair of short shorts and had a toothbrush stuffed in her mouth. She mumbled at him, spilling white foam down her chin and onto her chin. She stamped a foot and held up a finger. Lindsay quickly finished brushing her teeth and cleaned up the mess she had made.

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  Only then did she come back out. “Have you seen all the notifications yet? The original community was incredible, but this just opens so many possibilities!”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not sure how it worked for you two. Sorry about that, by the way. It didn’t even occur to me that it might be an issue. But for me and Aura, as soon as the process begins, we get ejected and put to sleep for the rest of the night.”

  “Ah,” She said slowly. “So, when I heard you moving about just now, you had only just woken up.”

  He nodded. “How about you and Angie?”

  “We were ejected from the dungeon, but that was it. We’ve been awake for around thirty-minutes, just talking and reading the notifications.”

  Nate tapped the button on the side of his wrist computer, turning on the screen. He wanted to see these notifications that she kept mentioning. His eyes slowly widened as he took in the various messages. If he had realized that the communities and dungeons could be linked in this way, he wouldn’t have closed the earlier conquered portals.

  Well, he probably still would have. Zombies and skeletons wouldn’t have made for a good community after all.

  ‘Two communities have been detected; additional functions have now been unlocked. The Inter-Community Portals, Cross-Dungeon Mercenary, and Champion systems can now be implemented at all current dungeons. Please Note that only members of the communities can access these last two functions, while members and those who have been whitelisted can access the portals.’

  Nate cocked his head, curious about these new, unknown dungeon operations. Part of Aura’s purpose was to serve as the manual he had originally been missing. However, she had never made any mention of them. Either she didn’t know about it, or it was something that had been previously locked to her.

  He closed that message, and a new one replaced it.

  ‘At this time, the Inter-Community Portals only go between the two communities. The portal has been placed in the side of the dungeon building, to the side of the doorway going inside. The energy cost to maintain these portals will automatically be taken from the energy generated by the community daily.’

  Before he had been earning some energy and resources from the community each day, now it had decreased a little more. Upkeep costs were a very real thing.

  ‘The Cross-Dungeon Mercenary and Champion systems are the Dungeon System’s solution to being unable to create life in low-level dungeons. Members of the community may sign up to become quasi-dungeon monsters in whichever dungeon they choose. These mercenaries are given a limited number of revives, while the strongest among them is granted the position of Dungeon Champion. In return, they are paid in resources for their chosen paths, along with qi orbs for cultivation.’

  Finally, the dungeons were beginning to seem more like the dungeons he used to read about in the stories on his old world.

  Sitting on the nearby couch, he kept reading through the different messages as more information was revealed to him through each one. Minutes later, he looked up, surprised to see that Angie had joined them at some point. Meanwhile, Lindsay was cutting up some fruit for their breakfast, along with other readily made items they had bought in the city.

  “Are you done reading everything?” Angie asked, brushing her hair to get rid of the tangles that had appeared in the middle of the night.

  Looking past her, he spotted Mika curled up on the bed behind her, still sleeping.

  He nodded, flicking a finger against his wrist next to the computer screen. “What do you two make of all this?”

  “I think we need to concentrate on conquering portals that we can create communities around,” Lindsay said from a few feet away in the tiny kitchen. “We, you, whatever, obviously, knew they had benefits before this, that was apparent even back home. With this new information though… it changes everything.”

  Angie began cleaning the brush, dropping the clump of hair into a nearby trashcan. She nodded. “It would be nice if we could turn that dwarven dungeon into a community. There’s no way to increase the pace at which each step happens, is there?”

  Nate shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. It all depends on being able to upgrade the Dungeon Core to the second level. The price of which increases with each dungeon. Once the Dungeon Core is upgraded for that first time, we gain access to a level inside the portal. A portion of the dungeon which is in their world instead of ours. Anyway, the idea is that we have to block any of them from crossing through the portal for a set amount of time, after which a thirty-day countdown begins. Fail, and the process begins again.”

  “Ah, that’s why you haven’t made more progress on that blighted elven dungeon,” Lindsay said, suddenly understanding the problem he had been facing.

  He growled and almost spat to the side, only holding back because they were inside. “That dungeon is such a pain. After Halloween, the elves pretty much abandoned it entirely. A few still enter it every once in a while, but that’s it. If the cost of upgrading a Dungeon Core had remained static, I would have been able to upgrade it now. At the current pace of them entering the dungeon, we’ll never earn enough. The shared pool can’t be used for the core upgrades either.”

  “Can we talk to them? Maybe, explain to the different intelligent dungeon races what is going on?” Angie asked.

  Nate bobbled his head uncertainly. “That might work in the dwarven dungeon as they seem to be… oddly uncombative in general. I believe that the portals do something to everything who comes though them normally, or even possibly who gets near them on the other side. I think that is something that conquering the portals fixes, actually. If you look at the beasts who enter the second floor of the first dungeon, they’re different than before, less driven by rage and instinct.”

  Angie leaned back on the couch as Lindsay approached with the breakfast she had made for everyone. “So, it might work with them, and any others like them. We saw the message board you had put in the portal room in the blighted elf dungeon. We could do something similar as an introduction.” Lindsay suggested.

  This time, it was Angie who shot the idea down. “It won’t work. The problem lies with the second step, needing to prevent them from coming through the portal. They can’t go back through the portals outside of Samhain. Warning them might make a few more receptive once the second level has been created. Before that though, it doesn’t really matter as they can’t tell their people back home.”

  “Exactly,” Nate agreed, reaching for a fork. “Anyway, let’s eat.”

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