Chapter 26 – Dress Up and Other Games

Lillia awoke in the dungeon. Lillia was fine with that. Lillia was not fine with the fact that she was fine with that.

That was a thing a lot of people said, ‘You get used to it.’ Waking up in a dark, gross dungeon surrounded by a mixture of a friend’s corpse and monster carcasses was not something Lillia was particularly interested in getting used to. The issue being the more time Lillia spent in the dungeon, the longer she thought this whole endeavor was going to take.

When she had first fallen down here, Lillia lacked context for the situation she’d been thrown into. Now that she had spent some time underground, she had more context. It wasn’t enough, but it was more.

However long this was going to take. It was going to be too long.

By the door to the black pit was Havoc’s body and the twisted carcass of the Crashscale Ambusher. Unlike the other monsters Lillia had killed, the Crashscale had not disappeared when she collected the rewards.

Havoc probably would have called it “good eating” and done something gross about it.

Lillia’s ‘morning’—there was no way to tell what time it was—was slow. Resting by the hearth had sewn her remaining wounds shut and massaged her sore muscles, but that didn’t stop her body from being convinced that it was supposed to be haggard. With everything they had been through, Lillia’s arms and legs were sure they were going to fall apart. She wouldn’t have blamed them for doing so.

One of the strange things about having access to the hearth was that Lillia always woke up satiated. What had originally been a pressing problem—the lack of rations—was now an issue of taste. The dungeon food sucked, but she was longing for it even while her stomach said she was full. The princess couldn’t fight the gnawing feeling that she hadn’t eaten in what must have been days.

Even worse, she hadn’t lost any weight. From what Lillia could tell, if anything, she’d put on some muscle. Whether that was from leveling up or simply using some of her muscles for the first time, it was impossible to know.

Lillia had spent the better part of the morning trying to lay out a plan for what she would do next. Havoc was awaiting her at the next hearth. Assuming that hearth was somewhere in the dungeon, it was within one of the rooms Havoc didn’t know about.

Or Nennia’s room, but if that were the case, Lillia and Havoc were both doomed, so there was no reason to plan around that possibility.

Assuming that the Ambusher was enough to impress the Huntsmaster, which it had better have been, Lillia needed to speak to them. After that, there were two rooms on the third floor Lillia needed to check. Her mouth went dry at the thought.

Two more rooms, plus Nennia. All of which were supposed to be worse than the second floor, and Lillia wouldn’t have called her time on the second floor a resounding success.

The first floor had been, well, Lillia wasn’t going to say “pleasant” but one bug and Havoc. The second floor had been the Spellmite Architect’s Challenge and the Hunting Grounds. If the dungeon were a hill Lillia needed to climb, the hike between the first and second floor seemed less like a manageable climb and more like a cliff of difficulty.

If the third floor was anything like it…Lillia was going to need help she didn’t have.

Of course, that was a skill within Lillia’s repertoire. If she had spent the past five years imagining her parents’ voices when things became difficult, she could imagine Havoc’s when things got too dungeon-y.

First, what was Havoc? Havoc was grumpy. That part felt optional.

Havoc, though, was also thorough. Now that she had defeated the Ambusher, Havoc’s first thought would have been to lay out all of her options. Sure, his plan for fighting the Ambusher hadn’t really worked. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t have and didn’t mean his method wasn’t a strategy worth pursuing.

Lillia set to work pulling each item out of her inventory and staring at it for as long as it took for the text to change.

Lillia was most excited about the crown she’d received from the Ambusher, but first thing Lillia noticed was that ‘crown’ was a misnomer. It was clearly a coronet. That or whatever kingdom granted this crown to its sovereign didn’t appreciate the gilded nature of royalty.

The ‘crown’ was unjeweled. Copper and bronze woven together and shaped to look like brambles. Along the uppermost branches were seven small thorns positioned evenly around the ‘crown.’

Lillia turned the item over in her hand. It was light, like a cheap replica of something her parents would have worn. Or that of what her aunt wore now.

[The Plains Tyrant Crown]

[Equipment – Crown]

[When equipped, allows the user increased movement speed when moving across grassland, plains, or dirt.]

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[The first strike against creatures with the subtype ‘beast’ deals increased damage. This bonus is greatly increased if the wearer was unseen.]

[While it does not meet the standards of the High Kingdoms, the crown demands authority through sudden and catastrophic violence.]

There were two immediate thoughts upon reading the description of the crown: The first was that at least the item’s description understood that it didn’t deserve the title of crown. That was one of the few times the dungeon and Lillia had agreed on anything. The second Lillia said out loud.

“Where am I going to find more grassland or plains?” Lillia checked the bottom of the crown as if it would explain some secret to her. “There already was one of those, and I got this for killing the thing I had to kill so I never had to go there again.”

A rock-like feeling sat in Lillia’s stomach. She had heard the few adventurers who were invited into the Grand Hall speak of a concept called farming. Lillia had understood they weren’t talking about actual farming—she was disconnected from the peasantry, but her mother had forced her to learn something about agriculture.

No, the farming they were talking about involved killing certain monsters over and over, like how Lillia had killed the chitterpede twice. Frankly, even fighting that horrid bug twice had been a terrible idea and had gone poorly. The idea of going back into the Hunting Grounds to either slaughter some more of those poor black beasts, fight another Ambusher, or discover what other fresh horrors lived there was the last thing Lillia wanted to do.