Chapter 272 – Bunkering up.

“All of them should be in the city now… how much time do I have before the shit hits the fan…”

Roland had gone through the compound to check if everything was in order. His whole house had been turned into a fortress throughout the years of development. He had created the defensive structures with the cultists in mind but angry skeletal monsters weren’t that far removed from the equation. In a sense, it would be a good test run if ever the time arose that he needed to face one of those cultist monstrosities.

At the moment he was making his way through his secret tunnel, his aim wasn’t to fight or set up any traps but to gather intelligence. While this was the longest one it was not the only secret corridor he dug out. Another one that led out to safety had been created as well.

If all failed and he was overrun by the monsters there was a way for him to get out. This was of course something that he would only do in the worst case scenario. His escape would be accompanied by some fireworks that would probably take out even a cult abomination. However, his home would be gone and it was his last ace in the hole that he wouldn’t play lightly.

“Hm… at least they aren’t able to detect these secret passages and they do have that defensive mechanism the Lich triggered.”

Roland had arrived at the wall leading toward the dungeon. When descending to the secret area he had dug through it and made a person-sized hole. Now only a fist-sized opening remained that allowed him to glance towards the inside. There he saw the usual room he visited to start his journey to the mining area.

He would not be going in there or digging up the path again. Instead, he just needed to stay here to magnify the signal with the help of his suit. During his many trips down he had continued to search for the best path. While performing that task he placed many of his runic mapping devices everywhere.

With their help, he could follow the monster on the inside and come up with the right paths to avoid confronting them or the adventurers. Thanks to that solution he had remained unseen by the adventurers. There was always a possibility of an adventurer selling information about his whereabouts to the thieves guild. Roland was still a somewhat high-profile person in the city, someone could want that data to predict his movements.

His pedantic nature pushed him to be secretive after all the trouble he had been through. Now that the mine was discovered this process would help him in denying some facts. No one had seen him wandering the lower regions and the guards rarely saw him going through the main entrance. Even the large golem that was used to carry all the loot had not been inspected by anyone.

“I should probably stop worrying about that, what’s done is done…”

After giving out a sigh he turned his eyes to the mapping device. There was an option to enlarge the minimap to encompass the entire visor which he decided to use. There was actually a possibility to show the map in a 3D-like render but then it became a bit harder to read. The easier way was to divide the dungeon levels by numbers and just go through them one by one.

As always the field was flat and presented to him. The first thing he noticed was the lack of humans or other people of the races. Only the monsters remained and they were close to the exit. At the moment they were at the third floor level while the last of the people were at the first.

‘It seems that the miners and adventurers have successfully been evacuated, now can they stop them from going outside?’

The people outside the dungeon had one advantage over the monster wave. There was only one exit to which all of the corridors connected. They only needed one spot to defend and if they managed to stop the skeletons then it would be over. The only problem was that everyone was taken off guard and not enough defensive measures were taken.

‘Will Arthur be able to gather enough guards? Are there enough adventurers at a high enough level and will they take this seriously enough?’

Roland was worried that either there won’t be enough manpower to stop the skeletal soldiers from bursting out or that they won’t be able to gather the required forces. The vast majority of the adventurers were still only steel and bronze. The only useful help would come from the silver ones while the others might just get in the way and then be used to create more forces.

‘I really should have placed more of them…’

Roland never expected a full-fledged dungeon break to take place. If he knew there was so much danger then he would have mapped out the entire dungeon area and placed runic batteries everywhere. As it was now he could not monitor all of the passages or know what was happening in the lower level. Without a proper connection, he would need to get in range with his armor to be able to connect to the limited web of detecting devices.

From the spot he was in now he could at most detect down to the beginning of the fourth level. It didn’t look good, the wave of skeletons continued to pour forth and it didn’t look like it was stopping. It boggled his mind, where did the Lich hide this number of skeleton soldiers without being noticed?

There were too many of them to have been created from actual adventurer drops. Judging by the bone weapons that most of them carried in the lower levels, they had been created from monster remains instead. However, even though the dungeon was vast not every monster could be turned into a skeleton. The lava golems could not as the caster required the corpse to be made up of some type of flesh.

‘Did that Lich find a spawn point or some kind of trap?’

There were traps that when activated could force a person to fight against a larger group of monsters like the Troglodytes. In the lower levels, such places rarely existed but could have been somehow found by the Lich. Roland was unsure when the monster escaped, it could have even been a month or two before this whole debacle started.

For the time being, he remained here to watch over the situation. While he felt somewhat responsible for this predicament it wasn’t like he could control what others would do when reacting to the threat. He helped out the most to his ability and now needed to think more about his own side than the others.

The thought of going up and helping the guards defend the entrance did cross his mind. However, it would be quite a dangerous endeavor, and the time spent blasting away the skeletons could be used differently. Thus after staking out the dungeon from a safe location he decided to return back to his home to prepare for the worst.

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First of all, he needed to restore the large cannon that proved capable of harming the Lich. It was his best bet at destroying that thing but there weren’t many more shots he could take with it. The whole thing wasn’t designed to use his armor which was also deteriorating quickly.

His trip here was not only to peek at what was happening inside of the dungeon. He had also used up the last bit of runic wire along with a large quantity of smaller runic batteries. With them, he had placed several detection devices inside of this tunnel at the ceiling area.

The tunnel he created didn’t stray away from the main road that much. The soil was quite hard in some places which forced him to produce this tunnel in a somewhat fixed way. Thanks to this though he would at least know if a large number of monsters started flowing toward his location. With an activation of his armor’s agility-boosting spell, he made the trip back to his workshop. There he was greeted with a silence that he had lately come to forget.

In the past, before he even came here and back in his old world he had slowly gotten used to solitude. When he appeared in the body of Roland Arden he was ostracized by his own family which didn’t really bother him as much. He was used to it and thought nothing of people avoiding him.

It was the reverse, when finally he started gathering friends and acquaintances it became uncomfortable. At first, he didn’t know how to handle the attention he was getting. Slowly with time, his heart started opening up and finally, he got used to the chaos that all of it brought along.

Bernir’s badly timed jokes, Dyana’s outbursts of anger, and Elodia’s calm demeanor, all of it was different, and found a way into his life that he would do his utmost to protect. He even started to get used to the constantly annoying rugrats.

‘I guess I’m getting sentimental in my older years…’

Finally, he delved back to work, with the help of his new skills he was able to give orders to both his spider drones and the turrets on the walls. With his brain and all this firepower he should be able to direct it all at any potential enemies. However just as he was going through them one by one he noticed a dot on his screen, there was someone running towards his house.

“Hm?”

“Hey Boss, open up!”