Dungeon Defense (WN)

I’m going to have to take some time to think about this later. I responded to Laura appropriately. We had a casual conversation where I told her that she didn’t have to go out of her way to be stubborn about speaking formally to me. I could tell that it was awkward for her to speak formally.

Truth be told, if we created a hierarchy according to our age, then Lapis should be informal with me, but…….

I imagined it for a second.

‘Dantalian? Why did you do that again? Do you ever think? You’re really pathetic. Can you even call yourself a Demon Lord like this? You just want to disappoint me, don’t you?’

……Just thinking about it terrified me.

Laura shook her head.

“There must be a firm rule between a lord and their vassal.”

“Let us do this, then. You can be formal with me when we are in the presence of others; however, when it is just the two of us, we can speak as we always have.”

“I am okay with that.”

There was a glint in her eyes.

“Relieving the personal concerns of one’s lord is also my duty as a vassal. Although my body is lacking, I will do my utmost to take care of both your public and personal matters, Dantalian.”

“It’s nice that you’re overflowing with ambition…….”

At that moment, a notice that an adventurer party had just invaded popped up. Laura must have noticed as well, but that was because she had on a necklace that automatically let out a warning alarm if someone invaded the dungeon.

She slowly got up from my hold.

“Hm, I’ll be off, then.”

“Are you sure you aren’t exhausted after having your mark removed? I can handle this one if you want.”

“No. I already feel refreshed thanks to your concern. A lord must not act needlessly. I will hastily take the necks of our enemies, so wait here. I shall beautifully handle this first official battle as your vassal.”

It seems Laura actually was feeling healthy as she walked out of my Demon Lord room with energetic steps. She even looked excited to a degree.

In any case, this was something to be grateful for. I now have time to organize my thoughts.

Let’s confirm the current situation first.

I muttered with a trembling voice. I have to speak in my head when I’m with other people, but there was no reason for me to be concerned when I’m by myself.

“S-Status.”

A ‘Ding!’ that absolutely didn’t fit the current severe situation resonated. If I could change one thing in this world, then the biggest thing I would want to change was this god damn sound effect.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

True Name: Dantalian Race: Demon Lord　　 　Faction: Dantalian’s Demon Lord Army Attribute: Neutral(-10)

Level: 20　　　　Infamy: 1120 Job: Dungeon Manager(F), Demon Lord(E)

Leadership: 25/30　　Might: 7/10 　　Intelligence: 29/30 Politics: 24/30　　Charm: 15/20　　Technique: 4/10

*Titles: 1. Demon Lord of Fear *Abilities: Tactics(F), Marksmanship(F), Mining(F) *Skills: Acting

[Achievements: 2] [Subordinates: 42 units/210 units]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

My stats had changed compared to before. The limit of all of my stats had gone up drastically because my Demon Lord job went up a rank. The more a player’s job level increases, the higher their stat threshold increases as well. Nevertheless, I felt like the threshold of my stats had gone up way more than it should have. This meant that it wasn’t only my job level that was affecting it.

I quickly looked at my title.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[Titles]

1. Demon Lord of Fear – This person has caused a large part of the world’s order to collapse. The owner of this title will receive the respect of demonkind and the fear of humanity: Leadership limit +10, Intelligence limit +10, Charm limit +10, Subordinate limit +100, Infamy +500

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“As I expected!”

I unintentionally let out a cry. This was quite a great title.

No matter how much a player levels up through completing quests or grinding, they’re unable to raise their stats beyond a certain limit. For example, if the limit of your strength stat is 30, then even if your base level is 99, your strength will never go beyond 30.

Therefore, it’s important to raise your job rank appropriately.

The rankings of jobs consist of 9 stages: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, and SSS. Each time your job rank increases, the cap of certain stats increases by 5 as well.

Your base level increases your fundamental stats and your job level increases the limit of your stats. There’s no gain in grinding mindlessly. No matter how much you increase your base level, if your stats have hit their limits, then nothing will increase and your extra stats will just lie dormant until you increase their caps. Similar to how players must upgrade their PC’s hardware and software together, they must also raise their characters while ceaselessly paying attention to both their base and job levels.

In this regard, a title that can increase the limit of your stats greatly like <Demon Lord of Fear>, something that can usually only be done by raising your job rank, is incredibly good. Normally, you’d have to go through great lengths to raise your job rank. For example, if you want to raise your swordsman job, then you have to hunt as many different monsters as possible and duel against people from different martial sects……. Gah, thinking about how hard I had to work in the past to raise my character is raising my blood pressure.

To put it simply, <Demon Lord of Fear> is like receiving 2 job rank ups for free.

“Well, then.”

I then became dispirited.

It was surprising, but I didn’t feel happy. My base level and job rank increasing is definitely good news; however, I don’t know why they had gone up. I’m not stupid enough to be delighted by some unknown miracle.

Let’s say that someone offers to give me 100 million won. The other party doesn’t respond when I ask them why they’re giving me that much money. I don’t know who the other party is and I have no way of knowing what sort of goal they could possibly have in mind by giving me 100 million won. In this sort of situation, who would be naively happy and pounce on that money?

The issue is that I had already received 100 million won. Now I have to do whatever I can to figure out what the other party wants.

━ The scenario has destroyed a predestined fragment of fate!

━ A Rank scenario <Female Iron Chancellor> has been ‘completely’ destroyed!

━ B Rank scenario <Enemy of an Enemy is an Ally> has been ‘completely destroyed!

━ S Rank scenario <Disunity of the Human World> has been ‘severely’ destroyed!

“This is definitely the cause…….”

I quietly gazed at the 4 notices.

I didn’t have to think for long. Once the shock had dissipated and my head had gone back to normal, I immediately understood what these 4 sentences meant. It didn’t require much thought either.

“These are game scenarios.”

These notices appeared after Laura became my subordinate. Therefore, all of these scenarios are connected to Laura.

Female Iron Chancellor is referring to Laura. The scenario <Enemy of an Enemy is an Ally> is also most likely related to Laura. It’s probably referring to the event where Laura allies with a portion of the Demon Lords in order to attack the protagonist’s forces. <Disunity of the Human World> is definitely talking about how the human side was split between the empire, which the protagonist belongs to, and the kingdom that’s led by Laura. The A, B, and S rank is probably determined by how close they are to the main scenario.

Therefore, by making Laura my subordinate, the events that were supposed to happen in the game aren’t going to happen anymore.

“Why are these obvious things helping me?”

The question went somewhere else; nonetheless, it didn’t take me long to answer this question as well. The fact that I was seeing this alarm for the first time meant that there was something different from the ‘me’ in the game and the ‘me’ in this world, which resulted in the creation of this new type of notice. A notice that the hero can’t see, but Demon Lords can.

What is a hero?

A hero is an existence that progresses through quests.

Then what are Demon Lords? To put it simply, they are existences that interfere with quests, so if a hero’s mission is to complete quests, then the mission of Demon Lords is to make it impossible to clear those quests. Therefore, if the hero gets experience points from completing quests, then, in reverse━.

“Demon Lords get experience points by destroying quests.”

The situation became clear.

I understood why I didn’t receive any quests in this world like I did in the game. In the past, I simply thought that it was because there was a difference between real life and the game, but that wasn’t the case. Quests don’t appear for Demon Lords at all. If anything, finding and breaking quests related to the main scenario is the ‘hidden quest’ for Demon Lords!

Breaking quests are Demon Lords’ true tasks.

Paradoxically, the act of ‘beating’ a quest includes both the act of completing and truly breaking a quest.

Something dawned on me at that moment.

“……Wait, then why didn’t anything appear for Andromalius?”

Andromalius is the reason why the hero decides to subjugate Demon Lords. If I’m supposed to earn experience points by breaking quests, then shouldn’t I have received a huge amount of experience points by killing Andromalius? Don’t tell me that Andromalius doesn’t actually influence the hero on his quest. There’s no way.

“Damn it. I don’t get it.”

I laid down on my bed. I surrender! I can’t figure it out. I was severely lacking in information. I’d have to one day either find and defeat an individual related to the main scenario or make them my subordinate in order to answer the rest of my questions.

Laura returned to the Demon Lord’s room as I was scratching my head fiercely.

“Huh? You’re back sooner than I expected.”

“There is a good reason for my early return.”

I tilted my head. Come to think of it, I didn’t receive a notification telling me that the adventurer party had been annihilated.

“There are people currently waiting at the entrance of the Demon Lord castle.”

“Waiting? They aren’t invading?”

“That is so. They are not invaders, Dantalian.”

If they aren’t invaders, then what are they? Once I looked at Laura curiously, she spoke in a serious tone.

“They are envoys. According to them, they came here as representatives of the villages nearby. They say that they have something important to tell you.”

* * *

The envoys mainly consisted of elderlies. Excluding the youngsters who appeared to be their escorts, the envoys were either village chiefs or people of similar positions.

Once I appeared with thirty golems and ten fairies, the elderly people quickly bowed. I call it bowing, but all they did was lean their bodies on their canes. I paid it no mind as I knew that this was genuinely the most etiquette that people of this age could possibly show.

“Raise your heads.”

“We are most grateful, O Great Being.”

The elderly man standing at the front raised his torso. Sure enough, he was the village chief of one of the villages I had subjugated before going to Niflheim.

“I will briefly heed your words. For what reason have you come here?”

“O Great Being……!”

The elderly man abruptly got down on his knees. It was so sudden that I feared my knees would break just by watching him. Oh dear, you’ll end up getting on the train to the afterlife before it even arrives at the station, old man!

Nonetheless, I responded coldly since I knew that I shouldn’t underestimate the other party when I don’t know what their intentions are.

“I said that I will heed your words.”

“My apologies! My sincerest apologies! This humble one is the village chief of the village at the bottom of Mt. Lauch and those here with me right now are also village chiefs. As you had requested, we have been diligently exterminating the adventurer parties that came to our villages; however, we were unable to deal with a single party.”

“……Hm.”

It is natural that there will be adventurer parties that these villagers can’t handle. They’re probably a group of E-rank adventurers. I responded in an offhanded manner.

“Everyone makes mistakes. The weight of the apology you are displaying to me right now is heavier than your mistake.”

“T-The adventurer party rallied a couple of villages and created a type of alliance.”

“What was that?”

I frowned.

The old man’s already lowered body was almost touching the ground now.

“Our sincerest apologies……most villages have been obeying your orders, but there are a couple of villages that have been wanting to rebel since the beginning. They were won over by the adventurers…….”

“Won over? Won over by what?”

“T-They are aiming for your……treasure, O Great Being…….”

“Hah.”

I was dumbfounded. The adventurers probably exaggerated a lot to those villagers. They probably used some obvious repertoire like there is a mountain of gold in my dungeon and ignorant country bumpkins will probably get tempted by that.

Nevertheless, it’s only some villagers and an E-rank adventurer party. It was a little unpleasant, but I didn’t intend to reprimand these old people for coming all the way here to tell me this.

And yet, I couldn’t help but be surprised by what they told me next.

“They say that the individual leading the group of traitors is a man from Jalsen Village named Riff.”

***

TL Note: Thanks for reading the chapter. My university semester started now, but they’re just giving us a bunch of assignments and making us listen to online classes. I’d be happy if the number of assignments wasn’t so high. I’ll be semi-busy while I take a day or two to get all of those done as soon as possible, but I’ll try to also reach my daily translation quota.