Gun Girl from Another World

Cumulative

The path to either side of the mural had joined up again into a larger hallway after about a dozen feet, making the whole massive stone column the mural was carved into roughly square. That hallway had taken our party into what could only be described as a Great Hall, with a towering ceiling disappearing into the shadows beyond the torchlight.

Once, the massive room, many Remmis wide and yet longer still, might have been used for feasting and celebration, but the remnants of the long, wooden tables lay broken and rotten, their pieces scattered across the stone floor. Broken weapons, crushed helmets, shattered shields and discarded banners are littered across the entire expanse, enough of them of differing designs that they couldn't all be from the same engagement.

Even now, the air is filled with the sounds of battle as a tide of small, humanoid monsters throw themselves against us with a lack of self preservation that no natural creature would dare attempt.

One would think that this would be an all-hands-on-deck defense, but behind us, unnoticed by either of us Heroes, Ayre and Korrigan seem almost … bored.

They're taking pot shots into the crowd, but it's with a lazy, almost resigned drawl to their motions, with nothing ever really approaching them. The reason is … well … because nothing's getting past me and Leuke in the first place.

Leuke and I are having the time of our lives. Blades come down and clash against Ryutaiji, and the sword-wielding Hero sweeps their bearers away with a wide swing. I'm right by his side, shooting around him into the surrounding foes trying to flank him. Initially, there had been mages and archers in the back, but they fell before they hardly got an attack off to my semi-automatic sweep. The rest …

… Well, the rest is really just prolonged clean-up.

Korrigan points her staff at a cluster to the far left, and a red ray leaps from the tip, zipping across the intervening space until it impacts one of the monsters in the chest. The next instant, an explosion of fire centered on that impact point engulfs it and its surrounding assailants.

With the rare opening exploited, she sighs and addresses the elf. "Is this what it's always like, traveling with a Hero?"

Ayre frowns, turning to shoot one of the large, monstrous wolves the green- and brown-skinned monsters seem to use for both mounts and war hounds. The arrow, surrounded by swirling seafoam energies, pierces right through the skull of the beast and the chest of its rider.

"Normally, Remmi alone isn't this bad," he admits. "Maybe this is what happens when you get too many Heroes together in one place. They were summoned together, after all. Maybe their insanity is cumulative."

"Are we even needed here?"

Ayre considers the child's question for a long moment, but ultimately doesn't give a direct answer. "Maybe this is for the best," he muses instead. "The way I see it, if they can tire themselves out early now, they'll be easier to deal with later. It's like managing a toddler." He pauses as he considers the analogy, and amends it slightly. "A hyperactive toddler with a deadly weapon."

"So …" Korrigan tries, "... a regular toddler?"

Ayre shrugs. "Do oni usually give legendary weapons to their toddlers as playthings?"

The girl is silent for a moment. "I had a wooden rattle shaped like a little kanabo."

That mental image makes Ayre break out into a smile. "Aww, that sounds adorable! How many boys did you hit over the head with it?"

The mage huffs and puts a break in the exchange with another fireball. "... Like I said," she mutters instead of answering the question, "a regular toddler …"

Things gradually start settling down, and the clashes of steel and explosions of gunpowder start to fade. Leuke and I clean up the last few of them and I turn back to Ayre and Korrigan.

"Phew, that was fun," I declare with a grin as I change out my magazine. "Way better than bats and zombies! Great hustle, everybody!"

For some reason I don't understand, that makes Ayre's face twist in frustrated anger and he takes two long strides right for me before smacking me down the face with the shaft of his bow.

"Ow!" I cry out, recoiling from the sudden impact. I rub my nose as I peer at my friend through one eye. "What was that for?!"

"What do you mean, everybody?" he asks. "Who's this everybody you're talking about?"

"Uh …" I look over the three of them. Leuke looks just as lost as I feel, and Korrigan just looks on in nonplussed consent to Ayre's outburst. "Everybody?" I repeat in an attempt at answering. "You, me, Leuke and Korrigan. Everybody."

"Well, you might want to recount," Ayre scolds me for some reason I've yet to comprehend, "because everybody didn't get to play."

"Why are you talking to me like I'm a toddler that stole the toys!?"

"Because that wasn't fun," he answers. "That was you and Leuke going off in a battle frenzy and leaving Korrigan and I behind!"

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"We didn't leave you behind," I protest at the unfair accusation. I would never leave my best friend behind, and Korrigan was the one we were supposed to be protecting! "You were both right there the entire time!"

Down comes the bow as Ayre whacks me again, and he ignores my outcry.

"Hey, this is Hero Abuse!" I shout as I keep getting whacked by his bow.

"This is Hero Discipline," my friend argues back. "You went so far off the road that you completely failed to realize that you and Leuke were the only ones doing any fighting!"

"But there were fireballs and arrows," I try weakly, holding my nose again.

"That was us keeping ourselves occupied and waiting for you two to finish! We could have had a tea party back here and it wouldn't have made any difference!"

I put on a limp smile and hold my hands innocently out to either side. "But shouldn't that be amazing, then? If Leuke and I really handled that entire wave of enemies on our own?"

At my mentioning of the other party involved, Ayre wheels on him, as if to see what he has to say for himself.

He apparently has much more experience dealing with angry friends because he immediately lowers his head. "Please forgive my hubris," the swordsman quickly gushes the moment Ayre's angry gaze falls upon him.

The elf's eyes sit on him a little longer, as if gauging his sincerity. "Well, at least you apologized, I suppose," he concludes with crossed arms and a sigh, then turns back to me. "You see, Remmi? That's a Hero's humility."

I look to the side, away from them both, and cross my arms, too. "That's a guy who's already been trained by his harem," I mutter instead, and I'm not really surprised when that earns me one more whack on the head.

Korrigan, who originally seemed in passive agreement of my punishment, moves on past us now that the show has mostly wound itself down, intent on inspecting the remnants of the battle.

Unlike naturally-occurring monsters, dungeon monsters don't just lay down and die when they are defeated. This is because they are not actually living beings, but concentrated masses of arcana generated by the dungeon. When they die, then, the bonds holding them together are released, causing the masses to break down and evaporate.

Breaking up these "clots" of power releases energy being held by the dungeon, lowering its overall power level and preventing it from reaching critical mass. If adventurers didn't do this regularly, once the dungeon reaches criticality, it would expand outward, consuming more territory. Sooner or later, it would inevitably intercept occupied lands and threaten settlements.

It sometimes makes me wonder what kept them in check before the humanoid races came about and figured that out, or maybe if there's something the Essence did to shrink the dungeons back down to manageable sizes. What would happen if two dungeons ran into one another? Did perhaps dungeon wars rage across the land in Tolestean pre-history, with hordes of dungeon-spawned monsters raging against one another until one dungeon or the other exhausted itself and lost the conflicting territory?

Are there whole megadungeons out there somewhere that have absorbed other dungeons and integrated them into their structures in one massive, patchwork labyrinth? Overseas, perhaps, where there might not be any civilization to oppose them.

But one might be wondering, if dungeon monsters disappear when they're defeated, what "remnants" are there for the child to investigate? Well, sometimes, not everything disappears. Sometimes, the arcana is thick enough to make a permanent item that remains even after the monster is defeated.

These are, predictably, called dungeon drops, and are the primary means of making money off of a dungeon run. Usually, they're just particular body parts that are worth a bit to alchemists and the like. Sometimes, they're magical stones, crystals or ores, valuable to smiths and artificers. If you're really lucky, whole items can survive, which usually means magical weapons or armor.

The higher the arcana level of the dungeon when you run it, the higher the likelihood of getting drops, since, of course, the arcana is more concentrated, and we came in when it was high, so we should have decent odds.

Of course, there's another thing that will be influencing that: Heroic Luck. It's an unmeasured characteristic, but powerful in little ways. How the System can influence something as ephemeral as luck is a question that … well, I have ideas as to potential answers, but I can't say I particularly care for the implications. In this case, I prefer to just assume that the Essence radiating from a Hero's body augments or reinforces the dungeon arcana somehow, and leave it at that.

Korrigan doesn't pick up a drop, though. She picks up one of the helmets off of the ground instead, turning the battered thing over in her hands. "Do we have to pick through all of this to find any treasure?"

I wheel toward the girl, delighted for the topic to shift away from the fight, itself. "It's really a mess in here, right?" I agree, but grin at her with a wink. "I've got a trick, though, so we don't have to sort through it all!"

I focus on my auto-loot ability and mentally flip through the objects in the room. Most of them are helpfully identifiable as dungeon objects, decorative pieces that serve no real purpose without, themselves, being exceptional in some way. That would be all of the broken gear, fallen banners and busted tables. That's not to say they're worthless if someone wanted to melt them down, but it's probably more work than they're worth, given the state they're in.

The Forest Cavern Dungeon, the first dungeon I entered in this world, actually has a wide array of harvestable plants that are frequently in demand back in Dabun and as exports. Of course, the place was barren due to the Corruption when I was there, but the arcana crystals we harvested instead might have been even more valuable.

All that to say that it's not impossible, or even particularly unusual, for dungeon objects to be valuable enough to be worth gathering up, but these aren't it. Having them laying around all over the place is really irritating me, however, so I mentally select every dungeon object that isn't solid stone, and the next moment, the room is significantly emptier.

Korrigan gasps in shock, her jaw hanging open. "Wait, where did everything go?"

"I picked up everything but the actual drops," I explain, motioning with one hand to the stuff scattered across the previous battlefield that hadn't vanished. "Don't worry, you don't have to hustle around picking them up, I'll get those, too. I'm just going to dump all of this garbage in the corner first."

So I go over to the left corner from where we came in, take my backpack off, and turn it over. Without ceremony, a great cacophony fills the room as an endless stream of junk barrels forth like a tide. There's so much of it that I actually have to walk back and forth a bit to keep it from piling too high.

As the last of it falls out, I give my bag a completely needless flick and shoulder it back on before turning back to the rest of the group. Ayre has seen the trick plenty of times before, but though Leuke knows I have the storage space, this is his first time seeing auto-loot in action, or me using the storage space so extensively.

Korrigan, of course, has never seen anything of the like at all. "What kind of spell was that?!"

"No spell," I grin. "Just Hero powers!"

Ayre just sighs and rolls his eyes as he walks over to us. "I have a feeling that the System spoils you a bit too much …"