Book 1 The Empty Twin - Ch 2.2 Fray into The Planet Dungeon

“Good morning everyone, these are the representatives of each race that are currently not in stasis.” Hermione gestures towards the group beside her.

As she gestures towards the creature’s representatives one of the house-elves who were assisting Marin, Shirou, and I with breakfast joined the group of representatives. These creatures called house-elves usually move by teleporting around. Although Shirou and I did observe a peculiarity whenever they teleported.

This peculiarity is again shown right now when the house-elf named Winky appeared; she wobbled a bit before correcting herself. This mistake was further highlighted due to the fact that she frustratingly grumbles at herself when this happens. There are times as well that it looks like they teleport just a bit too high, a bit further up from ground that looks unintentional.

‘I’ll just bring that up later when it’s relevant.’ I nodded to myself last night’s meeting did extend a lot due to a lot of questions that derailed the topic of discussion. Though I’m not complaining as a lot of the off-topics that were brought up helped us in getting to know each other.

Plus, I do find a lot of the topics on magic really interesting. It looks like only Marin and I were the only ones in this group who had what I would describe as a normal background. I was taking up a business degree with a minor in finance at Yokokoku or YNU for short. While Marin was taking Fashion Design and Clothing Tech in Otsuma Women’s University.

“Hem, hem.” Hermione voiced out trying to get everyone’s attention, as the group creatures suddenly went silent. Hermione awkwardly smiled as she addressed the sea of deadpan stares and raised eyebrows.

‘Probably an awkward inside joke.’

“Let’s start by presenting good news. While everyone aside from the group of 13 weren’t present in that blessing purchasing event hosted by Zelretch, we are happy to inform everyone they were still granted certain skills.”

“Obviously they have the ability to communicate in this reality,” Hermione started, “they too were also granted General Knowledge, Common Sense, ” which she then pointedly looked at Rose. I also spy both Lefiya and Shirou flinch at that as well.  “ and Inherit Previous Body’s Skills ; everyone also had a 22% increase in height well at least everyone not in stasis; we haven’t really checked the others.”

“The only problem is they don’t have anything specialized that is relevant to this reality, like the ability to pilot spacecraft, they also don’t have any knowledge on how to operate technology from this reality.”

“I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, that can be remedied eventually by investing in education pods. It’s an expensive solution but I think it is still very workable.”  Rose interjected, “especially since we are planning on clearing this dungeon.”

In this reality there are two ways of clearing a dungeon, the first is to conquer it and once you get to the bottom you either harvest or destroy its core, turning the dungeon inert. There are planet systems who do it this way because the space within the dungeon still remains. It’s just free real estate.

Others take it to the extreme where planets are just converted to pure agricultural or industrial lands while they relocate billions of their population into their now inert dungeon.

The second way is that they let the core remain intact while they harvest the dungeon endlessly. Dungeons are born from a different plane of existence. It takes outside energy for it to root, hence the initial purge where it absorbs most of the planet’s energy. The final stage of a life cycle of a dungeon is when it wants to reproduce.

According to General Knowledge dungeons generate their own energy. Once rooted they can maintain their homeostasis for a very long time, well according to history so far it can maintain itself for as long as the current empire has lived, so far.

For a dungeon to reproduce it must reach an overflow state, after a certain period of homeostasis. After that the “roots” of the dungeon reaches out and passively absorbs the planet’s inner energy while multiple minor dungeon breaks happen where energy is consumed, absorbed, and harvested by the monsters on the surface.

This happens when an overflow state is reached when a dungeon either has reached 50 or 100 floors, well at least that's what has been observed. There are multiple examples of planet dungeons with more than 100 floors but that’s because the planet governing that dungeon feeds it energy in a controlled environment, while hiring multiple adventures to cull the monsters; preventing it from reaching an overflow state.

“So anyway I think we can begin with the introduction.” Rose gestured towards Hermione, urging her to move forward with today’s proceedings.

With that distraction I find myself breaking my previous train of thought.

“Right, first we have Winky, she is the leader of the group of house-elves assigned to us.” Hermione started with the introduction. “Haruka, I’ll probably won’t forget this but please remind me to bring up the current house-elf population problem later.”

“Okay.” As I nodded in acknowledgement writing it down on the notebook that was provided to everyone within the group of 13.

As I looked at the representatives who were now given a table and chairs. They too were provided a pen and notebook for notes, unlike the rest of the creatures here in the audience who were provided with several sheets of paper and a pen.

A separate higher table was provided to the representative who resembles what probably is a centaur. ‘Human torso, horse body, yep they probably are centaurs.’

Even when he folds his legs to “sit” the centaur is still much taller than the other creatures beside him. The same type of table is provided behind us, as a long line of centaurs were facing the raised stage.

Unlike last night where I was tasked as the secretary of the meeting where I also took notes on the minutes of what has been discussed; luckily that job was given to an enchanted quill that does that for everyone. My new task is to provide summaries, take notes, and list down relevant questions or scratch out questions that were already answered. Only when all relevant questions are asked shall we open the floor to other inquiries.

After Winky’s self-introduction and her short lecture on their race’s capabilities, Hermione moved on to the next. “This is High Goblin Ragnar.”

As the short humanoid started his lecture I looked down at my notes to review my summary on house-elves.

Bring up the current population problem.

Can turn invisible and can silently move around. (Using their teleport activity?)

A lot of them have varied specialties, depending on the task given to them by their “family/master”.

Not slaves but in a mutualistic relationship with their “master”.

Almost everyone is skilled at housework.

Amazing at wandless magic but is limited to the magic provided by the master.

According to Rose Potter they are loyal to a fault and are kinda stuck in their own ways.

According to Gabrielle a lot of them are victims of abuse.

Highlight later: Need to bring up that their name might provide friction with the other races in this reality.

As I circled the last point several times. I also circled the same point under my review on the goblins. As I took notes on the goblin’s lecture on their race, I am mentally reviewing the information on elves in this reality.

If you remove the hybrids or mixed raced elves, as elves in this reality can only reproduce with someone whom they subconsciously acknowledged as their soulmate; that means they can essentially mate with any race, there are 4 types of elves in this reality. First are the Aeldari and Drukhari, these elves are considered ancient, they were created by now deceased gods several hundred millennia ago.

These progenitors of the now abundant Elves and High Elves, are tall psionic behemoths, who were specifically created to defend the old ones from extinction. While they failed at defending their creators, the Aeldari were strong enough to defeat the race who successfully annihilated a whole race of gods.

The Aeldari who onced were the leading race of this galaxy lost most of their population due to their excess of hedonism which resulted in them birthing a chaos god.

Nowadays the Aeldari are rarely seen as they generally live in spacecraft the size of continents, some even the size of planetoids. The spacecraft are called craftworlds and they generally move around deep space, which are areas outside of star systems without any hyperlane exits. Though it is estimated that each craftworld houses about a billion Aeldari.

Drukhari are similar to the Aeldari in this situation. They are an off-shoot race who embraced the excess of hedonism and surpassed it when their chaos god was born. Not much information is currently known about them as a lot of it was lost with time.  

They currently inhabit a psychic dimension built by the Aeldari and are unreachable by normal means. The only way an outsider will see this dimension is when they conduct raids on planets and you are taken as their slaves to be tortured for eternity.

They are easily the most hated race in this galaxy. There’s actually a current running theory that they are the largest source of pirates in the galaxy and that’s the main reason why no matter how hard governments crack down on pirates it seems that there’s an unlimited supply of them.

Shivering at the thought of that particular race. The one presenting right now is another creature described in popular fiction books, her top half is humanoid while the bottom half is pure fish. According to the speaker she belongs to the Siren race which is classified under the merfolk race. Though she did add that her particular sub-species has some common ancestry with veela.

While I take notes on Vasia’s lecture about the merfolk, I continue on with assimilating the information from General Knowledge . When I talked about how General Knowledge and all other information based skills work with Hermione and Rin after a bit of testing and questioning each other.

We came to two conclusions. First, you always know what the General Knowledge knows. For example when asked, “Do you know what are the prevailing races in the Chommell System and do you know how they were assimilated into the Grakkan Empire?”, your General Knowledge automatically prompts you, that you know this information.

In which Illya jokingly said “So half of the knowledge General Knowledge provides is that we know about the other half of the information it can supply?”  Which raised quite a few chuckles and some grumbled curses directed towards a certain dimension hopping being.

Unfortunately, Illya’s description summary of how the skill works is spot on. When prompted you only know that you know a certain information. You still can’t put it into words. It’ll be like presenting a powerpoint presentation but you did not participate in making this powerpoint.

In comes the  second conclusion, you still need to actively process it. If we’re using the same metaphor, I as the presenter of the powerpoint will still need to read all of the slides and the notes related to the presentation for you to be an effective presenter.

So in conclusion you still need to actively digest the information provided by General Knowledge . Luckily, it doesn’t really take too much time and you can do this effectively while multitasking and busy with other tasks.

Illya did suggest to everyone not to do this while in the dungeon as you need all of your mental faculties present so as not to make any life changing mistakes. Gabrielle did say that we might be able to speed up the process of assimilation using occlumency.

‘Argh, another thing on the pile of things to do.’ I do feel somewhat pressured due to the time limit set upon us. There’s a lot of things to do but too little time.

Anyway back to the elves, as the centaur is now presenting. The remaining two elven races are currently the prevailing race, or at least they are the ones who are most commonly seen. First would be the High Elves, the first off-shoot race who actually broke away from their predetermined end.

The problem with Aeldari and Drukhari, well at least a few hundred millennia ago, is that when they die their soul doesn’t go through the cycle of reincarnation. Their soul after death goes straight to the chaos god that they birthed. This eventually leads to the true death of their soul.

Not much is known on how the High Elves broke away from their destiny, but these days all of them not only wield psionic powers but also cosmic energy. Most of them work for the Consortium Primaris as a member of their cosmic space monks. They’re pretty tight lipped about their origins and a lot of them are quite proud of themselves in the best of days.

Scratch that, all elven races are proud of their heritage despite its history. Some of them even hold important positions which may cause problems for us later on, which is the main reason why Shirou and I would like to suggest a change in the house-elves’ names.

Which brings us to the final Aeldari off-shoot race, the elves. They are the youngest race amongst the four. Like the high elves, they too broke away from their destined end. They were able to achieve this by taking a gamble as they made a deal with a god of nature and magic.

The name of this god or goddess isn’t really known as the elves are very tight lipped about it but you can see physical manifestations of their god in their mother systems. This manifestation takes form as a large world tree.

One of these world trees is actually found in the planet that co-orbits this one. Looking up at the clear sky an unobtrusive view of that tree can be seen even from this planet. It looks pretty much like the Yggdrasil Tree from one of those fantasy games Naofumi always plays.

With that reminder my mood instantly dipped. ‘I wonder if I’ll get to see both Naofumi and Tomoya again?’

Shaking my head, ‘Priorities first.’ I chanted to myself. We need to survive on this planet first and finding Naofumi and Tomoya should be my least priority as they got reincarnated. Before I thought of finding my two best friends, another group of my close friends got directly transferred.

Haruka and Yuki, they’re the ones whom I was trying to get near during the transfer countdown. Unfortunately I barrelled into this eclectic group.

When Illya was teaching us Structural Analysis awhile ago, after she lectured me about Shirou whom I initially was quite wary of, she gave me an idea on how to easily find my lost friends.

While there might not be an easy way for me to find Nao and Touya, with her advice we might be able to find Haruka and Yuki easily.

*POV Change*

“Marin, don’t push too hard as you can get easily flanked.” I said as I sliced at a werebeast who tried flanking her by crawling up the wall.

“Alio! Alio! Alio!” sending fire blasts at 3 more werebeast who are charging at us from the ceiling. “Haruka, Haruhime, loose!”

Both fired their bows at the monster’s furthest from us. Marin then performed a wide horizontal sweeping gesture with her great sword as a trio of monsters were heavily maimed and pushed back by the momentum created by the large weapon.

“Zähre!” Illya chanted as a bird made of strings bombarded the injured enemies finishing them off.

“Phew. Good job everyone.” As I quietly admire how easy it was for Marin to wield her great sword, which was supplied by Shirou. She did invest in Sword Aptitude skills, a general one and another involving great swords, she also bought monstrous strength.  

I, myself, took advantage of the skill store and increased my aptitude for swords making my role as a magic swordsman much smoother; though I still am not as skilled as Ryuu. I found that out during one of our training sessions.

Anyway, looking at Marin as she easily picks up the corpses of the downed monsters and lining them up on a sheet of tarpaulin laid out by both Haruka and Haruhime. The reason we do this is to prevent the loss of energy from the magicites we’ll harvest.

Upon the death of a monster, the dungeon immediately breaks the body down; starting with its magicite. For as long as the monster is in contact with the dungeon the dungeon can easily extract the essence of the dead monster for later use.

Normally you can just quickly hack into the cavity where the magicite is located pretty quickly but the others argued that we’d want to maximize the harvest as they want to make use of every available part a monster can provide. Hence the use of tarpaulins and magic bags with expansion enchantments.

Another thing you can see from Marin is that she currently looks far different from her previous look as she transformed her hair, body, and face. She also bought a skill called Metamorphing which grants her the ability to change her body’s features.

She sheepishly explained that she bought that ability purely for the ease where she can “cosplay” different characters. Apparently in their reality there are groups of peoples who dress up as their favourite fictional characters as a hobby; wherein they invest quite a lot of time, effort, and resources in achieving this.

According to her she’s cosplaying as the character Archangel Haniel. She, with the help of Shirou and Illya, repurposed one of her cosplay clothes into something she can wear in the dungeon. As she is now sporting high waist pants, a corset, a heavily reinforced mantle, and thigh high boots that were modified because Shirou argued that wearing heels to battle is just dumb.

Moving on, we are currently on the 8th floor of the dungeon. Our group is tasked to do what High Skratte, formerly High Goblin, Ragna calls strip mining. Where we slowly but methodically harvest the whole floor, stripping it of its resources. Our current goal is to reach the 19th floor and to survey the area of 20th floor for when we plan a full team raid on the boss when it respawns after Shirou and Ryuu beats it.

Our current working theory is that this dungeon is on the precipice of a dungeon break and the best way to prevent or mitigate that is to redirect the dungeon’s energy into wasting its stores. We do this by clearing each floor, emptying it of all monsters and resources before we move on.

This also works for the benefit of everyone as every resource collected is used for either research purposes to better our likelihood of succeeding in our goal, used as materials for both Shirou, Marin, and their team of Skrattes and Centaurs who make weapons and armor for everyone, and finally this is something I don’t really want to think about the meat of the monsters birthed in planet dungeons are edible.

Unlike the monsters from Orario who disappear once their magic stone, or in this reality’s case mana core, is destroyed or extracted, the body shatters into motes of energy. Here everything remains even after death.

The cooking team, which consists of Haruka, Haruhime, Sakura, and Shirou with a large team of brownies, formerly known as house-elves, will cook large portions of the meat and are put in stasis for later consumption.

Other parts are also experimented on, take these werebeasts for example. These monsters are humanoid that look like they are mixed with certain animals. These werebeasts look like a bipedal turtle-lizard hybrid. Shirou has been salt curing about a fourth of the collected legs and tail from these monsters.

He says that these can be future products of our planet. Unfortunately we don’t have much when it comes to non-meat products as we only just began with the cultivation of farms. While there are magical ways of speeding up the process, the initial cultivation will need time invested.

Current projection says that it’ll take a minimum of 3 weeks before the first harvest is collected. That’s why we are also hoping that the next biome is a forest.

That’s one of Ryuu and Shirou’s goals of the day. First of course to defeat the boss on the 20th floor and gather data, and to scout the next area of the dungeon.

“Lefiya!” Syr, who was previously in a different part of the floor with Gabrielle and a group of Skratte, called out to us. “We are setting up camp near the stairs to the next floor, let’s eat first before we dive deeper.”

Sighing as I gave orders to the brownies, who are now breaking down or collecting the dead monsters, reminding them to alternate with each other when comes to work and break.

*POV Change*

“Oh yeah Shirou, how’s your hand again?” That detail slipped my attention when he suddenly started talking about his concerns on his apparent ease in his magecraft, remembering the unwieldy thorned spear where he bled a lot during the fight. This was the hardest skirmish, so far, but in the end I as a veteran dungeon delver wasn’t really troubled by our previous predicament.

I just brought  that fact up since it’s the only injury inflicted, so far, on this dungeon dive.

Shirou then awkwardly rubbed his hands on his thighs as he then presented his pristine palms. “Yeah, this type of minor damage is easily healed; but thank you for worrying.”

“How about you? Have you checked yourself for injuries?” Shirou replied with his stoic face as his hand touched my shoulder.

I felt that magical energy passing through my body, as I flinched.

He too flinched, “Oh sorry it was second nature, I am used to doing that in a warzone. I should have asked.”

“No, no, no, it’s fine but yeah ask beforehand.”

“Mipsy, let’s have a somewhat relaxed working lunch. All of the floor’s monsters are probably in this hall right now.” I, turning to the help who supervises our team’s extraction group.

Approaching the group of skratte and brownies breaking down the monsters. “Does anyone know which floor the others are currently on?”

“Mistress Ryuu.” Another elf appeared, “They being in  the 8th floor. They be taking  their lunch and break; mistress.”

“Good, depending on how strong the boss on the 20th is, we still have time to explore the floors beyond.”

“Maybe we could ask our team of skrattes and brownies to backtrack and help the stripmining team to push forward faster?” Shirou suggested as he and a group of brownies started setting up a kitchen.

They had several shiny metal stations made of stainless steel, where some of the brownies are already starting to cut the budgeted vegetables we could use on this dungeon raid.

While Shirou brought out a high output magical burner he requested from Rose and Hermione, and is now sauteing a piece of the aranea’s leg in a large wok. One of the brownies also brought out samples of the new monsters we have defeated for testing.

While this scene seems bizarre it has been our norm ever since we started dungeon delving. During our lunch breaks, Shirou and the brownies would taste test the new ingredients they have harvested from the dungeon and quite an amazing spread of monster based dishes. Though we still request a budgeted supply of ingredients from their reality for comfort.

“Well they can help the other team while we fight the floor boss, but we still need them for when we explore the floors beyond.”

“Skratte Zaartag did you have any difficulty with the 16th to 18th floor?” I addressed one of the captains of our skratte team, as he and a few select skrattes and brownies are assigned as guarding and combat as their main responsibility.

“Ms. Lion-Astraea aside from the sudden swarm of revived araneas, we do not have any problems with any of the floors.” The skratte formally replied as he probably picked-up on what I was going to ask.

Rubbing his chin with his right arm. “Yes, I think we can have a small team of harvesters group up with us while we back track towards the 16th and 17th, while you face the boss on the 20th.” He gruffly concluded.

“Thank you Skratte Zaartag, we can just have Mipsy accompany us as insurance and she can call you back after we’re done with the 20th. While the rest should double-back towards the stripmining group.”

This plan was acknowledged by everyone. “Just a reminder to the team who’ll be double backing, prioritise your safety and your reunion with the other team, take extra caution in preventing a monster swarm to form. We don’t want to pass parade  our own team.”

A monster swarm, Marin and Haruka calls it a monster train, is where you draw in the attention of multiple monsters as you backtrack through the dungeon; while a pass parade is when you dump said monster swarm into another group, distracting the monster swarm, while you escape for your lives.

With our plans finalised, I took a seat on one of the prepared dining tables facing down the hall as we already know that the stairs towards the next floor is behind us, making guarding our temporary camp easier.

Crossing both my arms and legs, this raid has multiple goals. The first and obvious one is that Shirou and I would face the boss on the 20th, defeat it; then using the wand wizard’s way of extracting memories, view it in a device they call a Penseive.

Generally planet dungeons spawns boss monsters either every 10 or 20 floors, plus or minus a floor, since the 10th was just a regular floor then we are pretty sure the next or the 21st is the boss room.

Unless the large aranea with a humanoid thorax was the actual boss. Anyway, aside from spawning a boss monster every 10 or 20 floors, the last 10 or 5 floors within a dungeon also spawns a unique boss monster each. So we are expecting a series of marathon boss battles starting from either the 40th or 45th floor up until the 50th.

Of course we were hoping that Gabrielle and Illya would succeed in their beacon plan. Which brings us to our second goal, Gabrielle and Illya are planning on creating beacons each floor to help assist with the accuracy of portkey travel.

A portkey is basically any object that is magically enchanted to create, what Hermione explains as, either a one-way or two-way magical wormhole that connects two distant points together.

Due to the fact that they can’t instinctually do long distance transportation magic. Unlike before where they are planet bound all their life in their previous reality; where the planet follows its own uniquely patterned trajectory through space. On top of this it is partially assisted by the will of their planet’s magic

In this new reality where none of those factors or information are currently available, Gabrielle and Illya proposed a solution. Instead of trying to calculate this planet’s trajectory through space-time and measure the pattern of its trajectory, why not make a magically unique beacon?

Where you can just say “Okay portkey you see that beacon? Go there!”. Of course if you look at that beacon from outside the planet it is moving but from the perspective of a person within a planet’s gravity well that beacon is stationary.

At least that’s how Gabrielle and Illya explained it. It’s a good thing General Knowledge also provides context on a lot of these terms that were previously alien to me.   None of these concepts weren’t relevant back in Orario and most of the advancement in technology was granted by the gods and goddesses to make their lives easier or to amuse them.

The final goal is to find dungeon-produced plant life, as we do not really want to depend on our food reserves. While so far the edible meat we have harvested from the dungeon can sustain us we are going to be in trouble if we continuously dip into our reserves of vegetables, fruits, and starch products.

Especially with the number of brownies around. A large portion of them were supposed to be in stasis but unfortunately there was a mishap where they weren’t really in stasis but put into a magical coma instead.

A magical coma which still requires them to ingest nutrients and calories otherwise they would die. So they were woken up to at least lighten the work but we are still suddenly burdened with about 4,000 more mouths to feed, and the first harvest at earliest will probably be in 3 weeks.

Suddenly there was a thud behind me as a bowl of rice with an assortment of vegetables and monster meat on top entered my vision. “Hey,” I raised my head to see Shirou holding the bowl of immaculate looking food at me while he sheepishly smiled.

“Hunger is the enemy.”