The moment I received Rose's pink quest window, all strength left my body.
I fell to the ground as I saw strange blue Mana circuits covering my body. There was something about these circuits that felt different from the circuits that were present all around the dungeon.
I could feel something different from them, and from the looks of it, I was not the only one being sucked in by these circuits.
Everyone throughout the dungeon was the same. They were being sucked into a different realm by these energy wires.
By the time I opened my eyes, I found myself suspended in what seemed like an endless whiteness.
This was not the same as the spectral form that I was now used to. I was not seeing the dungeon from the guest perspective either.
There was an endless whiteness before my eyes and this whiteness, one that stretched endlessly, was seen slowly filling with black dots.
They were distant at first, but slowly started appearing all around me.
Right beside me, my baby Qwy was also floating without having to move her wings.
She merely floated in this endless whiteness and watched the black dots pop up around us.
We had no idea what this was, but when a certain, large white dot appeared somewhere near me, I felt something that made me realise something important.
These white dots were the people that I was fighting alongside just a moment ago.
The closer ones were those who I had interacted with while the distant ones seemed to be the ones we did not have much interaction with.
[ "It has been confirmed that the dungeon has taken over your physical body. You are currently in a mental realm, master." ]
Her voice was all serious. She did not like the situation we were in right now, but this was the inevitable outcome that she had warmed me about.
Now we have to deal with this.
[ "The dungeon is looking into your memories and analysing your experiences right now. It is designing a punishment by cross referencing the data that it had gathered from the previous instances." ]
[ "The Assistance System will block the dungeon from accessing the core files and place a firewall around the secured data. However, blocking the dungeon under the current circumstances is not possible this time." ]
The way Rose used all those terms just for me made me a little emotional.
A while back, she was only text on a pink panel screen but now she knew how to speak the way I understood the best.
Also, from how she said those things, I could just tell that how the dungeon was analysing my mind, she was analysing the dungeon back like some reverse analysis module specialised for countering the hacking attempts.
[ "In some time, the dungeon will create the task with the lives of all these people at stake. Not only will you do something similar to what you did during the first dungeon task, since this is a punishment by the dungeon, the dungeon will do what it can to destroy as many people present as possible." ]
[ "Your task, however, will be to prevent the dungeon from destroying your allies. While you do that, you will also have to present your reasoning behind your actions and justify not taking the obvious task that would have benefited you the most." ]
Her words were very easy to understand. In fact, the whole situation, as dangerous as it may be, seemed far more straightforward thanks to her explanations.
If situations like these weren't so common, how did the other dungeon architect guests ever get out of these kinds of situations? ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ ɴovelfire.net
"Without you, I don't even know how I would have countered situations like these."
[ "As you already know what the purpose of the assistance system is, it will not be elaborated further." ]
[ "The judgement of the dungeon is clear. You are a threat that tried to get in its way. You are not a guest anymore but an anarchist that is trying to spread imbalance throughout the dungeon environment." ]
[ "One must overcome the judgement of the dungeon if one wants to preserve their own life as well as the life of the others around them. And for that…" ]
All the black dots or stars or whatever you would call them, were connected with a bunch of colorful lines.
Red, blue, green, gold, black, and a kind of white that you can see even in this completely white environment.
All these lines created a messy woolball of different colors, spreading a kind of dense energy around us that shook the entire groundless, ceilingless world.
Energy flowed from one point to another, and the fine threads of energy that were carrying this energy were abstract instead of being physical.
This whole thing was happening inside a realm that was more inside the mind than in the physical or spectral world.
I was a thought here, and perhaps that was why I could tell instinctively what this was and what I was supposed to do.
"A resonance protocol."
The black and white nodes weren't random; they were data points in a vast neural lattice.
The colored threads weaving between them weren't just mana lines but conscious fibers, executing emotion as code.
Red for aggression, blue for logic, gold for will, white for memory…
A recursive resonance protocol linking every soul that the dungeon had indexed from our raid parties.
This wasn't a battlefield. It was a cloud matrix running a moral stress test, and I was the variable here this time.
The Emotive circuitry was messing with my baby so much that it started screaming the moment this thing appeared.
She had never been this agitated before but, this messy thing hurt her more than any physical wound ever had.
The threads that had a certain purpose and were moving the energy through different points around the different black stars were connected through fractal command lines which made the setup feel even more intense.
"Calm down dear." Using our link as a medium, I used positive emotions to calm my Qwy. It wasn't difficult since I had experience dealing with things like these.
They may look highly complicated and very difficult to untangle, but the only thing I needed to do here was to untangle this whole mess while not messing up with any of the connection points.
'It was the same as diffusing a very complicated bomb.'
The price here, however, will be the life of one… or perhaps far too many people than what I can afford to lose here.
[ "The dungeon is cruel for this. Not only is it alternating the energy load throughout the different connection lines, it is also making the combinations far too complex for a quick solution." ]
[ "There are no attempts this time. One wrong move will result in deaths of one or many individuals." ]
[ "You can predict who will die if you calculate certain factors, but even that is a difficult task." ]
In normal cases, Rose would not give out important information until I pay her a price equal to the answer. But in important situations like these, none of it seemed to matter.
"So I have to first balance the energy load and then deal with the connection points one by one or in a way that does not harm the whole of the system, correct?"
[ "In simpler terms, yes. However, there's more to it." ]
"The dungeon will keep circulating the info-data so that I can't pinpoint the start or end points of the ongoing process, right?"
She was speechless for a moment. Well, it wasn't something to be speechless over.
I've been a cloud architect for long enough to understand the ins and outs of different data structures.
After spending all this time in this world, I have also come to understand how different energies function here.
The dungeon is the one that taught me how it functions and how it interprets certain things… so, after all this time, it should not be too surprising that I understand the challenges it presents to us, right?
Besides, the problem this time was simple.
It was simple. So much so that I couldn't help my sigh.
[ "Why are you so calm despite not understanding anything? You will have to do most of this on your own." ]
Her skill name is assistance system, not spoon feeding system. Obviously she's not going to do all the work every time.
The scenery before me right now was a little too complex. All the lives that had fought to take down the Naga mother was now hanging by threads— literal threads.
"You already knew I won't be able to save everyone." A smile appeared on my face as I thought about how Rose gave away the quest as if she knew exactly what was going to happen.
She was not that different from the dungeon. She was also asking me questions that she knew the answers to.
Her reasoning and motives were simply different here. But, well, we can think about all that later.
"Let's save as many of them as we can first, shall we?"
Taking a deep breath, I focused on the pile of strings present before me.
And right after that, I started my calculations the way they were supposed to go…