Chapter 4: Chapter 04

"I got laid!" Akane squealed.

"So you've said," Nicky said, nodding. "Thirty times, already."

"It's the sort of thing worth repeating," Akane said.

"And you're going to keep repeating it until I finally engage with you and ask about this momentous life occasion for you," Nicky said.

"Mhm!"

"Alright. What, precisely, made Roxy such an appealing choice that she was your first time, when previously, all of your dates ended with deciding that the other person wasn't right for you?"

"...Wow, you are really engaging, aren't you?" Akane said. "Uhhh... Hrm. Tricky question... gimme a moment to think about it..."

"We've got plenty of time," Nicky said.

"...I think part of it was, a lot of the time, when I was dating an alpha or a beta from either some other training group, or not even part of the Guild but the right age to be in the Guild, they put on a show of confidence, but it never felt right," Akane said. "It always felt like... well, like a twenty year old putting up a front or being genuinely arrogant. Because, y'know, that's what it was. But Roxy's confidence never felt unearned to me. She had clearly accomplished impressive things, and was quite willing to own up to potential shortcomings she was aware of. It felt real, like she really was that confident in her own abilities. And that's why I think you should date older women."

"I am twenty five," Roxy said from the front of the party, after disintegrating a rust slime. "Our age gap is three years."

"And for you, those three years were clearly productive," Akane said primly. "Are you done with the Dungeon yet?"

"This Dungeon is probably either of average size or larger," Roxy said. "Two more rooms, at least." She pressed herself against the wall next to the door, producing her tiny-mirror-on-a-stick, and then tapped the edge of the door with her fingertip before yanking it back. "Boss door. Four chests. Two mimics... one of which also has treasure." Roxy withdrew her mirror. "Alright. Next room is a straight corridor, with three chests in a line on either side. Middle chest on the left and far chest on the right are both mimics, with the far chest on the right dropping chest-type loot. I'm going to walk in, disintegrate the near mimic, then magic missile the far mimic, then we can check the rest of the chests for traps."

"You said you were a bad delver," Nicky said.

"I am," Roxy said. "A good delver would've brought a real security expert along. I didn't, though, because I can afford to be lazy and do it all with magic. Which only really works for threats that're at least two levels below you; on-level delving requires a security expert."

"Our standards for 'good delver' may be somewhat different," Nicky said dryly.

"Maybe," Roxy said with a shrug. "I dinged Level 10 a year ago and got the slotless Mystic Artificer class unlock every Level 10 spellcaster gets, and got handed over to a new mentor who really drilled delving tactics into me. Made me do twelve runs a day with perfect form, every day, for three months. Compared to her, I'm barely good enough to keep my license."

"...Hrm."

"You might learn better from her tutelage, if you're the sort who really wants to be good at dungeon crawling," Roxy added. "Anyway, stand back, I got this."

Roxy poked exactly enough around the corner of the door frame to nail the first mimic with a disintegration ray, and then a little more to nail second mimic with a magic missile.

"Clear," Roxy said, while the second mimic was still flailing and dying, before coughing up its loot. "Oh hey, an Alchemist Class Unlock. If either of you wanna be an Alchemist, this is a pretty good opportunity."

"Isn't that what support adventurers are for?" Nicky asked. "Or Familiars?"

"Kinda, sorta," Roxy said. "On the one hand, specialization is good because it lets you focus your efforts on being the best at one thing, letting you reach the highest levels of skill. On the other hand, generalization is also good because you can never be totally sure that you'll have a varied crew with all the specialists you need. Personally, I never regretted taking Alchemist because it let me turn the alchemical reagents that drop in literally almost every delve into potions, which were themselves useful, and also generally sold for more money than the reagents that went into making them."

"Hm. Fair, I suppose."

"I also like making things, so I liked having a crafter class," Roxy continued. "If you don't, then maybe a crafter class isn't for you. I don't know. I'm not actually qualified to advise you on your build, and you should consult with some experts- I'll connect you to a few of them- before making any choices in that direction."

Roxy waltzed into the penultimate room, whistling as she opened up chests and pulled out loot, stuffing it into a bag of holding.

"So, what kind of loot have we earned so far?" Akane asked.

"There's two competing schools of thought on tracking loot during a delve," Roxy said. "Some people say that tracking your profits during a delve is just going to distract you from completing the delve, and that you should only count your money after you're out of the Dungeon. Meanwhile, some other people instead say that every choice you make should be made carefully, with as much information as you can muster available to you, and that 'how much loot you've gotten' is a perfectly valid piece of information to track and consider during a delve. Our gut feelings sometimes mislead us, and being able to compare the predicted returns from completing the Dungeon to the predicted chances of surviving the attempt helps you make more clear-headed decisions about whether or not you should turn back and either cut your losses or quit while you're ahead."

"Which do you fall under?" Nicky asked.

"The former, mostly," Roxy said. "It's what I was taught, and the mentor who taught me delving tactics always told me that health and safety came before profit. That I should never for a moment consider questions of profit or opportunity cost when deciding whether to press on. A dungeon is either a cakewalk or not worth the risk, and that's that. She's never lost a party member, after thirty years of delving, so I'm willing to say her method works."

"You know some impressive people," Akane said.

"Eyup," Roxy said. "They were all either friends or students or sometimes both of Ariel Ironborn, back before she was the Guild Leader."

"You trained under the students of the Guild Leader?" Nicky asked, incredulous. "That- how have we never heard of you before?!"

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"Because Ariel Ironborn had a lot of friends and students," Roxy said. "She was downright aggressive about networking, really. Literally anyone who came to her for help, she helped them. She made a lot of friends with young, up-and-coming Guilders... and, y'know, in the process, she made them a lot stronger and more capable than other Guilders their age. See, she wasn't just doing this to be nice. She was doing this as a practical, hard-nosed way to build up a social network of rising stars who felt indebted to her for their tutelage, and who would, in many cases, go on to play the same role for other new Guilders and make them into rising stars, and then tell them they really had Ariel Ironborn to thank for the help, and they were just paying it forward."

"So that's how she became Guild Leader at Level 10..." Akane said. "Before that, weren't all the Guild Leaders, like, super high level? Level 15, 16? I heard that the Founder, Kara Strong-In-The-Arm, was Level 20, but that sounds kind of apocryphal and legend-like to me, so I'm not sure it's true."

"Kara Strong-In-The-Arm was a Level 14 Ranger who managed to hit Level 20 Dungeon Master in the process of creating the Guild," Roxy said. "It's actually a really interesting story!"

"Dungeon Master is an actual class?" Nicky asked. "I thought it was just an honorific for the Mystic Artificers who kept the Dungeons operating."

"Nope! Dungeon Master is the class that lets you create Dungeons. The class unlocks automatically if you get Mystic Artificer and Farmer up past Level 10, but you do need an open class slot for it, which is why I'm here- I want to unlock Dungeon Master and try my hand at creating my own Dungeons, and do some research into the field."

"Fair enough," Nicky said. "But... okay, how do you level it up? Delving your own Dungeons?"

"That's the most reliable way to do it, but also the slowest," Roxy said. "See, one Dungeon Master can make multiple Dungeon Gates, each of which can maintain one Dungeon Instance at a time. But one person can only delve one Dungeon at a time. That's why Kara Strong-In-The-Arm started the Guild, which was, at first, an accident. When she unlocked Dungeon Master, she first went back to her clan so she could make crappy Level 1 Dungeons for the clan's youngest generation of warriors to delve for XP and profit. But her clan wasn't interested, so she instead went to a nearby town and set up shop there, luring in Level 1s to delve her Dungeons so she could get XP. One thing led to another, and suddenly Kara Strong-In-The-Arm had completely abandoned her plan of leveling up Dungeon Master for the purpose of making dungeons that she could challenge to more efficiently level up Ranger, and was instead just rolling around in the money she made from Guild fees, but also all the paperwork she had to do to keep the Guild running."

"Huh," Akane said. "So, she did a very practical, hard-nosed strategy... that, by necessity, involved raising up other people and making their lives better?"

"Yeah, pretty much," Roxy said. "Naturally, Ariel Ironborn was quite happy to draw parallels between herself and Kara Strong-In-The-Arm in her bid for Guild leadership."

"Is that your goal as well?" Nicky asked.

"Hah! Fuck no!" Roxy cackled. "Running the Guild sounds like a complete nightmare! Besides, while I am a particularly exemplary result of the Ironborn method, I'm by no means its greatest exemplar, and absolutely not the only one. Remember that one mentor who drilled me in delving tactics? Yeah, she had thirty two apprentices at any given time, and each given apprentice was only with her for four months total. That's ninety six apprentices a year, and she's been doing this for the past six years."

"I'm beginning to see precisely why Ariel Ironborn isn't that concerned with the question of inexperience in carried delvers," Nicky said.

"I've heard through the grapevine that she intends to hire on some tactical trainers for helping with Guild basic training, sometime soon," Roxy mentioned. "A shame you two graduated too soon to get that training early on. Anyway! Boss time!"

---

"I can't believe it," Nicky said, sitting next to Akane at the table. "The second night since graduation, and I've already been through eight delves, in a Growth Dungeon, which was twice my level."

"Thanks for soldiering through all eight," Roxy said. "I was prepared to call it at two, for your sake, but you got up to speed fast."

"You may recall that we didn't do very much," Nicky said dryly.

"So, what'd we get?" Akane asked.

"We've gotten..." Roxy dumped her bag of holding out onto the table, and then cast a spell on the resulting pile of treasure, instantly sorting it all into neat piles. "Three Growth daggers, two Growth longswords, two full sets of mismatched Growth armor, a Growth tower shield, two Growth spellbooks, an Alchemist Class Unlock, two Farmer Class Unlocks, a Rancher Class Unlock, and a thousand gold in coinage or equally-fungible liquid assets like vendor trash herbs."

"One thousand gold," Nicky whispered.

"Yeah, Growth Dungeons are not good for your bank account," Roxy continued. "A Level 6 delve slot costs a hundred and twenty gold, with the Guild, and so eight slots like we just ran- in the middle of the night, so we didn't interrupt anyone else- would've cost just shy of a thousand gold. Assuming the only haul is coinage- and that's pretty reasonable, everything else is something you'd want to barter directly for other goods that simply didn't drop for you- then you're barely squeaking out, like, forty or fifty gold profit over the course of what would be two weeks of delving if you only delved once per weekday. And, uh. Well, unless you're doing things about as perfectly as a Level 14 Wizard, you're also going to be spending money on potions of health, mana, stamina... It's expensive, running Growth Dungeons. Thankfully, we don't have to pay for jack shit. Not even opportunity cost, because I'm pretty much always using my mana potion throughput as bargaining chips. I haven't sold very much of it directly for money."

"And, like you said, all of this is stuff we can keep?" Akane asked?

"Yep!" Roxy said. "Literally everything we got today. I don't want any of this crap. Keep it, use it, trade it, sell it, I don't care- although, if you need help selling or trading it, lemme know and I'll help you out."

"I'm gonna pay so many bills," Akane said, eyes watering. "I'm gonna buy my mom a house."

"My services as an interior-expander are quite reasonably-priced," Roxy noted.

"If I may ask," Nicky said. "What happened to the loot accrued from your intense grinding session with the tactics mentor?"

"There wasn't any," Roxy said. "She ran us through Training Dungeons. Very unpopular for any other purpose, because they give literally zero XP or loot. That does make them a hell of a lot cheaper to operate, though. But for the rest of my delving loot... well, I bought this house, a whole bunch of farmable plants, and some less-farmable stuff so I could work on this place. Anyhow. I think, for now, it may be best to just sit on this loot and not do anything with it. It's late, and we should be getting to bed. Night, girls." Roxy stood up, and walked off to her room.

"Bed sounds..." Akane yawned. "Pretty nice, yeah."

Nicky and Akane got up and walked back off to their own bedrooms, laying down to sleep...

...but, in Nicky's case, getting back up five minutes later to carefully get up, walk back through the house, and to Roxy's bedroom door. She hadn't even knocked yet before the door opened.

"You need it already, huh?" Roxy asked.

"...Yes," Nicky admitted.

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