IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.3, 6.4

On my third floor, halfway between the Raven’s Roost and the third floor exit, a chest had just popped up.

A chest that I had absolutely not wanted to put there.

I tried to remove it, and it sank into the floor right along with an intensifying of the itch. An instant later, another undesired chest appeared, this time on floor two.

That was… odd. Was this the curse?

That was a little underwhelming.

Later that night, the soldiers I’d trained with killed Atlas and claimed the loot from my chests. When they walked out and left my floor, I was hit by a wave of nausea.

And then, almost immediately after they left my stairs, the chests rose back out of the floor, taking some of my mana along with them.

More than they should have, actually.


Oh.


So that’s what the curse did.
Last

—IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.3



For adventurers, what was happening to me had to be pretty sweet, I had to say. For them, it was a larger number of readily available loot points which regenerated four times faster than the norm. For me, though? It was like I had a bad case of acne, if each zit that popped up did so with a pint of blood.

Plus the constant itch. But I could ignore that. I couldn’t ignore the mana cost, though.

I mean, I sort of could, with the number of minions I had on my first and second floors. I had plenty of reserves to fight adventurers and soldiers with. But the chests returned faster than my monsters could respawn, so in theory if I was being constantly invaded and used too many monsters every invasion, then I would be left without monsters to drain mana from adventurers with, and they would have free reign to loot and accidentally drain me.

I was one hundred percent certain that this was what had killed Central’s dungeons. In a way, Kamella had been right all along—they had been exploited to death. It’s just that something had circumvented the normal protections that existed against that.

And now that something was in me.

—IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.4