• Closed rooms—Start a fire inside one, and…
• Dark levels—It’s common sense to bring a torch with you, right? If you didn’t, I can sell you one at an exorbitant price.
• Low-ceiling levels—You sure don’t want to run into a monster when you’re crawling on all fours…
• Levels with special ground effects—Whoa! What’s a volcano doing in this labyrinth?!
…and so forth. Combine them, and you could implement pretty much anything imaginable.
“Nice work, Ramiris. You can craft these kinds of traps with your skill?”
“Sure can! As long as it’s within the labyrinth, I can set up nearly anything!”
She was probably right. We were on the hundredth floor right now, but the composition of gases in the air was little different from the surface. Everything she accomplished with this reminded me once again of the power of Mazecraft.
“By the way,” she asked, “what’s this closed room thing? Does that count as a trap, really?”
I gave her an evil grin. “Well, in the air, there’s this gas called oxygen. People, and most living things really, breathe this to bring it inside their bodies, although sometimes you see exceptions like me or Veldora. If there’s very little oxygen in the air, taking a single breath could asphyxiate you—and maybe even kill you instantly. So you gotta be careful in rooms like that. That’s the golden rule.”
Simply sealing off a room is not terribly dangerous, but if you start a campfire or something, you could drain all the oxygen from the space and even replace it with poisonous gases. Best not to leap right into any old room you find in labyrinths or hidden areas, you know? You need to analyze the atmosphere inside first, asking whether there’s poison gas and measuring the oxygen content. That’s Adventuring 101 right there—if you can’t do that, you’re not gonna live for too long. This world runs off magic, so you ought to at least have wind-based magic to circulate the air around.
I explained all this to Ramiris in the easiest terms I could think of, but she didn’t really get it.
“My. Certainly sounds like a mean trap anyway. If it doesn’t affect us, I suppose I don’t have to worry about it. But you… You’re scary sometimes, you know that? You’ve always given me that impression. But you’re still a great guy to have around! I sure never would’ve come up with this…”
Once she knew it couldn’t hurt her, she was all smiles. I appreciated the compliment, although it embarrassed me a little. A fellow gamer back in my old world would be well used to traps like this. But this was real, not some theme-park attraction. It put real lives on the line. I had no idea how many days it’d even take someone to conquer a dungeon like this. Was it possible in two or three? Plus, if the walls and geography were constantly changing, you’d probably opt to storm multiple levels at once to reach the save point at every ten floors. Someone like me—invincible to poisoning, no need to breathe or eat or sleep—could treat it like a footrace, but normal people couldn’t. Even heroic champions needed to rest now and then.
I had to admit, this labyrinth was starting to look pretty forbidding.
“Hey, you think this dungeon might be a touch too difficult?”
“Really?” Veldora replied. “I fail to see the problem.”
“Yeah, Rimuru! This is no big deal at all!”
Ramiris and Veldora were just laughing it off. Maybe I’m fine after all, I said to myself as I switched my focus to maze design.
Several days passed. Ramiris buzzed around, crafting all the traps we’d need, and Beretta and Treyni installed them for us. Veldora and I, meanwhile, brainstormed ideas for the mazes, coming up with several patterns and setting them up so we could easily change them in and out. Things were going smoothly, but once we began considering the ground effects we could add to floors, Ramiris brought up an issue.
“Oh, no, I can’t do that. I don’t have the massive amounts of energy it’d take to keep it all going!”
She quickly threw in the towel, and she had a point, admittedly. Basically, I was picturing floors where you’d potentially run into natural disasters—fires, floors covered in ice, howling winds. I guess volcanoes were asking a bit too much. I was assuming we could do anything with magic without considering the practical issues.
“Yeah… Sorry, Ramiris,” I apologized, throwing in the towel. “I probably went too far—”
“Well, how about we find some Fire or Frost Dragons, tame them, and bring them in here? I could even catch ’em for ya!”
This voice sounded familiar to me. It belonged to someone who shouldn’t have been here. I turned around to find a pair of platinum-pink pigtails framing a face staring right at me. It was Milim.
“Uh… What are you doing here, Milim?”
This was, I remind you, the hundredth floor, the bottom of a freshly designed dungeon. It wasn’t open to the public; there shouldn’t have been any way to get inside. So why was the demon lord Milim grinning at me in here? (Raphael apparently noticed her but didn’t report to me about it because she didn’t pose a threat. I know I gave the initial order, but maybe I should reconsider. Raphael was so inflexible like that. It annoyed me.)
…
But that could wait. I had Milim to deal with.
“Ha-ha!” She met my eyes as she stood proud, sticking out her nonexistent chest. “You looked like you were doing something interesting here, so I stopped on by. You got guts, y’know, trying to shut me out of the fun!”
Her wardrobe was as revealing as always, but it actually covered more of her body than before. Shuna and the goblinas had been designing her outfits, so maybe she’d developed a shred of fashion sense. The massive Dragon Knuckles dully shining on her hands didn’t match too well, though.
Very Milim-like was all I could say. She really was
