Book 2 | Chapter 12 | Now This She Can Do 1/3

For what felt like the 400th time in this dungeon, Lillia fell, screaming as she dropped from some space between the floor and ceiling and landed on her back. It knocked the wind out of her—again—but somehow, that didn’t stop her.
“Come on! Figure out where the floor is!”
[Lillia Used Indignance - Level 3: There was no target!]
“Yeah. Yeah.” The second yeah came out as a wheeze when reality caught up with her. Before she’d come to the dungeon she’d barely fallen. In fact, the only one she remembered was following her dad during the hunt. Outside of that?
Since she’d been thrown in here and fallen into the dungeon itself, it felt like Lillia was falling all the damned time. From the walls of Castle Varian, from trees in the Hunting Grounds, every damn time the dungeon decided to teleport her.
Thus the indignance. It was the dungeon itself. How was it wrong so consistently?
Lillia peeled herself off the floor—almost literally with how soaked she was—and checked her surroundings. The muddy-ash pit in the center of the room was mostly dry now, and a large fire was sputtering against the water in the center of it.
There it was, the Hearth. Though it seemed decidedly less water resistant than the one on the crab had been.
Outside of that. At the door where Lillia had come into the Fourth floor, there was now a mural in place of the door. Lillia standing under stained glass. She was in the white of the ambusher’s dress in this one.
Stained glass could have meant Eisel, but he was dead and the dungeon knew it. There was also stained glass in the Cathedral upstairs. Which meant she could go back and meet up with—
Lillia dropped the immediate thought of Havoc as her gaze drifted to the right, and to the door back to the storm, the ship and the battle with the crab.
And Gerand. Or whatever he was. In her heart, Lillia knew he had something to do with Sir Nobody. After all, he’d recognized Havoc, and Vianaffir and had reacted to the note… rather violently, but at the same time, Gerand hadn’t exactly seemed like a Sir.
Lillia had never met Sir Nobody, so she couldn’t be sure, but she’d always pictured someone gallant, someone with a goatee and a manicured moustache. Now that she thought of it, there was probably a knight from her life back home that was attached to her image of him, but she couldn’t place their name right now.
Or the names of any of the knights really. Though, unlike her handmaids, that didn’t bother Lillia. Frankly, she only heard the knights’ names during ceremonies, when the criers would announce thirty-odd in a row alongside some of their feats. Every one of those events resulted in Lillia battling against the idle want to sleep through the rest of the damned thing.
Of course, she couldn’t fall asleep back then. If she fell asleep during the announcing of the knights, then she would have been carried to bed instead of being allowed to dance.
She sighed before she spent too long lingering on the past. It was allowed to be a goal, but it wasn’t allowed to be a sorrow. That was the rule.
Lillia lay back down for a moment before finally peeling her entire person off the floor and standing. As soon as she was up, a glowing orb appeared between her and the new Hearth.
[Collect Your Rewards!]
That was a message she hadn’t gotten to see in a while. The dungeon didn’t need to prompt her much anymore.
She tapped the glowing orb.
The last glowing object had been a legendary drop, and had cycled through a hundred options before the Dungeon forced its shape into the Radiant Dawn. This one had a shape in mind the moment Lillia’s fingers brushed against it.
Of course it was spiky enough that she almost dropped it straight away.
The mysterious item was a handbag, or at least it was in the shape of one. The entire structure seemed to be made out of concentric shells with the spiked tails of conches poking out at a thousand angles. If she wasn’t lethally sure of what a handbag looked like, Lillia might have assumed that this was supposed to be used as the end of a mace.
It was lighter than it looked, despite being made of sea shells. She wasn’t a stranger to using the bounty of the sea to create fashion. After all, the Southern Kingdom Dolstaya incorporated shells into their jewelry and scales into their headwear, but there had never been anything this elaborate.
She held it tightly, turning it over while being careful to avoid stabbing herself.
[The Sea Queen’s Carrier - Legendary Item]
[Princess Class Exclusive]
[When Equipped: Affects the Adaptive Regalia Skill]
[Queen of the Seas - All Dresses created with Adaptive Regalia while this item is equipped will arrive in their Queen of the Seas state. Each material can only create a single Queen of the Seas dress.]
[Her Domain - As long as the Princess has Authority, she can breathe under water and cannot drown.]
That was…that was a lot.
Lillia knew when her boot options expanded that she was going to read a lot of descriptions in a row. She also feared that one day, she might be able to combine different types of materials, at which point, she would never be able to keep track of how many options she had.
Adding a new dress for each material type was going to risk that.
Lillia slipped the handbag over her arm as if she were about to carry it, and it vanished into her inventory. To experiment, she imagined taking it off her arm, and it popped back into her hand, ready to be left behind unequipped.
Had she received almost any other item, she would have, before checking what it could do, briefly considered selling it to Rickshaw. Unfortunately, this was once again a princess-class exclusive item, so she knew exactly what he’d say:
“Darling, where’s the margin in a one-woman market?”
Obviously it would have helped Rickshaw and Lillia if there were more princesses working as adventurers, but firstly she would never wish that on anyone, and second, nobody from the lower kingdoms was supposed to refer to themselves as a proper princess. It was only right that the class system work the same.
Okay, no better place to start than the classic.
Now that she had the Sea Queen’s Carrier equipped, Lillia pulled out a piece of Chitterpede chitin and crushed it. The iridescent dust washed over her, layer over layer, creating a fine armor of scales that ran from a high collar on her neck to—
It was the Chitterpede Battle Gown. Just the normal battle gown. Lillia looked around herself, as if the new part of the dress would be anywhere other than on her person.
“What the hell is this?”
[Lillia Used Indignance - Level 3: There was no target!]
She spun again.
“Seriously? Nothing? You had this whole description and everything and—”
Someone knocked on one of the doors. It took until the third knock to recognize that it was the door to Rickshaw’s personal store.
Lillia composed herself, pushed back her soaked hair and strode over to the door just as the skeleton was knocking again from the other side. She opened it, and almost took skeleton knuckles to the nose.
“You gotta attune it.”
“What?”
“You gotta attune the item. Like your Radiant thingy from killing Eisel, you gotta attune to the item to get the effect.”
Lillia blinked. “Oh. But it’s in there.”
“You just gotta rest with it in there, Darling.”
She looked back over her shoulder to the Hearth in the center of the room. Resting here would allow her to test the new options that the item brought, but at the moment she had a better idea.
“Once you do that, you’ll be good to go,” Rickshaw added, assuming the silence was her not understanding the issue. He scratched the bottom of his jaw, fingerbone screeching slightly as it drew across the bone. “Then you can go do whatever you want.”
“Is the shop open?”
The light in Rickshaw’s eye socket glowed brighter as he leaned against the door frame. “Am I open, darling? Of course, I got the shop right here and you have a Hearth. Which means you can—”
“Great!” Lillia looked over his shoulder, but Rickshaw managed to somewhat get in the way despite the height difference. “But—”
“But?” Lillia asked. Why was there always a butt with every damned thing in this dungeon?
“Well, I am open, but it’s only some of the shop.”
“Do you need more time to…”
Rickshaw nodded along and motioned for Lillia to continue with her train of thought, which led to an eventual sigh.
“You need more Hearths. Don’t you?”
“Atta girl.”
“How many do you need to open the shop?”
“How many you got?” he said before snapping his fingers and pointing at Lillia as if she were going to be much happier about that news. Once she didn’t return his enthusiasm, he sighed. “Look, it’s a big store, darling. You don’t gotta worry about finding what you need but—the stock is essentially infinite and you gotta divide that into little chunks, you know.”
Lillia drooped. “I get it. The Dungeon doesn’t—”
“Well, yeah, but it’s also good for business,” he said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Darling, but this is my job and though I’m cheering for you—like I cheer for all my paying customers—if I just let you see everything all at once, you might start saving.”
He said the word saving with the same fear people used to invoke the reaper.
“So is it you or the dungeon making that choice?”
“Did the basilisk show up first or the chicken?”
“Basilisk?”
“It’s a—It’s like a cockatrice but—Look, kid, the point is don’t worry too much about it. Do you wanna come in and shop or not?”
Lillia checked over Rickshaw’s other shoulder and this time he didn’t move to block her. Behind him, the fog in the cabinets had faded away, though the items were still too blurred to see.
In the end, she shook her head.
“Need to get something first.”
“Something?”
“Remember when I told you I’d get you the items from the Blacksmith?”
“The Hobgoblin?”
“Yes.”
“He’s alive?! Figured he was dead or I would have been more pissed about—”
“Look, I’m going to get him now! We will have the items and—”
“You’d better! You were supposed to bring me blacksmith items last time and you brought me a corpse.” Rickshaw tried to jab his point home into Lillia’s chest but she slipped out of the way—she was getting better at that sort of move.
“I am. I’ll be right back and—”
He slammed the door and the boom echoed around the room.
Lillia stared at the handle. Did he—
The door opened, and Rickshaw sheepishly poked his skull through the opening. “I request you take your leave until you return with the goods. Your Majesty.”
Lillia nodded.
“Better?” he asked.
“It’ll do. See you soon.”