The next morning, they had three guests for breakfast, all eager to get going for the Dungeon run.
"Is Rae ready?" Tessa asked as she settled into a chair beside Thor.
Karl shook his head. "Not yet. She’s perfecting her bath, and will likely reach the peak of Totem Rank later today. She’s very close, but not quite at the bottleneck, and she’s convinced that it will be better if she pushes the bottleneck a bit before trying to advance."
Tessa sighed. "That’s a shame, the run would go faster if she was at Mythic Rank."
Karl nodded. "Well, there’s always another attempt. After all, now that the experiment is public knowledge, every Alliance is going to be trying to find ways to unlock new difficulty levels for every Dungeon.
But that reminds me, has the Overlord Ranked team asked any of you to accompany them on their runs since we returned?"
Tessa nodded. "Yeah, we will all be going with them today. It took some convincing to get Lotus to do something other than argue about cookies with Button, but we put them both down for a nap before the dungeon after lunch."
Terry, the visiting Blood Knight, chuckled.
It made them both sound like small children, but he had been accosted about the cookies when he first arrived as well. He wasn’t sure if they were sisters or simply kindred spirits, but there was definitely more than a decade between their ages.
That also explained why Lotus was missing breakfast.
She had been up all night eating cookies.
She could dress it up with any sort of excuse that she wanted, but the fact remained that she had definitely eaten enough of the cookies to put her and a small dragon into a sugar coma.
In fact, Karl wouldn’t be shocked if they were both in dragon form right now, sleeping it off. Lotus’ Beast Form was a small green dragon, roughly the same size as Button’s Forest Dragon form.
One day, he would have to find out why she didn’t get a humanoid beast form transformation the way that everyone else did.
She was a cute dragon, though.
In preparation for the trip, Karl formed the Group, with himself as the lead, just in case that made a difference in whether they would be offered the chance to do the higher difficulty again.
There was a large crowd gathered in front of the dungeon entrance when they arrived, including a few that Karl was sure were reporters, taking notes and using a System Skill to record the group entering.
"We’re not exactly subtle." Mars, their Trollish Shaman, joked.
"Well, we are pretty awesome. Hard to ignore." Karl agreed.
The Troll chuckled, while Terry rolled his eyes.
"I can see why you are Deve’s friend. That man is pathologically incapable of taking anything seriously."
Dana giggled, and Karl noticed that many of the young men in the crowd blushed the moment that [Fox Charm] hit them.
"You should have seen him when the dungeon difficulty increased. We’ve got a Chaos Badger on the team, and he’s absolutely sure that the whole thing was a divine cosmic joke, some sort of secret Badger plot to mess with him."
Mars nodded and stroked his beard with a sage expression on his face.
"Given his history, I agree. It is possible that the Laughing God and the Beast Gods have teamed up to turn his life into their own personal entertainment channel. All it needs is one more badger and a Green Dragon Cleric."
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