The depths of Thomas’ dungeon were, contrary to what the name might have indicated, not actually underneath the Natural History Museum.

  Instead, he’d taken over the catacombs that had belonged to an otherworldly invader.

  Alaxia Mystscale had, once upon a time, been a truly infamous tyrant, only to be deposed just prior to the merge. She had managed to escape to her hideaway in the jungle and been dumped here along with it, but rather than learning from her mistakes, she’d immediately tried to “conquer” the Earth … while only wielding a fraction of her strength and pissing off everyone during her first appearance, ensuring that strategy’s such as a defeat in detail would fail miserably.

  Ultimately, she’d died, and Thomas had spent the entirety of the territorial expansion he’d gained by killing a near C-Rank dragon to claim her stuff, which he was still going through.

  This time, though, he was focussing on something topical for Halloween.

  Whole bunch of different recovery potions … nah, too basic.

  Bloodline elixirs … those would give a permanent boost to anyone who used qi, meaning cultivators, anyone else would simply suffer a small but permanent cosmetic alteration. Golden and supernaturally durable hair for a Nemean Lion, glowing blue eyes for a Halcyon, stuff like that.

  Cool, but not something he’d be handing out willy-nilly. There were people who would likely want to use one, however, the fact that they were minimally useful didn’t make them any less magically complex and expensive to make.

  Magical gear no one could use yet and that would absolutely break the bank to replicate … for obvious reasons, that wasn’t an option.

  And so on, and so forth.

  In hindsight, that had been eminently predictable. After all, this was an armory meant to be used by its former owner as a springboard to conquer a new world, not a dollar store, never mind something more specialized like a prank supply shop … assuming something like that even existed.

  It seemed like he’d have to go back and actually make the stuff himself. Like he should have done the entire time. Because to be honest, that was actually kinda fun, laziness had just been too attractively easy to resist.

  So, what could he make that would be topical, but not pointless? What were some symbols of Halloween?

  Well, pumpkins, obviously, but he didn’t have any of those yet. Spiders would go over like a house on fire with at least some of his delvers, though he didn’t know who, specifically, had arachnophobia yet, as there were no spider monsters in the dungeon.

  Oh … giant prehistoric spider. Grauvogel-something. Thomas didn’t know exactly what they were called, but he knew they existed and had been huge, having lived at a time when the atmosphere’s oxygen content had been significantly higher, giving rise to such things as large spiders, massive dragonflies, and three-meter long millipedes.

  Although, was that particular arachnid the biggest to ever exist?

  Thomas thought about that for a couple of seconds, then added another request to the noticeboard, asking for the biggest spider, extinct or not, people could have, as well as a textbook that would allow him to further refine the next request.

  But that done, he turned his mental gaze back to his available patterns, looking for something topical that he actually had.

  Skulls.

  Specifically, the skulls for a velociraptor, summoned without any skin or flesh on it, enchanted to do what a carnivore did best. Eat.

  A simple little gimmick that had some technical use cases, especially en-mass. Stick a bunch of these in a bag, empower them, and dump them over a large enemy to cover them in endlessly chomping “golems” of a sort.

  Granted, the skulls would need to be at a higher grade to be truly powerful, but overpowered items weren’t the point of the event.

  “It doesn’t sound spooky enough;” Elias commented, as he hovered nearby on bronze wings. “Can I try?”

  “Sure,” Thomas replied, not entirely sure what the fairy was offering.

  Elias fluttered down and landed on the skull, placed his tiny palm on its forehead, and the description began to change.

  “Wait, how did you do that? How do I do that?” Thomas asked.

  “Renaming things is easy with Dretolara’s System, which I still have a little access to, so you can’t do it. But if you reproduce that one, it should keep the new description,” Elias replied immediately, and upon trying it out, he was proven right. “But I think you should make a stronger version. Maybe poison it?”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Oh, I know exactly what to do with this one,” Thomas said, sending along the mental image of a grin.

  Then, he infused it with the power of boomslang venom, an incredibly nasty hemotoxic weapon.

  He could have just poured venom over the whole affair, but that would have made it somewhat dangerous to handle and made it work quite slowly.

  Because while boomslang venom could not be absorbed through the skin, people in combat situations could easily be suffering from injuries that allowed a route of ingress. And as far as the speeding up went, well, boomslang venom might be able to make blood run from every orifice and cause brain bleeds on top of that, but it took a full day to make that happen.

  Making it magical rendered it vulnerable to affliction-clearing or curse-dispelling abilities and reduced its staying power, but it also made it much more immediately useable.

  And, as an extra bonus, the updated description reflected the one Elias used, rather than the original one.

  Actually, that was really good. So good, in fact, that he wanted to use them himself … except he couldn’t, because neither he nor his creatures could use magical gear. And Elias was apparently not overly useful on that front either.

  “Activating magical gear requires you to use some kind of compatible energy, but there’s no gear that can be fuelled by the magic of a dungeon monster. You need a specific power to let your creations use mana, but I have no idea what it’s called, or how you could get it.”

  Thomas sighed.

  “I know you can’t do anything with that information, but I was a human warrior before all this, remember? You’re lucky I know as much about the internal workings of dungeons as I do,” the fairy replied testily.

  “Yeah,” Thomas agreed. But just because neither of them could change the current state of affairs, it didn’t mean he had to be happy about that.

  So he returned his mind to making more stuff.

  Spiderwebs were an obvious choice, a low-hanging fruit almost easier to come up with than the skulls. But he would be using them to make something more utility-based than his previous creations.

  They’d been used as simple bandages in ye olden times, they were strong, absorbent, and had several other helpful properties.

  So he drew deeply from his new well of potions, specifically, the weaker ones.

  The B-Rank one he’d gotten from that cultivator weeks ago would stay where it was, at the end of a specifically designed gauntlet one would have to run to get it.

  However, Alaxia’s hoard had had more than just high-strength remedies for champions and commanders, it had also held recovery potions for people of every rank and method of advancement.

  He infused the webbing with the power of a relatively cheap F-Rank healing potion.

  “Can you rename them as ‘Healing Embrace’?” Thomas asked.

  “Sure,” Elias said, touched the wad of spider silk, and changed the name. “But can you give me another one? I have an idea …”

  Another glob of non-sticky silk fell onto the ground before the fairy.

  Thomas took one look at the new description, burst out laughing, and followed it up with a deadpan “You’re evil.”

  Oh, he could see the outrage on the delver’ faces already …

  He’d also be sprinkling in weak healing potions with the regular loot once the event was over. It would increase the survivability of delvers, making it more likely for people to enter while also not making them effectively invulnerable to anything that didn’t kill them instantly while they had potions.

  Thomas also decided to recreate the Halloween rewards at E- and D-Rank as well, to be dropped from appropriate monsters.

  As for the rest of the event loot tables, he filled them out with decorations. Actual fossils, candy from the gift shops in the shapes of bones or skeletons, also infused with healing potions, a couple of skulls that would look cool sitting on a shelf, etc. along with the usual array of pelts and other stuff that would make any room they were in look like an 18th-century hunting lodge.

  With all that done, Thomas wound up right where he’d found himself so many times.

  At the teleporter that had inflicted the dragon upon them all. Or at the very least, the jungle that had later gotten dumped on everyone’s head, transforming anyone unlucky enough to overlap with another living being into something inhuman, but that was just semantics.

  The point was that it could be upgraded, using the body parts from a grand total of five creatures that could act as dimensional anchors, being so powerful that they prevented their surroundings from being dashed to pieces by something as disruptive as, say, a bunch of realities being smashed together.

  Ergo, there’d be one in each of the eight merged areas, so if he could either buy or directly retrieve something from each of those places, and he could redirect future dimensional incursions wherever he wanted. Probably on his own head.

  It sounded stupid, but in reality, he’d put more than a little thought into that idea. He could create a nice reception area for friendly newcomers to prevent any early “misunderstandings,” the extra-universal aliens would not run into any humans and be scared, or encounter humans who’d get startled and do something stupid.

  And if the visitors weren’t friendly?

  Well, there was a reason dungeons were widely known as being deathtraps.

  Of course, the defenses would have to be well-hidden to avoid making it feel like a trap, and so far back that the initial area was actually safe, but the point still stood.

  Perhaps …

  Thomas’ next thought was interrupted by a sudden influx of energy, as though a person had just died in the dungeon. No, multiple persons. At a time he didn’t have any delvers.

  What the fuck?

  Thankfully, it was a matter of milliseconds to locate the issue. The soldiers who’d been guarding the entrance were, well, gone, in both senses of the word.

  A scorch mark had replaced one of them, crystalline spears had nailed a second to the wall, a third had been sliced to pieces by something that had left no obvious traces, and two more were already dissolving within the dungeon, devoured by the magical area’s material reclamation properties.

  Only a single man was still alive, crawling deeper into the Dungeon while trying to hold his guts in with one arm.

  Fuck. Someone who came in guns blazing was a problem, and unlikely to have even remotely good intentions, considering that with the deal Thomas had made with the British government, they had to allow people access. For someone to feel the need to kill the soldiers … yeah, that was bad.

  Also, if they all died, what would people assume? Would they blame the mystery mercenaries or murderers or whatever you wanted to call them? Or would they blame him?

  Double fuck.

  Thomas had already been sending a spider monkey towards the entrance with a healing potion, assuming this had simply been an accident he could earn browny points on, but he immediately redoubled his efforts, directing a tiger to drag the man deeper in.

  This would be bad, regardless of what this was about.