Chapter 125: Maps for Sale
By sunrise, six different maps of Fey Nights were for sale in the distant city.
Five were bad.
Max watched adventures bring them into his dungeon.
The cheapest was a charcoal sketch showing the gate, the first stream, and a warning that every light in the fog was trying to kill whoever followed it. The most expensive marked dryad groves, quickling ambush sites, the burned eastern trail, and the route discovered by the beastkin scouts. It also placed the far threshold on the wrong side of the level.
The sixth map belonged to the guilds.
They did not sell it.
They did sell access to the information around it.
For a fee, an independent party could attend a briefing before entering. The briefers explained that the first stream was no longer a reliable landmark because dryads had shifted its banks. They demonstrated the whistle pattern satyrs used to draw separated attackers from the trail. They displayed a fey hound’s estimated teleportation range with chalk circles across the warehouse floor.
People paid more for those explanations than they paid for the paper maps outside.
The people who could not afford them listened at doors, questioned revived attackers, and copied route cards whenever someone left one unattended. By midmorning, useful information had escaped every organization trying to control it.
"The quest rewards the person who discovered something about our dungeon." Anna said. "It does not stop anyone else from using it."
That was more dangerous than the inaccurate maps. A party normally guarded its advantage. These people were learning that shared knowledge moved all of them closer to the contribution reward, even if they argued over who deserved credit afterward.
Representatives from seven organizations occupied a warehouse facing the city square. Revived scouts moved between tables, correcting distances from memory. Mages compared the forest’s fog to recorded enchantments. A clerk collected descriptions of every defender encountered and paid extra for information confirmed by more than one source.
The divine quest rewarded contribution. Information counted. That changed who entered the gate.
The first wave after dawn still included treasure hunters and people convinced they could become famous by running faster than everyone else. Behind them came parties carrying matching route cards. Each member knew where to turn after the stream, which lights belonged to fairies, and how far a fey hound could blink between attacks.
New arrivals joined the restored attackers throughout the morning. Some had traveled from other districts during the night. Others represented nobles who sent equipped retainers instead of risking themselves. A military delegation in dark blue coats stopped outside the gate and interviewed survivors before allowing any of its observers to enter.
Nobody needed to love the dungeon or hate Max. They only needed to believe the reward was worth the risk.
"The city on the other side of the portal are treating us like a treasure ground." Anna said.
Her protected command room held six active maps and twice as many messengers. Gnome clerks tracked the challenge separately from ordinary Sanctuary operations. The arrival halls remained busy. Visitors continued eating in restaurants, trading in the market, and traveling into Corathen through the approved routes, although many spent their time asking staff what could be seen through the sealed combat portals.
"Treasure grounds don’t usually kill you and bring you back at midnight," Max said.
"It would make surveying more popular if they did."
Fey Nights did not collapse because people understood it.
The forest still possessed more defenders than any normal party would face. Fog still moved. Trails still changed when roots crossed them. The treant restored at midnight with its full strength, and the fey hounds remembered every place the attackers had tried to secure.
But the invaders had changed.
The burned route gave them a dependable line from the gate to the first stream. Engineers laid logs across the mud Max’s rain created. Shield bearers surrounded healers instead of leaving them exposed. Archers stopped wasting arrows on quicklings and fired into the spaces they had to cross.
Most importantly, the people in front were no longer deciding where to go.
Markers passed backward through the column. Orders came from scouts positioned above the fog. When satyrs called from a false trail, runners carried the warning to everyone behind them before the deception could divide the advance.
Sigmund adjusted.
He abandoned the first stream before the attackers arrived and concentrated his forces around the routes they had not yet mapped. Fairies removed the invaders’ new signs and replaced them with perfect copies pointing the wrong direction. Dryads collapsed the log road after the first thousand crossed, cutting the column in half.
The fighting lasted all morning.
It cost the attackers more people than any guild plan predicted. It did not send them back to the gate.
At midday, the armored woman from the first day reached the far threshold again. Max still did not know her name. He knew the scratched shield she carried and the way strangers began following her whenever their own leaders fell.
This time, she had more than four hundred people with her.
Sigmund attacked from both sides of the final trail. Fey hounds broke the rear formation while red caps charged the front. Fairies filled the air above them with false targets.
The invaders did not stop to kill everything.
One group held the rear. Another surrounded the wounded. The rest pushed through the threshold into Level Two.
The first people to enter the Orc Highlands stumbled into bright sun and knee-high grass. Open hills rolled toward the arena route. Stone ridges cut the land farther west, concealing the alternate way through the prison. Orc horns answered from both directions.
Hizon stood on the nearest rise with regular goblins spread below him.
Hobgoblins held the center in disciplined ranks. Giant bullet ants moved through the grass carrying goblin riders. Behind them, a colossal stag beetle raised armored horns higher than a mammoth’s shoulders.
The Goblin King lifted his weapon.
His power moved through the entire force.
The attackers who had survived Fey Nights met a defense designed for people who arrived fresh.
They did not last long.
The armored woman survived long enough to see both the arena road and the opening toward the western ridges. She pointed two scouts toward the second route before a bullet ant struck her shield and carried her from the ground.
One scout reached the first prison marker.
Neither returned to the city before dying, but the challenge restored them at midnight with their memories intact.
The next advance began before afternoon.
More people crossed Fey Nights than during the entire first day. Some followed guild route cards. Others followed the road those groups had secured without paying anyone. Arguments broke out over who deserved contribution for a bridge built by one guild and used by every rival behind it.
By late afternoon, three major guilds had permanent representatives inside the forest camp. They stored water, replacement weapons, and medical supplies beneath roofs made from timber cut the previous day. Crafters repaired armor while fighting continued farther ahead. Runners traveled between the camp and the city gate carrying corrections to the map.
The camp changed the level more than any single victory.
Attackers no longer had to bring everything from the distant city on every attempt. A person entering the gate could join an organized column within minutes. Wounded fighters retreated to living healers instead of surrendering a day to restoration. People who lost weapons drew replacements from the stockpile.
Max considered destroying it.
The camp stood inside his dungeon. He could send enough defenders to overrun it, or intervene himself and erase the position before it grew.
He left it alone.
The challenge was showing him what an invasion did after it found ground worth holding. If he removed every problem personally, he would learn only that he was stronger than the first people through the gate.
He did tell Sigmund to attack its supply line.
Quicklings stole repair kits. Fairies lured porters away from marked trails. A dryad grew roots beneath the storehouse floor and split three barrels of water. The camp remained, but keeping it useful required hundreds of people who were not advancing.
The same pressure reached the normal side of the dungeon in quieter ways.
Travelers arriving through Crag Mountain wanted to know whether joining the challenge would improve their own rewards. Gnome attendants explained that the hostile quest belonged to the distant gate and that no route from the Sanctuary led to it. Several adventurers offered to help defend Max instead. He thanked them and refused. They were visitors, not registered dungeon entities, and nothing in the challenge promised to restore them if they died.
Restaurants filled with people watching staff reports. Merchants delayed trips into Corathen to see whether the restrictions would spread. They did not. The Sanctuary kept functioning while a real invasion fought on the other side of sealed combat portals.
That separation was the reason Max could concentrate on the defense without turning every guest into a possible attacker.
In the Orc Highlands, the invaders tested both routes.
The main force followed the arena road because it was obvious. Hizon met it with hobgoblin formations and mounted goblins sweeping around both flanks. The Goblin King’s strengthening aura turned ordinary defenders into a wall the tired attackers could not break.
Smaller groups entered the western ridges looking for the prison route. They found narrow passages, locked chambers, ambushes, and defenders who could attack from above. One party returned to Fey Nights alive with a partial map. Three others pressed deeper and disappeared.
At the far end of the day, the invaders had not cleared Level Two.
They had learned how it could be cleared.
The military observers returned to the distant city before midnight. They carried no treasure and had made no serious attempt to reach the front. Their report concerned trail width, supply requirements, command failures, and the number of healers needed to keep a thousand-person column moving.
Two rulers sent officers to the square before the report was finished.
Guild representatives met them beneath the balcony. They compared contracts, argued over control, and discovered that none of them could claim the promised reward if the dungeon core remained beyond four levels and a country.
At midnight, the fallen returned.
Fey defenders reappeared throughout their forest. Hizon’s destroyed formations stood again in the Highlands. Goblins remounted giant bullet ants. The stag beetle rose behind the restored lines.
Attackers filled the camps and secured routes they still held. The forest position became crowded enough that its leaders opened the stored food before dawn. The armored woman returned beside the survivors who had followed her into Level Two.
Someone finally called her Captain Kale.
Across the gate, new banners hung above the city square.
The guilds had spent two days competing. On the third morning, they intended to stop, and work together.