Puzzling Puzzle

After David left, Violet purchased two more 10 meters x 10 meters roundabout hallways as well as another two 5 meters hallways. Then, she called it a night and fell asleep in the slime jigsaw puzzle room. She didn't feel like being rained on and the grassy outskirts of the room were far better than the cold stone hallways or stone steps in the dungeon core room.

The next morning, Violet checked her dungeon status and saw she now had another 73DP from her kodama's efforts and 13MP from her daily mana regeneration. This put her total at 292DP, which she didn't have any real plans to spend right away. Violet planned to finish her room and hallway building strategy before investing any points into anything else. In that regard, Violet quickly spent 10MP on another two 5 meters hallways to connect the first half of the roundabout hallways to the new rectangle rooms.

Now Violet only needed another 10MP for another two 5 meters hallways. Luckily, Violet didn't have to wait very long before another group of adventurers entered her dungeon.

"Now, remember ladies, stay in formation. I don't want anyone dying on me."

Rosetta was sure to caution her other party members as they entered the dungeon. As a guardian, she played the role of tank for their party. Their party setup was a bit cliche with a guardian tank, monk and ranger damage dealers, and a healer. However, Rosetta rather preferred the setup since it made things simple.

"Don't worry, young one. You might have a few ranks on us, but we all passed the adventurer's test the same as you."

Balvna, their dwarven monk, assured Rosetta. Balvna was probably the oldest in their party, besides Estel. However, elves had longer lives and so their rate of maturity was a bit strange in comparison to humans and dwarves. However, Estle had a good head on her shoulders and she was quite skilled with her bow and shortsword, making excellent use of the skills she learned in her elven village.

Balvna and Estel were only F-ranks while Rosetta was C-rank and their healer, Aurora, was D-rank. However, that was just because humans had a tendency to let their young apply to be adventurers much sooner than the elves did. As for Balvna, she had failed to learn her father's blacksmithing techniques and had set out to find her own path as an adventurer after her younger brother was promised the workshop.

"The slime is cute, but I'm surprised there aren't any others around."

Aurora noted.

"Well, the scenery is quite nice as well. It isn't quite as nice as a real forest, but it isn't bad for a dungeon imitation."

Estel replied.

Aurora cleared her throat as she tried to bring her group's focus back to the task at hand.

"Well, let's dispatch the slime and then we can collect the available resources. Estel, why don't you take this one? You and Balvna could use the levels the most, so it would be good to take the chance while we have easier [Monsters] to practice on."

Estel nodded and readied her bow, lining up her shot, before letting her arrow loose. The first shot missed the core and Estel just pursed her lips as she lined up her next shot. That one did the trick and the slime soon dissolved into a puddle and Estel was rewarded with a system message. She had leveled up, which wasn't surprising considering she was only a few experience points away from her next level when she entered the dungeon.

"Alright, Blavna, why don't you join me on guard duty? I'd hate to have [Monsters] ambush us and there are three entrances in this room. Aurora and Estel can collect whatever plants we need and then we will move on when they are ready."

"Alright, you got it!"

Balvna easily agreed. Unfortunately, they had no way to know that there weren't actually any other [Monsters] in the dungeon. Almost all of the rooms were empty, save for one and it was a waste of energy and time for them to be so on guard.

However, this information was found out soon enough as the group began to explore the dungeon. Most confusing of all was that the hallways and rooms seemed to be arranged strangely and they ended up getting lost a few times. Eventually, they had to call it good enough as they entered the puzzle room once more.

"Should we try out this puzzle? My system notification says there is some sort of carrot bread for a reward. It might be nice to have something to eat after all this walking around..."

Aurora quietly asked.

"Yeah, alright, we can take a break. It shouldn't take too long for us to figure out the puzzle with four of us working on it."

Rosetta easily agreed. However, she was wrong and, after waiting several hours for her guests to finish up and leave, a rather confused Violet went looking for her new guests to see what the problem was.

While Violet had been ready for an ambush, she was rather surprised to find a party of four women adventurers looking rather frustrated and exhausted as they struggled to figure out how the slime jigsaw puzzle worked. Violet laughed heartily as she called out

"You know, you're lucky I haven't added the option to lock you all in here until you complete the puzzle. You can just leave if you can't figure things out."

Aurora shrieked in surprise and Balvna scolded

"Stop that! It's probably just the dungeon master. I'm sorry we are taking so long, we didn't mean to stay so long. We just can't seem to figure out this puzzle."

Violet glanced at the board where the puzzle pieces were stacked haphazardly on top of one another. Why it hadn't occurred to her guests that they should be filling in the board in one flat layer was beyond Violet, but she supposed she shouldn't make fun of them too much. It wasn't like the system had known what a jigsaw puzzle was, at first, either.

"I'll tell you what, I'll give you a hint for next time if you agree to leave for the day now. How does that sound?"

Violet's offer was met with groans of dissatisfaction as Estel complained

"But I wanted to eat that carrot bread! We've been working on it for so long, surely we're close to figuring it out now?"

Rosetta shook her head at her party member's antics before replying

"As much as we would love to stay, we shall respect your wish, dungeon master. We would be grateful if you would give us that hint for next time. Hopefully, we will have better luck then."

Violet smiled amusedly at the pouting elf woman standing behind Rosetta as she replied

"Very well. Next time, try placing the pieces as one layer horizontally within the confines of the puzzle box."

Rosetta looked back at the puzzle with surprise, but said nothing. Things made a lot more sense now that she thought about it from that perspective. She still doubted that they'd be finishing the puzzle anytime soon, but it wasn't like they had to leave town any time soon either. There were free-roaming [Monsters] in the forest that needed subjugating and they needed to report the state of the dungeon to their city's guild.

The guild had to wait a while before they could send out a proper navigator class adventurer to map out the dungeon, but they wanted to keep tabs on things in the meantime. They couldn't very well keep directing the new adventurers to the dungeon if it suddenly became too dangerous. That was part of the reason why adventurers were partying up into groups like hers with higher-rank adventurers escorting weaker adventurers.