Sporemageddon

The fifth floor probably had an official, more proper sounding name somewhere in the records kept for this dungeon, but the delvers called it The Pen.

The name tracked. Compared to the previous floors, which had rather minor threats that could be mitigated with a well-trained crew with some basic gear, the fifth floor required people willing and ready to fight to kill the entire time.

The entrance into the floor was a stone-lined archway deep in the fungal grove that made up the fourth floor, and as I came to it, I found it... more or less undisturbed.

Teams were sent down there, to the fifth floor and below, but it was rather uncommon. The floor’s only real valuable extracts were exotic dungeon animals and meat. And while sending a crew down to hunt every day would probably generate a fair amount of fresh meat on the daily, I think a factory farm of sufficient size could probably match it without the inherent risk that came with delving into a dungeon.

More importantly, it was now probably around early evening, or late afternoon. I hadn’t exactly sprinted over, but I was still aware that time must have passed.

A team delving down this deep would only have a couple of working hours before they’d have to trek back up to the surface.

It was just not economical to work this floor daily, so there were time-slots used instead. Usually near the end of the week. A team would come down with the rest in the morning, set up a camp on the fifth floor overnight, and return to the surface the next day having had nearly a full day to hunt and prepare for the transport back to the surface.

The meat, I knew, was processed by premium butcheries. It was high in mana content and its quality was better than... well, just about anything normal people would have access to.

I knelt down three steps into the entranceway, just far enough in that anyone who may have followed--though I doubted that I had been--wouldn’t see me, then I opened my satchel up.