Chapter 291

“We’re coming up on the city center now,” Acacia said.

With their arrival into the most relevant part of the City of Eros, they had started seeing other delvers. And indeed, while there wasn’t the bustle of a true city, especially not one like Aradon, it was still shocking since they were in the dungeon. So even seeing a handful of people walking around casually was a surreal experience. It was supposed to be rare to meet a single other delving party: knowing she was on a floor where hundreds congregated was almost as hard to digest as the first few times she’d ran into encounters under Lust’s influence.

A good portion of the delvers were dressed in ... interesting gear. Natalie understood why Acacia had thought they weren’t new to the city; her own pink armor fit right in. While nobody else was wearing erotite, it seemed, they were in various states of undress. Flimsy dresses and lace robes for the mages; leather bras that nicely accentuated tits for the medium-armor rogues; and for the heavy-armor wearers, outfits similar to Natalie’s own, though of varying colors and inappropriateness. Frankly, Natalie’s was still on the higher end of revealing. She was the Paladin of Lust, after all; these people were just here being exposed to the Passion’s influence in part.

There were plenty of men in similarly inappropriate outfits. Lust’s domain hardly affected only women, that was just Natalie’s preference. Natalie hardly flinched at all the abs, arms, and chests on display—and asses in a few cases, since the men weren’t immune to some of the lewder outfits either—and a part of her could even admire their physiques in an abstract way. Mostly Natalie just found the situation surreal though. And her attention was predominantly distracted by all the female assets on display, so ignoring the men was easy.

Acacia led them to the Palace. The Palace was the eminent structure in the City of Eros, situated dead in the center—presumably; she didn’t have a top-down view—and was constructed of white stone with gold and purple accents. It was a gaudy construction, extravagant in a way even places like Tenet couldn’t match, and also enormous: the building dwarfed them, and the front double doors were nearly twenty feet high as Acacia led them in.

“Like I was saying,” Acacia said, “I super recommend you pay for rooms in the Palace. Not only are the assignment boards here, so you’d have to make a trip every twelve hours anyway, but the creature comforts are worth one token per day. Ah, you two did bring Tokens, right?”

“We had to fight our way here,” Natalie said. “So yes. We have some. Could we share rooms, if we wanted to?”

“No, actually,” she said. “One room per person. Visitors are fine though.”

“How is that enforced?” she asked. “How does payment even work?”

“You’re about to see,” Acacia said.

And indeed, Natalie’s words were already trailing off, because Acacia was leading them to a desk situated off to the side of the enormous palace entrance. The administrative-looking outlet seemed misfitting of the rest of the environment, as if it had been plopped down there afterward.

“Good morning, young ladies!” the woman made of metal said. “How can I help you? Signing in?”

“An automaton!” Natalie said. “In the dungeon?”

Automatons. They weren’t extremely rare beings, at least not for delvers, who frequented the Exchange—a place Natalie and her team had been using less often than most, admittedly. There was also the Bestower, but she was a special automaton, the one who granted classes upon a person’s eighteenth birthday.

As far as Natalie knew, no one had ever seen an automaton inside the dungeon. If there had been staff manning this strange city, she would have expected it to be someone like Malice. A repurposed dungeon soul.