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[Dungeon]
A couple of days had passed since the man had left. And though it meant that I could get back to work, there was something missing now. It felt…
It felt…
Lonely? Yes. Lonely.
That was it. Was I lonely?
Perhaps.
Though I wasn’t sad about getting back to work, excited even, I felt more alone than I ever had before, and it was peculiar to me. At no point in the span of my life so far had I felt anything like this, nor had I ever experienced anything even resembling companionship or company. I still hadn’t, but just observing the man challenge my dungeon was enough seemingly. I had never been in proximity with a person, and I had never even seen one before; before this man stepped inside me, excluding that short green fellow who pursued my cat.
Never had I thought of what it might be like to spend the rest of time alone. I had always had that goal of growing strong and running my dungeon well, of challenging many adventurers. It had seen me through it and without knowing what I was missing I had coped just fine.
I hadn’t even conceived that a feeling such as this might exist. Yet here I was, alone. The echoing silence of my dungeon rang like a gong in my head.
I felt incomplete. For the first time in my life, I had felt the joy of company. And even if the man hadn’t known I was there, watching him explore the depths. I had known him, and that was enough. I had felt the beating of life within my caverns and the experience was electric. I had felt alive. Annoyed, but alive.
What I had originally thought was an annoying, incessant drumming that stopped my work was life, conscious life. The feelings had shot through me. Now, in its absence, I felt the hollow, solitude flooding back in.
Would he be back?
Or…
Would I be left alone forever?
NO!
They would be back, I was sure. Dungeons were useful, he was just going to get more people.
I… I had to be ready.
Snapping out of it, I checked on my mana.
Fully charged!
Having someone extra in the dungeon, producing and using mana had made it far easier to gather what I needed, and though one part of me was watching him intently another part was actively scooping up that mana for my own use.
I had already planned what I wanted my remaining ice floors to be, and I had got the mobs to do it. The walrus boss for floor ten and the synth cat for floor nine. All I had to do was build it.
The synth cat was an ambush predator and I wanted to make a floor where that characteristic was taken to the extreme. Something that disguised them and meant adventurers felt under constant threat. I had my idea, I just had to make it work.
First though, I would have to repopulate my dungeon. I hadn’t done it immediately because I had been distracted by the feeling of loss once the man had gone and the planning of my next few floors. But before I began building it was something I needed to do.
Luckily, respawning all the wolves that the man killed required only a couple hundred mana, a slight fraction of my supplies. Nice and easy I thought, I would definitely be able to respawn them in great numbers when I had far more adventurers coming along, I bet I could even link the mana through a crystal to automate it. Perhaps later.
I watched the mobs as they spawned, taking up exactly where they had left off with seemingly no confusion or changes. The wolves behaved exactly the same, the trees from the first floor, well they didn’t have any sort of personality, so that was hard to tell.
Secondly, I needed to work on replenishing the chests and resources that the adventurers would take, perhaps in the same way, like a floor reset, as well as switching things up a bit.
After all, if the floor was always the same, then what on earth was the point in most of them? It would become boring and tedious, and I was not going to get that label. I wanted to be unique.
Spending my mana to repopulate the chests, I noticed it took material from my storage, wherever that was, why did I not know where the material I absorbed went? I thought to myself.
Whatever. I couldn’t get distracted now, I had lots more to do, a question for the future perhaps.
Dungeons had to grow and change, there must be a way of re-organising it, like an overhaul ability. Surely it wasn’t that I had to destroy and recreate everything if my levels were wrong, that would require so much mana that I would just never do it.
The system seemed to have everything imaginable in the store and I thought it unlikely that it would have overlooked this.
Focusing on what I wanted, I searched the store until I found it, with four options.
It was called dungeon adjustment and it basically allowed me to create mana-free changes to my dungeon at the cost of points, even going so far as to allow me to completely redo the dungeon from the ground up. Though the number of points was astronomical at one million. I thought the major adjustment with the floor swapping could be useful, but 5,000 points was quite expensive.
If I took a floor out, I wondered if it would hold it in magical limbo and then I could swap it around and fill in all the gaps.
But perhaps even more useful was the minor adjustment. If it gave me the ability to modify the ice run quickly and freely, and whatever other floors I created in a similar vein, I could change up the routes and tracks often.
From day to day, places would change, potentially catching out unwary adventurers and scoring me kills and thus mana.
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At the moment though I didn’t need it, I was happy with the dungeon and didn’t feel the need to adjust anything. Besides, I had no points so I couldn’t even if wanted to.
Thinking of all the ideas I could use this token for set me off into what I was in fact supposed to be doing, which was building floor nine.
When looking over the ice run, I had noticed - whilst I was totally not pushing helpless animals down the tracks - that when highly polished, the ice had a slightly reflective surface.
What I was hoping for, was a surface that was reflective enough that it would confuse the adventurers and mobs. Obviously, it wouldn’t be a perfect mirror, there was just no way to achieve that with ice. But hopefully it would create sufficient distortion that I could confuse them enough that the synth cats would be able to ambush them.
First though, I had to do some testing.
I summoned a block of ice. It stood in front of me, a towering pillar of frozen water. Slowly melting; droplets rolling down its side.
Why did this happen? I questioned. When I had frozen the water, this had not happened so it couldn’t be to do with the atmospheric temperature, which I was sure was much colder than necessary. So, it must be to do with summoning it as ice instead of freezing water. I had chosen to freeze water before, because it would flow to fill the complex shape of the floors and walls as water. Summoning the exact shape of ice as that would have been insanely difficult.
Absorbing and resummoning the block a number of times, I realised what was happening. The excess energy from summoning the ice was being converted into heat which caused the surface of the ice to melt before stabilising as the cold of the floor and the ice stripped that heat away.
As the droplets refroze, they created an uneven texture on the surface of my block. This was a problem for my mirror effect. The droplets would have to be removed.
But how?
Bashing them away with rocks or gravel would probably end up cracking and dirtying up my block, not creating the smooth surface I needed. I had noticed in the second floor how the stream had slowly eaten away at the banks and smoothed out the stones in the bottom. Over time they had worn away at them. Perhaps I could do something similar.
Water wouldn’t work, obviously, it would just start freezing in the cold. So perhaps sand?
Using my telekinetic hold, I summoned some sand and began the process of grinding it against the droplets. It took a while, but over the course of a few minutes the droplets began to get eroded away, small flakes being taken away with each pass of the sand. Soon, I had removed them from one side, it was true they were gone but the surface didn’t have that shiny gleam, but a more matte surface. All the sand had scratched into the surface of the ice, degrading the surface whilst also improving it.
This was not the way, but the idea of using sand to erode things away set me off thinking about ideas for traps. Perhaps if it was moving fast enough, I could start breaking down adventurers with it.
I thought about ideas for the trap for a while, concluding that it wouldn’t fit in the dungeon as yet. Perhaps on a later floor.
My next idea was shaving the ice down with a blade made of mana. It took a few attempts before I got anywhere close to getting a flat uniform surface. I kept cutting at slightly different angles and the resulting mess was tricky to perfect, but I got it, and the result was a definite improvement. Perhaps with some polishing it would be serviceable. I would shelve this technique whilst I tried some other things. But the force blade had been a great invention and yet another idea for a trap.
My last idea was to use a bright jet of flame, with a good application of my force magic to scrape away the water droplets and let the surface refreeze, I was hopeful in producing a smooth surface.
Shifting my mind over to the ice, I concentrated on getting a small jet of flame, it started off flickering, the orange tongues of flame waving back and forth in the air. Using my mana, I pushed air through the flame from the base, saturating it with fire mana as I did so, and the flame shrank and changed hue from orange to red to white and blue.
Liberally washing the ice block in my flames, I quickly got it melting, the refrozen droplets disappearing into the watery surface. Seeing all of the surface begin to shine with the melting, I shut off the flame and started pushing the water down with waves of force magic, refusing to let them freeze in clumps.
Over time the block began to refreeze and the new surface, although imperfect was smooth and shiny.
Sections where I had failed to wipe away the water needed a bit of heat and force to smooth out that localised spot, and another couple of hours was used up experimenting with it.
Finally, after a good few hours’ testing, sample one was completed. It was a failure. Although the surface was nice and smooth, the ice just had too much colour to it. The pockets of white meaning that any reflected image would be far too hazy and blurred to be effective, if it could even be seen in the first place.
I needed it to be completely clear, then I might be able to get the effect I needed.
But how to do so? Something was causing the frosty white patches in my ice, I needed to find out what that was before I could attempt to rectify my process.
Focusing in with my mana sight, I examined the ice, trying to drill my vision inside the block. It took a few moments, but I detected traces of air mana, trapped within the ice, pockets of air. Water must have air in it for aquatic animals to live as every animal I had seen thus far seemed to require air of some sort. So, water must have enough air within it for them to survive.
Therefore, when it froze, those gasses end up trapped in the ice, thousands of tiny air pockets that gave the ice its white colouration.
Now, how to go about fixing this?
Perhaps if I boiled the water, it would force the gases to be released and the water could then be frozen into a transparent block of ice.
It sounded plausible, hopefully, it would work.
This in fact worked rather well. Though managing to boil the water was a bit of a faff. I needed to first carve out a thin giant bowl, and then heat it with a fire. Enough heat that it caused havoc with the atmospheric cooling. Thus, I had to transport it to the safe zone, to boil it and then carry it back down the floors to the 9th floor to freeze.
I smiled to myself at it. Once again, I cut, smoothed and polished the surface to try and get the effect I was looking for.
It seemed to work. With some clever lighting I figured I would be able to get the effect I wanted. It would still require a lot of tinkering and perhaps I would need to buy a real mirror from the store to see how they did it. maybe some kind of backplate to enhance the reflection. I pondered.
Still, the reflection at the current level was probably enough to confuse adventurers.
As I was pondering this, the thumping returned. Drum, drum, drumming into my head. I felt my spirit lift as I zoomed my presence back up to the first floor. The man was back, the man was back, I chanted to myself.
No, he wasn’t.
Instead, it was the little green one, and this time with a few friends.
I did not like him, no. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t feel any fondness for him. Perhaps it was the brutish way he had disregarded me the first time. No stopping to stare in wonder at my majesty!
He would pay for that. Yes, he would.
Some of his friends though, they did stop to look in wonder. I liked them more.
After they got over the awe of me, they moved on – a bit too quick for my liking, but, I suppose acceptable – to the trees. The original green one – Marrok as I learned later – showed them how to dismantle the trees. Standing just out of reach and cutting off branches.
After showing the other goblins how to deal with them, he took one of them and wandered down to the second floor whilst the others dismantled my trees. They were much more sloppy, and I was hoping that they would get caught out. Alas they seemed to be managing.
As Marrok and the other goblin returned from the second floor, one of the goblins fighting the tree closest to the stairs messed up, glancing at Marrok, and slipping into reach of the branches.
What happened next was a perfect coincidence, well, perfect for me anyway.
Slashed with the branches, the goblin stumbled back, its foot landing on one of my hedgehogs, its iron spines lanced through his foot.
He screamed, falling backwards and landing in a thicket of my blood sucking brambles. Which slowly slid around him as he clutched at his foot. Perfect sequence.
The brambles seemed to be extraordinarily effective as the goblin seemed to grow more gaunt and deathly before his friends eyes.
Marrok dashed forwards, yanking out the hedgehog but it had no effect. The brambles draining his life. I crowed my victory at his look of confusion. It was the female one by Marroks’ side that noticed.
“The floor, the floor” she called out pointing to my plants.
From there they managed to rescue him – Glady – stripping the plants away and freeing him from my trap.
Nearly, I thought to myself. So close.
Still, taking some of his lifeforce had gifted me some mana in addition to the mana I got passively from them.
Enough to top me back up to nearly full.
The goblins appeared a little shook up, I had come close to claiming one of them after all. Still, they shrugged it off well, advancing to the second floor without much delay.
The second floor was a much more straightforward fight and they easily dealt with my wolves, slaughtering both packs. I held back my cats, not wanting to have them killed when there was no need. With such a large group I thought it unlikely they would be able to isolate and kill one of them.
They crowded around the waterfall, looking through the hole and to the next floor. I had purposely made the stone between floors thick enough that they wouldn’t be able to spy on much of the floor from above.
Marrok, the goblin leader shoved the one who had got caught in my brambles forwards, tossing him down through the hole to the floor below.
He yelled in surprise as he tipped over the edge and landed face first.
The others jumped down and they bantered back and forth a bit, Glady complaining that he had landed on his nose.
The difficulty ramped up significantly on the third floor, so much so that I was confident that I would be able to kill one. I had my piranhas, Goliath tiger fish, the snake and of course the alligators. Armoured, tough and faster than you’d imagine such overgrown lizards to be.
The first bit of action was a few piranha bites on one of the goblins as he slipped into the water while crossing between islands.
They dragged him out quickly leaving relatively little damage. Shame.
The first challenge was the alligator. They had passed close to the snake, but missed its hideout by a few metres. It was very camouflaged after all.
I was saddened that they killed my alligator, but the teamwork was quite impressive. Marrok lured it forwards slashing out with his axe. The others attacked when it was looking the other way dancing back as the alligator snapped at them and allowing another goblin to attack from the other side, all while arrows were raining down on the alligator in between hits.
It took them just a couple of minutes before the damage piled up and the alligator died.
The next alligator went similarly. This wasn’t good. Surely, they wouldn’t be able to kill all my alligators?
The next one they targeted was the male, about 25% larger than the others, this behemoth was lounging at the edge of his island. Like before they attacked, but this time the gator used its powerful tail to propel itself from the water at Marrok.
He stopped his charge, swinging his axe from below and stopping the alligator from latching on, dancing out of the way with a quick hop.
Not again! I thought to myself.
But lady luck was with me this time, as four goblins jumped onto the island, two on each side of the beast, one of the goblins stumbled - his leg having been bitten into by my piranhas – and sprawled forwards, allowing my monster to latch onto his arm. As it turned, it slapped out with its tail knocking the other two goblins back where they slid into the water.
Marrok and the last remaining goblin on the island ran towards the two in the water hurrying to get them onto land, but my alligator rolled, popping off the arm in its mouth and going for another bite. I felt the energy blossom as blood spurted from the wound.
Marrok abandoned his fellow in the water, sprinting back over and managing to knock the next attack from the goblin’s head onto his shoulder, potentially saving his life.
The alligator, feeling cornered began dragging the goblin it had latched onto into the water, spotting this, the remaining goblins abandoned all calm and began a frenzy of hacking slashes, trying to cut through my brute’s armour. In the end it was the little one who had followed Marrok down to the second floor whilst the others were dealing with my trees that did it, plunging a knife into the gators brain and killing it.
Meanwhile, Glady, still trying to rescue the two goblins that had fallen in had managed to haul one up onto the surface and was in the process of hauling up the second when I saw it. The goliath tiger fish, scenting blood slammed into the goblin, pulling it down into the water and pulling Glady off his feet. He managed to keep hold of the bank though and the fish abandoned it, taking with it an enormous chunk of flesh.
Yes! I crowed to myself. There was no way he would survive. The shoal of piranhas that collected made sure of that.
In quick succession I felt it, the rush of mana and then.
~~Congratulations: you have killed your first sapient being. For doing so you have been awarded 10,000 dungeon points. Well done. In addition, you have been awarded 10x mana gain from this death. ~~
~~Congratulations: you have killed your first goblin. For doing so you have been awarded 5,000 dungeon points. Well done. In addition you have been awarded 5x mana gain from this death. ~~
~~Congratulations: you have killed your second sapient being. For doing so you have been awarded 5,000 dungeon points. Well done. In addition you have been awarded 5x mana gain from this death. ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 37 ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 38 ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 39 ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 40 ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 41 ~~
~~Congratulations: you have reached 2x mana concentration including reserve, as such you have been forced to level up: Level 42 ~~
~~Congratulations: You have reached the milestone: Level 40 and as such have been granted a perk. The following perks are available:
Heal
8000 dungeon points
2000 tonnes of soil/stone/wood, 100 tonnes of rare materials
Item: Treasure Blueprint Set 1, 2 & 3, trap set 1 , 2, & 3.
Mana boost: 160% total, 85% bonus mana gain for 5 months
35% off next store purchase
25% off boss price and mana respawn x10
Choose wisely, your next perk is available at level 50~~
The rush of the kill plus the mana filling me and I lost myself for a moment revelling in the feeling. Oh yes!
I would certainly be killing again if that was what it did for me. And 22,370 dungeon points, it was, it was intoxicating. I couldn’t believe it, I had so many.
Finally, finally I could make some great progress. Well, when I had dealt with the rest of those pesky goblins.
Oh, and my next perk, excellent.
