Dungeon Wars

by Jeffrey Logue

  “That’s right,” Claire agreed. “As long as we get adventurers back inside of your dungeon, their deaths will once again empower you.”

  “Great! Alright, let’s summon some adventurers!” Doc metaphysically rolled up his imaginary sleeves.

  “Is that wise, Doc?” Anadine spoke up respectfully, “After all, we don’t know where your dungeon landed, after all. What if we’re in a city of very strong adventurers? You don’t have the power to fight against that kind of a threat.”

  Doc paused. “That’s a good point. I only have two floors to wield, too. Claire, can you use your pixie tunnels to quickly scout the outside?”

  “Are they clear? I’m worried a few may have collapsed,” Claire asked.

  Doc did a quick internal scan. His mind examined the remaining pixie tunnels, which originally ran through the length of the dungeon. Similarly, though, most were ruined.

  “Most of the pixie tunnels are gone,” Doc reported. “However, the one connected to the entrance is still intact, and it has a newly opened exit above it—by which I mean it has a hole. Now that I look around, there are quite a few holes in the dungeon.”

  Doc paused for a moment, not letting Claire leave yet. “Also, I don’t detect any immediate threats outside the dungeon. You should be safe so long as you don’t go father out than a few feet. That’s the current limit of my senses.”

  “Then I’m off.” Claire flew up into the ceiling entrance to her tunnels and flew up the dungeon. She couldn’t help but notice how short the trip was as she arrived at the entrance hiding spot inside the skull. The ceiling had collapsed, unveiling a new entry point into the dungeon.

  “Doc, are you aware your first and second floors fused into this... mess?” Claire asked through their mental bond.

  “I saw it,” Doc’s depressed voice echoed in her head. “From twenty-six levels to three, this really is a huge tragedy for the dungeon. What’s worse, the new first floor is such a complete mess of rubble, and I can’t use my powers to clean it. I’m having enough trouble just sealing the holes.”

  Letting out another sigh, Claire opted to ignore the gaping hole and opened the secret door hidden next to the skull. She flew out of the rock and observed the immediate surroundings. The sudden teleportation had landed the dungeon entrance in the middle of a forest, with magic having blown most of everything away around it, forming a perfectly round clearing. She counted a fifteen-meter gap to the forest edge all around them. Claire then zoomed to the top of the mound and turned in a circle, examining everything she could see. To her disappointment, however, all she saw were trees, stones, and plant life. Feeling some trepidation, Claire flew high, higher than the trees above the canopy, and stared.

  To her amazement, the land was covered with trees to the horizon. Behind the dungeon, there were tall mountains that reached toward the sky, but they loomed in the distance. She could see lakes, streams, animals, and monsters as well, but there were no settlements of any kind. Wilderness surrounded them.

  “Doc, I don’t think we’re going to be able to recover your power anytime soon.” She said slowly. “Unless you cause a huge disturbance, I don’t think anyone will ever know we’re here. There are no adventurers for miles.”

  There was a slight pause as Doc seemed to process this information.

  “Is there anything in your lessons about this kind of situation?” he asked. “Maybe you have some hopeful news that will help? A special dungeon method passed down from your ancestors? Anything at all?”

  “Well,” Claire tapped her lips thoughtfully, “since you won’t be able to survive using the old methods, then maybe we can change your style of dungeon to Plan B.”

  “What’s ‘Plan B?’” Anadine asked through the bond curiously. “Does it stand for ‘bondage?’”

  “I’d be okay with that.” Rowen shrugged. “Tying up adventurers seems like a natural progression for a slime dungeon.”

  Claire sighed and shook her head. “I’m referring to the other method of creating a dungeon—the second option, if you will. By this, I mean that you’re going to have work hard, Doc. It’s going to take time and sacrifice to do this.”

  Doc didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “What do I need to do?”

  Chapter 2

  “Let me return to the dungeon first,” Claire said. “This’ll take a bit of explaining.” The little pixie flew back into her pixie tunnel and down to the heart room.

  “Welcome back,” Doc said.

  “I only left for a moment,” Claire refuted with a smile, “but thanks anyway.”

  “Hey Claire,” Anadine spoke up from the floor, “You said it didn’t look like we were anywhere near a city, right? Can you make any guesses on where we might be?”

  “Sorry, Anadine, but I think we’re far away from anything remotely identifiable,” Claire shook her head with a resigned sigh. “Even with magic enhancing my vision, the only thing in every direction were trees, hills and mountains, none of which I recognize.”

  “My studies with Milly taught me some of the more notable landmarks,” Rowen offered. “Perhaps I could make a suitable estimation of our location if you provided me with some visual cues. What were the trees like?”

  Claire pondered before answering. “The trees that seem to be dominating the immediate area are green but less leafy and smaller with a thicker flesh. Given the temperature, most trees would be sleeping if this were still Nehatra.”

  “That makes this forest more evergreen than seasonal.” Rowen reasoned, “Which means we’re somewhere much more north than before. Claire, was the wind moving towards or away from the mountains?”

  Claire shook her head. “There was no wind I could feel or see coming from a single direction,” she explained. “Rather, it seemed that the wind was quiet and soft.”

  Rowen frowned and began to mutter to himself, while Anadine persisted with her own questioning. “What about the soil? What color was it?”

  “Black and brown,” Claire said after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Final question: did the air have an oddly higher amount of ambient mana?”

  “Yes,” Claire answered.

  “Then we must be in the northern wilderness,” Anadine asserted. “It’s the only place that makes sense.” Rowen looked up and frowned, giving Anadine a cold glance of annoyance.

  “What’s the northern wilderness?” Doc asked.

  “It’s a large swath of forest and mountains that separate the northern countries from the southern countries,” the slime girl explained. “The mountains mostly cover the middle of the continent, creating a huge area of wilderness. The only opening in the range leads into the valley of the grey orc nations, which is to the north and slightly west of Nehatra. The mountains, in turn, are surrounded by a great forest on all sides, connecting the mountains to the sea and stretching across the entire range on both the northern and southern sides. Then, there is a layer of swampy marshland on the edges of the south side. The Empire stretches across the entire wilderness, but even it isn’t foolish enough to make large expeditions into the wilderness. To safely get to the northern nations, you’d have to travel the merchant road in Valorek, cutting through Glenwood to the east.”

  “I have no idea where any of these places are,” Doc stated. “But can I assume that there is minimal chance of encountering adventurers here?”

  “Correct,” Anadine said. “The wilderness is considered a deathtrap for anyone but the strongest warriors and mages. Most don’t even make it out of the swamps, let alone enter the forest.”

  She tapped her jiggly face, which happened to be her body as well, in thought. “There are many incredibly strong monsters and animals that live here, staking territories all around. I’ve heard tales of untapped natural resources as well. That places us in a location of high stakes and high rewards.”

  “It’s likely a little worse than that,” Claire continued from the side, using her magic to repair the entrance to her home in the
wall. “Given the density of magic in the air and the lack of sentient races, there’s a good chance this place is home to many other dungeons, too. It would be a colossal problem if they found us right now, given our current state.”

  Her work completed, Claire landed on a stone outcropping stretching out from the back wall, parallel with Doc’s floating crystal. The entrance to her home once again stood on the wall above the pedestal, a newly made set of stone chairs and table standing in front. She took a seat, placed her chin on both her palms, blew a strand of hair, and smiled in comfort.

  “Thankfully, my home didn’t suffer any damage in the move,” she reported, “Unlike everything else.”

  “So, to reiterate,” Rowen interrupted dryly, “We find ourselves tens of days, if not weeks, away from familiar land, surrounded by threats like monsters and other dungeons, with a depleted dungeon running on low mana, and without a nearby food source by which to recover our strength.”

  “That about sums it up I suppose,” Anadine said.

  “We’re all going to die here,” Rowen groaned.

  “Now, now.” Claire held up her arms calmingly. “Thankfully, all isn’t lost quite yet. We still have a chance if Doc can successfully become a natural dungeon.”

  “You still haven’t explained what that is,” Rowen pointed out.

  “Then I shall go ahead and do so,” Claire said with a smile. She cleared her throat in preparation. “Now, it’s time to begin a new lesson on dungeon management. Tell me, Doc, in your first year and few months of living, what have you learned that makes a good dungeon?”

  “Well, a good dungeon is one that balances adventurer greed with adventurer fear,” Doc recalled. “There must be plenty of treasure and loot to attract adventurers in, while the dungeon traps and monsters should kill only just enough adventurers to increase the dungeon’s power without terrifying the remaining adventurers into retaliation. However, too much treasure and the adventurers will become rich and stop returning. In addition, dungeon monsters have to be balanced well according to their level of strength, and any monster I summon while adventurers are within the dungeon cost more mana than if I summoned them while none were present.”

  “That’s correct,” Claire agreed. “What you’ve said is the optimal form of dungeon management when faced with adventurers. However, would that model still work without adventurers?”

  “I can’t imagine that at all,” Doc admitted ruefully. “With my current mana expenditure, I’d use too much power to manage everything, and I’d shut down to conserve mana.”

  “So then, ask yourself this,” Claire paused dramatically. “How do dungeons that come into being in the wild grow? And by wild, I do mean like in this forest where adventurers are rare to find. To stop you before you can say it, I promise you my mother knew at least a few wild dungeon pixies, so this isn’t a trick question.”

  Doc thought to himself and ended up metaphysically shrugging. He couldn’t imagine a world without adventurers coming every day. The few times that had happened to him, he’d been bored for the entire day. Not even watching gory—yet humorous—recordings of adventurer deaths had lifted the fugue.

  “The answer is that these ‘wild dungeons’ create what is known as a natural dungeon system,” the pixie revealed. “It’s a system designed to use the minimum amount of dungeon mana to create the best results. It should be said, though, that some civilized dungeons also use this method, and all dungeons end up combining aspects of both methods once they reach a certain level of power, regardless of their starting choice.”

  “By ‘natural,’ you mean the principle of the food web, correct? I’ve heard that term before from one of my tutors,” Anadine rubbed the top of her slime body with a tentacle. “You’re referring to the natural process of plants growing under the magic of the sun then being eaten by insects, which are eaten by birds as the cycle continues to the top predator. Then everything dies and is eaten by worms to be turned into dirt for the plants.”

  “That’s it exactly.” Claire clapped, at which Anadine made a bow with her slime body. Rowen rolled his eyes but said nothing.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Doc asked in confusion. “My slimes don’t eat each other.”

  “They don’t try to eat each other because you restrict their natural behavior,” Claire reminded him. “Under the old way of doing things in your dungeon, the slimes were little more than small extensions of your consciousness that you could enter and exit at will. The natural way of doing things is more laid back, letting nature do its work with minimal interference. In the wild, your slimes would be naturally territorial, especially against different slime families. Allowing them to live as they would in nature would encourage them to grow and evolve on their own. We wouldn’t have to do as much experimenting to discover new slime evolutions.”

  “But won’t that lead to another Gretony?” Rowen snorted. The boy had not been present for the rogue slime attack on Doc, but he had heard enough of the event to know Doc had come very close to losing his dungeon. Gretony had been one of Doc’s slimes once, yet he had somehow come into a being as an individual sentient creature. After growing into a lord slime, the third stage of slime life, he’d initiated an ambush on Doc and almost succeeded in replacing Doc as the dungeon consciousness. Privately, Doc knew the true identity of the slime, but as it was dead, he saw no use in speculating over it.

  “That was a unique case.” Claire shook her head. “While sentient dungeon monsters are certainly nothing new, I’ve never heard anything about one trying to take over a dungeon by replacing the hive mind. I do know a few stories about some that killed their dungeon for the heart crystal and wielded it as a tool...”

  Claire noticed three pairs of eyes on her. She blushed.

  “A, anyway,” she stammered. “Doc won’t have to worry about a rebellion as long as he hides his heart room from the new monsters and we keep an eye on any slimes that show initiative and intelligence, as unlikely as that is. Though it won’t only be slimes in the dungeon once Doc allows it to develop naturally.”

  Doc sent Claire the feeling of raising an imaginary eyebrow. Claire rolled her eyes and giggled.

  “You understood that when Anadine described the idea of ecology, she was referring to many different types of animals and monsters, right? Plants, too? If you leave your slimes to their own devices, they can’t propagate quickly, nor can they recreate every role in the web on their own. That goes double for the small amount of slimes you can create. Tell me, Doc, can you make any elemental slimes right now?”

  “I…” In slight bewilderment at the sudden prompt, Doc reflexively channeled mana into a fire slime summoning circle. The circle, however, rejected his mana, and left Doc very confused.

  “I can’t?” Doc realized as he tried to condense his magic again. “My magic isn’t forming the element to go with the slime. The magic circle isn’t accepting it.”

  “Remember how you first made your elemental slimes?” Claire reminded him, “You had to rely on your mana crystal ability to first create the stones that catalyzed their evolution. In case you’ve forgotten, Doc, your personal dungeon mana is element neutral. You can use every element but can’t produce those powers on your own without help. Without your mana crystal ability, you’ve lost half of your slime repertoire. That means no more fire, water, earth, or wind slimes.”

  “So besides making me feel worse,” Doc murmured, “where are you going with this?”

  “Since your slimes aren’t enough, then it’s time to unlock another race for your dungeon,” Claire beamed. “Still, you don’t have enough mana to unlock it the straightforward way as an ability. Instead, you’re going to add them to your dungeon the old-fashioned way: kidnapping, domination, subordination, and assimilation. You know, the nefarious things dungeons are usually known for.”

  Rowen and Anadine shared a look.

  “You ever hear of dungeons kidnapping before?” Rowen asked.

  “No, but then agai
n I’ve heard of worse things happening in dungeons.” She shrugged.

  “To make this work,” Claire continued “You’re going to need a more aggressive approach when it comes to drawing creatures into the dungeon. Once you believe a suitable number of animals and monsters are inside, you’ll need to close the entrance and quickly kill everything inside with your slimes—maybe traps, if you still have any working ones.

  “After you absorb their bodies and mana, you’ll not only be stronger, but you should also have memorized their body composition and make-up. Without too much experimenting, you’ll be able to recreate those bodies as dungeon-born animals and monsters. When you leave them to their natural instincts, they’ll create the ecology of life and death within your dungeon that you’ll need to gather more mana and bulk up.”

  Claire paused. “You could also just choose to let monsters migrate naturally into the dungeon without killing them. I’m not very comfortable honestly with the idea of letting monsters in the dungeon that are not connected to you magically. It’s too big a danger to us if they choose to attack, especially in your current state.”

  “That’s on the variable of how many creatures actually enter the dungeon,” Doc grumbled. “I have no desire to end up bored and lonely with nothing to do while waiting on the chance hope some beast enters my dungeon. What if another dungeon appears in the coming week and decides to attack? We need to quickly attract a lot of monsters to make this work.”

  Claire shrugged. “It’s your dungeon, Doc. I can also advise you. How do you want to handle this?”

  Doc looked down at Anadine and Rowen.

  “Anadine,” he called, “how much booze slime do you have left in your body?”

  “A good bit,” she answered. “It hasn’t been so long since I needed it to disguise as a human, so my body hasn’t dissolved much of it. Do you have a need for it?”

  “Yes. Go to the top floor… go to the entrance and coat the ceiling up to the opening into the cavern with the leftover alcohol. Don’t bother with the entrance itself or the other surfaces. Be careful, though; the former first floor is so badly damaged that I can’t determine if the old traps are active or not.”