His name was Maginhart, but I hadn’t been involved in naming him. I guessed it must have been Warrane, as his supervisor. Afterall, Maginhart was another of the Soul Bard’s middle names. My dungeon was starting to grow so large that I was losing my personal involvement in things. I guessed that was both a good sign and a bad.
Maginhart kept glancing at me. As one of my creatures, he would get a vague sense of where my eyes were. Even if they weren’t visible, he would know when he was catching my gaze or not.
“Do you have something to say?” I asked.
Maginhart nodded. He had inherited more of the lizard side of the kobold genes, and his thin tongue stuck out of his mouth and rattled when he breathed. “Thisss kobold doesssn’t want to sssound rude,” he said, his tongue seeming to spin over every ‘s’ sound.
“I never killed anyone for talking plainly,” I said. “I don’t remember doing so, anyway. Wait, have I? There was the…nope. I definitely haven’t! Go on, Maginhart.”
“Thissss kobold…he…” he began. His grasp of language was somewhere between Shadow and Wylie. “He wondersss why you are playing with cryssstals, and not helping Wylie and Gary.”
“That’s a good point. It might look like I am just playing, but I have a plan. Watch.”
Focusing on the crystal set on the deconstruct sphere, I gave a command.
Deconstruct crystal.
After a whirring sound and a flash of light, which startled Maginhart, I was left with a pile of dust.
It looked like crushed glass, and for a second I had a sickening feeling that this wouldn’t work and that I had just wasted the communication crystal.
“Maginhart, could you just feel the crystal dust for me? Careful you don’t cut yourself.”
The kobold kneeled beside the pile. He prodded it, and then picked up a pinch and let it drift from his hands. “It isss sssoft.”
“Good. We’re getting somewhere.”
Next, I created a leech. The squelchy thing was barely bigger than a slug, and its skin was dark brown and covered in slime.
“Leech,” I said. I knew I wouldn’t get an answer back, but it would understand me as its creator. “Eat some crystal dust.”
After the leech slithered over to the dust and ingested some, I felt my nerves play up. I reminded myself that my nerves weren’t real and that I was just excited to see if this would work.
The leech didn’t look any different after eating some dust. I had no messages to tell me anything had changed. Maybe I had messed this up. Still, I had to see for sure.
“Okay,” I told it. “Go north in the dungeon and stop when you find the rest of the kobolds.”
The leech left the room. Normally I would have chatted with Maginhart to see how he felt about the dungeon, and how well he had settled in, but I was too on-edge for small talk.
Have you ever felt like that? When you’ve just fed a deconstructed communication crystal to a leech, and you’re anxious to see if it was a waste or not?
I checked my map and saw that the leech had stopped now, which meant he had found the kobolds.
At first, I heard nothing. I had messed this up, hadn’t I?
“What’sss thisss?” said Maginhart. Kneeling beside the pile of crystal dust. He lifted a pinch of it and held it to his ear. “Huh?”
“What is it?” I said.
“It isss talking. Lisssten.”
He walked to me and held the little pinch of dust close. I heard voices now. Kobold voices that sounded far away, but voices none the less. The first was male, the second voice female.
“Does Shadow think that Dark Lord will rescue Wylie?”
“Cores aren’t sentimental, Tomlin. Why would he rescue him when he can just create another?”
“Tomlin doesn’t believe Dark Lord would abandon him.”
I looked at Maginhart. “That’s enough. Thank you, you can place the dust over there, separate from the other pieces.”
My plan had worked! I had guessed that the essence of the crystal was its ability for two-way communication over vast distances. Broken down, it would retain that ability while losing its bulky crystal structure.
By having my leech eat it, I had imbued the leech with its power.
Relief washed through me. This hadn’t been a waste. And what’s more, I now had a way to eavesdrop on the Wrotun general meeting Godwin said he was going to hold.
I wished that I could create an army of 10 leeches and send them out as spies, but I had reached my dungeon monster capacity. I would have to level up to be able to create more.
Using my core voice, I ordered the leech to slither out of the dungeon and to the Wrotun cavern, where it would find the cavern meeting and listen in for me.
“Maginhart, could you take this crystal essence and put it safely in the inventory room?”
“Yesss, Dark Lord.”
While I waited for the leech to reach the caverns and Godwin’s meeting to begin, I had a boss monster to meet. I had even more traps to make. The last thing I needed was to get caught in a Seeker invasion right now, so I couldn’t let this stop my preparations.
CHAPTER 21
I had combined an angry elemental jelly cube, some hivemind shrooms, and a bone guy. The melding room had worked its magic, and now there was a new boss monster waiting to serve me. As a core, I don’t get to open many presents, but I guess this was the closest thing. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
I kept my excitement in check as much as possible. When it came to the melding room, I had learned that it was fine to hope the monster would turn out one way, but it was sensible to expect something completely different.
I hoped to get something that had a bone guy’s ability to take a battering, combined with the flexibility and elemental damage of a jelly cube.
What I was equally likely to get was a kind of bone-hard blob that refused to die, but barely moved. Impossible to tell. I mean, the last time I’d used the melding room I had ended up with a giant troll-spider with leeches for legs.
So it was with this knowledge that I calmed my thoughts, telling myself that I would accept the result no matter what it was. I hopped away from my core pedestal and into my melding room.
It took me a second to focus. With my senses on, I smelled spent essence. I looked around, but I couldn’t see a boss monster anywhere.
Huh?
Had the room failed, or something?
Another thought hit me, this one a punch to my non-existent stomach.
Had my new boss monster killed the goatief boy? Was he lurking elsewhere in my dungeon?
I had gotten the melding complete message while I was with the First-Leaf and the Rushdens. What if my monster had left the melding room and explored the dungeon, passing his time by slaughtering the first person he came across?
I mean, I have nothing against my monsters picking up a hobby. But this had caused me a lot of trouble.
It was a hard thing to have to swallow, but it was the best explanation for what had happened, given the monster’s absence. I had created a monstrosity in my melding room. A mix of creatures that came together to form an abomination that had no right to exist.
Normally that would have been a good thing. But today? Something had gone very, very wrong.
I was glad when a voice distracted me from my thoughts.
I was very, very confused when I didn’t recognize it.
“There he is.”
“He’s here! He’s here!”
“We’d like food. Hero meat, please.”
“It could be darker in here, y’know. This place needs more darkness!”
I heard them then. A single voice at first, before more joined in, then even more, until dozens of voices were talking to me.
Looking up, I saw them. The melding room ceiling was covered in a growth of black fungi. They looked like rotten mushrooms, but with tiny eyes and mouths. Some of them were pure black and some were speckled red, white, and gold.
“Silence!” boomed one
of them.
Well, I say boomed, but it was more of a squeak, to be honest. Just a louder squeak than the rest. At any rate, it shut them up.
“We will think as a hive, not as single minds,” it said. “There is too much individuality on display here! In the presence of his Dark Magnificence, your voices will silence themselves and the hive will prevail.”
“Hive prevail.”
“Hive prevail!”
“Hive prevail.”
“Rid your minds of these notions of the self. Embrace the tides of collective consciousness. Do you not understand the concept of silence? Or of the hive?”
“Sure! It means a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence.”
“Yeah, you pompous arseface! It doesn’t mean we all speak as one; we just share our knowledge and opinions with each other.”
I felt dizzy trying to tell which mushrooms were talking at any one time. The only thing I could work out was that one of them was trying to quieten the rest, but was having a tough time of it. As a master of nearly a dozen kobolds, I could sympathize.
When they descended into a babble of arguments, I began to lose my patience with them all.
“Enough!” I said.
They stopped talking now. All their strange little faces turned toward me. It was disconcerting, having more than fifty eyeballs looking at me. Even worse was when they seemed to slip into their hivemind, and they all blinked at once.
“I am Beno, the core of this dungeon. I live under various names. The Dark Lord, His Dark Magnificence, The Master of Darkness. You were created to serve as the boss monster in this dungeon, but I may have made a mistake. You appear to be nothing but a growth of talking mushrooms.”
“Just mushrooms? Show him!”
Something suddenly fell onto me then. It balanced on the tip of my core.
A strange feeling shot through me, almost like an invisible arm reaching inside me. It became hard to think.
And then the sensation left, and the thing on top of me rolled off and plopped onto the ground. It was a mushroom. Small, black, entirely unappetizing, even if I still had a desire for food.
It smiled wide with its tiny little mouth. “I did it! I read his thoughts!”
“Ah,” said a mushroom on the ceiling. “The knowledge has just come to me.”
“Me too! He has a strange mind.”
“Ha! Dark Magnificence? Dark Lord? He gave those nicknames to himself!”
“He likes to pretend he is the Soul Bard! I saw it in his mind. He tried to hide it!”
If I had cheeks, they would have reddened. As it was, I hid my minor embarrassment and focused on what was happening.
One mushroom had somehow wrenched thoughts from me, and the others learned the same thoughts just seconds later. That was the power of the hivemind, I supposed. It meant this would be a good monster for gathering intelligence, but how could it ever stage a final battle?
As if in answer, four more mushrooms dropped from the ceiling. When they hit the ground they began to grow, their forms stretching and molding until they became larger shapes.
They would have been chest-height stood next to a man, and their figures were human-like in that they had two normal-proportioned arms and legs and they stood upright. It was only their faces that gave away what they really were.
The four of them wore haunted expressions and had dead eyes, lacking in color and set deep in their sockets. No, they weren’t Dungeon Academy overseers.
They looked like they had visited the shores of death but then had been washed back by the tide just when it was within reach. They were undead, and undead meant bone guys.
Yet, they weren’t made of bone, or even of fungi. Their humanoid forms were made from ooze packed tightly together so that they wobbled when they walked.
Two were glowing red, and heat emanated from them. The other pair was blue, and a chill was cast from their bodies. I understood now. I had seen aspects of the hive fungi and the undead bone guys, and now I could see where the angry elemental jelly cube had come into play.
So, the mass of fungi growing on the melding room roof could not only read minds and spread that intelligence to the others, but they could form big slime shapes with undead characteristics and elemental damage.
Not too shabby at all. Not when you think about what I could have ended up with. Stuff like a giant, bone-hard mushroom. Or tiny mushrooms made from jelly. Or even an undead mushroom that spat out blobs of jelly. Really, the melding room could make a mess of a monster if you were unlucky.
Possibilities raced through my mind now. Perhaps this monster wasn’t so bad after all.
The first fact that stuck out was that the four creatures that formed from the fungi hadn’t added to my total dungeon capacity. It meant an almost endless supply of creatures, right?
I was rich! Rich with monsters! The mushrooms could drop off the ceiling and form something bigger, adding to my army.
But then I noticed something. Each of the newly created forms was shorter than the last.
I decided to try something. “Could you please for two more…uh...jelly men?”
On command, two mushrooms dropped from the ceiling, and these were also shorter than the others.
So, there was a drawback. It seemed that the more of the shapes they formed, the weaker they were. I wasn’t quite so rich. If the mushrooms kept dropping and taking different shapes, they would get smaller and smaller until soon, they were forming ones barely bigger than a mouse.
Maybe their true power was elsewhere. There was something else I could try.
“You. Fire jelly man. Follow me, please.”
I quickly hopped to the pedestal in the core room. “This way,” I shouted.
Soon, I heard squelching noises approaching. So, they weren’t going to offer much stealth, that was for sure. Before long, one of the red ooze men had joined me into the core room.
He looked around, his dead eyes scanning the room. He opened his mouth to speak, making nothing but a slurping sound at first. Then he found his words.
“The master needs me?” he said. The noise his gullet made was quite revolting, and it took a lot to disgust me. I usually love disgusting things.
“I want to try something,” I said.
Slurp. “I am ready.”
“Could you stop this sound, maybe? It’s distracting.”
Slurp. “I am sorry, but I cannot.”
“Fine, we all have our flaws. Listen, there is a mage in the labyrinth. He has spells that cause ice damage.”
“I should attack him?”
“No. Wait here a second.”
I hopped back into the melding room, where I heard the fungi chatting to each other.
“He doesn’t like our slurping? Does he think he is the king of Xynnar or something?”
“Shh! He’s back.”
“A mage with ice damage. Nasty.”
The chattering gradually died down as knowledge of my presence spread through the hivemind.
“Make another ooze man,” I said.
Again a mushroom fell, and a shape formed. This was the smallest one yet by at least an inch. But, it was colored red, and heat emanated from it.
Aha.
It was like I’d suspected. When I had told the last jelly guy about the ice mage, this information had gone straight to the hivemind, even though they were in different parts of the dungeon. Then, when they’d created a new jelly person he had fire damage, which was an elemental counter to ice.
It was capable of spreading information from one part of the dungeon to another with barely any delay, and it could use that to tailor the ooze creatures to match the enemy.
My new boss monster might not have been anywhere near as fearsome as Gary. It might not have had his delightful personality. But, it could be very, very deadly.
“Dark Magnificence,” said a
voice. It came to me through my core hearing, so I knew it was someone in another room.
“Maginhart?” I said.
“Your crystal dust is talking.”
I felt anxious now. Anxious and excited. If the crystal dust was talking, it meant that my leech had made its way into the caverns, and to the meeting the Wrotuns were having.
Now, it was time to listen to them all talking behind my back.
CHAPTER 22
In the alchemy chamber, I hovered on my pedestal with a pinch of communication crystal dust beneath me. It was hard to hear the voices at first, and even more difficult with Maginhart humming to myself. After asking him to leave, I was alone. I concentrated, and the sound became a little clearer.
There were dozens of voices all chattering at once at first. The leech must have found his way into wherever they were holding the meeting. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pick anything out.
Then I heard something banging again and again. I recognized the sound because it was burned into my memory; it was Godwin’s staff.
“Order! Order!” he shouted.
The voices trailed off one by one. Some became whispers, but soon, all were silent. Even so far away in my dungeon, I sensed there was tension in the room.
“I have called you all here for an important reason.”
“Yeah, Second-Leaf Gumkin started charging more for her stew!” shouted a voice.
There was muffled laughter before the banging of a staff stopped it.
“Do you think this is a time for jokes?” thundered the First-Leaf. “One of our own has died, and you laugh?”
The tension doubled. I almost felt it cling to me, even in my core room. Godwin seemed to have the whole fill-people-with-dread effect down to perfection.
“I am sorry,” he said, in a kinder tone. “I do not mean to call you all here to shout. I know that people grieve in different ways, and for some, laughter is a mask. But the Rushden family are here, and laughter is salt in their wounds.”
There were murmurs now, but no more heckling.
“The future of our people rests on what we decide here today, my fellow leaves. My family. My most beloved people.”
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