by Alston Sleet
Most of my day was spent just watching and plotting, trying to work out why they just pushed to run all their people through those two trials instead of trying any of my other challenges. The ones I was most eager to have tested were the magical challenges, but the dwarves seemed almost pathologically opposed to them. Their casters were few and far between, and they pulled guard duty but didn’t try any of the challenges themselves.
The oddest part was watching the elite guards versus the recruits and trainees. The elites were stable and ready for any moment to go wrong. The recruits would alternate between boasting and high energy or moments of silence and concern. The elites just stayed silent. The entire time. It was honestly a bit creepy. They flashed hand signals at each other when they were relaxing, apparently some kind of sign language, but otherwise, they just sat their guard with watchful eyes.
It wasn’t until day twenty-two that I found out what the deal was with the challenges and why they were pushing everyone through as they were. It was the achievements. Gaining an achievement was usually reserved for some amazing feat or performance, something recognized by the ‘Voice of the World’, I assume misses blue-box, for acts beyond the norm. Most people would never gain such an achievement in their entire lives. Achievements came with an increased chance to learn a related skill or trait. My copper agility challenge? It upped the chances of a recruit gaining [Enhanced Agility], some kind of increased flexibility and movement skill. The recruits spent a lot of time wondering what the possible related skills for the melee challenge were.
One of the tests I had tried to set up for my [Will of the World] skill triggered during this time. The young dwarf was obviously very scared of being in a dungeon and had refused to take off his thick leather and chainmail armor. I had been very eager to watch his performance since he was the only one to wear such encumbering gear while preparing for the challenge. Everyone else was either in light leather armor or even a tunic like an arrangement. He instead decided that he wanted his protection and wasn’t changing his mind.
It was actually interesting to watch the discipline issue first hand. The argument was that the dwarf was always training in it and would need to be always ready in that same armor. It didn’t matter what the soldier was doing, he should do it in his gear. I could see his leader wasn’t convinced, but he seemed to agree to let it go. I was laughing to myself wondering how that would be used against him in training later. I hadn’t been in the military, but I had watched more than a few movies which had basic training.
His run was mostly uneventful, he had a little issue getting across the last platform. That had as much to do with his short legs than any problem with his extra weight. When he went to collect his two copper coins though, the pedestal spat out a single magic glow stone. This stone wasn’t like the glow stones the scout had wasted in my dungeon before. Those stones had a spell which was loosely tied onto it. Push a little bit of magic into it, and it would glow, but after just a few tries the spell would unravel and fail. This stone was densely packed with mana, and the glow spell was woven and tied through the entire physical structure. It would take a sledgehammer and patience to destroy the stone.
As for the enchantment on the stone itself? It wasn’t just some spell loosely tied in, it would take as much mana as a mage could pump through it and glow using all of it. While they wouldn’t be able to use more than about thirty minutes worth of light from the mana in their version without the spell unraveling, mine would take a weeks worth of mana to produce light before becoming unstable.
His reaction was comical to me at the time. I thought his cheering and screaming to be entirely out of line. It was just a slightly better glow stone. The elite scout offered him multiple golds the moment he returned to the chamber, and he refused without hesitation.
The scuttlebutt of the trainees in discussion with him answered a host of questions for me though. No one seemed to carry around a magical weapon or item except the mages and most just had staffs, only one of the elites had an amulet as well. Magical items were rare and difficult to get. They required risking the insanely dangerous dungeons or having a mage spend literally weeks focusing their magic onto a single object until it became saturated with their mana and the intended effect. For me, it took minutes of effort and a truly minuscule amount of my magic.
Funny enough, a persistent rumor began that the challenges offered better rewards for success when you were under some kind of extra difficulty. It wasn’t the case, the trigger I had used with the [Will of the World] was just to hand out a glow-stone instead of a copper coin very rarely. The young dwarf just got lucky.
My concerns over how useful a dungeon core would be to a mage grew from the glow stone discovery. A dungeon core’s magic being directed was seen in the same way my planet looked to nuclear weapons. The Will of the World pushing out achievements for my challenges had the potential to be as game-changing in power growth for the dwarves’ troops as giving them handguns would be.
Finding out about that kind of change renewed my view of travel as an excellent idea. If I were tied down to one location for too long, other countries would see it as a national power issue and they would attack the dwarves, and then me, just as a matter of survival. If they instead knew they would get a chance at the same power on a regular basis that would probably maintain stability, or at least direct the wrath away from me.
While the dwarves ran my challenges, I couldn’t change my dungeon. The magical aura around the dwarves and the way they disrupted the magic in my dungeon made it very difficult. Totally enclosed areas like my treasure room were simple to work in, anywhere connected to the pull of the dwarves aura? Not a chance. My instincts though seemed to be perfectly fine with sitting in wait and watching the dwarves. If I had to describe the sensation, it would be like how a crocodile views a herd near the watering hole. It’s just a matter of time, I can wait. They will come. No need to rush or put in any effort until it’s time.
While I didn’t feel rushed or bored, I still needed something to occupy my mind. At first, I did the first thing I would have done with the ability to move my view anywhere I wanted. It only took one nude scene before I slunk away. Dwarves aren’t particularly attractive from a human perspective, but that wasn’t the problem. It felt empty. I was a dungeon core, a stone, I had emotions, but they were cold and solid not the rush of chemical changes that they had been. I didn’t feel aroused or horny, those happened in the body, and I didn’t have one. The most I could gain was an aesthetic like appreciation, and that was almost depressing to discover.
Soon I found myself scouring the dwarven fortress as well as the deep mines below the castle and into the mountain. I had been eager to inspect the dwarven smithies, but disappointed to discover that they mostly worked on repairing armor and weapons. The sharpening wheel made more of an appearance than anything else. The apprentices spent absolutely mind-boggling amounts of time making nails, arrowheads, and crossbow points. Even things like pots and cookware had more time devoted to them than any kind of legendary weaponsmithing.
My discovery of the smithy and how little weapons were made, gave me a brilliant idea for another whole wing of challenges. Crafts! I could have a smithing area, where you had a limited time to make a specific item or the room fills with flames! Or how about a leatherworking stand where you had to finish some construction out of leather! Jewel crafting! Armorsmithing! Pottery, glass blowing, woodworking! Tailoring! The options were endless, and all of them allowed for more than just mercenaries and soldiers to try to gain achievements. I could expand my rewards as well since I would learn patterns from more than just killers, but crafters as well.
The rewards from these challenges could be designs, raw materials, and I could even offer more than just a pass/fail, live/die, grade on a crafting trial! On second thought that might be beyond what I could manage using the [Will of the World] skill yet, but it might be possible in the future.
My promise not to change and modify my dungeon to
protect the secret of my sentience was slipping fast.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mistakes Were Made.
As the day for my departure from the dwarven stronghold approached, I realized that I had screwed up in some truly spectacular ways. If the dwarves were less friendly and orderly, or if they had been actively hostile, my mistakes could have led to problems for me. Potentially even my death.
My first mistake was thinking that I wouldn’t be found hidden up in the mountains. This should have been an obvious mistake. How were dungeons commonly discovered? It couldn’t be that people just randomly wandered into them out in the middle of nowhere. I’m sure that type of situation happened, it just couldn’t explain how the majority were found.
The answer was dungeon explorer teams. All it takes is someone who is sensitive to mana, even if they aren’t skilled enough to be a mage, and a team willing to wander around dangerous and remote areas to find these newborn dungeons. Day twenty-eight, just two days before I had planned to leave, had a group of adventurers wandering around within a short distance of my dungeon. I had actually used [Far Seeing] to scout around my previous entrance, the actual physical location of my dungeon, as a precaution before I returned my gateway. I had been giving myself all kinds of credit for being extra cautious and responsible and taking the extra effort before I let my gateway return. This was extra effort that I didn’t actually think was necessary, when I noticed the team huddled around a person who would walk a few hundred feet, meditate for a bit, then turn slightly and walk again.
I watched them for a bit trying to figure it out before I realized they were running a grid pattern and trying to use a skill to find something.
They were tracking the extra mana that I had inadvertently let loose into the world when I first opened my dungeon. To me, it seemed like barely a wisp of wasted mana. Given what I knew about mages now? It must have appeared like a burst of mana shooting into the world with a plume like a rocket's exhaust. I spent the rest of that day ignoring the adventurers entirely, watching them scamper around like ants had become a guilty hobby for me, and instead spent my time trying to seal every inch of my dungeon against mana leakage. I needed to spend time imbuing my walls with extra mana and the will for repair anyways.
I could have waited for the adventurers to leave my dungeon beforehand, the extra effort of using mana even in the areas furthest from the adventurers was strenuous. I struggled through anyway since I didn’t want my home base, the actual location of my dungeon and core, to be exposed. My greatest protection at the moment was obscurity. To everyone else, I appeared suddenly, and I would leave suddenly. I’m sure the secret of where I was would leak eventually, but hopefully, it would be in a millennium, not now!
Then I realized; I wouldn’t be able to move my entrance from the dwarven castle directly somewhere else. It would just be too difficult. I had enough issues with transferring my gateway. Holding the space, then moving it, and then letting go of the previously held area? Even thinking over the steps involved felt like trying to track six hands at once. This meant my arch would have to return to my dungeon before I could move it again. Luckily, returning the doorway was easy, it mostly consisted of relaxing my hold rather than any active effort. But how would I keep the magic from leaking?
If I let my entrance spew mana out when it moved, as it was in the dwarven castle, then it would be a signal flare telling everyone where I was each time I transported my entrance. It might be missed if I transferred it each time the area was empty, but the correlation between the (soon to be) famous traveling dungeon and a remote location where no one could find a dungeon? It would be sure to be discovered. This was something I wanted to avoid for as long as possible.
I spent all day thinking about it as I willed mana into my walls spewing repair and resistance thoughts at every surface. It’s a measure of how far I’ve come, how I’ve been changed, that the idea of just closing the entrance before I move it only occurred to me after a day of thinking about it. It would be uncomfortable, and a bit like trying to hold my breath while doing heavy weight lifting, but not dangerous. It was just entirely unnatural for a dungeon core.
My second big mistake was mitigated because the dwarves were polite and disciplined. They could have invaded my dungeon, camped out in the entrance vestibule, and then never left. With the complex and dastardly plan of ‘don’t leave,’ they could have crippled me. I would still have options, but they wouldn’t be great options. Letting them out near my actual dungeon would be a worse case solution. But almost as bad would be transporting them to another location. I could just see the dwarves being dropped off in a human settlement and the humans thinking that it was an invasion. First, the dwarves would be slaughtered, then I would be attacked en masse!
Part of it can easily be fixed. I just have to train the sapients to behave. A bit like trying to educate a herd of unruly cats, but it should work. I’ve already done a bit of this. I don’t let groups through to challenge hallways, though I plan to allow for group challenges in the future. I don’t let them backtrack in ways I won’t allow, etc. That being said, if they are persistent and are just downright more stubborn then I am, I have little recourse at the moment. Some future group will probably try to do this. Tie up some criminal (or send in a recruit) to ‘hold’ me in one location. If they go with this gambit then I can’t let them stop me from leaving, or they will never let me move, on the other hand, I can’t take them with me either!
The solution was as evident as it was stupid. I just needed to make a second gateway, vestibule, paintings, and plaque. I made a complete copy, directly below the original, and then made more warped connections into all my different hallways. Keeping them locked down tight, for now, I would hold it in reserve for if I needed it. The entire process took a day of work. Most of that was just reserved for trying to get my paintings to match. I went back and forth on it, but eventually, I copied Denda’s plaque as well. I had spent weeks checking my dungeon for where that secret could be, but so far I still couldn’t find anything.
Now if a group decides to refuse to leave, I can just block off the different connections and the entranceway and just let them starve to death. Cruel, but if they don’t follow basic politeness, then I refuse to be polite in return. This is my home. Even if I’ve invited you in, you can’t just refuse to leave!
It was weird how easy it was for me to keep track of all the different twists, turns, compressions, and expansions of the dimensions within my dungeon. I thought at first that it was my [Spatial Manipulation] skill. While that seemed to help, I now believe that it was just the fact that my dungeon domain lets me understand so much of what I’m touching with it. This might be why moving my entrance was so tricky, I’m moving it outside of my domain.
Once the dwarves packed up for the night leaving my halls empty, I started to wander using [Far Seeing]. I was looking for a new location with new sapients to challenge. I first started out to the north and east, but just found more and more dwarf fortresses and towns. It became apparent quickly that I was heading deeper into the dwarven territory. I had hints of this from Jorgen’s memories but not much more than flashes.
Going north and west from the castle traveled into nastier and nastier mountain ranges. These were sheer cliffs and walls of rock. I kept resetting my skill higher and higher into the air trying to get a bird's eye view of where I should go. Eventually, I found a pass that seemed to be cut directly through the mountain range. Two large hulking piles of stone with a slight dip between them had a road that zigzagged back and forth in the foothills before it dipped between the two overbearing mounds.
After zipping along the length of the pass, through repeating casts, I eventually found a gigantic stone fortress which straddled the road. The bulwark was obviously structured to keep something out since the back side was mostly open to the path while the face was just a stacked wall of large cut stones.
The road on this side of the structure cut out suddenly, but the well-tra
veled path to the defense meant this was a manned structure. You don’t man defenses like this if there was no reason, beyond this wall was some other group. Maybe just monsters, but more likely an organized offense.
I kept zipping along and up into the air, leapfrogging my view forward and up, until I exited the mountains and out into rolling fields of grass. Along the mountain range, I finally found signs of civilization. Small open-air cookfires and crude torches sputtering in the darkness on a sad wooden palisade.
The kobolds and these lizard people were what Jorgen was familiar with; a sad and a pathetic lot. They were skinny, unhealthily so, using very crude weapons of stone and wood, and seemed nearly on their last legs as it was. Jorgen’s memories told me that this area was nothing like what they would prefer. Whatever they were doing out here, the main thing they were doing was dying out.
Returning my view back to the exit of the mountain range I decided to go even further north. After twenty minutes of my bouncing leapfrogging viewpoint, I found more fires in the mountainous foothills. These Kobolds had real clothing, metal weapons, armor, and a stone gatehouse like structure in front of their tunnel. The three at the entrance seemed to be standing watch, their slitted red and green eyes staring out into the darkness.
The tunnel quickly dipped downward at an awkward angle, then slowly rose again along a shaft with multiple steps and flat stone areas. Each flat area funneled into a single person entranceway while a mostly rounded circle of stone sat beside it. Such a structure would allow someone to fight an advancing army until they reached the door, then they could shove the stone wheel in front of the door. Looking closely I even noticed a small lip of stone above and below that would act to retain the rock from being pushed out of the way.
