Bone Dungeon (Elemental Dungeon #1) - A Dungeon Core LitRPG

by Jonathan Smidt

  First, several different metals had made themselves ‘known’ to him via his absorption of them. He found iron and copper, though Erin hadn’t woken from her sleep for him to ask her about them. He had also found a small strain of gold, but again, he wasn’t certain if that was valuable. The only reason the metals stood out was because they were different from the normal rocks and dirt he had been eating away.

  The other things he had stumbled upon were the skeletal remains of a variety of creatures. Ryan wasn’t sure if it was his affinity for dark mana, but as he absorbed the remains, he instantly gained an understanding not only of bone, but also of the creatures the bones had belonged to. Frustratingly, though, some of the skeletons were incomplete. As he pushed forward with the excavation and his final room, he found himself hoping for more bones to complete his collection.

  “Finished that boss room yet?” Erin stretched as she rose from her nap. How long had she been asleep? He really had no idea of time down here.

  It was taking a while, mainly because he needed to take breaks from his work to give his mana time to refill. On the plus side, as he grew larger, his mana began refilling faster, increasing the rate at which he could work. A busy dungeon was a happy dungeon, it seemed.

  Once he reached his final room, he had been able to make changes without feeling much of a drain, but the boss room had taken him at least a day, if not two, to create. If he had to guess, he figured he may have been dungeon building for a week now? And Erin had slept the entire time. Lazy fairy.

  “You could say that.” He was only half paying attention to her, having found a human skeleton as he was finishing up his final room. Spiffy. That made four different skeletons in his collection. In the silence, while Erin took a nap, he may have become a bit obsessed with completing his sets, to the point of creating a few offshoot tunnels here and there as he searched near the remains he did find.

  “Well, let me take a look.” Erin stretched her feathery wings and took flight, heading through the small opening he had made between his room and the boss room, per her instructions.

  Erin told him he couldn’t completely cut it off from the dungeon, but that his room should be hard to find. As such, he made a tunnel from his chamber that snaked up and a down a few times, before connecting through a small hole at the top corner of his boss room. He felt it was sneaky.

  “Ugh, you couldn’t have made that easier on me?” Her voice was filled with irritation as it came through their bond.

  Well, you can’t please everyone.

  Ryan finished his final touches on the first room: a sprawling expanse like the second, seeming almost natural, not dungeon made. He wanted to talk with Erin about a few things before adding to it.

  “I like this ceiling. This room feels eerie,” said Erin.

  Dark stone illuminated only by a faint white glow – it was eerie. Especially since the room was too large for the light to chase away the darkness. But hey, Ryan didn’t have any way to add extra light. The only reason there was a slight glow was because it permeated everything Ryan had influenced. Erin had told him the glow represented objects that had been worked on by a dungeon’s mana.

  “Well, eerie can be good, right? We are a darkness dungeon.” He sent his humor through the bond. Maybe she had forgiven him.

  “Oh, how could I ever forget?” She huffed as she flew on to the next room. Erin zipped around the large space, inspecting the walls, muttering to herself here and there.

  “Ryan?” She was inspecting one of his offshoot tunnels. Oops. “What is this?”

  “Um, I was looking for something.” He could tell this was about to go south.

  “Oh, like metals?”

  “Yes, totally those.” Phew, that was close.

  She poked around in the offshoot tunnel, looking at the soil, checking the portions he had absorbed away. He watched her through the walls and realized something just as she noticed it. He had absorbed the skull he had found there but forgotten to absorb the rock around it. The effect: a piece of stone with the perfect imprint of a human skull.

  Crap.

  “What have you been doing?” she screeched.

  Yup, she was mad. So very, very mad.

  “Come on. Throw me a bone!” Ha. Probably a poor time for that joke. “I didn’t do anything with it, I just absorbed it. I needed it for my collection.”

  “YOUR WHAT?”

  Oh, note to self: anything dark-related is a touchy subject.

  “My bone collection.” He was quickly filling in all the other offshoot tunnels he had made. She didn’t need to know about those. It was easy enough; he found he could create anything he had absorbed with a simple thought and a minuscule mana drain.

  “I’m going to act like I didn’t hear that for now, and finish inspecting the dungeon.” Her tone, and her feelings, told him this was not over.

  Chapter Six

  “So, what did you think?” Erin had finished looking over Ryan’s hard work, and was now sitting atop him, albeit silently. She hadn’t spoken to him since his mention of his bone collection.

  “It’s a good start.”

  Oh, that’s promising.

  “But it is pretty basic.”

  Ouch.

  “Well, you didn’t really give me much to go on,” he grumbled.

  Great plan, shift the blame back to the angry one. I really need to think about things before I say them.

  Erin growled and hit him. Obviously, being a diamond, he didn’t feel it, but he got the message. She was mad. Really mad.

  “Sorry, I tend to speak without thinking sometimes.” He sent his remorse through the bond.

  “You ‘tend,’” she stressed the word, “to do a lot without thinking.”

  Fair point. His mind was currently sneaking around the walls, seeing if he had missed any bones. Ryan found he could send his consciousness to multiple places at once, allowing him to multitask.

  Oh look, another bone.

  “Ryan.”

  Oh no.

  “Ryan, you’re searching for more bones, aren’t you?”

  His emotions must have traveled through the bond while he was speaking with her. She’d felt his sudden excitement and figured him out.

  “Um, will you be mad if I say yes?” he asked.

  Ryan still hadn’t quite gotten used to being bonded with her. She seemed able to make guesses about what he was thinking based on what emotions she could sense him experiencing. It was rather unnerving.

  Her anger came across the bond, and he prepared himself for another fit from her. However, the emotions slowly faded to sorrow.

  “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  “I’m really sorry, Erin.” He sent waves of his own sorrow through the bond. Ryan hated to hurt people, and he really had started to care for the fairy. “I’m just trying to become a dungeon you can be proud of.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just a little biased. You chose practically the worst dungeon type you could. The only one worse would have been chaos.”

  “You know, I don’t remember that being an option.” He really was curious about this chaos affinity now. “Did you hide it from me?”

  Erin quickly shook her head. “That’s not it. I would never purposefully hide anything from you.”

  Ryan wasn’t sure if that was true, but he was listening.

  “Chaos is the direct opposite of celestial. Because you are paired with me, and I am a celestial fairy, chaos wasn’t an option. In the same way, a dungeon with a chaos fairy cannot choose celestial. ”

  “If it makes you feel better, I wouldn’t have chosen chaos.”

  Ryan didn’t know what Chaos was, since Erin hadn’t explained much on it, but something in his core told him he would have stayed away from it. He wasn’t evil.

  “You know what, how about we get to building some mobs?”

  Erin’s mention of mobs drew his full attention. She certainly knew how his mind worked.

  “Awesome. What do I have to do?�
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  “As I mentioned before, darkness dungeons utilize skeletons and zombies as their basic monster types.”

  He remembered that, hence his bone collection.

  “All right, so how do I make them?” His mind was already swarming with ideas.

  “Normally, darkness dungeons begin with making mobs from bones they have found through expansion.”

  Ryan beamed. “Well, I have found a lot of bones so far.”

  “Then try to reanimate one of those sets.”

  Reanimate? “How?”

  “Well, send your mana into the set of bones you’ve found, and it should naturally begin to bring the creature back to life.” She seemed to hate giving him these instructions.

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Now who’s the slow one?

  “Because I absorbed every set I found.” How else would he have a bone collection?

  “Oh.” She paused. Ryan was curious what she was thinking about; her emotions were all over the place. “Hey, Ryan, I think I just solved our problem.”

  “What problem, and does it get us to this whole ‘making mobs’ thing? I really want to make some.” He had been waiting a long time for this.

  “I think I found out how I can accept you as a darkness dungeon.”

  Oh, that was definitely more important than mob summoning.

  “I’m listening.”

  “So, part of the reason why darkness dungeons are destroyed by the church is because of how dangerous and evil they are.”

  “Well, I can guess raising things from the dead is usually frowned upon.”

  Erin nodded in agreement, continuing, “That’s part of it, Ryan. The other issue is how strong they can become in a short amount of time.”

  “How?” Isn’t getting strong fast a good thing?

  “Remember I mentioned you are limited to how many mobs you can have based on your level?”

  “Yup! At Bronze Eleven I have fifty points. But I’m sooooo close to leveling.”

  “Right, well, when a dungeon reanimates a skeleton or a fresh corpse that it has found and didn’t create, they don’t count against that value.”

  Oh, that’s interesting.

  “And those mobs can leave the dungeon.” She let that hang in the air, like it was a big deal. Ryan had no idea why, and his confusion must have gone through their bond.

  “Normally, dungeon mobs can’t leave the dungeon,” Erin explained.

  Well, then.

  “So, having mobs that don’t cost anything and can leave the dungeon to roam the land presents a danger?” he said. “That makes sense.”

  Ryan guessed masses of undead meandering about killing innocent people would cause quite a stir. Hell, he could almost sympathize with the church for fearing dungeons like that. Almost.

  “But I’m not going to do that.” He felt Erin’s mood rise, though she looked at him with a confused face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to raise people from the dead, and I don’t want to be destroyed before we get strong.” Ryan wasn’t evil, and the thought of bringing people back from the dead left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “I knew you weren’t evil. This is why I think my solution will work for us.” Erin was glowing a little brighter, and her mood was infectious.

  “You still haven’t told me this solution,” he reminded her. He was glad they could get this to work, glad she seemed in a good mood, but he was still confused what her solution was.

  “Well, as long as you promise to never raise the dead or create mobs from fallen adventurers—”

  “I promise.”

  “—we can make our mobs completely from scratch using our own dungeon bones.”

  She waved her hands in the air at the last part, a smile across her face. If Ryan had to guess, she had just come up with that name.

  “Works for me. So, can we get to mob summoning now?”

  Chapter Seven

  Erin’s mood changed completely the moment she realized Ryan wasn’t planning on using the bodies he had found as his mobs. In fact, now she seemed almost as excited about mob summoning as he was.

  “So, first I’m going to explain the basic mobs you can make as a Bronze-level dungeon.” She had his full attention. “There are two main mob types: skeleton and zombie.”

  As she spoke, she flashed images of both to him.

  “But, as a Bronze dungeon, there are four types you can summon, as each main type has two sub-types: beast and human.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “Beasts are broken down based upon their sizes. As you get stronger, you will be able to create larger beast-type skeletons and zombies.”

  Ryan shuffled through his knowledge on what types of beasts he had absorbed. He had found complete skeletons for rats and squirrels, an incomplete deer, and an incomplete wolf. He had also found a single human skeleton, but it was missing an arm for some reason.

  “At Bronze level, your human-based skeletons and zombies are limited to basic versions, but when you level up, you will be able to make them tougher, and even give them armor and weapons to use.”

  “So, can I make fifty human skeletons?” Each mob counts as a point, right?

  “No, different mobs have different point values.”

  Ugh, so much to learn.

  Erin held up her fingers, and started ticking away at them, as if trying to remember the information herself.

  “Small beast skeletons are worth one point, small beast zombies are worth five points.” Oh, that’s easy enough to remember. “Normal human skeletons are five as well, and human zombies are ten.”

  “Are their values based on their strength?”

  “More or less. A single human skeleton is stronger than a small beast skeleton, but five small beasts might be able to take on a human skeleton. Variety in dungeons is key. It will take you a while to figure out the combinations that will enhance your dungeon. Most high-ranking dungeons even modify each and every floor to hold different mob types and adapt them to highlight the strengths of those mobs.”

  “Why do zombie beasts cost five times as much as skeletal beasts, while human zombies cost only twice as much as human skeletons?”

  Erin stared at him for a moment, mouth agape. After a second, she shook her head.

  “These are just the starting costs. At Silver, your medium skeletal beasts and zombie beasts only differ by five mob points, or twice as much.”

  “Then why such a large difference now?” He really wanted to know.

  “No one really knows why mobs cost what they do, Ryan. However—” She paused, her face growing dark. “There is a belief that the God of Death wanted to tempt dungeons into summoning more human mobs than beast mobs early on.”

  Ryan shivered at this. Just what type of being was the God of Death?

  “Well, that was dark.” Ha. “So, what do you recommend we make?” he asked Erin. He was at a total loss, not to mention nervous about taking the first step to becoming a powerful dungeon.

  “What do your collections look like?”

  “Well, I have full sets of rat and squirrel bones. My deer and wolf sets are almost complete as well, and my human is missing all the bones of his right arm.” He wondered if something had dragged away that arm after the human died.

  “Hmm. The wolf and deer are both medium beasts, so you won’t be able to use those yet.” Darn. “Rats and squirrels could be interesting, and a human missing an arm.”

  Erin fell silent, thinking.

  “This dungeon building is hard,” Ryan whispered, trying to imagine the best possible combination. Fifty points suddenly didn’t seem like much for his three rooms.

  “So, I think we should use a human skeleton for your boss,” Erin finally said. “And if we mix up skeletal squirrels and zombie rats for the other rooms, we can at least give adventurers a bit of a scare, and maybe kill one or two to help you get a little stronger.”

  R
yan started doing some basic math. A human skeleton for his boss would cost him five points, leaving him with forty-five points spread across two rooms. Should he try to even them out? Or should he make the mobs harder as adventurers came deeper?

  “Just a single skeleton in my boss room? Isn’t a five-point mob pretty low for a boss? The other rooms are going to have forty-five points divided between the two. Seems a bit off.” Shouldn’t his boss room be his strongest?

  “Oh, bosses are different. They cost five times the basic cost of the mob you use. Your single skeleton is going to cost you twenty-five points and will be unique.”

  “What?” That would leave him with twenty-five points for the other two rooms. That hardly seemed adequate.

  Erin ignored his outcry and continued. “So, Ryan, how about you put five skeletal squirrels in the first room? And two zombie rats with ten points of skeletal squirrels and rats mixed in for the second room?”

  The numbers added up, though Ryan still couldn’t get past the massive cost of his boss skeleton. Why was it so high? Oh, well. First things first: skeletal squirrels.

  “Well?” Erin broke the silence that had filled the room.

  “How do I make a mob?”

  “Oh!” Erin started laughing, and while Ryan loved the sound of her laugh, this time he was annoyed. She was laughing at him, and it hurt.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I–” More laughter. “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you.” She had tears falling down her face. “As a dungeon, not only do you learn everything about the things you absorb, but you can then create them at will.”

  He would have smacked his own face if he had one. He had been creating dirt to fill holes and manipulate his dungeon, but he hadn’t realized he could do it with other things, too. He turned his focus back to Erin as she continued.

  “Think of your squirrel skeleton, and push mana into the image, willing the bones into existence.” He started to concentrate. “In the first room!”

  Whoops. He had been about to try and summon the skeletal squirrel in the room with them.