The Quizard Mountains: A Dungeon Core Epic (Station Cores Book 2)

by Jonathan Brooks

  The first problem – and the reason he didn’t have any Units in the dungeon before this – was that he had no way of easily maintaining (feeding) them underground. He could create meals for them using his Molecular Converter, but since most – especially the larger predators – were carnivores, it would eat into his Bio Mass without a way to easily obtain more. For the herbivores it would be easier; however, it would still mean that he would have to constantly harvest trees and other plant-based material to feed them as well. He had some thoughts on the subject, but it was something he would address once he figured out what he was going to do about his other issue.

  The second problem – and what he felt like was the most important – was that he had a limited number of Units he could create before he ran out of Processing Power/Intelligence. Currently, he could control up to 16,000 Bio Units which sounded like a lot until you consider that just one of his BBQs took up 3,000 of them. In order to populate his entire dungeon, he was going to need more – a lot more. He could pump all his points into PP/I to bring it to 53, giving him 21,200 Bio Units that he could control. Just as Milton was about to dump all his points there, he hesitated; his other objective suddenly occurred to him.

  Dirt.

  His drones were fast and a heck of a lot faster than they had been in the beginning. However, the amount of dirt they would need – based upon the 180,000 Basic Earth Units they had used just to finish their Workshop – was a big concern. If he dumped all his points into Processing Speed/Agility they would work even faster, which would hopefully be able to keep up with demand.

  It was a hard decision because he needed more of everything. Looking back at where he started, broken and barely surviving on a foreign planet, he had come a long way. But with his own advancements came a whole new slew of problems that needed him to be stronger and more prepared. It was difficult to see where he would need to concentrate as far as his own development went, especially considering that now that it wasn’t just him and ALANNA at risk. Even if it wasn’t his idea for them to come here in the first place, he now felt a sense of responsibility for the two Proctans toiling away underground.

  In the end, he split the points he had available. 10 points into Processing Power/Intelligence brought it to 50 and 3 points into Processing Speed/Agility brought that total to 40.[13] He was a fan of round numbers and it turned out to be a good thing – milestones tended to come at even intervals as well.

  Congratulations!

  When you reach certain milestones in your statistics, additional bonuses can be unlocked. In this instance, when you reached 40 points in Processing Speed/Agility and minimum of 30 points in Communication/Charisma, the speed at which your drones complete their projects is increased by 50%

  Congratulations!

  When you reach certain milestones in your statistics, additional bonuses can be unlocked. In this instance, when you reached 50 points in both Processing Power/Intelligence and Communication/Charisma, the Bio Unit limit is no longer based upon your Processing Power/Intelligence statistic. Instead, the amount of Bio Units you can control is based upon your Reactor Output.

  Current Reactor Output: 17%

  Current Bio Unit limit: 170,000

  Milton just stared for an eternity of five seconds at the notifications he received after he allocated his points. This solves all my problems!

  Either he was just one lucky son-of-a-gun, or he was starting to finally see the power that a Station Core could unleash upon unsuspecting enemies. While he had wished many times that he hadn’t been damaged when he came to this planet, he didn’t think he would have the same appreciation of his capabilities if he hadn’t rebuilt himself essentially from the ground up. A fully-functioning Station Core must be a beast of defensive machinery!

  Now that he didn’t have to worry about running out of Processing Power to control his Combat Units – not to mention that his drones were going to be able to produce more than enough dirt to fulfill his guests’ requests – Milton started to tackle his first problem…

  Chapter 12 – The Farm

  “ALANNA, we’re not ready yet!” Milton screamed out in a panic.

  “Milton, you’ve said that before and see how that turned out? Now, get your ass in gear and prepare for their arrival,” the stoic attitude of his AI guide calmed him somewhat as he thought back at what they had accomplished.

  It had been a busy day and a half as everyone started to work together to build his dungeon. As they progressed, however, Milton couldn’t help but think that it was their dungeon – they had all contributed toward its creation.

  After seeing the initial plans that Whisp had created, he only had one change that he brought up with her regarding the placement of rooms and their strategy. He had been thinking of the best way to go about defeating whoever was sent to destroy them. Based upon his assessment of their previous attack – and his poor defensive performance – he decided that the best strategy would be one of attrition.

  Sure, they could throw all their biggest guns at any intruders right away – and this might work if they were surprised and unprepared – but if they managed to defeat the first room full of their deadliest traps and Combat Units they were screwed if they couldn’t follow it up with anything better.

  To Milton, this seemed like a poor way to go about it. If the first room was loaded up with his heavy-hitters and were somehow wiped out with a single attack from, say, a Caster, he wouldn’t be able to replenish their numbers fast enough because each of them needed to be individually grown in his Bioconversion Laboratory.

  He took advantage of his gaming background instead. While he wasn’t too good at developing the infrastructure needed for a dungeon – in games they all just worked by “magic” – he did understand how they were set up. He just hadn’t been able to copy it before now because he didn’t have both the knowledge and the resources to do it. Now he did.

  As a party entered a dungeon, they would face easy mobs and traps for the first level. From there, the difficulty would ramp up level-by-level until by the end of the dungeon they were escaping death by the skin of their teeth and had to use everything at their disposal to defeat the boss.

  In most MMORPGs he had played, each dungeon had a specific level range that it was suggested you be in order to achieve victory. Sometimes, if you had really good gear or tactics, you could tackle something above your level and still come out on top – but it was usually a gamble. If you attempted it and failed, your character would die, and you would lose experience, items, gold, whatever…and then you tried again. Fortunately for Milton, these Cordpower fools couldn’t respawn.

  He was going to follow the same type of setup in this dungeon. However, he was going to ramp up the difficulty…quite a bit. If he imagined the three that had attacked him before as being levels 5 to 10, and if they were sending more to attack that were probably stronger in the 10 to 20 level range, he wanted their dungeon to be for parties level 50 or above. He didn’t care about playing fair – he was playing for his life.

  While Brint and Whisp started the process of creating the first rooms near the entrance, Milton began mining dirt. Not just any old dirt, however – he was mining it with a purpose.

  Just past his facilities, the Proctans’ personal rooms, and their Workshop, he started hollowing out a giant cavern that he planned to extend more than a mile underground. He moved the portable Power Generator and Molecular Converter from up by the entrance and brought all but the eight drones he still had out mining out north underground. He had a fairly good stockpile of everything else (other than Basic Earth and Gravel) at the moment[14], so his drones were needed for his current projects.

  The ceiling reached over 100 feet in the air and was supported by multiple thick columns of stone that had a thin core of Weightonite surrounded by generic sandstone. He filled the stone-covered floor with a nutrient-rich soil that required a bit of Basic Earth mixed with Organic Material until it was deep enough to allow proper drainage and irrigation.<
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  After some perusal through his options, Milton then produced some genetically-modified grass that grew extremely fast. It was much more expensive in terms of Organic Material than regular grass, and it was a “normal” green color that he hadn’t seen among the blues and purples on this planet so far. From what he could tell, the grass would triple in length everyday as long as it was watered frequently and had enough light.

  He needed help for the next part, which ALANNA was gracious enough to offer with her patented “cheerful” attitude, “You need to build a General Parts Assembler, dumbfuck. I can’t believe you haven’t built one already.”

  I’m really going to need her to figure herself out. This back-and-forth of personalities is confusing me. It took a couple of minutes of to find it in his available facilities list, which seemed expanded since he had last looked at it. He was going to have to investigate it later, when he had more time…and more resources.

  The General Parts Assembler was a catch-all for everyday items needed in construction when you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for. He thought of it as like a Home Depot that you didn’t have to walk two miles through because everything was conveniently listed – all you had to do was just pick it out.

  Most of the things that he had made so far, he was able to visualize, and the Molecular Converter would do its best to create it. With simple tools and slabs of rock – it worked perfectly. For things like a pump, sprinkler system, and grow lights, he had very little idea how they worked so he couldn’t visualize how they were supposed to look. With some experimentation, he probably could figure it out; however, he was pressed for time and this was much easier.

  The GPA was a little on the expensive side, costing him almost a third of his available 13,000+ Basic Metal Units, but it was something that would help in the long-run. It ran off portable power, so he was able to easily hook it up to his Power Generator he already had nearby. It was just slightly larger than the Molecular Converter, but it didn’t have the capability to convert other things – just produce parts and finished products. He was so excited he even told Brint and Whisp about it, which had the girl in fits about not being able to see the list. She pestered the poor guy about what was available to make until Milton butted in and told her he would work on assembling some sort of interface in the future. They didn’t have time to deal with it now, so they got back to work – albeit with frequent looks from Whisp who looked like she wanted to ask about something else but restrained herself.

  There were no express plans in his core on how to set up the sprinkler system, so he used whatever knowledge he had gained from his Advanced Engineering skill to improvise. With only one minor mishap – where he accidentally created a blockage that blew out a part of the ceiling – he had a fully functioning greenhouse.

  He siphoned off some of the water coming from the underwater cavern he had found so long ago to fill a reservoir located in the ceiling. From there, a pump he had created from his GPA pumped water through some non-porous stone pipes that crisscrossed along the top of the cavern. When the water emerged through holes in the pipes, they were directed through sprinkler heads that dispersed the water like a gentle rainfall.

  Additionally, he installed grow lights along the perimeter and dispersed through the room, blanketing the whole field of grass with a soft glow that was almost indistinguishable from the daylight outside. He had only gotten about 40 feet down his cavern with his grass, water, and lights when he ran into a problem.

  The pump and lights required his Power Generator to work, which limited the amount he could realistically cover when it was placed in the ceiling. What he had so far was a good start, but he needed more generators to continue building what he was calling his Farm. He really needed those deposits in the Quizard Mountains even more now.

  Instead of dwelling on what he didn’t have yet, he instead made plans for when he did have the resources he needed. He continued to instruct his drones to dig further, extending his Farm cavern since they needed the dirt from it anyways. He then turned his attention to what every farm he could think of needed – livestock.

  Thanks to Brint, he now had access to a Picow as a Combat Unit. The giant pigs that were the size a very large cow were the perfect Bio Mass resource that would hopefully provide an unending supply of material for creating the defenders he would use inside the dungeon. Additionally, they would provide the sustenance needed to maintain those Combat Units.

  However, he couldn’t afford to wait the normal amount of time it would take them to procreate on their own. He knew from talking with ALANNA before that he could make them reproduce – flashbacks of her discussion on FUCM ran through his mind – but the time needed to produce additional Picows was something they couldn’t wait for. Fortunately, there’s an app for that.

  Inside his Biological Recombinator, Milton placed the Picow as the base subject and a Proctan as what he wanted to combine with it. He was a little weirded out thinking about turning these giant pigs into breeding and feedstock using Proctan DNA – and then using them to feed both his Combat Units (not a problem) and his Proctan allies (cannibalism anyone?). He skirted around this issue by making sure that he didn’t change anything physically about the Picow to make it look more “Proctan”. He figured that would have to be enough.

  Recombination Complete!

  Analysis of: Picow Livestock

  Rapid insemination: +100

  Multiple births: +200

  Hyper-gestation period: +300

  Enhanced accelerated growth: +400

  Young age (Less than 6 months old): -100

  Total point total: +1100

  He had to make them initially smaller and younger so that he had enough Trait Points to accomplish what he wanted. They were going to be old enough that they didn’t have to feed on mother’s milk and could eat the grass already rapidly growing throughout his Farm. Even starting out at a young age, they grew and matured so rapidly that they were able to reproduce within a day and a half. They would produce at least two and possibly more offspring per reproduction cycle and would be ready to give birth within a day.

  A downside of their rapid growth was that they would only be able to reproduce once before they grew too old and had to be “converted”. Additionally, the grass on his Farm was barely enough to sustain four Picow Livestock before they ate everything – they needed to consume a lot to maintain their accelerated life-cycle.

  All-in-all, however, his new Farm could eventually produce enough Bio Mass that even if most of his Combat Units were wiped, he could theoretically repopulate them all without having to hunt outside sources. Milton created four of his new livestock (3 females and one male) to start the breeding process. They only cost a fraction of what an adult Picow did, but the investment of over 3,000 units of Bio Mass was worth it. Sustainability was key if they were to succeed and they were on their way!

  Of course, that was when one of his Blood-thirsty squirrels noticed a party of Proctans entering his territory.

  Chapter 13 – Preparation

  Fortunately, the four intruders were still hours away from finding his dungeon. That gave Milton time to panic, have a temporary mental breakdown, and then pull himself together as he assessed the current state of the dungeon.

  While he had been “farming”, Whisp and Brint had been hard at work building the first room near the entrance just past the doorway containing the Monomel Wire Grid trap. After Milton had told her that his drones could understand and follow blueprints, she made them as detailed as possible so that Brint wouldn’t have to relay every piece of it. All it took was Brint staring at it while concentrating on delivering orders to the dozen drones still available to them. Within a couple of seconds, they had the plan and were ready to go.

  Since Milton had a reasonably good Tactical Map of the underground area around his core due to searching for ore deposits, Whisp was able to sketch out a bare-bones representation of the final configuration of rooms according to the available
space. It followed the general path of his original tunnel, but it expanded it significantly as well. Her drawings didn’t have most of the rooms fleshed-out yet – only the first couple; despite that, he was excited to see how it would end up.

  By the time Milton alerted them to the incoming danger, his Proctan allies were just finishing up the first room. The planning and detail of each part of the room was calculated down to the smallest inch – and it showed. He was impressed, especially when he saw that she had hollowed outside the perimeter of the room so that it could hold and allow the repair of traps.

  The way she explained it to Brint – to which Milton listened in – was a box inside a box. The inside box was the room which invaders would travel through. This inner room was suspended and supported by thin beams of Weightonite which attached to the outer, slightly larger box. This hollowed out section surrounding the room – assisted by platforms and ramps – allowed his drones to safely navigate themselves around the perimeter without fear of direct contact with enemies. They would be able to fix or reload any traps that needed it and it also provided a place for triggering mechanisms to do their thing behind-the-scenes. Milton had experimented with various hidden triggers behind walls, but what he saw here made his attempts look like an Elementary School science project. In short, it was genius.

  Whisp was in the middle of setting up a trap to test its effectiveness as he told them about the four invaders coming their way.

  “They can’t have found out about their operatives already. It’s either friends of theirs or someone else entirely. Unless Cordpower sent more than one group…in which case we could be screwed,” Whisp concluded.