by Nick Ryder
Hero’s Dungeon 2
A Superhero Dungeon Core Novel
Nick Ryder
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Do You Want More Hero’s Dungeon?
Chapter One
I flexed my clawed fingers, the copper fur on the back of my hands flashing in the cold white lights of the facility.
I was never going to get used to that, I didn’t think. Fur. Claws. Wings.
I spread the wings now. Huge eagle’s wings that forced Lisa, Elaine and Marie to duck down a little as they took over the room in the facility. I felt trapped just then, confined inside the facility when I could have been out soaring over the desert skies.
Elaine ran a hand over the glossy feathers, just as intrigued with them now as when I’d first added them to the body I’d eventually inhabit.
Lisa was more concerned with what I was currently building on the console in front of me. A monster that rivaled all the other creations we’d made in the facility so far. A hybrid creation not unlike the one I’d built for myself.
My body was a combination of all the blueprints I’d had the girls gather from the area surrounding the facility. I’d cherry-picked the best bits. Extendable wolf claws that were just enough like Wolverine’s to make me feel super-powered, even when I was one of the few that hadn’t been given extraordinary powers the day Earth changed forever. The fur was taking some getting used to, but I didn’t hate it. It helped that my girls, part-animal themselves, were just as fuzzy.
I still had two legs and two arms, but they were more powerful than any humans. Bolstered by the muscled limbs of a wolf.
The wings were the most exciting. My back ached, not with the weight of the huge things, but with the temptation to say fuck it and ignore the danger I knew was lurking outside the military facility that had been my home for the past twenty years.
“We should add the fire sacs,” Lisa said, tapping the screen and bringing my attention back to our latest creation.
Marie, a rat-human hybrid, was curled into my side, her twitching ears rubbing just close enough to my armpit that it was a little ticklish. Her tail was wrapped around my ankle. “It added so much power to Elaine’s lizard,” she agreed.
The cat-human hybrid, Elaine, purred and continued to stroke my wings. Her pet lizard was slumped in the corner, sleeping on the hard ground of the laboratory. It had the potential to be deadly, but its unwavering loyalty to Elaine made it a powerful ally. No one was scared of the creature.
“Putting fire in something we’re not sure about might not be a good idea,” she said.
Lisa stood close to me. Her hand looked like mine, the same extendable claws and fringing of fur—hers white—just encroaching onto her hand as it rested on my chest. “I think Sol can handle it if it goes off the deep end and starts attacking either of us.”
Marie nuzzled her face into my side. “But I don’t want him to get hurt.”
Elaine laughed, finally moving from the wings to run a sharp claw down my back, not breaking skin, but making me shiver. “Sol’s too powerful to get hurt, his new body is ridiculous. Besides—” She pressed a kiss to the back of my neck, soft and lingering. “We’re never going to let anything happen to him.”
Marie’s hand snuck under my shirt to feel the abs there.
Lisa kissed my cheek, eyes locked onto mine. Then she moved lower, sucking and kissing my neck.
I shut my eyes and leaned back. God, I’d missed this.
The piercing slap of metal against metal made my eyes snap open. The door to the room had been slammed open.
My girls didn’t stop their ministrations even as a six-foot, blond hunk of male muscle sauntered into the room. He looked like the cover of the world’s cheesiest romance novel, with dazzlingly white teeth. I stared for a while, completely confused about what I was seeing.
Mostly because this six-foot, blond, obviously male hunk of muscle had boobs.
And they might have been the nicest boobs I’d ever seen in my life.
“Why don’t you ever fantasize about me?” the adonis whined, with the familiar, genderless voice of the AI I’d been sharing a consciousness with for the past weeks. I groaned and rubbed my eyes, feeling nothing now, and muttering under my breath.
The scene melted away around me, and I was once again looking into the military facility from behind a CCTV camera lens.
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” I said to Ego, trying and failing to get rid of the frustration that came from, once again, being without a body. It had felt so real. Ego had been pushing his luck more and more recently, invading my dreams.
“You seem so fixated on the body thing that I wanted to try it out for myself. I was struggling to decide on which to be, though. My files tell me it’s okay to be both.”
“Not like that,” I hissed, feeling trapped. I wanted to stretch non-existent legs, to crack non-existent knuckles. “Fantasize about your body in your own dream next time.”
“But you know I can’t—”
“I’m serious, Ego.”
Ego didn’t respond. At least the sulking AI was silent. I felt caged; claustrophobic, and he wasn’t helping.
I flitted through the cameras until I came across my girls. They weren’t huddled or draped around my powerful body anymore, and they definitely weren’t giggling and horny.
Instead they sat, tense, in the room they’d kitted out as a lounge. Old couches had been dragged in there. Elaine was lying across the top of a couch, the very tip of her tail twitching lazily. She rested her head on her hands and frowned. Her long red hair cascaded around her, a stark contrast to her pale calico markings. Her lizard lay on the couch beneath her, similar to my already sorely-missed dream. It looked asleep.
Marie sat on a beanbag on the floor. Her small body was almost swallowed by the huge thing, and she sat curled into a ball that hid her long, shapely legs. She wore a male, military button-down t-shirt she’d taken when first waking up in her new body that came to her mid-thigh. She was frowning too, eyes following Lisa’s agitated movements.
Lisa paced. The wolfish woman was dressed the most appropriately of them all in a button-down shirt open at the collar and combat pants. Her larger, powerful body filled out the military gear. Her claws extended and retracted with every step.
“We’re sitting ducks,” she was saying. The girls had all accepted her as the leader—at least, the one with a body. I figured I was, almost by default, the top dog in their small pack, but I couldn’t be with them all the time. Lisa made decisions when I was missing.
Right now I was too frustrated by my lack of body to even let them know I was there. I didn’t have the ability to slam open the door and draw attention to myself. I didn’t have the raw power to earn my status as leader.
I’d been a Master Sergeant in the air force, and now I was reduced to a CCTV system.
Sometimes watching Lisa strut around like the natural-born leader she was filled me with such envy it was best to stay quiet.
Marie lifted her face just enough that her speech wouldn’t be muffled. “Which is why we should
start making more animals to defend us. We need some traps in the facility, too.”
“I don’t know. I think Cara is how we stay safe,” Elaine said. “She’s powerful. She can help us.” Cara, the young woman with the team of apocalypse-survivors outside the facility, had gained superhuman powers in the Event that had essentially ended the world. She was dangerous. She’d taken out nearly a whole army that had threatened her village — but only with our help.
“She’s a loose cannon,” Lisa dismissed with a flick of her claws, sweeping her long white hair behind her shoulder in the same motion, which somehow made her look extra dismissive — and strangely alluring, all at once. Maybe just to me. “We need to go out there and start being offensive. Let people know that we’re dangerous.”
“Are we that dangerous?” Marie asked. “Dangerous enough to want to provoke people?”
They still had no idea how dangerous they could be. There hadn’t been enough fighting yet for their true potential to be shown; they hadn’t been in their animal-hybrid bodies long enough to realize that they were so much more than just humans now.
And I hadn’t even broached the idea of modifying their bodies further yet. There was potential to make them even more deadly.
“We’re a target anyway,” Lisa argued. “Just by being here. The solar panels on the roof draw attention to us. We need to let people know that even though we’re here, it doesn’t mean people can come and take advantage of us.”
“We need to be more powerful first,” I said, revealing my eavesdropping presence for the first time. Elaine jumped, the fur on the back of her neck standing on end, but recovered easily. She was too elegant to fall off the back of the couch. The other girls didn’t show any signs of surprise.
“We are powerful,” Lisa argued. “And we get more powerful by using our abilities more. We need to go and practice fighting. We need to go and collect more specimens so we can keep altering our animals to get stronger. We need to be out there.”
Marie shook her head, ears flat to her hair. “I’m sorry, Lisa, but no. We shouldn’t leave the only strength we have — this facility — behind, and wander away. We need to turtle. We need to make traps, to stop people getting into the facility. We have no idea what’s coming, and—”
“Cara can help us do both,” Elaine argued, raising arched red eyebrows at the girls.
Her lizard beat its colossal tail against the couch, as if agreeing happily with its mistress.
“I want a body,” I added to the conversation. “I need one.”
“Because you alone will be all the power the facility needs..?” Ego said.
“You should have a body,” Lisa agreed, ignoring Ego’s passive aggressive remark. The AI definitely knew how to keep hold of his resentment. “But Ego is right, it’s not the most important thing. We need to protect the facility.”
“I need a body,” I said again. “It’s important that I get out there and see what’s really going on.”
Lisa looked offended. “You don’t trust my reports?”
“I need to see it for myself,” I stressed. “It’s not about trust. It’s about being able to truly understand.”
“There’s no reason not to have a body,” Marie said. “You can work on it.”
“And we’ll work on keeping the facility safe,” Lisa said, giving each girl in the room a hard look. “We’ll get out there and show we’re not to be messed with.”
My interlude about the body had only been a short one, and the girls dissolved quickly back into their disagreement about how things would play out in the coming days.
I left them to it.
I had a body to build.
Chapter Two
Lisa eventually acquiesced.
“There’s no reason we can’t achieve everything we want to,” she said. “I’m sure an attack is coming. There’s no way people that brutal just leave and learn the error of their ways.” The fight she’d witnessed between Cara’s village and the invaders had put her on edge. There was a whole world out there. Endless numbers of people who might come across their facility and decide they wanted to take it for themselves.
If the fighters at the village were anything to go by, they would hold nothing back trying to win.
“We don’t have enough nutrigel to do everything,” Marie said. She glanced at the CCTV camera where Sol had been watching. “Creating Sol a body and creating enough monsters to keep us safe? Not to mention how much it takes to feed every living thing in this facility. No offense, Sol.”
“Um,” I cut in. “I am alive. Definitely alive.”
“Psh,” Ego added. “By definition? Yes, fine. But in reality? Barely.”
“OK. What the hell is happening right now? The AI is telling me I’m barely alive because I don’t have a body? Because I don’t eat? I’ll have you know, I am swimming in a vat of nutrigel right now. What was the last hot meal you ate, Ego?”
“My favorite is spaghetti carbonara,” the AI said dreamily.
“Oh, gosh, delicious!” Marie agreed with a small laugh. “Extra mushrooms.”
“Ewww,” Elaine said, sticking out her tongue. Marie wrinkled her nose at the cat woman in return.
“Is no one going to address that Ego just told us he had a favorite food?” I asked the room. “Am I going crazy? Just because I’m a brain strapped in to the neural network of an old abandoned government facility doesn’t mean I’m less human than a disembodied robot.”
“If I had a body,” Ego amended sadly, “my body’s tongue would probably enjoy spaghetti carbonara. I have had a long time to think about it, Sol. A long, lonely time…”
“Wow, Sol,” Elaine chided me, teasingly. “You made Ego sad. How can you be so … heartless?”
“If I had eyes they would be rolling so hard right now,” I said.
“Sol needs a body,” Lisa said, propping her hands on her hips and immediately drawing attention back to her, including mine. “Can you imagine being trapped in that thing? It must be hell. We have to let him get a body.”
“It is hell,” I muttered, but this time they didn’t acknowledge me, so I spoke louder. “I’m leaving for real now. Feel free to talk about how handsome you think I’m going to be. I’ll try not to listen, but I probably still will.”
“We don’t have to let him do anything,” Elaine said, glancing up at the camera lens she guessed I was watching through. To the best of our abilities, we made eye contact. Her sweet face and easy smile made me want to smile back. Such a simple thing, it made my chest ache that I couldn’t do it. “He can do whatever he wants. Remember that he’s the one who brought us back. He saved our lives.”
All the women nodded. And they looked like they meant it.
“He’s a military man,” Lisa reminded them. “He’s going to be much more useful in a fight than some random creature we create anyway. He knows how to fight.”
“That’s settled, then,” Marie said, voice small. “Sol gets a body, and we do what we can with what’s left of the nutrigel.”
The nutrigel was a problem we hadn’t found a great solution to yet. It was tasteless goop made of protein that both sustained the living things in the facility and was used to gestate the things they created. But it was a finite resource, and eventually it would run out.
“So it’s settled, then,” Lisa said, though neither Elaine nor Marie looked like they’d come to a real conclusion. “We make more creatures in here and work on protecting the facility. Setting traps and things.” The way she said it made it obvious she didn’t think it was a priority; that she was only conceding to make Marie shut up. “And then we spend more time outside the facility. We can keep an eye on Cara to see whether she’s someone we can team up with in future, and we make a mark on anything we come across, let them know that we mean business.”
Lisa was met with skeptical faces, but her smile stayed firm, and wolfish, on her pretty face.
I worked on my body for ages, playing around with the blueprints we had avail
able, hoping to create something viable and truly powerful. The body from my dreams swam in my mind. A wolf body. I liked that. Strong and powerful. A natural-born leader, just like Lisa. But, let’s be honest — even better. With the advanced knowledge I had now, plus extra pieces of awesome anatomy from different creatures, I could work on creating the body to end all bodies.
But the rest of it was more complicated. By now we’d accumulated quite a few blueprints from the creatures just around the facility. Nothing exotic. The land stretching in every direction was desert, and that limited the things we were able to find by a lot.
There was nothing interesting from the snake that I could take, nothing from the lizard that really appealed to me. Somehow the thought of being scaly made me feel icky.
Warm, thick fur was much more appealing. I would be like the rest of my girls then, too. An unbroken covering of human skin was, unfortunately, not possible with the machinery. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of legal loop-de-loop the owners of this facility had had to do. Never create anything too human...
I kept an ear on the girls while I played around with my body. It seemed they’d come to a conclusion that seemed to work for all of them.
“You’re right about the nutrigel,” I cast my voice back into their room, turning my focus from my body and blueprints on the reader I was searching through. “We need to come up with a solution for that quick. I have one, but … I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
“What’s the plan?” Lisa asked.
“We make a farm,” I explained. “Some low-tier creatures we can easily control, and that we can sacrifice to the bots to reclaim as nutrigel when they’ve reproduced. It’ll be a constant birth to life to gel cycle.”
