Dragonheart Core

Chapter 164: Repurpose

I faced my Fungal Gardens, and made the first of many painful decisions.

A land of death, yes, full of biting teeth and destruction; but wasn't that the problem? There wasn't enough mana up on my first floor to maintain those kinds of monsters, even with Nuvja's boon. There had been a singular second evolution here, the reaper's cap, and that had only come from Ghasavâlk actively feeding it a burrowing rat. It wasn't meant to be devastating.

Burrowing rats, luminous constrictors, stone-backed toads, shadowthief rats; they could all survive here, thrive here, but there were three sleeping in their dens that couldn't.

The lunar cave bears.

They were large, powerful, broad, and ultimately, wasted. Too strong for this floor, no opponents to test or train against beyond each other, and no reason to fight invaders when they weren't strong enough to take down Silvers. They stuck to hiding in their dens, prepared to serve as backup; something to stop invaders who tried to leave.

Shoth wouldn't have tried to leave. He would have just enslaved me.

Therefore, I needed to move them to where they would actually fight. Currently, the midnight bear was venturing through my Jungle Labyrinth, as he was wont to do in a realm perfectly suited to his abilities. And considering I doubted his offspring would get the two-headed bear evolution without a second soul to take into the mix, I planned for midnight, or perhaps bugbear; I needed to put them where they would be most efficient. And that wasn't the Fungal Gardens anymore.

Sorry, I didn't say, because this was for the better. Instead, I pushed mana to them in carefully woven miracles, memories of evolutions and the power of other floors. Go below. Become strong. Become free.

The eldest bear raised her head, ears perked; she cast a mournful glance back at her den, the rolling hills of whitecap mushrooms I constantly rebuilt to feed her, which I wouldn't be doing any longer. Hard to have a Fungal Gardens full of diverse and constantly-evolving fungi when my bears ate their weight over and over again. Gods if that wasn't the reason I hadn't had a plant evolve in forever.

I wanted more. I always did. And if that meant I had to remove the hungry eaters to give those behind a chance to grow, so be it. The bears would grow themselves in the Jungle Labyrinth, learning to harness the shadows like their father or moving to the Skylands to work with Akkyst if they got another evolution.

And in the absence of lunar cave bears, I needed a new commanding species of the floor. Since I wouldn't trust a higher evolution, considering they would need to move below eventually, so instead I would shoot for one that had already established themselves. One that was hungry and manageable; one that wouldn't just be a plan for invaders leaving, but instead for invaders arriving.

My points of awareness swiveled in, layering over the floor in drifting pockets of intangible eyes. The patches of shadows crawling over the edges, spilling down the limestone like the creeping vine disguising the entrance stone; the water, beading over the ground in endless rivulets, the delta studded with green algae and lacecap mushrooms. A haven for the insects and fungi and small, scurrying beasts; not for lunar cave bears, but something else.

I didn't want my commanding species to be mushrooms, despite the floor's name; while I would be massively improving their number, I wanted something more intelligent to prepare.

…perhaps I should have picked myconids as my Otherworld schema. I ignored that thought.

Fungi yes, but later. Now I needed to make the world better to hold them for when they came. It wasn't even a remaking, in a way. The Fungal Gardens were too established for that; most of my floors were, really. It wasn't like before, when I could tear out the walls and carve out a new shape, not with a god already attached to the mana.

But what I could do was refine its purpose.

The Fungal Gardens weren't strong. They were never supposed to be strong. I had originally wanted them as a disguise, a faux perfectly normal cavern in a mountain to keep from excessive invasions; but with the Adventuring Guild dropping its fat ass directly outside my halls, that wasn't an option.

Instead, it was awareness.

The shadowthief rats were just that—thieves. And while some of them were demonstrably irritable in the way of the bastard who had eaten my moonstar flower, the vast majority were content to steal anything shiny and bright and filled with mana. Perhaps I could guide them to steal things with less substance—namely, knowledge.

I pictured it; an invader entered my dungeon, awash in armour and weapons and unwritten specifications. And as they walked through my Fungal Gardens with bravado and suspicion, the shadows moved. Crept forward with clever paws and black eyes and took things, buckles from boots, coins from pockets, and information about fighting. Preparing my dungeon for what was coming.

With a delicacy they didn't deserve, I supplexed that dream into every single shadowthief rat on my first floor, sharp and uncompromising; I wasn't forcing them, not really—they were still open to do whatever they wished. But I made damn sure they knew how powerful this would make them.

A society tucked in the crevices. A young mother with six pups raised her head, mind bright; she was curled around both her children and a collection of jadestones, pulsing soothing mana through them as they mewed and waited to open their eyes. They would be the new commanders of this floor, no longer anything more than a nuisance for those that entered my dungeon; lull them into a false sense of security. What was I, but an empty hall full of rats and snakes? Don't raise your guard.

And in terms of other misleading creatures, I swept in lower, prodding through the green algae curtains and protruding rocks. The insect boiling pot; the drop of mana ripe for the taking, because I was beginning to understand that I had to have some handouts if I wanted my creatures to ever reach the peaks I wanted them to reach. In an ideal world, I would have a lifetime to slowly build them up, granting them decades to fight against the insidious slope down. But I didn't. I had invaders outside my door constantly charging in.

So I reached out and grabbed the various critters and insectoids and bugs crawling over the corpses of their fallen brethren, peering into their thoughts, seeing their schemas. And then all around it, four more, spreading up the walls and down into the gulley of green algae and cradled between the stalagmites. I dug my teeth into the stone, hollowing out little coliseums of hunger and growth.

The groundbreaker ants, the eye-blight butterflies, the hunting mantis. All of them grown from supping on Otherworld mana condensed into perfect, miraculous potential. All the mana from Alda's death kept me from even thinking about costs and I carved out five boiling pots in total, ready to elevate others.

I was being perhaps a touch dramatic over what would likely manifest as ants and beetles. But if I could take anything, I would.

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The bears, gone, already beginning their long journey beneath as they plodded through had once been their home. And in their wake, my mushrooms would finally grow again, evolving and diversifying, and becoming anew.

More insects, great buzzing clouds to pollinate and spread and die to my masses. Those that stayed, and those that went further below.

Shadowthief rats, already primed for gathering, now to focus on collecting information. Finding armour, enchantments, attunements; anything I could tell to my lower floors to prepare for. If we had discovered Shoth's attunement before, perhaps I could have stopped him earlier.

My new floor. To the outside world, functionally identical; but not to me. Not to what it meant, now.

Nuvja's mana prickled uncomfortably overhead, those iron-teeth of watchfulness. I ignored her. She was a shadow; she didn't need a floor made of utter destruction. The Fungal Gardens were going to be a warden, and by all gods was I going to keep it that way. I had learned from Rhoborh, for all I didn't particularly enjoy the memories of howling at him; they could be annoyed and pissed, but they didn't want me to break their contracts. They would allow more changes than I had previously been willing to do.

The time, always ticking. I gave myself a last second to push a map into my lunar cave bears' mind, showing them the route to the Jungle Labyrinth using auxiliary tunnels that I was going to be destroying the moment they made it there, and then moved below.

The Drowned Forest; it hadn't seen much wear and tear in Shoth's delve, which was fine, because it did most of what I wanted it to. It bit the party, forced them to fight for the first time, but didn't throw all my creatures into death. Didn't make them claw themselves to ruin against Silvers they would never kill.

I needed to remake my raid-frenzy. I didn't know how, I didn't know if I was even supposed to, I didn't know if that was just a facet of my existence as a dungeon core—but fuck it, I needed something new. This mindless rage didn't do anything to protect me, and it brought us all down. They needed to be able to think to defend me.

Later. Later. Always later.

I chiseled out more of the canals as I dove through my floor, building better bases for the lichenridge turtles to stand upon and force the invaders through the water. A couple more dens for creatures off the sides, wider openings for the ironback toads whose armour was quickly outgrowing the previous sizes, pathways woven through the mangrove roots for my electric eels to dart through, dead trees raised for webweavers to scuttle and knit false leaves for. Everything tangled, everything difficult.

I was… maybe moving past the Drowned Forest a little faster than my other floors. Now that the terror had died and I was working instead of dying, all I could remember was Rhoborh's calm responses; he hadn't even engaged in my rage. Just let me batter myself against him like a whinging fool.

I wasn't a hatchling. But that had been remarkably hatchling-like behavior. The damnable thing was that I had signed the contract, had agreed to house and protect his priests, and then lost my fucking skull when the tithe came calling. I couldn't afford to just– piss off every deity in my wake. And gods, wasn't that a phrase? Piss off deities in my wake, like they were a common bug scuttling around underfoot.

I was a dungeon core, a hunk of red-black marble no larger than my old claw, a single scale of my previous self; I was locked in my halls, unable to leave. In every sense, I should have been watching the world shrink around me.

Instead, it was so much bigger. Enormously so. And while a sea-drake could lay claim to an ocean and never demean himself to any standard, a dungeon couldn't.

My mana bristled, and I distracted myself in growing a new vampiric mangrove. That was enough self reflection. Yes, I knew I had to be different, that I couldn't afford to swear vengeance against existence itself—and I was succeeding, there was a reason Gonçal was still alive—but that didn't mean I had to like it.

Back to planning excessive deaths for all invaders. I'd worry about having to reinvent myself later.

The den of kobolds chittered and warbled as I poked my way in, bowing their scarlet heads with honed reverence. I preened over it for a lovely second before dumping an immediate ten points into the stone; I hollowed out great pockets of stone and twisted the rock at the bottom into jagged blades. Then I pushed billowing moss over the top, weaving delicate webs that would never hold weight—pitfalls. Then another, with fire-warmed coals underneath; another into a watery canal; a thousand ways to fall and all of them deadly.

Dig these, I murmured, pointedly stabbing a sharpened lump of rock like a facsimile shovel. Protect your lands. Create dangers.

The kobolds churred, contemplative; none of them were quite to Chieftess' level, where she had made a mind out of a monster, but I could trust them to figure this out. And perhaps I would send up a few kobold hunters from the Hungering Reefs to serve as a guide for this new and improved nightmare.

The Drowned Forest didn't need to be much changed; it just needed more. More creatures, more traps, more things scurrying underfoot to take time. Considering the kobolds were still faltering in the wake of their previous strength, I wanted to guide them into a more trap-focused existence; those below would be strong, but these above needed to be clever. Doable. It would have to be.

I carved a few more traps—left memories of the mana reward for killing—and then dove below.

The Underlake. This was where things had really started to show themselves; where my invaders adapted to me, rather than fighting straightforwardly. The first time I had made them act in a certain way, rather than being acted upon.

Still my tidewalker sprite waited under evolution, a lingering cloud of mist watched over by the ancient eyes of my armoured jawfish; he would be leaving, damn Mayalle's desire, and in his wake I needed more. Therrón had died here due to his own incompetence despite his ability to get the rest of the party through untested, and in the future I had to presume more would come with that ability. Either that, or doing as they had in the past—just walking through.

Invaders could use mana to hold their breath? Fine. There wasn't anything I could do about that, short of using my creatures to hold them underwater until they ran out of mana; and while I wanted that, I couldn't count on it.

But what I could do was make that no longer be the simple route. Walking across the bottom was currently a mild deterrent; the sand slower, the currents difficult, that was it. Pain and annoyance, enough to push them to swim or go slow enough they were killed. And I already had a solution.

The bloodline kelp was a tangled amber-gold mess of blindness. I had worked to contain it in the center of my floor, rather accurately knowing that it would devour my halls if I let it; and now I would let it. If my creatures couldn't find their way around it, they'd die, and the strong would survive. I would hold their claws, but only to a point. My dungeon was not a paradise, only the Haven.

But what for the creatures? I'd had a plan for the Fungal Gardens and Drowned Forest, but here I hesitated—I began sweeping the silvertooth schools together, brute forcing past their insipid minds to shove them into one swarm, a glimmering, silver-scarlet cloud drifting through the space.

Above all, the royal silvertooth swam. He was my first second evolution, his sleek body rippling with power, fangs sticking out of his mouth—and into his followers, oddly enough. Half of his initial school listed from ivory spears in their sides, healed over but still present. Curious.

Whatever it was, it was up to him. I was just increasing his army.

Politely, I dumped the entire population of silvertooths under his command; he'd use them better than they functioned alone, driven only by their blood-frenzy and blind to any strategies beyond that. He wasn't intelligent, because I had rather a high standard, but he was certainly more than them; already I watched him swim in tighter circles, dragging his followers in, creating a false whirlpool of teeth as he examined his newest additions.

The roughwater sharks were still here, and armourback sturgeons, and greater crabs, and cloudskipper wisps, and–

Movement.

I could be called nothing but paranoid now, Shoth lurking in my thoughts like a phantom; my imminent enslavement hung heavy through my core as I entirely rebuilt my life in desperation to remain free—every point of awareness not actively chained to an evolving creature threw themselves towards the moving currents, where water splashed through the tunnel–

Where bronze scales and gold eyes swam into the entrance.

Gonçal.

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