Dragonheart Core

Chapter 22: A Third, Begun

Billowing Moss (Common)

A long, trailing moss with massive roots; through the strangely limited hold gravity has on its leaves, it grows both outward and upward, disguising the ground below it in rolling hills of pale green.

Well. That was certainly a nice distraction from the mind-numbing chore of tunneling out rock.

The snapping turtle hardly seemed to notice the loss, staying curled up safely beneath its massive armour. The kobold who had been so kind as to give me a new schema retreated back to her cave, licking metaphorical wounds with her thoughts running rampant with further plans. She had stopped hunting alongside the other two kobolds but they still lived together, warbling about plans and ideas to each other—certainly still friendly, even if they were going separate routes. The other two kept up their habitual pattern of hunting and investigating the surrounding land, seemingly waiting for the opportunity to do more.

The first wanted to kill. I couldn't wait.

I nibbled through the remains of the billowing moss, idly creating a small patch in a mostly empty room of the second floor; it sprung up in massive, waving strands of pale leaves like fields of grass. Already I could see how it could disguise the mangrove's roots from suspicion, allowing them to stab their thorns freely, or even hide pitfalls and other various traps beneath its flowing green hills.

Once I had finished my third floor, I'd come back and cover the second in moss. Hopefully my creatures would adjust to the sudden ecosystem change with grace.

Not that I had time to worry about it, what with how much I'd been working.

Those initial twenty-three points had disappeared remarkably quickly with how big I wanted it to be; I'd taken my time to carve a beautiful little entrance tunnel in the bottom of a random section of the canal in the last room, as one last little defense. If adventurers wanted to make it further down my floors, they would need to go into the canals, and hopefully my silvertooths could kill them before they made it to the third.

Then I'd taken the time to cover that entrance, so that water wasn't leaking down while I tried to carve, and then I got to work.

Space was the theme of this one, and I was doing my damnedest to live up to it. I started with the initial tunnel, gnawing my way down from the puddle on the second floor; I made it massive and twisting, burrowing deep into the mountain as it extended like a snake. The entrance was on the cove side, enough that I could creep feelers through the wall and hear the ocean past that—I pondered that for a second, wondering if I should avoid that and dig deeper into the mountain on the other side, but I shook it off after another second. I didn't know what was deeper in the mountain, whether stone-drakes or goblin-hordes, and I could be relatively more assured that there wasn't anything on the side closest to the ocean. Probably.

I grimaced but kept digging that way.

Once the tunnel was done, nearly three thousand feet long, I just went back through and started expanding; I ballooned everything out to be around a thousand feet wide, a rough rectangular block of a floor. Then I threw in tunnels, outcroppings, all manners of stone beds and twisting rock formations. Something a city could be proud to fit into with all the grace of the deep water.

I layered the bottom in… well, I was calling it sand, but I wasn't positive if it counted—I'd done the same thing for the second floor, just shredding the stone into a mess of little grains. I was hardly an expert in sand but I was pretty sure it had to be made from quartz, and I only knew how to shape limestone. Ah well. It functioned well enough.

In the end, I sagged, exhausted and with mere flecks of mana to my name, and looked out on the new expansion to my kingdom.

It hardly felt like much, being so empty of life or water, but I could see what it would become—three thousand feet long and one wide, uneven and twisting, with tunnels branching off from various ends to reconnect to later sections. I shaped sections where I could grow eventual forests of sea kelp, little ridges where I could try to find a freshwater coral to fill, sprawling dens carved all over the walls with all manners of various levels of comfortable and barely sustainable. They'd have to fight for the best.

My preferred form of survival. Only the strongest would make it in my dungeon.

I paused, but reached back up to my second floor; strongest though they might be, I didn't necessarily want all of my creatures to have to be aquatic to make it further into my dungeon. I didn't have a fourth floor yet, but I carved the barest start of a tunnel in the back of the last room, something that I could eventually around the third floor so that terrestrial creatures could still make it further down.

For another day. I needed to actually fill the third first.

Three days after I'd started, profoundly empty of mana but with a massive, sprawling cavern below, I finally poked my awareness back up to the halls above.

Seros had done his proper duty, taking command while my attention was elsewhere, meandering his way around the second floor and even popping up to the first just to make sure everyone was behaving themselves. They all were, of course, because the threat of the largest creature in the dungeon was plenty to keep their heads on straight.

The kobolds had… hmm. They'd stayed two distinct groups when it came to hunting, though still living together, but the female had picked up a loose piece of limestone and was staring at it like the most interesting thing in the world; she held it awkwardly in her dull claws, scrapping at the tip with her eyes narrowed.

Was this what it was like watching hatchlings flounder around growing up? Gods, it was infuriating. Just make it into a tool already. Sighing, I shifted my focus elsewhere.

A few silverheads, separate from the rest of their school, trembled inside a mangrove's exposed root prison. All three of them had bleeding gashes on their sides from previous escape attempts but they hadn't yet fallen, attempting to bash their armoured heads into the thorns to push them aside; I curled up to watch, seeing the mangrove twist and shift as it tried to pull its roots closer to spear them–

And promptly messed up. A tug too close and one of the silverheads managed to bash a root out, exposing an opening, and fly for freedom; the other two followed. Not bad, if I had to say anything pleasant. They certainly weren't the smartest but I could appreciate any creature able to get out of a trap.

Apparently, someone else did as well.

Your creature, a Silverhead, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Armourback Sturgeon (Uncommon): This creature has grown tired of a life as prey and forgone fear entirely—though it starts off small, its scale plating grows so thick that nary an attack can damage it, allowing it to grow exponentially, unfazed by mortal worries.

Electric Silverhead (Rare): If you can't beat them, join them. This creature has grown an actual head of silver, and this highly conductive metal allows them to magnify an electric eel's lightning mana, far increasing its lethality. Collecting in schools that serve under an eel, they feast on the remains of the prey they take down together.

Silvertooth (Uncommon): Using numbers over size, this creature gathers hundreds of its fellows to create massive schools, swimming peacefully until their blood-frenzy is activated. It will only calm down once its prey is dead, ripping ecosystems apart until their hunger is satiated.

Oho.

A little bit more than moderately annoying that there weren't any new options, but I supposed that made sense; it was only three silverheads, evolving after a minute encounter with a minor threat. Hardly anything new.

Both the electric silverheads and silvertooths had mates. I choose armourback sturgeon for all three, letting the hazy glow overtake their scales as they drifted off to an evolution-filled slumber; with any luck, they would dominate my third floor as the creatures with the largest size potential, if I was reading their description right.

Maybe. Not like the current one I had was doing much. He spent most of his time meandering about the second floor, rooting through the sand for food. Similar to the cave bear's level of indifference, really.

The thought wore heavy on me. I wished he would come back.

But my second floor was stable enough, ready for creatures once I had mana enough to start experimenting, and from then I could properly start blocking adventurers who didn't have a way of swimming through the water. If they wanted to continue trying to kill me, they'd have to really start working for it.

Now I just needed to figure out how to fill it with water.

-

Velesso pushed his way to the surface, tail swishing through the water; it was always odd, breaching. The air wavered and pushed on him like a living thing, so much thinner than water yet impossible to see through all the same. He disliked it.

But humans dealt in air instead of water, and as a merrow, he had to make concessions.

At least in Calarata he could make any deals at all.

The open-air tavern stood quietly before him, too early in the morning for anyone but those who had been drinking all night with no intentions of stopping to be there. The handful were a rowdy bunch, freshly off the Diving Darling and unwinding after another day's piracy, but…

No Albo.

Velesso certainly hadn't been close to the pirate. But they'd had an understanding, and that led to deals. Underhanded deals, because that was all Calarata knew, and the merrow kingdom he served needed those. It wasn't exactly like the Leóro Kingdom would be too fond of buying illegally sourced goods and services.

But Albo wasn't there, and Velesso had been sitting on a stolen hoard of crystalized mana for a week now.

He narrowed his white-ringed eyes, resting his elbows on the wooden dock of the tavern; the patrons hardly glanced over at him. Maybe they would deal with him; but he couldn't trust them not to scam him. Most humans knew damn well that merrow didn't have the ability to properly convert their money outside of Calarata. Velesso couldn't exactly go ask the Dread Pirate to make them deal fairly.

"You're back."

He glanced over.

Chelle, with her deep, teal-blue skin and almost white fins, poked her head up next to him; she leaned against the tavern's side, surveying those drinking with her head cocked to the side.

"So I am," Velesso rumbled in response, drumming his webbed fingers over the wood. His claws tore tiny holes through the grain. "I'm… trying to find someone."

"You've been here every day for almost two weeks," Chelle noted. She would know—the other half of his guard-patrol, the ones who made sure the merrow city of Arroyo stayed safe in the cove. He hadn't been shirking his duties—mostly—but he certainly hadn't been as present as he should have been. "Who?"

"Albo. The man I mentioned." Some of the patrons were staring at them curiously, in the cups as they were, but the merrow language was difficult enough for humans to understand and he doubted any of these could. "I want to make a trade."

Chelle narrowed her eyes. "Your group is missing too?"

Too?

She pressed her fingers together, fangs peeking from her lips. "I had my own humans I traded with, nightmarketers, but I haven't seen them in three days. We were supposed to meet for a deal."

Velesso frowned. Calarata was filled with more death than life on most days, but not to the point where both of their groups should be disappearing with such ease. Maybe there was a new threat the Dread Pirate hadn't taken the time to deal with yet?

"Chelle!"

They both glanced as a man burst into the tavern, clothing in tatters and scratches marring his tanned skin; he sprinted over to her, dropping to his knees with a clatter.

She blinked, leaning forward. The human tongue warbled from her mouth. "Brus?" Of all the luck to be waiting in the tavern while her contact had come back; Velesso cautiously stayed silent, but the man's eyes seemed to wash right over him, bulging with panic.

And greed.

He reached into the bag slung over his shoulder, fumbling at the clasp; another second and he'd torn out the corpse of a death-bloated toad, dropping it between them with the splat of drying blood. Velesso frowned, narrowing his eyes; a stone-backed toad, common enough in these parts, though much larger than normal and well-fed–

And absolutely dripping in pure mana.

Gods.

He glanced at Chelle and knew she was thinking the same as him; guard-patrols though they both were, the Priestess of Arroyo would still listen to them if they brought her something like this. Pure mana.

"We're still on for a deal?" Brus asked, rocking back on his heels. He laid his hands forward, revealing his bag still bulging with more creatures. Velesso could taste the mana diffusing through the air.

Chelle grabbed at the pouch strapped around her upper arms, laced over her front to keep from interfering with her fins. Velesso mirrored her; any and all coin could be spent if it meant earning pure mana in return.

What the Priestess wouldn't give them in return for this.

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