Vlad watched as the small black dressed duck disappeared out of the entrance of his dungeon. He examined the desolation the champion of the death god had left and felt despair. Now what was he going to do? He needed to repopulate his dungeon and he was too scared to use undead.

Trembling with apprehension he summoned his scouts and once they arrived he sealed his dungeon. He immediately realized he would be unable to maintain the seal for long. He just hoped he could use the delay. He felt bereft of ideas and desperately wanted his companion. She was always so confident.

But it was not to be! He cast around to see what he had to work with. First he absorbed the frog his minions had fetched him. So not a frog, he had a toad. He liked the poison glands and long tongue. He thought he could do something with those. But that was for the future.

He contemplated his snails. They looked bizarre with their dragon-like heads. He just knew he couldn’t use them on the first level and that it was iffy on the second. They scared him.

But having nothing else he slowly transformed his second level to look more like a series of caves, rather swampy caves at that. Then he spawned the first of his – dragon-snails – yes he liked that, the first Dragonsnail stood one and half meters tall at the shell and was three meters long from draconic snout to slime covered tail.

Vlad examined his new guardian and noted it had a chaos gift, it secreted a corrosive poison – or should that be venom, as it would work via touch. He decided to leave it as the solitary occupant of the room.

The following three rooms each got one dragonsnail, the one in the second room; the largest room on the second level, had two heads and spat acid out to six meters. In fact they all had a different chaos gift, and, in a way that ran counter to logic all the gifts made the snails more dangerous than they should be.

In the last room before his heart chamber he placed two dragonsnails. That left his heart chamber; he summoned two dragonsnails to guard him but felt something was lacking.

He contemplated the barren first level. He had to do something and he had to open up. With extreme reluctance Vlad called up his tired and rather feeble skeletons and zombies. Vlad re-established Red as floor boss. With relief he opened up and sent out his scouts to find something, anything he could use to replace the current first level guardians.

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* * *

It took Vlad just over a week of worrying before he decided to use one of his dragonsnails as the dungeon boss and to use it as the second floor boss. During that time he endured another visit from the damn duck and received another painful tap on his core.

Vlad was heartened that the overpowered duck was the only one to make it to his heart room. The dragonsnails with their thick shells and thick skins were hard to defeat. They were slow, but persistent.

The toads proved interesting but they were if anything even more powerful than the snails. Vlad was starting to despair. He really didn’t fancy another visit from the death duck.

By now Vlad had a large collection of insects, a baby lizard, a vole and a field mouse. None of this caught his fancy as a fast solution. So he decided to take a chance. His scouts had spotted a wandering goat and it was night. He instructed two of his skeletons and sent them out to gather in the straying goat.

He was lucky, nobody was around and they were able to the chase the goat into the dungeon where his skeletons succeeded in killing it. The goat took three of the skeletons with it.

A little experimenting allowed Vlad to modify his nanny goat monsters into becoming bipeds. He also gave them stubby short-fingered hands.

It was with considerable relief that he replaced his skeletons and zombies with his new meter-and-a-half-tall nanny goat monsters. They were quite handy with the spears he supplied them. That left him with Red and his four scouts.

He also managed to kill several adventurers, at least at first before they became warier and took to including a more experienced adventure as leaders or advisors in their groups.

The death duck’s third visit didn’t result in a core ache but in the words, “better, much better. Get rid of the rest soon.”

Time passed and Vlad replaced his scouts with summoned field mice. They weren’t as successful as they tended to get picked off by an annoyingly large variety of things that considered mice prime tucker.

Things were going well and Vlad started to create his third floor. The caverns he was creating were large so that he could use his new cliff toads.

And then Jasper popped out of thin air near the ceiling and dropped like a stone to the floor of the chamber. She landed with a loud thump and a cry of surprise and pain.

« Jasmine! Erm, Jasper you’re back! Where have you been? It’s been five weeks! Are you all right? »

Jasper looked up in horror at the huge two-headed dragonsnail that was Vlad’s dungeon boss monster. It was six meters from snouts to tail and the shell towered over two meters from the floor.

« Meet Lassie, she’s lots faster than the other dragonsnails and she breaths fire. Oh and she regenerates. Isn’t it cool? »

Jasper just edged back from the – to her – revolting foul smelling sight.

« And our count as of this moment is eighteen adventurers killed, and only one party has got this far. Except for the damn death duck. »