Caught completely off guard, Ethan was sucked through the doorway. What made it so hard for him to resist was the suction had come from below his feet. The corridor was still there, the three hatches closed, but the floor was missing, opening up into a yawning black void that captured both his legs and half his body before he was able to get his fingers into the lip of the hatch he’d just been pulled through.
Ethan managed to get a grip, but against the explosive decompression he was powerless to pull himself up. Instead, he was forced to wait the few seconds it took for the air to be sucked out of the small area and to disburse out into the large cargo hold under his feet. Once the suction force was gone, he was easily able to clamber back out of the hole and reenter the hatch he’d entered from. Despite the three doors being intact, he nevertheless decided he’d gone far enough and turned to head back towards the bridge. There was only one more section beyond this section anyway. As it was the end of the ship’s living space. Since he had no hope of finding anyone alive back there, he decided not to finish his search.
He wasn’t too worried about getting lost down there. As long as he wasn’t pulled out of the ship, he was confident in his ability to make his way back to the bridge. No, what worried him was his oxygen supply. He’d searched three rooms so far, and although he had only spent ten to fifteen minutes exploring each room, that only left him with a quarter of his air supply left. What would he have done if he’d been sucked into the cargo hold and had to make his way back to the bridge on such a low tank? He shuddered at the thought, refusing to let that be an option.
Sealing the hatch behind him, he opened first one, then all the doors between himself and the bridge, making sure to close each firmly behind him as he went. He now knew, or at least suspected with a high degree of certainty, that he was the only one aboard to survive the catastrophe. That being said, he’d discovered three new rooms filled with resources he planned to make full use of to facilitate his survival from this nightmare situation.
“…and that’s when I got sucked through the hatch and decided it was time to come back.” Ethan finished explaining his adventure to Luna, the ship core clutched tightly in his right hand as he spoke. He’d been pleasantly surprised when he returned to the bridge to find that the walls, floor, and ceiling were all emanating a soft white light. Making the room visible, even though the creeping figs covered every surface. Luna for her part, had listened to his story quietly. The only contribution she made was to project a list of everything he’d found of note in each room he’d visited. Ethan appreciated the effort, as having a visual list like that helped him remember the rooms better.
“So, what do you think I should do now?” He asked once he’d exhausted his memory of the short trip out of the bridge. His mind was beginning to fog over after more than fourteen hours awake with only periodic bouts of unconsciousness in between. Add in the repeated mana depletions, the forced healing and conversion into a dungeon boss… he was surprised he was still on his feet at all. Luna clearly knew that too, as she cut right to the chase with what she wanted.
Bring the stoats, and their cage, onto the bridge. Along with a sufficient source of biological materials for me to replicate them, and then get some sleep. I’ll absorb the stoats one at a time, then using the creeper fig, and the remaining stoat for their mana, and the biological material to reduce the costs, I’ll create as many of them as possible. It will add to the mana pool we can draw from and provide more carbon dioxide for the creeping figs to turn into oxygen, also helping them grow.
Ethan nodded along with her words as they filled his mind and vision, almost too tired to argue, except for one sticking point.
“Biological material?” He asked, knowing full well what she meant, but not liking the idea one bit. “Are you suggesting I use one of my fellow crew members as a source of bio fertilizer?”
Why not? You’ve told me more than once today how much you hate that woman, Cherry. Besides, unless you move them into the cold vacuum of space, the biological materials are going to begin rotting soon. When that happens, they will not be good for anything. I suppose you could create biological materials using mana, but that would take days to generate the same effect, and leave you weakened and sick the entire time, unable to work towards the goal of survival.
Needless to say, Ethan’s tired mind couldn’t find a satisfactory argument for any of those points. So, ten minutes later, he’d deposited the now open stoat tank and Cherry’s body to the ship core, before stuffing his face with three ration packs and falling asleep before his head hit the pillow he’d grabbed from Sven’s room on the way by.
* * *
When he woke, the first thing Ethan did was check the clock. Then blink in astonishment before grabbing the glass orb from the command seat he’d set it on before falling asleep.
“Hey Luna,” he said with some confusion, looking at the time. “What’s wrong with the clock? According to this, I’ve been asleep for almost twenty hours.” There was no way that was right.
That is correct.
Luna said, her words scrolling through his mind.
You had a rough day. Being all but killed, converted into a dungeon boss, healed rapidly, suffered mana depletion multiple times, and then went exploring into the unknown. Your body needed time to come to terms with your new reality. Don’t worry though Captain, while you were sleeping, I made full use of the time.
Shaking his head to clear the last of the cobwebs away, Ethan decided not to worry about how long he’d slept, and devoured three more ration packs as Luna filled him in on what she had done while he’d been sleeping. She hadn’t lied when she said she’d been busy.
“So, we ended up with Twenty-three Stoats? Shouldn’t we have gotten more like two hundred twenty-three? The stoats are only half a pound a piece, while Cherry was at least one hundred twenty pounds.” Ethan asked, feeling like what he’d done was a bit morbid, especially if it netted him such a small profit. While he thought, he ate the nearly tasteless ration packs. They were travel rations, like an old earth MRE, with a shelf life that exceeded the lifespan of most humans by a wide margin. Though, what they lacked in taste, they more than made up for in efficiency. One of these packs contained everything the body needed to remain functioning at full capacity for two days. He frowned at that thought as he downed his third one. Perhaps there was something wrong with mana produced food, and that’s why he needed more of them?
Correct. We only got twenty-three. The conversion rate of biological materials is poor regardless, but the more differences that exist between biological types, the higher the conversion rate becomes. In this case, the conversion rate was something like ninety percent wasted. It was much worse when using the human passenger Sven, as biological material for the creeping figs because humans and plants are so different. However, the similarities between you Captain, and your little brother were great enough that the conversion had almost zero percent waste. As for the stoats, they cost five of your mana units to create, but only cost one when using the biological materials, you provided. I have already tested their mana unit capabilities as well. Each stoat produces half a mana unit as described by your…testing… and takes approximately an hour to recharge. Between the creeping fig and the stoats, we now have access to something like twelve units of mana per hour.
“Mana you didn’t let go to waste I see,” Ethan said with a nod of approval when he looked at a short stack of four plastic shipping crates that had been created since he fell asleep. He felt like the conversion rates and the costs involved were too high. How did humanity ever make it to space with these limitations? Still, he was confident Luna was doing the best she could, and it wasn’t like he could do any better, so he moved over to the newly created crates. Adamantly refusing to think about his brother being used as ‘biological materials’ he popped the lids. He saw Luna had put ration packs into one, water bottles into a second, and was slowly filling up the other two with emergency panels and foam adhesive he’d built the temporary airlock with the day before. They wouldn’t hold up to impacts, but the plates could be slotted together seamlessly to form an airtight seal that would prove useful when he went exploring the ship.
“How do we expand your domain?” He asked then, watching as some twenty odd rodents scampered around the room, getting into everything but refraining from making a mess. He could feel them somehow, niggling at the back of his mind. Ethan hadn't tried yet, but he somehow got the feeling that he could influence the actions of the ship core created stoats. Something to do with being a dungeon boss perhaps?
I wasn’t certain until I created the stoats. But now, I have the feeling a domain is expanded naturally when the concentration of mana reaches a certain threshold. Theoretically, if I spend every unit of mana as it becomes available to create more stoats, we could take back the whole ship eventually. There are several logistical problems with this approach however, and I have the feeling it is not the best way to proceed. Also… I can feel something… blocking me from expanding. I can’t really explain it, but I can feel it.
Ethan shrugged, honestly not having a clue how they should go about expanding the domain either, or what could be blocking her growth.
“Well, I think we are on the right track, at least in the short term.” He said as he finished the last of his ration packs. “I’ll explore the ship, find out the extent of the damage, and do what I can to patch the holes… and find a mana battery… and a mana engine… and some sensors… and, hopefully, whatever is blocking your growth…” he trailed off, realizing the task ahead of him was far larger than just ‘fix the ship and fly home.’ Until he got some sensors online, he didn’t even know if he could go home. So, he brushed it off and went back to the top of the list. Exploring.
“Unfortunately, with only an hour of air, I won’t be able to do much exploring, or repair work for that matter, before I have to return and recharge the air tank. Is there anything you can do about that? It seems strange, but I don’t even recall seeing any air vents or oxygen scrubbers anywhere before. Not like back on the moon. I wonder why I never noticed before.” He frowned again at just how little he understood about ship cores.
That is because when the entire ship was part of my domain, I was able to regulate all of that with mana. Inside my hull nothing was required of human technology to facilitate life. Where human technology came into place was for locomotion, and sensing the outside world, or storing unused mana for later use.
“The holes in your memory are beyond annoying,” Ethan said with a sigh. “You can fully explain to me how you interact with a mana engine, or mana battery, but you can’t tell me how to create one. Not only that, but when it comes to expanding your domain, something dungeon cores are supposed to do naturally, or creating new monsters or materials from thin air, you can’t do it without a blueprint. All of which were conveniently lost. It feels like we’re crippled in this situation far beyond what we should be.” His earlier sigh turned into an aggravated grunt as he paced around the small room, now clear of debris. Ethan wasn’t mad at Luna, not really, but the circumstances he found himself in were too much.
I’m sorry Captain.
Luna spelled out the words looking small and sad in his mind’s eye.
I do, however, need to clarify that I am not a dungeon core. I’m a ship core. A dungeon core that has been modified by humanity for a specific task. My memory is fuzzy and much of what I was before has been stripped away from me. Tasks that I once could do with ease are now beyond me. My sole function is to ferry humanity from one location to another. What use is there in letting your transportation keep the ability to create dragons, when that isn’t needed for flight?
The sad feeling behind the letters took on a bitter, resentful feel, and Ethan winced in sympathy. The realization hitting him for the first time the dungeon cores were intelligent beings’ humanity ripped away from their natural environment and essentially forced into slavery. Even the history on cores he remembered from his school days did nothing to hide that fact.
Ethan opened his mouth to voice his apology to Luna for her treatment, but stopped as he remembered something else from his history lessons, and from what Luna herself had said. That being, when a dungeon core is removed from its domain the intellect the core had developed, along with all the domain growth it experienced over the years was completely reset. If that was the case, then how did Luna know she couldn’t do things now that she could before, and how is it that she retained even some of her memories when her domain took such a hit? From what he knew, her mind should have been erased entirely when her domain collapsed, not this partial amnesia she was showcasing now.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said at last, deciding to shelve his suspicions for now. After all, Luna was his lifeline in the dead ship he found himself in. What good would it do to show his doubt openly when it might mean his death. “I didn’t mean to blame you for our situation, I’m just… very frustrated. I need to work on fixing the ship, but with only an hour of oxygen…” He trailed off, hoping he’d struck a good balance. Gosh, this was even harder than when he thought she was merely capable of yes, no answers and called herself ship core in the third person.
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No, it is my fault too. I shouldn’t be taking my frustration out on you. My anger is for humanity. You are my dungeon boss, my Captain. Our lives are linked now, so getting angry at each other is counterproductive.
Ethan was nodding along until he read the part about him not being human anymore, then his motion stilled. Shock overcame him and he nearly interrupted, but Luna kept right on scrolling text through his vision and her next words distracted him from the topic. It was easy enough, as he was doing his best to avoid every topic he didn’t want to think about.
Speaking of productivity, I do have a potential solution to the oxygen problem. I’ve been scanning the life support module in the tank the stoats were housed in. I can tell we do not have enough units of mana available to create a duplicate, but if you take it apart and I absorb it piece by piece. Then I think I can replicate the unit given enough time. You will just have to assemble the pieces as I create them.
“…that is an intriguing idea,” Ethan answered after a pause. “But you already said you can’t make changes to the things you duplicate. So, what good would creating another oxygen scrubber do us?” He looked at the unit on the tank as he spoke. It was fairly compact as far as these things went, but there were so many filters and hoses coming off it he didn’t know what Luna was getting at.
That is true, as I am, I am only able to duplicate things in their entirety. However, if you take it apart before I absorb the blueprints. We only have to make the parts that you require. The oxygen scrubber as it is has several additional pieces that you wouldn’t need. For example, the filters were made to remove nitrogen and other undesirable chemicals from the air as the stoats defecated and urinated. Those filters, at least the application of them, wouldn’t be necessary for you. My thinking is that we produce the parts and put them together into a new configuration, that you could wear as a backpack and plumb into your helmet. That way, it would be continuously scrubbing your hour-long oxygen supply. There would be degradation over time, and it wouldn’t work indefinitely, but it would greatly extend your operation time without the need to carry additional tanks of oxygen that we don’t have access to anyway.
“…oh,” Ethan said after an even longer pause as his mind opened to several new possibilities he had never considered before. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that despite the limitations of what Luna could produce and the mana restraints they were under, that he could still make alterations that might help him in the long run. The flashlight they had duplicated as an example. It was made up of an LED bulb, housing, wires, and a power source. He wasn’t an electrician by any means, but he knew it was possible to string power sources together into larger and more useful forms. Then, there were the wires inside the electronics themselves. Even if he couldn’t reproduce an entire piece of equipment because it was damaged. That didn’t mean he couldn’t use individual components taken from multiple sources to create a new whole.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about Luna.” He said at last, grabbing a small tool kit he’d found inside one of the crates and moving over to the tank. “Let’s get this thing taken apart and you can absorb it. We can brainstorm while we work, to see what other ideas we can come up with while we’re at it.” When he realized the magic Luna could do, he’d somehow forgotten that he was capable of doing work himself. He’d unconsciously put the entire burden on her without even realizing it. Now though, well now he was excited again. He was still in a life and death situation, and he would much rather be at home with his brother still alive. However, knowing he could help steer the course of the events he was trapped in gave him a renewed sense of purpose, and he couldn’t wait to get to it.
Six hours and four full mana depletions later, his enthusiasm had waned somewhat. It was true they could break down a larger task into more manageable, bite sized pieces. However, with their limited availability of mana units, coupled with the hour-long recharge time, even in smaller pieces there was only so much they could do. They’d discussed using their available mana to purchase additional plants or stoats to grow their pool. Unfortunately, in order to devote their mana to growing their pool, they had to delay the production of anything else they needed. So, it had quickly become a game of resource management, where they had to balance short term needs vs long term ones.
In the end they’d decided to pour all their effort into getting the oxygen scrubber up and working. Going so far as to add Ethan’s personal pool of mana points into the mix to get it done faster. This incurred additional costs, as it required him to eat a hearty meal with every expenditure, and he spent most of that six-hour period lightheaded and dizzy, but they’d figured getting him out and exploring would free up Luna’s mana pool to focus on their other needs. Namely, figuring out how to grow her domain.
“Alright,” Ethan said at last, as he snapped the final piece into place on their improvised oxygen scrubber. “Let’s get this bad boy connected to the suit and I’ll wear it around in the bridge for the next few hours…just to make sure it actually works before I go outside. That way we can continue to use my mana pool to speed up your growth before I leave.”
He smiled down at the contraption they’d managed to put together. It was about the size and shape of a two-liter bottle, with a pair of finger thick hoses coming out of the narrow end that attached to the fist sized air tank in his skinsuit helmet. They’d used some modified gun belts found in Sven’s room to create a harness for the scrubber for it to rest horizontally on his lower back.
I understand your desire to test the scrubber out before you leave, but what exactly should be our priority going forward? We talked at length about what we could do with the available mana every hour. But we have yet to reach a conclusion about what we actually will do.
Ethan nodded his helmeted head as the text scrolled by. She had a point, they had talked about crafting everything from food packs to computers, and he even brought up how he could take the 1911 replica apart and have her absorb it in pieces so they could create more one spring and bolt at a time. However, they hadn’t really decided on a course of action yet.
“The problem,” he said at last trying to focus his exhausted mind on the task at hand. “Well, one of the problems anyway, is that we really don’t know what we will need going forward. Can you grow your domain enough to reclaim the whole ship, if so, how long will that take? Can we remold your existing domain into a complete, if very tiny, ship and attach a mana engine to it? Should I focus my efforts on patching the hull or looking for…” he cut himself off with a sigh of frustration as his mind went on another tangent.
There was simply too much to do, and he wasn’t equipped, mentally or physically, to deal with it. He looked around the room, eyes falling on the body of his brother, still lying where he had fallen. It had been nearly two whole days now since he had died, and if it hadn’t been for the cold temperature in the bridge, and the fact that Luna used much of his blood and soft tissue as raw material to fix his own injuries the body would be in a pretty bad state of decay by now. As it was, he could already detect a faint smell of decay wafting off of him. It was time to decide what to do with his and the other’s bodies. Long past time if he was being honest with himself.
“I guess the first thing I have to do is take care of my brother and check the last two rooms for others.” He said after thinking about it for a long time. “I’ll create caskets from the emergency repair panels and put them into space, so they don’t decay any further.” Decision made; Ethan ignored Luna’s pointed suggestions that they should utilize all the available biological materials they had access to in order to grow her domain faster and set about the task of creating caskets from the emergency plates.
The plates in question were steel net reenforced carbon fiber infused polymer that held up exceedingly well to the radiation of space. Much like the skinsuits that were standard issue to nearly anyone who moved outside a planet. The plates were grey, one-foot squares with a lip running around all four edges that fit snuggly into place with the lip of any other panel. It formed a tight seal but was limited in utility unless one was trying to make a flat wall. That’s where the foaming adhesive came in. A small bead of the adhesive ran along the lip of the plate, and it would become pliable. When pressed together to another plate, it would essentially weld itself together into a single whole. It made the entire plate slightly pliable while it was heating up too, so some flexibility could be achieved in the structure.
It didn’t take him long to glue a number of them, most of the stockpile Luna had produced actually, together into rectangular coffins. He gently laid his brother into one. Perhaps it was the damage he had suffered, but Mark felt far too light in his arms as he lifted him up. His little brother had always been a giant in Ethan’s eyes and seeing him reduced to this was enough to break his heart.
As he took a few minutes to go gather up the remaining bodies, Ethan thought about his past. He hadn’t felt like an older brother since he was ten years old. When he was finally old enough to realize that Mark was simply better than he was. Better at school, better at talking to people, more helpful to their parents… to say nothing at all about his athletic abilities. He’d resented Mark then, had for a long time really. It was hard to be an older brother to a genius. To feel that protective urge welling up inside of him but knowing that nothing he did would ever measure up.
Disregarding his earlier desire to play it safe with the oxygen scrubber, Ethan walked passed Cherry and Sven’s now empty rooms before reaching the third section and retrieving Lesa’s body. Dragging her back to the coffin he’d built for her, he moved onto the fourth section, the one with the hole in the floor. After waiting for the decompression to pass, Ethan opened the door into Dale’s room a crack to prevent anything loose from being sucked into the floor hole. The room had pressure, so whatever had made the hole in the corridor must have come up through the cargo hold below.
Without bothering to look at Dale’s room, he gathered up his body and returned it to the bridge. After that, he maneuvered around the hole in the floor to the final section of the ship. Just like each section before, there were three doors here too, one on the right, left, and straight ahead. The door on the left he already knew opened into space. The door straight ahead, led into the captain’s cabin, a double sized unit that his brother Mark claimed as his own. Ethan couldn’t bring himself to enter that room yet, so he turned to the last door on the right. The one that belonged to James. He was Dale’s twin brother, and the pair of them were frontline fighters in Mark’s party.
Just like with Dale’s room, Ethan ignored everything and only grabbed the body. There would be time for a treasure hunt later, right now he had a task before him. Dragging James’s body back to the bridge, he dropped it into the last coffin. That was everyone accounted for. The ship had eleven cabins, two rows of five, and the captain’s cabin at the back. All five cabins on the left had been destroyed, leaving only the five on the right. Cherry and Sven’s bodies were already gone, used as biological material for his survival. That left Mark, Dale, James, and Lesa. Without much pomp, he dragged the three coffins belonging to his brother’s team down the hallway and, adding some adhesive to their undersides, dropped them into the cargo hold. He expected to be winded by now; after all, the bodies in the coffins weren’t light, but he was holding up fine.
Moving back to the bridge, he picked up the last coffin, his thoughts returning to his past. It felt far to light in his arms, but he ignored the feeling, still too caught up in his memories to worry about that. Turning toward the hatch, he started his funeral march.
Their relationship had soured in their teens. Mark was a prodigy and Ethan wasn’t. They didn’t have anything in common with each other, so they stopped interacting. Things didn’t change much in their adulthood. Mark became a professional gladiator, famous the whole system wide. He had action figures and wall posters with his likeness on them for goodness’ sake. Meanwhile, Ethan took a job as a shuttle pilot. Spending his off days playing low gravity VR games. He didn’t set the coffin down when he reached the hatch, choosing instead to grip it tightly to himself as he worked the wheel one handed.
It was so bad, even after Ethan was diagnosed with the wasting disease, he didn’t tell Mark about it. He’d retired from the Colosseum and become a professional adventurer, flying around the system in his personal spaceship with his hardened adventuring team, doing dungeon raids on newly discovered dungeons to capture their cores for the Moon kingdom. Stepping through the hatch, Ethan steadied his feet before opening the airlock that had once led into his old cabin, gripping his brother tightly to himself as the air vented around him in an explosive burst.
Mark had just finished a dungeon dive on one of Jupiter’s moons when he got word of Ethan’s predicament. The crazy fool dropped everything and rushed back to the moon. He didn’t even deliver the core he’d captured, just flew directly to Ethan’s apartment, and forced him onto his ship. He’d scoured the adventurer network looking for a newly discovered dungeon. He’d told Ethan about it once he’d gotten onboard the Luna, how he’d been healed and strengthened by killing dungeon born monsters. He was determined to cure Ethan the same way. It took nearly a week for Mark to find out about the rift, and the dungeon world beyond it. There were rumblings of war, but he ignored them. Tearing off at full speed to save his big brother.
“I was never the brother you deserved, Mark.” Ethan said as he put a bead of adhesive on the back of the coffin and pressed it against the wall of his cabin, a wall that was now outside the ship. “I was angry with you for so long… but the last eight months we spent together on this tiny ship were the best months of my life. I’m sorry you died for me and not the other way around… but I promise not to let your sacrifice go to waste.”
Ethan stood there, in the doorway between the safety offered by the ship’s thin hull, and the endless expanse of space outside and stared at his brother’s coffin. Traditionally, he should have ejected it towards the sun, where it would eventually burn away from the heat of Sol, but out here, in this unknown system, with the planet sized debris field all around them… he just couldn’t do it. Still, unlike the others who he’d dropped into the cargo hold, he wanted his baby brother to have a view.
The hour mark came and went unnoticed as he stared out into the newly created asteroid field. He stared unseeingly as chunks of broken planet and warship drifted lazily passed his field of view. His mind followed suit and drifted back to the past. Dwelling endlessly on what might have been. Slumping down, he nodded off into exhausted sleep, where his mind tortured him for his sins, both real and imagined. Until, jolting awake, he remembered how his brother had abandoned his mission halfway through to save him. How, he hadn’t delivered the dungeon core he’d captured. Instead coming right for him. The fact that a freshly discovered, unmodified dungeon core was nestled snuggly inside his brother’s cabin at this very moment.
Ethan breathed deeply, trying to control his excitement. He didn’t know if having an unmodified dungeon core would be helpful in this situation or not, but he fully intended to find out. Giving Mark’s coffin one final look, Ethan turned and resolutely shut the door. He turned away from the bridge and moved towards the rear of the ship, towards his brother’s cabin, situated right at the end, just in front of the mana engines.
Moving past Lesa’s door without a glance he spun the wheel to the next compartment and braced himself against the decompression. He could see it in his mind’s eye, a small box made of what looked like obsidian. Not much bigger than a case, one would keep their glasses in. He’d asked Mark to show him the core itself, but he’d adamantly refused, saying that two cores could not exist within the same domain. That it would cause problems or something, he didn’t go into details and Ethan hadn’t cared enough at the time to ask. Now though, now he cursed himself for a fool.
Pausing only long enough to close the hatches behind himself, Ethan leapt over the hole in the floor and worked his way through the hatch. Ethan stopped in front of the last hatch. The one that opened up onto his brother’s cabin, the Captain’s cabin, larger than the rest and taking up both sides of the isle. Having reached his goal, he paused for a moment and swallowed. Now that he was here, he had the oddest feeling of trepidation wash over him.
Reaching out with trembling fingers, Ethan grasped the wheel with both hands… and turned.
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