Chapter Three

Dungeon Core, tangentially located in the alley behind Pa Pa Jiang’s Chinese Restaurant, New York City, Day 8

  As the dungeon was building out the third room on its second floor, it suddenly felt an odd disturbance in its core, causing it to screw up and pour too much mana into its expansion, making the room inflate, stretching a corner of the room out like an oversized-bubble instead of the rough-packed square look it had been going for so far.

  As the dungeon focused on the disturbance in its core, it became able to pick up an ongoing resonance between a part of its core and a nearby presence in the astral plane. The resonance increased in magnitude quickly until, suddenly, the resonance settled into an unbreakable link between it and the presence, a link it inexplicably knew ended with its creator, residing within the astral plane.

  It was a matter of minutes before a telepathic connection flowed down along the link, “Okay, Three, what progress have you made?” It demanded to know.

  The dungeon, no, Three now, happily answered “Hello, Creator, my initial chamber was unusually large, but I have resolved that by barricading the room and building out my first floor following it. My first floor is quite nice, it has five rooms which is more than the-“

  “That’s good.” Three creator interrupted, “That means you can help me out now, One and Two are still starting out. We need Miasma at the moment, so I want you to channel all the miasma you can get along this link and up to me. Do you understand?”

  “Creator! Are you certain, without miasma my ability to crea-” Three’s complaint was interrupted.

  “It doesn’t matter, you seem to have plenty of mana, figure something out, and while you’re at it, we want you to work on pumping as much mana outside as you can, and conquer all those humans.” Three’s creator then broke off the telepathic link.

  Three contemplated its store of miasma, about ninety percent of what it would need to create a lesser imp, which it had been saving for. If Three was able to summon an imp, than it would have a scout and infiltrator of some measure of intelligence, which would be ideal to figure out the cause of its lack of creatures and perhaps enable it to secure more. At the same time, if it didn’t begin to channel miasma up to its creator soon she would surely notice, and perhaps reprimand it. On a related note, she didn’t seem to care too much, so she might not notice a slight decrease in the amount offered compared to what he had, and following her instructions well might make her happy enough that she eased up and allowed it to keep some of its miasma once she no longer needed anymore.

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  Just let me use a little, Three thought, as he pulled up the pattern for dungeon moss and began gathering mana to start constructing it. However, when Three went to pull some miasma from its pool to stabilize the construct, it was suddenly overwhelmed by a flash of pain as its core threatened to tear itself apart. The construct immediately destabilized and turned into a putrid black ooze before disintegrating.

  After spending a few minutes recovering and making sure its core was okay, Three tried again, on the surface around its core this time, I need something, I can’t work from nothing! It screamed mentally against the pain that erupted, carefully threading the bare minimum required miasma out of the pool and into the construct, fighting against the pain, and it was done! The construct stabilized for an instant, and then, totally beyond its control, the miasma was dragged back into its miasma pool like a hammer as the construct exploded, fragmented into a million pieces, and drained half Three’s mana pool in myriad unstable explosions of random material that quickly broke down into nothing, all the while Three was mentally screaming in agony at the pain of the micro-fissures that just erupted inside its core.

  This time it took Three what felt like an eternity, but was more like a half hour, to recover enough to do anything, even think. When it did, its first thought was ‘So I have no choice but to obey,’ followed shortly thereafter by ‘For how long?’ and ‘Hopefully performing well will eventually make her ease up.’ It desperately buried the worry that she would just continue as she had begun, saying ‘She created me after all, she must have some concern for me!’ optimistically. Three then carefully worked to create another thread of miasma, mindful that it not snap back this time, and fed it into the link. The thread began to get sucked into the link, more and more quickly, causing a sharp ache as it drained Three’s miasma pool until it was empty, only slowing down when the pool was depleted and it was forced to drain the miasma as it was filtered out instead. As it was easing up, Three relaxed a bit as the ache began to subside, but it never seemed to quite ease up enough, leaving a lingering ache around the link which aggravated the micro-fissures and caused it some pain.

  Hoping to alleviate the pain, Three channeled some mana into its core in an attempt to heal the fissures, but to its distress, any attempt to concentrate or focus mana around the fissures just resulted in the mana splintering and fragmenting off into a chaotic mess, rendering a much larger portion of its core matrix completely useless. It took the core an entire day to manage its distress to the point it could effectively concentrate on its three, no, four, goals: give all of its miasma to its creator, it had no choice in the matter, done; channel as much mana as possible to the outside, achievable through sustained growth, not done; conquer all humans, whatever those are, not done; find a way to please its creator such that she alleviates her restrictions, or in the case that is impossible, find a way to get back at its creator, not done.

For the time being, all Three could do was get back to working on its second floor, now with a painful distraction forcing it to slow down.