Chapter 8

The party that set out from Weaver Estate the next day was the same as the one which had returned victorious from Caseville, with the exception that Silva and the Winged Knights were occupied elsewhere in the kingdom preparing for the arrival of Velundese refugees. And the unspoken possibility of Velundese soldiers as well.

That left Tom with Sevin, Rory, Grant, Antoine, Emil, and Jessica. Aisha joined them, reluctantly, having been convinced to at least be available for emergency healing should the party get in over their heads at any point. Mark and Tony, ages thirteen and fifteen, joined the party as well. They were stableboys at Weaver Estate and were brought along not to delve the dungeon but to help take care of the mounts while the others were busy.

Aside from the humans of the party, Lo, an evolved Korgoath, led a pack of his unevolved brethren. If any of the lesser Korgoath had chosen a name, none of them were forthcoming with it to the humans, and it did not appear in Tom’s minion menu when he checked. The Korgoath were one-eyed monsters with gray skin. They walked on all fours, with massive claws on their forelegs that they used in conjunction with their teeth to savage their prey. They had spines on their back.

Lo, as an evolved specimen, was primarily larger, and the attributes which made his kind dangerous in battle were more pronounced. Lo himself was rather torn in his service to Tom; he was the only one of the pack which had been free-spawned; the others had been spawned by Tom. Lo had submitted to being Claimed rather than face death at Antoine’s blade.

It had galled him once to serve under a much weaker human, but Tom was now higher level than him, and the bonds which formed the minion-master relationship were cemented so strongly now that Lo was uncertain he could resist any command except one of self-sacrifice.

Aside from the Korgoath were the minitaurs. Three of them, the oldest, largest, and strongest of them being Brutus, whom Tom had evolved at the same time as Lo. Brutus, unlike the lesser Caesar and Cicero, had four arms and a frightful musculature. Brutus, unlike Lo, did not struggle against Tom’s leadership, but accepted it fully and kept the lesser Minitaurs in line.

They journeyed to the southeast this time to a wild dungeon that was believed to be in the mid twenty level range. While in the past they had spent most of their traveling time tunneling, on this trip they remained on the surface, although Tom continued to Customize a path for them. With the additional Cores Linked into the network, Tom’s ability to Customize his environment had grown significantly.

Or rather, Alpha’s ability to respond to Tom’s will had grown.

As they proceeded, the road building that Tom was performing grew easier and easier. The Core took more and more of the burden as it discovered what its Controller expected of it, and before long Tom only needed to dictate what direction they were traveling in and the mostly tamed dungeon core would construct a solid stone road wide enough for four horses to walk abreast. Tom barely expended any mental energy or concentration on the matter at all, and the group was able to travel at a swift trot for most of the day.

They made camp just before dusk, and with a party so large setting up a watch schedule was easy. They ate a stew full of beans and rabbit flavored with spices that Jessica thought tasted a bit like Tabasco sauce with a more earthy tone.

Three days passed like this before they reached their destination. Unlike most dungeons, this one had a small settlement outside catering to dungeon delvers. The dungeon, which Tom was referring to as Zeta dungeon to go along with his naming scheme, contained water elemental monsters, the cores of which were valuable enchanting materials. It was also known as an excellent place to attempt to awaken ones class, although delving a level twenty dungeon as a commoner was a dangerous prospect.

After discussing matters with the others, Jessica decided to sit this dungeon out. The elementals would be resistant to her fire magic and unlikely to fall for her auditory or amateurish visual shenanigans. The others accepted her reasoning and departed without her.

Jessica spent the day practicing with her magic. When the other patrons of the inn saw her abilities, they mistook her for an ordinary mage specializing in entertainment and encouraged her to put on light shows for the settlement to enjoy, and Jessica promised that, when night fell, she would attempt to do exactly that in the night sky.

For the rest of the party, the dungeon was fairly trivial. This dungeon full of elementals was not seen as particularly challenging and many Adventurers in the kingdom chose it to level up due to the relative weakness of the monsters inside. Their weakness was their core, a small crystal which controlled what was effectively a large puddle of water.

The trick was destroying the core without completely destroying the value of the core shards as enchanting materials. While the party wasn’t delving this particular dungeon for the typical financial reasons that other delvers used, Sevin and Rory in particular saw no reason not to try to make a bit of coin in the process, so they got quite wet as together they fought against large puddles of water that tried to drown them.

Once they managed to wrestle the core out of the puddles that were the water elementals’ bodies, the water returned to being just water, and the young Warriors passed the writhing crystals through a ritual that Emil maintained for them which stunned the elemental crystals long enough to return them to the surface, where the still living elementals would be purchased.

Shards of the elementals’ cores were worth a sliver of the bounty compared to the intact cores, but on the few occasions where Rory or Sevin accidentally broke one, they carefully collected those as well.

Unfortunately there were only ten or eleven elementals in the entire dungeon. While the respawn rate was very high, a local adventuring team cleared the dungeon once or twice a week, so there weren’t very many challenges for the team to overcome on the way to the Core room. This core was aqua-green and half-buried in the wall.

Tom quickly Claimed it and renamed it.

Core Name

Zeta

Controller Options:

Link

Level

25

Level

HP

23/30

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Expand

Mana

3105/5340

Reduce

Territory

25 kM^2

Evolve

Floors

1

Summon

Inhabitants

3 water elementals, 42 humans

Spawn

Experience

3.8*10^12

Customize

Seed

Tom examined Zeta Core’s status for a moment, then examined the rest of his growing network. He now had ten cores Linked together. However, some of the other cores were running very low on health. The damage that connecting Tilluth to the network had caused hadn’t been repaired yet. He considered his options for a moment.

Reaching out through both Alpha and Zeta, Tom used his Level ability on the distant cores in his network that were damaged. He used Level to heal the damaged cores in his network, either all the way to their maximum HP or very close to it. On average it took five levels, leaving him with a significantly stronger set of cores than before. Only Tilluth core was unable to level due to a lack of experience; Tom had foolishly spent all of Tilluth’s experience as his first action as a Controller and the villagers hadn’t generated enough to level the core beyond its present state. Tom didn’t level Zeta, recalling the advice of the books he had read on his class not to use that ability unless he had spent time establishing rapport with a core.

Satisfied with his efforts, he began reconstructing Zeta’s dungeon. While he left the top floor as it was, he began adding floor after floor until he reached the maximum depth of fifteen floors, ten less than the core’s level. He’d never made that association before and wondered if that was the case for all dungeon cores. He’d have to experiment with other levels of cores to find out what their maximum number of floors was.

Tom decided, as he was customizing the dungeon, that Zeta Dungeon would be different from the other dungeons he had created so far. It would have a variety of biomes, rather than just the subterranean biome that he had been leaving as default.

He had first discovered that he could customize a floor’s biome all the way back when he was level one, but hadn’t played with the option very much since then. He left the first floor of the dungeon as it was, but changed the second floor to the grasslands biome. He was surprised when he learned that, instead of seeding minerals, he could seed crops. He conferred with the others, and eventually decided to seed a legume which was a staple of the Welsian diet.

On the third floor, he experimented with the forest biome, and discovered that the seed option determined which sort of trees formed. Like the grassland, the forest biome enjoyed a false sun, and once he had selected which type of tree to Seed, saplings began sprouting and growing at visible rates. The third, fourth and fifth floor were dedicated to growing different types of wood; oak, yew and pine respectively.

On the sixth through tenth floor, Tom used the savanna, taiga, desert, rainforest and tundra biomes. Each of the floors had a false sky to them and, although the actual territory only extended for about three square kilometers, they gave the illusion of going on forever. Tom placed the stairs close to each other so that the delvers could quickly pass through the floors on their way to whatever target they aimed for, rather than spreading them out and forcing the delver to search for them.

He set the floors to seed wildlife. That was the option; just wildlife. He would be very curious to know what sort of animals the dungeon would generate to fill the regions he was creating.

Deeper in the dungeon, he began exploring subterranean biomes. There was below-ground marsh, a mushroom biome, a frozen cavern, and a volcanic cavern as well. The last Tom quickly customized away back to a regular cavern after the heat became unbearable in just a few moments. Perhaps if the party had some sort of protective enchantments to deal with the extreme temperature he would have left it, but even after he changed it back the pools of lava which had spawned took a long time to vanish.

Creating the new floors of the dungeon took longer than conquering the dungeon had. When he returned to the Core room, where Zeta Core awaited, he Collaborated with it to try to get an idea of how it thought of the dungeon he created for it.

To his surprise, Zeta Core was extremely annoyed with him. Not only had Tom not leveled it, despite using it’s new connection to the other cores to level them, but he had created a dungeon which strained the limits of Zeta’s capabilities to maintain.

Not only was it annoyed, it was extremely confused. Tom’s actions had caused so many new items to be added to its task tree. It had been so organized before, but now it was struggling to put things in order of priority.

Tom considered for a moment how to help it. Reluctantly, he used Level on the core, and it gained three levels in an instant. That only somewhat relieved the Core’s annoyance, but he could sense that its grip over its dungeon had increased significantly with just those three levels.

After that, Tom spent an hour trying to help Zeta organize its task list. Tom found that, among other errors, Zeta kept coming back to the first few floors because Tom had neglected to spawn monsters in them. Reluctantly, he set the dungeon to spawn wolves on floors two through five, and on five through ten he spawned dire wolves. Floors eleven through fifteen he populated with a combination of gnolls, goblins, korgoath and minitaurs.

Satisfied with the outcome once Zeta core stopped throwing errors at him and reluctantly settled into a routine, Tom returned to the surface, where Jessica was in the middle of putting on the most impressive light show that Tom had seen her display yet.