The Child appears to be about eight or nine years old and Logan was so shocked that he almost didn't call off his army in time. Luckily that didn't seem to matter as they simply ran past the child. He knew that he would have to deal with people eventually, but he figured his first encounter would be with an adult or maybe even a group of adults. The child for their part ignored everything and made a beeline for the house. Logan briefly wondered why the mantises or even the rat swarm, yes it actually counts as a small swarm now, didn't bother the child. Soon though he got his answer as a large green .. eh, man .. thing came charging into his territory. He is about 2.5 meters tall with a large muscular build, pointy ears, and large ... what can only be described as tusks jutting up from his bottom jaw. He is also carrying a large club like thing and wearing minimal armor. Logan throws everything he has at the newcomer which doesn't go too well at first with one or two rats getting squished with every swing of the newcomer's weapon. It's not working because they're fighting like they always do, that is to say without guidance. To be fair though they haven't really needed to do anything special up to this point. With a thought he orders the rats to focus on his eyes and throat while the mantises concentrate on his "tender bits". Logan isn't really a fan of fighting dirty but hey, sometimes you got to work with what you got and sometimes losing simply isn't an option. It doesn't take long for a rat to snatch out one of green guys eyes and take off with it while another rat sticks its head in the now empty socked and starts picking at the brain matter directly. The wails of agony are indescribable but short lived thankfully as one of the larger rats manages to chew through his vocal cords. There's blood and guts and entrails everywhere but eventually his little army is victorious, and the green guy is dead.
The good news is he got A LOT of mana for that fight. The bad news however is most of his troops are dead making it painfully obvious how underprepared Logan is to help anyone. Realizing he needs to get his troop count back up as soon as possible he upgrades the rat spawner yet again hoping for another spawn rate increase. This time however as soon as he upgrades it the spawner spits out a rat that is twice the size of even the ones he spawns manually. The new rat is an imposing figure for a rat. It is well over half a meter in length. Now that he's had a chance to calm down, he suddenly remembers the child although the kid doesn't seem to be anywhere at the moment. Thinking back through resent events Logan remembers them going into the house but doesn't remember them leaving. There is only one place they could be then Logan figures and thankfully the expansion to find out is relatively cheap. Taking a quick second to purchase the expansion and sure enough he finds the child hiding in the corner on the second floor trying to make themself as small as possible.
There are so many questions going through Logan's mind right now that he isn't even sure where to start. Was this their home before whatever battle had taken place here? Was whoever did this still around? He figures that green monstrosity is probably not alone. Speaking of that green monstrosity he decides the real question should be what attacked this house instead of who. Sadly, he doesn't have the means to answer any of those questions at the moment. Although he is starting to understand why they specified that they want him to help the humans of this realm and didn't just say they want him to help the people of this realm.
What he can do is try to cheer the kid up. With a thought he sends the new larger rat up to the second floor with orders to be friendly. He would send something else, but he doesn't exactly have many options at the moment, and you can't exactly pet a praying mantis. At first the child is terrified of the rat. After a few minutes though it becomes obvious the rat isn't going to attack and the kid relaxes a little. Sometime after that the little bugger gets brave enough to reach out and try to pet the rat. While this is going on Logan decides to work on beefing up security after reminding the big rat that the kid is friend not foe.
He goes back to working on the door of the house. Gathering the broken pieces of the door he stitches it back together as best he can using the skill he was practicing earlier, careful not to ruin the overall shape of the door. When that is done, he grabs the large chair that he spent so much time working on and gently feeds the wood into the door. Pretty soon, thanks to all the practicing he did earlier, he has a sturdy looking door. The problem is that the door is slightly larger than it needs to be. In fact it no longer fits in the door frame. Instead of subtracting wood in order to make it smaller he decides to try and compress the wood to make it extremely dense and thus much more durable. At first nothing happens but as he continues mentally applying pressure he can feel the door begin to shrink. He isn't able to condense it down by much but it's enough to make it fit in the door frame. The resulting door is about half again as sturdy as a door that size would normally be. With that finished all he has left to do is repair the hinges.
Before that though he decides to check in on the kid. It's starting to get dark and he doesn't know when the kid last had anything to eat or drink. The kid doesn't seem to be in any immediate need of food or water, but Logan doesn't want to put off finding food and water till the last minute. Based on the design of the house he doubts whoever lived here had indoor plumbing so his best bet for water would be a stream or a well. Food is a lot simpler as almost any kind of meat, nut, or berry will do. He decides to try sending a few rats out to scavenge. He doesn't have anything for them to carry food and water in but at this point he doesn't even know if they can leave his area. He picks a few recently spawned rats and tells them to go out and see what they can find after telling them to focus on anything containing water. He wants to send another pair out right away to gather food but first he needs to make sure the rats he sends out are going to come back. While he's waiting, he decides to look in on the kid and finds him cuddled up with the giant rat as if it's the most natural thing in the world. "Kids are pretty resilient" he thinks to himself as he watches the kid slowly stroke the rats head while falling asleep.
Only now does he realize that he has been gaining mana from the kid simply being in his territory. With his newfound wealth he decides to buy the third upgrade for the mantis spawner. Expecting it to simply be a spawn rate increase like the third upgrade to the rat spawner was he is surprised to see a giant praying mantis crawl out. Again however giant is a bit relative although these new mantises are about 30cm long. He also can't help but notice the spawner has dramatically increased in size. After taking a moment to check he confirms that the Rat spawner has also grown. He guesses this is to compensate for the increased size of the spawn able creatures.
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A short time later the rats return dragging some kind of canteen made of animal hide. After focusing on the canteen, he is somehow able to determine that it does in fact contain clean water. He isn't sure where they got it or who they took it from, if anyone, but not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth he has the rats take it up to the second floor and place it so that the child will find it when they wake up. Now that he knows they will return he sends out a couple of scouting parties looking for anything edible but specifically anything containing seeds, since he doesn't want to have to keep scavenging. He also wants to entice the humans to come to him since he can't very well go to them.
That settled he gets back to working on the hinges for the door. After bending the hinges back into proper shape, which took longer than he expected, he grabbed a couple of the metal cups to both repair and reinforce the hinges. After that it was just a matter of using the hinges to secure the door to the door frame. That process was neither easy nor simple, especially since he was having to do it all himself while maintaining focus on multiple objects. With that done he is now mentally exhausted; he is both relieved and worried that he can still become exhausted. Relieved because it proves he's not dead, but worried because it means too many enemies at once could overwhelm him, until he gets stronger spawns.
The giant rats are impressive but at the end of the day they are just giant rats. Speaking of which he only just now remembers he never bothered to check what they were designated as. Mentally scolding himself for getting distracted he takes a moment to focus on the new giant rat that just spawned. A dire rat huh, well that makes sense dire wolves were suppose to be really big wolves so why wouldn't that same logic hold true for other animals. He also inspects the giant mantis expecting it to say dire mantis but instead he finds it listed as goliath mantis. Well so much for that theory, or perhaps that only applies to mammals.
Just as he is about to busy himself with expanding the underground area one of the groups he sent out returns. It seems they were only able to find a few seeds and some mushrooms. Perfect he thinks as he plants the seeds along the eastern edge of his territory, already planning for the future. The mushrooms he has the rats store inside the house so they will hopefully last longer before drying out completely. When he is finished with that, he notices that the last expedition he had out has return with a berry bush they managed to uproot. An entire berry bush, really guys. The bush is to big to fit in the house and he doubts he can replant it so he has the rats chew off a branch with lots of berries on it and take that up to the second floor.
That done he starts to work on the underground area when a thought suddenly occurs to him. he can't really make it big enough to be useable without risking the ceiling collapsing. That does give him an idea for some traps later on though. Realizing he will have to expand his territory even further underground he makes a mental note to come back to it later. "so many expansions so little mana" he thinks to himself. He is still getting mana from the child being in his territory and that combined with the mice, roaches, and other various encounters has him almost ready to expand upward again. As much as he knows he needs to expand down and outwards the idea of only having part of a house just doesn't sit right with him. Even if the only part he is missing is the roof it still feels wrong.
with nothing to do but wait he decides to take stock. Doing a head count and judging by how much time appears to have gone by since the upgrade he deduces that a dire rat must appear every sixth spawn. He wishes it was every spawn but at least they are spawning regularly. He wants to throw another upgrade on the spawner but those upgrades are getting expensive and he still wants to expand. Turning his attention to the praying mantis spawner he notes that he doesn't have enough goliath mantises to make a guess at how often they spawn since he still only has the one. He is sure another one will spawn eventually though. Taking a look at the little gem he notes that it is now completely spherical and about the size of a tennis ball. Focusing on it he decides to pay attention to the name and is surprised. Apparently it's not a gem at all but rather something called a dungeon core. He's still not sure what it is but the word core implies it's even more important than he realized. Mentally kicking himself for not asking more questions back before becoming whatever he is now he looks at his expansion options one more time before mentally kicking himself again, this time for being so dense. He is able to control and to a certain extent manipulate large sections of land. Also that gem is called a dungeon core. Therefor he must be something called a dungeon. He still doesn't really believe an area can be sentient but when all other explanations are exhausted whatever is left must be the truth. The sudden realization that he IS his territory is surprisingly not shocking at all. He guesses a part of himself must have already known that.
Taking a step back from his mental spiral and apparent self-realization he decides to check in on the kid only to find they are still sleeping. Poor thing must have been exhausted, who knows how long they were running for yesterday. He really wants to know if the child is a boy or a girl but checking just feels wrong on so many levels.
With morning light comes a brand new expansion and with it a brand new spawner. He did manage to get the rest of the house, albeit just barely, but it's the new spawner that has his attention. On the opposite wall from the mantis spawner at the highest point of the wall where the two halves of the gable roof meet there is a wasp spawner. Unlike the other spawners this one spits out wasps automatically and he can't manually spawn them. A little over one hour later and he can finally afford the first upgrade for the wasp spawner and he has no idea what changed. even comparing the wasp that just spawned to one of the other wasps it takes him a few minutes to realize what the difference is. The new wasp has stronger venom than the others even though the two wasps look very similar.
With that mystery solved he takes stock of what he has in the way of defenses and while still not up to the same quantities he once had he does now have larger versions and a new spawner. The seeds he got yesterday are already taking root. He knows it will probably be a few days before any shoots start popping up. He hopes it isn't the wrong time of year to be trying to grow food. The mantis spawner is spitting out a new mantis one every hour. The rat spawner is spitting out a rat every thirty minutes. The real spawning champion right now is the wasp spawner however spawning a new wasp every 15 minutes.
Just as things are starting to look up he is invaded by yet another green monstrosity. This one although similar in appearance to the green brute from earlier has two very distinct lumps which tell him it is in fact a she. He just hopes enough stuff has had time to spawn to deal with this new threat.