When Alison finally reawakened, it had been 5 years since her abduction according to her internal clock. She immediately felt why her mana levels had restored as there was a huge torrent of structured mana flowing into her, but except for a tiny tendril she had no control whatsoever over the flows of mana flowing through her. These flows opened up her internal dimension tap to a bigger size without regard to an efficient process, simply forcing power through her to brute force the portal further open, losing much of this mana in the process.

She was shocked to learn that this was possible, for an outside influence to take control of her internal flows to such an extent. From the tiny strands of mana flowing to her internal storage she could catch quick glimpses of greed and elation from its source. Though in what regard these feelings fit into the bigger picture remained outside of her influence for now.

With the increased output the material she was in got soaked in her energy and she was able to recognize a bit more of her surroundings, though the flows of energy flowing out of her, that used to feel like playdough, now felt more like firm ν-steel than anything she could manipulate. From the flows she could finally start to determine a rough shape of where she was situated, but before the picture could firm up, the flow of mana into herself dried up and her dimension tap closed down again to its previous minimal level. From the rough picture she got earlier however it seemed she was included as the tip of some kind of staff or similar.

The minimal output however was enough to keep flowing a bit through the material and supply her with just enough minimal operation to keep her from shutting down again, though her thoughts were still sluggish and anything more than simple existing was still out of reach.

With time she finally was able to create a clear picture of her surroundings and it was indeed a staff with her core as the centerpiece on top of it. Unable to influence anything or talk to anything no matter how hard she tried her emotions started to push through even the muted state they were in.

She slowly fell into a depression and was unable to do anything but sit on her virtual bed and feel sorry for herself for quite some time. Not even having the ability to end her own existence she shut down all active outside perception, little as it was, to try and figure out a way out of her existence.

***

This went on for several decades with floods of energy coming and going in irregular intervals. With time she was able to determine more and more of the source of the energy she was receiving as after the first change it remained the same over all the years. With this input of foreign impressions they started to chip away at her apathy more and more. The more she caught the more of a complete picture she was able to form, it seemed she was being used to augment what seemed to be spells from fantasy lore.

She was in the possession of a mage that used her to dominate others and build his own empire, killing all who were opposing him. The more she learned the more she got disgusted by what humanity had turned into over the millennia since the Terran Federation had collapsed. With each repetition of impressions, she started to find her resolve more and more. She was an officer of the damned Terran Navy. She would not be cowed by some despicable human behaving like shit. She would damned well find a way out of this and pull humanity back to it's former glory. And if she had to do it through the ashes of what remained after she was done with them, then so be it. She would take humanity by the scruff of their neck and take them through a wringer to find the best they had to offer and rebuild from there what was lost.

She was a freaking dungeon from fantasy lore, she could work with that. She had the whole database of humanity at her fingertips. She could devise a training program that would find the diamonds in the rough and polish them.

With new resolve she once again spent her whole attention on her database to figure a way out of her current predicament. Soon she had to accept however that nothing in her databases seemed to help with the problem she was facing, so she finally turned to what she knew she could control, that being the tiny strand of energy that trailed off the huge torrents used to force her tap open every now and then.

Using this small tendril, she started to optimize the opening, closing and operation of the dimension tap whenever the torrent flooded into her. The increase in efficiency led to her being able to siphon a bit more of the energy from the huge torrent, which again led her to be able to increase her processing power to further increase the efficiency and thus get the snowball effect rolling.

With each instance of the energies arriving she was able to optimize the process more and more until finally she felt like she reached peak efficiency with what was possible with her limited capabilities.

The now extra power siphoned off the flows she could finally use to start to backtrack the energy flows and hopefully start to influence the mind behind the flows as she did the bobcat before. She noticed the same barrier that was there with the other 2 humans she encountered before, but other than before, this time she didn’t try to hammer against it, but she could follow the conduit of energy into herself as it was actively connected to her core.

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With each repetition of being used she could penetrate a bit further into the mind of the despicable excuse for a human who was wielding her core as a weapon, not to protect but to dominate. She learned that he was the heir of a once powerful kingdom, that fell on hard times. Many former subordinate nations breaking away to go their own way.

He used the last of his kingdoms treasures to buy her core on the black market and draft a dubious artificer that would have no scruples working with something that could otherwise be used to advance whole countries.

Once done, Francis used the enhanced power granted him by the direct utilization of primal mana through her, to stomp all resistance within his splintering Nation, and his direct neighboring countries into the ground and assumed the title of God-Emperor. Naturally this caused the other surrounding kingdoms to start forming alliances which in turn caused Francis to rely on the staff more and more heavily to keep his enemies at bay.

This in turn allowed Allison an increasing amount of influence over his mind, which enabled her to make him extremely paranoid as time went on. During this time, with a constant goal in her mind, she managed to finally finish digging herself out of her pit of depression she had found herself in immediately after being captured.

She now recognized that humanity had changed irrevocably over time, and that she would have to find another approach to rebuilding the civilization she once knew. She was an Officer of the Terran Navy, she would help bring humanity back to what it was before, and if she had to beat some sense into them first, then so be it. During the times of respite between the episodes of action, she began to hedge a new plan.

First, she would find a way to free herself of this entrapment she found herself in currently. Then she would start to imitate what the other dungeons did, enabling her to grow big enough to start manipulating her surroundings at will, building more advanced pieces of technology as time progressed, working her way back up to previous levels.

In the meantime she would make some adjustments to the standard procedures proposed in the information package, optimizing her dungeon to train the worthy to help weed out the ones not required for the future she had in mind. She would use the worthy to take over the leadership positions she envisioned for them, once finally able to reclaim her lost technology. She accepted the new reality of leaders needing strong physical and mental constitutions, even granting them the longer lifespans needed to effectively lead her new Nation. She would dedicate her dungeon to build an increasing difficulty of mental and physical challenges to help raise this new generation of leaders.

She had always loved building, and especially managing ecosystems, so it shouldn’t prove too difficult for her to start a dungeon from scratch once she managed to get out of her current prison situation. Though now that she finally had an avenue of attack into the mages mind it would only be a matter of time.

Over the next decade she started to plant the idea in his thoughts, that there was another core to be claimed sitting in the open, in the backwater wilderness beyond the human plains. She kept nurturing this idea and encouraging his tendencies to seek out more power until finally she managed to convince him to go on an expedition to find this fictitious core that could endanger his powerbase.

Due to the paranoia she stoked in him since the beginning, he wouldn’t trust anyone to go with him for fear of someone else taking the new core away from him, so he went alone. He trusted only in his own power to keep him safe.

After weeks of travel he arrived at the location he believed the core to be at. But not finding any evidence of there ever being any core at all Francis starts to suspect someone close to him must have come here already. Taking out his staff he starts to channel more mana through it than ever before, trying to divine the culprit who took the core away from him.

That was just what Allison was waiting for. Recognizing from the streams of energy flowing into her, that Francis was in a remote enough place for her to enact her escape, she used all of her accumulated energy to strike back at the mind behind the source. Not used to such a strong influx of energy flowing in the other direction than intended the conduits of mana in the staff shattered in an explosion of mana and glowing hot shard.

Reeling from the mental backlash of the mana trying to flow into him, Francis was unable to strengthen himself, opening himself up to the damage caused by the explosion of the staff. Several mana soaked shards penetrated through his torso with one reaching through his eyes deep into his brain. He never had time to recover from the mental backlash before a piercing pain shot through his head and ended his miserable life, freeing Allison to fall to the floor unencumbered.

Finally freed of her confines Allison arrived at the floor, rolling down the short incline and coming to a stop in a small ravine just on the bottom of the small hill her escape took place on. A small river flowed around the hill just below where she ended up, though she wouldn’t know that until she could claim the area around her.

For now, she was happy with the immediate area around herself, though reduced she was finally free again and could start building a dungeon, meant to be the seed of something grand. Now resolved to her fate, she knew she needed time, and lots of it, before she could start revealing herself to the rest of humanity for what she was. She would first need to prepare a core of trustworthy and honorable core of people to start rebuilding the human empire from.

She was happy to see that already several bugs were crawling around in her close proximity, helping her along to regain her former strength and more. She just hoped the wilderness she currently resided in was enough to give her time to rebuild, especially since she wasn’t going to give off another betraying pulse of energy to open her dimension tap.