Seros ripped the head off the last invader in a bloody, visceral explosion.

I'd had no reason to as a dragon and I wasn't capable of it as a dungeon core, but there was a very strong desire to weep in relief.

To be very clear, I didn't, but I wanted to.

My brave, beautiful bastard of a seabound monitor sagged back, spitting out the invader's head—a tall, willowy woman with a mask built into her face and an unpleasant habit of manipulating bones—with a weary hiss. In the cramped corners of the Jungle Labyrinth, he could only fight so well, no room to batter opponents with his tail or slash out with his back claws. She had taken full advantage of that, reaching out with her wretched little powers to twist his limbs out of alignment, forcing him to stumble and heave for breath against ribs that constricted around his lungs—but for all that she was terrible and awful, he was still Seros, chosen of me. It would take more than someone who fancied herself an invader of my dungeon to take him down.

And though he dragged a broken back leg and fragile ribcage, his fangs had found a home around her neck comfortably enough.

I flew to him with all speed, heedless of waste as I poured healing mana into him like a waterfall; his frills perked up when he felt me, even as he collapsed against the ground to take the weight off his broken bones, our connection thrumming with pride. Only slightly begrudgingly I lavished praise on him as I healed the worst of his injuries, bullying bones back in place as I stitched them together and smoothing over fractures and misaligned joints.

It had been a special sort of agony to be unable to help when the invader was here, sucking up all my mana as I tried to heal his injuries and only strengthened her instead, and I more than made up for it now.

Because for all that today had been a disaster on levels I was only barely starting to comprehend, Seros would survive, and that was enough to calm part of my soul.

But it had been a disaster.

The first minutes had been tense enough when I'd thought there were only a handful of invaders—surprise of all surprises, my mood had not improved when damn fifty of the bloody things had tramped through my Calaratan entrance like they owned the place. No one above Silver, thank the gods, but Silvers were still stronger than the vast majority of my creatures and there were a lot of them. So.

Yeah. I was having a great time.

They'd poured through my first floor in droves, letting me get a real glimpse of how adventuring parties worked—the largest I'd seen had been seven and they hadn't been the most coordinated, much more common in sizes between three and five. Plenty of interesting specializations, from casters to enhancers and everything in between, what would have been glorious study if they hadn't been attacking me, and from my useless, helpless position overhead, I had embedded every image into my core. If I used mana, they just absorbed it and knew that I was active, so I just had to sit out. It burned. I hated it.

So I had gotten to just watch as they sliced and cut through my burrowing rats and luminous constrictors, joking and confident as they rated my danger level. Nuvja hide some attacks and weaker fools fell, but those higher-ranked Silvers had strolled through.

The Fungal Gardens had served their purpose, though. The glint and flash of jewels pulled everyone further in, whispered of wealth and glory with sweet little nothings, and the invaders marched forward without a glance back. The second the last one had come through, I had calculated the risk as enough and made my first active command, tunneling away at water until the creeping vine had unfurled from its position overhead and crawled over the entrances. In the darkness of the first floor, it had been indistinguishable.

The joy at seeing invaders stumble blindly in search of their escape had not been enough to make up for the death of the mother cave bear.

She'd died quickly, which was the smallest of comforts, but one I would take. Her mate had taken revenge but not on the pair that had actually killed her, just hapless bystanders, but their blood had at least helped. Objectively, I knew her cubs could survive on their own and her mate could guide them for the rest of their journey, but. Well.

I saw her corpse and thought of my first lunar cave bear, so long ago, and how the den that had once housed him was now empty once again.

For all I made and spawned and cared for thousands of creatures, their losses would always hurt.

But onward the invaders came, and there was no time to mourn because more of my beloved creatures were dying.

The eldest and firstborn ironback toad, an arrow through the mouth—an electric eel that'd been so close to evolution stabbed through the stomach and dragged out of the water to flop until she died—a dead mangrove crawling with webweavers set alight until they burned. With each, I snarled and snapped at the air, watching invaders clap each other on the back and cheer like it wasn't lives they were claiming, like they weren't killing my creatures without a thought for their actions.

But I wasn't the only one losing here.

Those who brushed too close to the mangroves felt the bite of their thorns, and one poor sap had gotten a stab through the neck with nothing for his adventuring party to do as he died a messy death. Electric eels punished all those who entered the canals if the silvertooths didn't get there first, and the waters thrashed with scarlet froth. It had taken three whole suddenly-missing feet before people started to distrust the stepping stones over the canals, the lichenridge snapping turtles getting more than their fill from the woeful little fools so stupid as to step on their back.

There was something gratifying about seeing my traps work, in a way. Because while I had carved the ledges with the specific intention for razorleaf lichen to sit and wait for unsuspecting hands, it was another thing entirely to see someone reach to the surrounding wall for support and rear back with crimson fingers, and then promptly regret their mistake further as the blood awoke the silvertooths when they tried to cross the canals. Or to see the little holes kobolds had dug and filled with sharpened spears actually serve a purpose, trapping invaders until they bled out, or how the chieftess had been able to command a whole hoard to overwhelm their opponents with a semblance of strategy.

Or the very, very welcome surprise that Nicau, human as he was, had killed an invader.

He'd mentioned something about his abilities when he came back from the jungle I still had yet to name, and to see it in action was eye-opening. Not just able to talk to other beings but… command them, in some way?

It also made me excited about Seros' blessing of the depths. Surely that had more abilities than just hydrokinesis if little Nicau could force his opponents to freeze before him.

Questions for later days, though.

The Drowned Forest had been when the invaders truly started to feel losses—already they were split up by the branching paths, no longer having the pure advantage of numbers as they were reduced to only their adventuring party instead of a crowd, and whole groups disappeared under the tangle of my creatures while others walked on in blissful ignorance. Perhaps ten dead, though my own forces were decimated as well—kobolds slumped over the canal banks, greater crabs twitching through punctured carapaces, mangroves chopped and bleeding scarlet from gashes over their trunk.

But oh, the losses did not stay on my side as the invaders made the push to the third floor.

I had been getting the sense that this was not a particularly prepared group from the beginning, with the heedless way they had thrown themselves into my depths and seemingly had no information about why they were facing. This fact was only made abundantly clear when they came to face my beloved Underlake.

Some had seen the water and immediately turned around, which was gratifying, and only more so when they found that my first two floors had not stayed docile and clear while they were gone. Others still had plunged into the water, and it did turn out that there was an irritating little ability where they could circulate mana in their lungs to avoid needing to swim along the surface—infuriating, but I had expected at least something similar. My life would have been just too easy if only aquatic races could make it past my third floor. Ah well.

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Because for all that they could survive the water, that did not mean that they could fight in it.

There was something extremely satisfying to be a sea-drake and watch those that had killed me flounder uselessly in the water.

For all they tried to remember how to swim and figured out that no, you could not, in fact, swing a sword as efficiently underwater, my creatures were built to fight in this environment. I'd watched gleefully as the royal silvertooth commanded his horde of followers to shred unsuspecting fools apart, the greater crabs swarming over those walking along the bottom, roughwater sharks tearing anyone without the firepower to stand up to them to shreds. There had been a particularly delightful moment where a fire mage who'd been so terribly cocky as she burned my mangroves to stumps on the second floor had come face-to-face with the fledgling sea serpent and learned that no, fire did not work well underwater, and sea serpents were not kind enough to give her a second chance to attack.

Glorious. I reveled in that.

And then the duo that had killed my cave bear struck once more, and they'd ripped off the sarco's head.

I wouldn't quite call it shock, since they had paid dearly for the victory, but there was a part of me that didn't really know what to do with the situation. Because as powerful as Seros was, and as cunning as the horned serpent was, and as determined as Rihsu was, the sarco had been a beast. Larger than anything else in my dungeon, capable of both terrestrial and aquatic combat, lazy and slow but capable of taking down anything else in my dungeon. Though I would never have told him, I was fairly sure he would have defeated Seros out of the water. His bulk was just so intense.

And then he'd been defeated.

I'd barely had a moment to think over it, trying to piece together what to do with that information, when a point of awareness watching the armoured jawfish tear into a full adventuring party noticed something near the surface of the floor. I'd looked up, and. Well.

There was an invader, a tall, broad man with scales and fangs unlike any creature I'd seen before, swimming to the top of the water. Above him, the cloudskipper wisp darted to and fro, kicking up larger waves as she delighted in the raid-frenzy without any combat from herself, barking and howling in that odd, storm-like voice of hers.

And then the bastard, the goddamn savage, had reached out with a sliver of crystal and stolen my wisp, trapped her beautiful canine form in quartz, and then had the fucking audacity to just leave.

Because apparently, there had been some scholar I hadn't paid enough attention to, and when he'd fled back up to the first floor, he'd managed to both avoid the cave bear and spot the difference between limestone and creeping vine to find his way out. Which, fantastic for him, except then that others had managed to leave—some shadowy figure who hadn't tried past the second floor, the scholar, maybe half a dozen other cowards, and now this wretched thief.

I had killed those that had killed my cave bear, my sarco, my toad, all my beloved creatures who had deserved better. Even if they had defeated them, they paid for it in their life, and I could only get so angry at a corpse before I was wasting time.

But this man had stolen my wisp, and he'd gotten away with it.

I ached and I raged and I seethed.

Only half a dozen invaders made it to the fourth floor, which was a bit of a balm, and I watched with greedy, hungry eyes for their destruction—they stumbled through the twisting tunnels, one party and one solo, and my creatures closed in.

Seros took out the man who had defeated the sarco and joined the hunt as well.

The adventuring party made it far, their unique collection of abilities certainly not countering my Jungle Labyrinth but at least allowing them to scrape their way through, though they paid in plenty of blood. Their healer took off the edge, which felt vaguely like cheating when I was on the opposite side, but for all their brutish tactics, they were not the strongest thing on this floor.

That was made abundantly clear as they turned one final corner and came face-to-face not with the exit, but instead the horned serpent's army.

The destruction was quick and lovely to watch, shredding past their defenses and taking them all down with the kind of speed that didn't give them a moment to react, turning them into sad little corpses that didn't deserve to go any further.

Or. Well.

Mostly.

For all I was saying the invasion was over, there was still one alive.

They just weren't in any position to be attacking.

A human, but with an extremely prevalent serpentine ancestry—probably naga or lamia, I couldn't tell yet. She was young with powerful healing mana, which I would've welcomed collecting from her soul, but for some reason, the horned serpent had curled around her. Psionic mana bloomed from her antlers, pressing into the human's—Kriya's, I thought, because I apparently paid attention to all these unimportant details—mind and tugging her into sleep. And then, even when she was asleep, she wasn't killed.

Which. Why?

She was serpentine, yeah, but I had pegged the horned serpent as intelligent enough to know that I couldn't just recreate a fully sapient being for her army. And even if she knew that, what was the point in taking a human? They weren't exactly helpful.

But the horned serpent just dragged her slumped body onto her back and started to transport her down to the stone jungle of the fourth floor.

I hoped she didn't intend for me to keep the brat. Nicau was already stretching the limits of my patience—not through anything the boy had done, admittedly, but I hadn't been particularly fond of odd, fleshy humans before and I certainly hadn't grown more so after one had killed me—and while this one had a few more pleasing serpentine qualities, it wasn't enough for me to actually tolerate her.

And judging by the light threatening to burst out from underneath the horned serpent's scales, I wouldn't be able to have a nice, long conversation with her before her evolution started.

I shoved aside the excitement from that thought and continued to care for the more pressing issues.

Seros had taken out the last invader, because of course he had, and once more my halls were empty of threats—which was fantastic, because I'd probably lost a third of my total creatures. My lower prey-level populations were utterly decimated, rats down to a sniveling fraction of their previous number, and the halls were littered with corpses—but the most irritating, frustrating, infuriating thing?

I couldn't claim it.

Already my core heaved and swelled with mana, plugged full to burst, and I was hard limited by my seventy-five point capacity. Just a handful of humans had released more than that with their death, and for all that a significant portion had gone to the creatures who had killed them, far more was just now floating aimlessly around my halls, drifting away with nothing to hold it.

Because I didn't have room.

Do you know how annoying that was? Could you even begin to comprehend the raw fury I felt at having successfully defended myself, killed nearly fifty invaders, and I couldn't even profit from it?

If I hadn't already sworn to destroy Calarata, I would have made that promise now.

But for as much was slipping out of my grasp, I could at least try to reclaim some—I dumped an immediate seventy points into the first and second floor, regrowing rats by the dozen, swarming little bodies born into the aftermath of devastation. Then I reached out and grappled for the mana hovering overhead, trawling along the edges of my control like a tease.

It was an infuriating, difficult process that took far too long, but I was able to reclaim about a quarter of the mana I would have gotten had I had room, and I was only able to do it by continuously using up what I collected to make more creatures and then returning to desperately scrapping at the air like a lowly beggar.

In the end, it was enough to mostly replenish my numbers, and I suppose I'd just have to take it.

If I wanted an answer on why I should select increased mana capacity on my evolutions instead of just increased regeneration, I'd gotten it in spades.

Bah. Bloody rules.

There was still more mana waiting to be harvested in all the bodies scattered over my floor, but I decided to hold off on that for now—it wasn't nearly as time sensitive as other issues, and I needed a better distraction.

And oh was I about to get one.

Because as my creatures shook off the last of their raid-frenzy, calming down as my healing mana swept through the halls and took the edge off the worst of their wounds, there were some a little larger than the others, a little fiercer, a little more full. There had been over forty invaders killed in my halls, invaders fat and ripe with mana, and while half went to me, half also went elsewhere.

And for some, that half had been enough to push them over the edge.

Spread all over my floors, creatures lit up from inside with pale white light, minds crawling with the instinctual urge to protect themselves in preparation for a rest. All around, I could feel their awarenesses pinging against mine, thoughts racing, impossible possibilities filling the air with the sweet, sweet taste of mana.

I had other tasks to do. Invaders hadn't just attacked my creatures but also my halls, burning down my mangroves, destroying my stone, leaving behind filthy little remains and traps and other repulsive things that I would have to clean up. I'd have to send out scouts and make sure that there would be no further attacks while I was recovering, make sure that the mountain was quiet again, make sure that I could have this very necessary time to protect my own.

But not right now.

Because there were messages by the dozens, by the hundreds, crawling across my core, and I knew exactly what they were. Excitement flickered, bright and sharp, as I curled around the golden letters and prepared myself.

It was time to decide on evolutions.