Chapter 74: Settling In
Thursday, April 27th, 11:18 AM
Dungeon Ciara
Joy couldn’t help but smile. Each movement of her body felt strong. Quick. Lethal. Training had never felt like a chore to her since she and the others had begun with Joe one month before, but now, it was all she wanted to do. That feeling had only grown since she had joined the Marine Corps of her own free will. This morning was her first day of boot camp, and she was in heaven.
While some other young adults had complained of the long hours ahead, Joy reveled in long runs, sparring, obstacle course training, and practicing her frost-empowered strikes against bags and training dummies.
Everything they’d been through so far was not only easy for her to manage—it was downright enjoyable.
There were a few others among the trainees in their makeshift boot camp who had awakened powers similar to Joy’s, though they were substantially weaker due to lacking residency in the Dungeon.
Because of her undergraduate studies having neared completion, her tendency to remain focused, and her stoic demeanor, Joy was also slated to undergo training in an improvised version of Officer Candidate School once their rushed version of basic training ended in three weeks.
Seabright and Twin Lakes beaches had been all but absorbed by the three main branches of the military, once the Army and Air Force had arrived. Eight platoons marched in the sand beneath the mid-morning sun—four from the Corps, two for the Army, and one each for the Navy and Air Force.
The President decided to implement the draft in a novel fashion, waiting until each person was awakened and identified as having a class before being put through basic training. Thus, every single recruit was stronger, faster, and more resilient than a typical human.
Each recruit’s military occupational specialty, or MOS, was largely determined by what sort of powers they had gained. Since the class that was gained when awakening had everything to do with the wants and needs of the individual, it made career choices rather simple.
Joy’s MOS was 0301 - Basic Infantry Officer. It was expected that she would go on to lead raids against enemy Dungeons, and she was eager to get started.
When they took lunch, the food “trucks” that were erected by the Crow’s Nest were a popular choice. Since the entire population of 5,500 who now resided above the Dungeon were effectively under orders to work together as a team, currency was unnecessary. Chefs who had awakened cooking abilities became better at their craft by doing, and since the ingredients were provided by Ciara, there was no reason for anyone to go hungry.
Thus, for the time being, Joy didn’t need to pay anything for her surf and turf lunch from the truck of the same name. Aside from the fresh fruits Ciara provided, their meals had been rather lackluster before cooks and chefs had awakened the ability to prepare foods with absurd alacrity.
After almost two months of downing stale energy bars, and questionably-roasted meats and fish for protein, Joy reveled in the delicate aroma and mouthwatering flavor of each perfectly-seared bite.
Children’s laughter rang out from the newly-formed K-12 school situated in the courtyard of the enlarged housing complex Ciara had added. The sound made Joy smile. For the first time since their world had been turned upside-down, she felt a shred of normalcy and real hope for the future.
When she’d finished her lunch, Joy deposited her plate and utensils into one of the racks shaped by Ciara. Because of the nature of her Dungeon, anything that could be considered a contaminant was automatically absorbed, leaving the dishes utterly spotless without requiring a dishwasher.
Joy dropped to the sand for push-ups of her own volition, to make the most of the remainder of her 30-minute lunch break. To her surprise, by the time she had done ten push-ups, there were four other marine recruits who were doing the same. After fifty push-ups, she had most of her training platoon on the sand near her.
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Joe returned from his lunch with Mike and stopped to stare as he found his entire platoon of trainees on their faces in the sand.
Joy called out as they pushed, “294, 295…”
Damn it, I love the sight of motivated recruits, Joe thought as he walked across the sand to address them as Joy reached with 300.
“Attention, recruits!” Joe barked.
“Sir, aye-aye, sir!” Eighty souls formed ranks in front of him. Every face was hard and focused. Not one showed fatigue from having finished three hundred push-ups a moment before.
Joe fought the urge to smile. It was harder because he felt Siobhán’s ever-present love for him through their bond.
She’s a girl worth fighting for.
That thought elicited an extra flood of adoration from Siobhán, and Joe had to cover his mouth and fake a cough to conceal his brief smile.
After lunch, the recruits were put through a training regimen that would have been unthinkable before they were awakened.
As a team, they lifted logs of tungsten instead of wood.
A climbing wall erected by two men with a Dwarven Carpenter class stood almost sixty meters tall. The slowest of his recruits were able to scale it up one side and down the other in less than twenty-five seconds. Deep pools of water on either side ensured that any mistakes were nonlethal, and Joe only had to heal one young woman whose hand struck a climbing ledge as she fell after losing her grip. Even then, her injury was nothing more than a light sprain of two slender fingers.
An elaborate series of bars and poles were erected above another pool of water, to serve as a lateral climbing course. Recruits learned fast that falling was a bad idea, since wet hands had a hard time gripping smooth metal.
Running was done at what Joe estimated to be twenty miles per hour, over distances of forty miles at a time, wearing 70-pound rucksacks. Recruits tired from that, but none seemed in danger of burning out—not even the smaller women who’d volunteered.
That would’ve killed me even before I got sick… Impressive, ladies.
They finished out the day marching in formation to cadences, and Joe was proud of their determination.
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I finished adding the tropical rainforest climate to my sixth floor and gave the mental command for my core to shift down again.
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Floors: 7
Minions: 631/980
Residents: 12/24
Denizens: 6.11M
Traps: 25/35
The passive income from my denizens had become so much that it took less than thirty seconds to recover fifty-percent of my mana—which was equivalent to my entire mana pool before finishing the sixth floor.
My largest floor yet, the sixth was had hills that rose more than two hundred meters above a series of rivers that ran between them, over area of sixteen square kilometers. With a maximum height of 350 meters on the sixth floor, there was plenty of space for massive trees.
My favorite part of climates was that they took whatever you had and simply made things easier. Rivers and streams flowed without my intervention, clouds formed, and soil was seeded. Unlike the desert of my fifth floor, where very few plants grew except around the singular oasis south of the great pyramid, I was treated to the spectacle of billions of plants warring for sunlight.
Broad-leaf trees grew slower than some of the other plants, but their sturdy, upright nature allowed them to dominate the space within minutes. Vines reached out and strangled other plants as well as each other. Plants whose light was stolen away completely withered and died to become fertilizer for the rest.
I had taken the opportunity to push a single, small minion tunnel all the way across the North American continent in an effort to gather more species. I added teams of twelve enkelyn minions in each of three locations—the Mojave Desert; a place identified by surviving locals as Weatherford, Texas, and some location in southern Florida. Each enclave of enkelyn were given their own series of micro-climate homes, with a request from me to either capture or lure in nonhuman wildlife to be killed in caves that I placed in each location.
My fifth-floor desert benefited from a series of new minions.
Based on a mix of Sidewinder and Mojave rattlesnakes, Dune Masters were, by tradition, five times as massive as the Mojave rattlesnake, with females reaching two and a half meters in length, while the males grew to two meters. Both sexes were heavy-bodied with stout five-to-six-centimeter folding fangs sporting venom glands from both species and the ability to hide beneath the sand with only their well-camouflaged Sidewinder eyes showing. Each received a Stealth augmentation, making them almost impossible to spot if you couldn’t see where they’d disturbed the surface.
Twenty Dune Masters now lurked among the sands of the fifth.
The iconic Giant Desert Hairy scorpion was a necessary addition, though I added venom glands from the Arizona Bark scorpion to supplement the comparatively-mild venom of the Giant Desert Hairy. With the largest body I could make but a coloration and pattern that closely matched the appearance of the desert’s sand and stone, they didn’t need much else in the way of camouflage. At twelve inches in length with a Grace augmentation, my Sandstalker’s movement speed was impressive enough that it could catch up with a human from behind if the person was unaware. Anything aside from armored boots would likely prove useless against the three-centimeter telson at the end of their tail. Thirty of them lay hidden in the desert of the fifth.
My small tribe of enkelyn in Florida annihilated an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake when it made a bee-line toward one of the bulkier spider folk after invading their home. The snake didn’t suffer long, as it was simultaneously roasted, electrocuted, bludgeoned, and cut apart by a series of spells.
While they settled in to feast on the hapless predator’s corpse, I made use of the largest and most dangerous species of rattlesnake to fashion new minions for my sixth-floor jungle.
At five meters in length, with a head twenty centimeters across and thirty centimeters long that concealed eight-centimeter fangs, and a body up to forty centimeters wide; these snakes were massive. While I was unable to put her on a scale to be weighed, I estimated the weight of the first female I summoned at sixty-eight kilograms. I’d added splotches of green to the disruptive, brown, gray, and black pattern of my Everglades Diamondback, which made them difficult to spot while hiding on the forest floor. They received a Toughness augmentation, and I spawned thirty of them to lurk in the jungle.
Enkelyn from my second floor were overjoyed to pass through a small tunnel to reach their new home on the sixth floor, as well as the chance to live apart from goblins. I left the tunnel open to allow smaller denizens to make their way down, though I had very little in the way of creatures that could be suited for that biome.
[It’s lovely—like southern Felmyst,] Misha remarked as they stepped from the tunnel into my new tropical rainforest.
Even more lovely was how it took no time at all for the enkelyn to befriend a pair of my Diamondbacks. They were all minions, so it made sense. But I still had a bit of trouble reconciling how minions could work together so easily. The sapients were different, in that they could slaughter and make use of my normal minions for raw materials. That said, and contrary to my expectations and aside from hunting smaller, sentient beings like the others, the enkelyn seemed far and away to be the most peaceful of sapient minions I had yet to spawn in my Dungeon.
Lizardfolk claimed the tunnels previously occupied by the Rock Goblins on the third floor. The first thing they did was to use stoneshaping magic, similar to the goblins before them—but instead of altering the shape or size of the tunnels, they added coarse sand to the bottom of each. When that was done, they filled around half of the tunnel system with ten centimeters of water.
Curious to know how it might affect their tunnels, I added a temperate climate to one small section, which caused water to flow at a languid pace as it entered through the tunnel floor and was reabsorbed at the bottom of that area.
The first lizardfolk man to pass through that stretch of tunnel paused to press his head against the sandy floor. He raised his head up and uttered a piercing hiss-like cry that caused all nearby lizardfolk to rush toward him.
Each scrutinized my newest alteration to their home, before exhibiting similar behavior, with sharp-toothed maws raised toward the ceiling.
After a moment, the first spoke, [Creator, we are thankful for your blesssing of flowing waters.]
I was still unsure if they had named one another despite my offer for them to do so after they were summoned. Since I’d not witnessed any of them glowing, I suspected they hadn’t yet. Compared with my other minor sapient minions, lizardfolk had proved stoic, seeming to favor body language and posturing over spoken words. In fact, despite their presence in my Dungeon for nearly a week, this was the first time one had said a word.
[You’re welcome. Would you like the rest of the tunnels to flow in a similar manner?]
[You honor uss, Creator.] The entire tribe had arrived, and forty voices spoke as one.
[Consider it done. If you require anything, just ask. But I have a question for you.]
As I applied the climate to their caves, they darted around with surprising speed, stopping every so often to hiss at the ceiling.
[We bend to your will,] the first lizardman intoned. He inclined his long, sharp-toothed snout and shut his eyes.
The others did the same.
[I gave you permission to name each other, but it seems none of you are named yet. Is there a reason why?]
Their eyes shot open wide as each prostrated themselves against the tunnel floors.
A lizardwoman replied with a seedy, rasping tone, [We dare not, for humans and orcs will punish usss…]
[This is my Dungeon. You are immortal, and I will not allow anyone to oppress your people. Humans may pass through, and there may be times when you will fight them, but I won’t tolerate anyone punishing you for taking control of your own lives. If I ever summon orcs, you will be their equals.]
A screeching sound reverberated through the tunnels, like a thousand rusty nails across a chalkboard.
I started to wonder if I’d said something wrong when I spotted oily tears forming in their eyes.
Above the piercing screeches, the first lizardman choked out, [The Creator is ssso kind…]
Within a minute, all forty glowed blue and grew to a meter in height—which was more than it seemed, since they stood like bipedal, smooth-scaled crocodilians with heads slung far forward of their powerful hind legs while sweeping, blade-like tails balanced them from behind. In terms of mass, they were at least twice the size of goblins, with most likely a match for the average human man. Of all the sapient minions I had brought into my Dungeon, lizardfolk were the only ones who exhibited almost no dimorphism between the sexes, with females only slightly larger than males.
[All sapient species who live in my Dungeon will be treated as equals, regardless of size or power. I expect all of you to work together, because we have a daunting task ahead of us.]
That pronouncement earned me another round of bowing and scraping against the tunnel floors, to which I replied, [Welcome home.]
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Floors: 7
Minions: 747/980
Residents: 12/24
Denizens: 6.54M
Traps: 25/35