The Core looked at its remade dungeon. This time the theme was Ice, the polar opposite of last time's fire.

Nix, its current boss monster, was sleeping peacefully in her cave. Unaware that in a couple of days at most she will be killed and replaced by another boss monster who will fit the next theme better than an Ice attuned Lunar bear.

[ Requirements not met; you cannot make your 11th floor before killing at least 10 sentient invaders ]

As progress was still locked behind the death of adventurers that never bothered to show up The Core began to wonder about its dungeon's new theme.

Plants? No, it already did that thrice.

Status effects? No, it didn’t feel like making a jungle, that always required a lot of time.

Brute force? No, too boring and it already did that eight times.

Cities? No, they were rudimentary at best and unbelievable at worst. No invader would gasp and go, that looks just like my hometown! It's not like there was any invader in the first place.

Something came into the dungeon. The Core immediately diverted its attention to the entrance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sentient being, just a wolf of a species it had collected a sample of ages ago. It was injured but that wasn’t anything out of the norm, plenty of animals came into its dungeon in a wounded state thinking it was a place of safety as their nonexistent perception made it impossible to see through Illusions made by Illusion vines, the cold variant this time.

The lone wolf didn’t defy the expectations placed on him and died quietly just like The Core intended. The memories of it began to assimilate to it and it paid attention out of not having anything better to do. His life was usual for his species, he was born, learned from his mother, grew and was on his own, found a mate for breeding season, went out of the forest, and got attacked by a passing human-

The Core paused.

The human wore different clothes than what it learned humans should wear, although the System only showed it what adventurers wear so maybe it had an unrelated job?

Nevertheless, it was a human and that’s all that mattered. After all the system didn’t say that it had to kill adventurers just sentient invaders. But if the memories are correct then the human is going actively away from the dungeon.

That wasn’t anything to panic about, if they had advanced enough mana sight then they could have already spotted it and were now going to report to the authorities.

...But from that distance to see it requires level 7 advanced mana sight. Something that a human that wields a sword definitely wouldn’t have.

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The Core was panicking, there was nothing it could do. No monster could go out of the dungeon and no spell its monsters knew could be heard or seen from that distance. Not to mention no one is suicidal enough to go to where a potential fight is happening! But it needed to do something, anything, or else who knows when the next sentient beings show up!

...It remembered something.

It, as the core of this dungeon, can go outside. There was nothing in the rulebook preventing it from happening, only its lack of legs and instincts. This means if it uses Override and possesses a dungeon monster then it could go outside to the human.

The Core didn’t waste any time and began creating the perfect temporary body.

It picked the Celeritas bird as a base and began assigning the appropriate skills as quickly as it could, ending up with these stats.

Celeritas bird lv 15

STR 28 VIT 21

END 17 DEX 26

PER 25 MAG 13

Skills:

[Soul protection lv MAX] [Sense sharing lv MAX] [Acceleration lv 1]

The Core wished it could give it more skills and higher leveled Acceleration but Soul protection and Sense sharing at max were more important. It used Override, the skill as painful as always, a characteristic that every skill having to do something with souls has.

The bird, now it, didn’t count as a dungeon monster. Naturally that caused every monster around it to be hostile and attack, it quickly escaped its high strength not just for show.

When it flew in front of the exit, it hesitated, instinct muted yet still screaming about the dangers of outside, but the thought of being stuck with a forever 10-floor dungeon made it stop stalling. Even if it died and a piece of its soul was lost forever it would all be worth it for even a chance of improvement.

The Celeritas bird flew out and saw the sun in its full glory for the first time. Yet it didn’t pause to admire the sight, activating acceleration and flying in the direction where the human was supposed to be.

It didn’t have any skills to further increase its perception so it could rely only on its naturally high one. Something that the bird was more and more worried about the longer it didn’t see the human.

Fortunately, with its already high strength aided by acceleration, it quickly found the human. Not so fortunately the human was being attacked by a Gigantic Plant Jackal. It would be bad if the human died even if it managed to drag the whole body to the dungeon, sentient being's souls were guarded by Gods, making it impossible to extract memories from them.

The Bird with its lack of fighting skills didn’t want to intervene as that could lead to its death and with the dungeon so far away the first thing to get to its corpse would undoubtedly be a hungry animal.

Thankfully it looked like it underestimated the human, who was fighting on par with the jackal. However, it didn’t recall what variation of the swordsmanship skill they were using. That wasn’t surprising considering there was a ton of those and it was cut off from the rest of The Core making it impossible to ask the System for an answer.

The Human dodged a bite aiming for their jugular and retaliated by slashing the beast's throat. The jackal couldn’t move away in time so instead it manipulated the roots on its body to shield it from the sword. The blade must have been enchanted because the roots did nothing to stop it. The animal was defeated, and the human didn’t seem badly injured, just dirty from the blood that was sprayed on them.

The swordsman put the beast's body in a ring and continued with their journey. The fragment of The Core followed him at a distance and hoped that their Perception was below 25.