Pov Dungeon Core

I was relentless in my work. It had been a while since I expanded floors without adding any materials to them. Well, technically I did add some, but the few rooms were so little in comparison to the volume of the floor that they shouldn’t even count.

It took me another breakthrough to get my Enhancement skill to S rank and to finish enchanting the outer layer. It was a lot of work, but now it was time to test it.

We had a couple of melters we had been able to steal, and one of them was pointed at my outer shell. No matter how many times I’ve experienced this, it still hurts. They still cause small microcracks, although they are healed in just minutes.

“Go ahead,” I gave the command, and the melter was activated.

They usually burn for about 10 seconds, sometimes more, sometimes less. This time it managed 11 seconds. I could feel the mana draw, it actually took a significant amount of mana to protect against this attack, but it didn’t get through.

I felt like some of the tension I held in my crystal disappeared. While I was certain that those Pixies’ beams were a lot stronger, this was just the first and most diffused protective layer, meant to handle things that got through the rest of the defenses.

Our defensive plans also constantly changed, as we were actually building out some of the defensive structures with all the bells and whistles and then testing them out. And when you make things in real life instead of relying solely on theory, you found out that there were things that simply didn’t work the same way as expected, and because of this, we needed to adjust.

We had plenty of people with skills and minds that were good at simulating things, and even I could do that if I had the proper parameters. What we found was that we were currently too exposed on the top. The problem was that our enemies could concentrate their attack on a small area that was visible on the surface, and we could only defend properly from that small area.

No matter what defenses you built, in the end, they’re only delaying actions. You need to proactively attack if you wanted to stop the siege, as I’ve come to learn and what I should have already known.

So right now, my entire dungeon was out of place. After many discussions, everyone agreed that we should somehow—though no one actually knew how to do it—raise my dungeon so the equator of my dungeon would be visible on the surface.

Yet the problems it proved were so much worse. We would need support pillars to keep me from falling downwards, and those would become weak points. While I would survive the drop and could possibly dampen the impact forces that would follow, it would still do incredible damage to the whole dungeon structure, and I’m guessing a lot would die.

No one came up with a good solution, so while the plan was good to make us more defensible and allow us to better attack our attackers, this idea was tabled.

It only took a week for someone to bring up an idea that might help fix our problem. It was one of the adventurers who was still in silver rank and had only joined the Academy recently.

He was accepted because he was truly a brilliant thinker. His brand of thinking wasn’t what we had in abundance—that of theory. He was more of a practical thinker, one that we didn’t have too many of. Yet I don’t think he would have come up with this kind of solution if he still wasn’t silver-ranked.

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Adventurers had many tools to deal with all kinds of situations, and some of them were magical. As a gold rank, you really didn’t have to worry about climbing anymore. If you already didn’t have some way of moving fast through difficult terrain, climbing as a gold rank was beyond easy if you trained just a little bit. So silver ranks had more tools that would help with more mundane challenges.

The problem was, magical solutions cost a lot, but that didn't mean artefacts didn’t exist that had been resold multiple times that no one ever knew when they were originally made. New ones weren’t being made because basically no one was rich enough in silver rank to use them.

There were some surviving artefacts that wealthier teams used when they got their hands on them. So, while there were none in my dungeon, it was well documented that there were artefacts that, when activated, could hold their location in space against tremendous force.

There were many names for them, and the objects were quite different, but the most common one was a simple rod that, when activated, simply couldn’t be moved. It was often used to climb down when you didn't have anywhere else to tie your rope to and, of course, for traps against larger beasts. With a creative enough mind, it was a truly welcomed addition to any adventuring party.

He proposed that maybe we could build larger versions of those to hold the entire dungeon in place, but that had other problems. With the accumulated knowledge we had, in less than a week, we had multiple prototypes of these types of artefact.

They were quite costly to make, but they were also quite useful, at least in my opinion. Using this artefact, I could see many of my trap designs, puzzle rooms, and other obstacles being overcome so much easier.

That made me think about the effect of equipment. Should adventurers try to pursue and get these devices and artefacts, or should they try to do everything on their own? It was a difficult question, because if you didn’t have those devices, you would be so much weaker and able to solve a lot fewer problems. Yet it was undeniable how much more survivable you would be if you had access to these kinds of devices.

Perhaps I should look more into these kinds of artefacts, as I didn’t even have any idea that such an artefact existed that could help you in such unique ways and who knows what else has been made. Perhaps I should make some of these available to be gained through quests. It was an interesting problem, but something I didn’t really have time to deal with right now. So, it went on the list.

Calculations were being run as they tested these artifacts. While they weren’t completed yet, it was going towards a viable solution, although we would need a combination of artifacts that were truly huge and a newly developed enchantment that would work together with this artifact to make me unmovable from a relative spot in this world. A few other departments also found these artifacts quite fascinating and were already testing some of them on the satellite outpost.

It would just take so much mana to make these artifacts, as the cost of their materials was ridiculous. Then, of course, there was the maintenance. It would take a large chunk from my mana generation, which was crazy as it was already so high.

I was trying to think of a solution when I managed to expand the 59th floor to its limit. So it was time for another breakthrough. I still had many skills that weren’t S-rank that I should work on, but perhaps that was the solution.

I thought about it for quite a while, but the more I thought about it, the more I believed it might be possible. What if I made such an artifacts ability—to keep things from moving from one spot—into a skill?

That way, it would affect all of me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about support that would need to hold up the immense mass that was me. For some reason, thinking about how much I weigh made me happy.

So, I pushed my breakthrough back a bit so I could focus on learning how the artifact affected space and what parts of it I wanted in the skill. I was certain that this skill would be affected by My World skill. It seemed to go hand in hand because that would give me more control over the space I was in. I felt that I was ready six days after I began, so I triggered the breakthrough.

When I came out of it, I immediately reconnected with my dungeon and then looked inside me to see what skill I got. It was named Hold Location, and it was rank E. That should work, but I did put the full 20% into this skill, and it was still only at rank E. In comparison, the last skill I made, Enhancement, was created at rank C. So this new skill should be quite powerful.

As I activated it, I did feel like basically nothing could move me from my space. But interestingly enough, I think I could change which relative part of the space I was holding onto. If I wanted to, I think I could hold onto the space in a way that the world would simply continue to move forward without me.

Of course, that would be devastating, as it would mean I would slow down way too fast and basically kill myself in the process. Yeah, I was not going to mess with this skill in such ways.

The testing itself took a week, as lifting myself upwards was not easy. Still, when I was about a meter up from my last position, I activated the skill. It took about 1/20th of the mana to upkeep compared to if we had made the artifacts to keep me from falling.

I didn’t fall down even a little bit, which meant this skill worked exactly as we wanted it to work. We weren’t going to lift me up just yet, as there was still too much work to be done on the outer defenses.