A’Ferun looked around this last room, taking in the odd details, things that had been lacking in the — rather few — other rooms. For one, the walls were ornately carved with irregular geometric patterns inset with colored gemstones. The shapes of both the stones and the carved designs overlapped all over the place. The depth of the carvings as a whole was hard to be certain of, but his skills warned him that his senses were being deceived by the composition of the shapes to make the walls appear deeper than they actually were. Part of that came from the silvery glow of a fortune’s worth of mana stones shining out from behind often delicate looking carved cut outs in the dungeon wood walls.
And every one of the mana stones looked like the stone that had been shown in the puzzle door illusions.
Sparing a glance for the wildly spinning soul tracker, A’Ferun felt a horrible realization sink in. His light somehow had become trapped within the core of the dungeon, probably clinging to existence after the obliteration of her body when that massive disintegration bomb went off. Without her own body to return to, she might very well be condemned to an eternal imprisonment within one of those horrific, monster spewing, murderous dungeon cores.
And worse, without a body to return to, freeing her from such a prison would kill her.
“What am I to do?” he whispered.
----------------------------------------
«Well, he’s not going on some berserker bashing spree,» Aide offered.
For the last who-really-knew-how-long, A’Ferun had just stood in their core room while the mages swarmed around in an excited frenzy of observing and cataloging all the things Prime had done different from their expectations.
He even seemed oblivious when Kinser smacked the knuckles of one of the sailors. The man had reached for some of the colored quartzes embedded in Prime’s wall carvings. Kinser warned him, “Don’t anger the core! Where will you run if this dungeon sends out monsters onto the ship to retrieve what you’ve stolen?”
Prime watched A’Ferun’s aura as it swirled with his racing emotions. She ignored Aide’s attempts to focus on the positive. She did not need the reassurance, and she didn’t have any to share with her partner. Prime was too busy trying to recall and project what it felt like to be N’kieran, to live that Role. Most especially, she was reaching for that emotion of assurance, that feeling where even if she wasn’t the master of her destiny, she had no regrets over the destiny that lay before her.
If any of A’Ferun’s affections for N’kieran had been his own honest emotions and not foisted upon him by his Role, then if she could share through the empathy of his Halo her sense of confidence and enthusiasm for picking up this new life, that should assuage his fear on her behalf. And if all he had felt was imposed upon him by his Role, then maybe his Halo would remind him of the good will he could earn with the Idahl by “returning” her to N’kieran’s father.
Gradually, the emotions around A’Ferun stabilized into an enduring resolution. he spoke with the mage sages, and they remained in the core room long enough for Kinser to break out food and them fed. Shortly after that, they cleared the rest of the floor. The blue robed mage made a map as they went, and they tried to revisit the illusions that had replaced the sliding piece puzzle doors only to find the illusions weren’t there anymore.
A’Ferun’s party exited back to the ship in the late afternoon. The first thing Prime did was spawn a shadow krait in the core room, directing it to hide within the cover of the carved walls.
«Level up?» Aide asked.
«Yeah, let’s,» Prime agreed. It felt like she nodded off for only just a moment.
Upon Prime’s waking, Aide passed through the level up notices, commenting, «The core grew a 30 mm layer during the level advance, and I’m pretty sure that was all for some extra mana reserves.»
| Congratulations! For reaching level 2 within your first month of existence, you have earned the ability to create floor themes.
| For reaching level 2, you can now manage the resources your defeated defenders leave behind.
Prime dismissed the notices and deadpanned, «Yay. More cultivating.» She swept her senses around the ship, finding that she needed more ears, for which she decided on spawning more rats. Aide had teased out and registered how to apply shadow affinity to their spawns for her Construct skill, so she made three shadow rats down in the bilge. Their cost was on par with a shadow krait, maybe a smidgen cheaper. After the third, she needed to recharge, though.
Aide asked with a bit of pout to their tone, «What about resetting our floor?»
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«That can wait. We need information now.»
«But if someone comes—» Aide began.
To which Prime cut in, saying, «They will have to get by the disinterest sigil you put up after going through Muscle-Head.»
Aide didn’t say any more, but once Prime felt she had enough spies (the rest being plain wharf rats to safe mana) and moved on to refreshing the defenses of their floor, the angst-y, antsy feeling rolling off her partner eased up a lot.
Having spawned not quite a hundred rats at that point, the process became a fairly reflexive set of actions. That was good because the pens that had been set up in her hold caught Prime’s attention. She did not have a pleasant reaction to discovering those pens were filled with slaves.
«I will murder that ass! Lead Halo or not, the utter dirt bag bullshit of it all!» she ranted. «How dare he!? Implicating me in slave trading!? I’ll level the lot of them! I’ll flay the skin from his flesh and use his testicles for shark bait!»
Aide let Prime rant until mid watch, by which point she had wound down to muttering imprecations while smashing through opening up the standard encounter rooms. Sending the equivalent of a throat-clear down their bond, he said, «I reviewed the auto records. There’s another ship sailing with us, the one that towed us into port. That captain convinced Muscle-Head they needed to carry cargo back to—»
«People are not cargo!» Prime snapped. «So what if they’re only at the proto-soul stage?! They are at the point where they are shaping the foundations of their immortality! Self determination is crucial at this stage!»
Firmly, Aide said, «Let me finish.» They then waited for Prime to concede that.
She trusted her partner enough to push aside her outrage. When she felt like she could hear them out all the way through, she said, «Alright, I’m listening.»
«Muscle-Head spent a merchant’s dower outfitting our ship, and he was busy with those details. The other ship’s captain got his authorization to set up deals for transporting cargo, to defray costs. He had the contract for the slave transport finalized before Muscle-Head discovered the nature of the cargo. His focus is fixed on how to free N’kieran, who he believed from finding us is trapped within the ship, so he decided not to get into a contract dispute in a foreign nation. He did insist on at least ensuring what passes for humane conditions for the slaves being transported. And he’s already working on a plan to make that captain rue bring the slave trade near you. Well, N’kieran, but, same difference, right?»
Prime let that sink in for a moment. Releasing some of the outrage — and a fragment of hurt that she refused to acknowledge — she said, «Fine. I won’t use his balls for fish bait. That does not mean I’m going to let slaves be shipped around in my vessel. They’re all sealed into slavery, even the children, and that is just wrong! Do you still have the chain breaker sigil I asked you to prepare when we found out that mana enforced enslavement is a thing on this world?»
«I do,» Aide confirmed.
«Can we use it on others?»
Aide took a moment to consider before they said, «With some tinkering, I think so. The problem is how to deliver the sigil. If you haven’t noticed, the ship isn’t a floor. I’m surprised you’re able to spawn defenders out there at all now that we restarted the core instantiation process for ourselves. I’ll be shocked if you can alter the ship’s structure or lay in traps. And I’m pretty sure that, in our current state, we’ll have to make the chain breaking sigil into a trap to use it. We’re not Breakers to completely ignore the constraints of a PLOT, ya know.»
«Where do most of the foreigner slaves sold in Lusfal end up?» Prime prompted Aide.
«Oh,» they quietly said, the spill over of Prime’s tragic empathy underlaying her outrage laid a somber air between the partners. «In dungeon clear crews.»
«None of the slaves that my rats have seen are “exotics”, so, yes, in dungeons. And I remember hearing that hateful sa’desh Pimarant saying how the overseers of those clear teams prefer experienced, sealed slaves.»
Prime and Aide plotted into the morning, pausing only when Prime had to search out things to Absorb to regenerate enough mana to continue refining the floor and re-spawning defenders.
The level up at least helped turn down the volume on the mathematical echoes Prime had to endure while widening out the rooms.
Also, A’Ferun waited until after breakfast to escort the sage mages back into the dungeon’s first floor. That gave Prime enough time to widen all of the standard encounter rooms to their planned sizes and to put dire rats in a few rooms, with shadow kraits and some spying-eye wharf rats assigned to the hallways.
This time, four fresh-faced sailors joined them, and A’Ferun and Kinser left killing the monsters to the men who could gain experience from them. The mages were given all the time they wanted to study any and every thing they could, although the group did leave for lunch.
During their break, Prime spawned and absorbed what she could. The corpses of her defenders returned between a quarter and half of the mana she had used to create them, with the ones that got in more successful attacks returning more mana to her. She stuck with the defenders the group had already seen. That same slimy suitor of N’kieran’s had mentioned that dungeons which rapidly shifted their monster types or advanced their monsters were considered too dangerous to tolerate.
When the scholars returned, Prime traded off with Aide on monitoring them. While Aide had that duty, she slipped into her Mental Office and plotted out the second floor.
The first floor was loosely based off of a ship’s below decks, so Prime decided the second should be based off a city’s docks. She had a notion to create the third floor as a replica harbor, including a sea folk settlement, and for the fourth floor to be the sea-side city beyond the docks. In her imagination, the city led into a grassland plain, then a forest, a lake, a hidden cave system that led to the open sea, and from there to endless possibilities.
But first, she had to figure out how to begin the second floor with its wide open skies without triggering the requirement to move their core. The slaves she planned to free would need some place to hide and there was no assurance in her heart that A’Ferun would leave them free if he found them before the end of the transport contract. There were times that laws seemed more important to him than whether they brought about peace or misery.
While Prime watched the sage mage and A’Ferun guarding them, Aide worked on fitting the chain breaker sigil into something that Prime could place as a trap, or imbue into her loot, or otherwise get into a usable state.
That left Prime with time to ponder on how to get the slaves onto their dungeon floor in the first place.