It took them a regretably long time to clean the dungeon. Zack worked through the night to repair damage and replace destroyed mobs. Alex stayed only late enough to assure the inevitable fire deparment that everything was fine—though they insisted on quickly examining the building regardless—and Archie excused himself at two in the morning to sleep.
When he finally deemed the dungeon was back up to his standards, Zack retired to his core room to rest. As the magical consciousness of a rock, he didn't technically need sleep or any form of physical recuperation. Mentally, though, he was exhausted. His emotions were stretched to their limits, his self-control equally frayed. He tried to put on a brave face and appear as light-hearted as ever.
He didn't really feel that way, though. Between his meeting with snow, encounter with Ember, and two of his friends leaving, Zack was feeling spread thin and stressed. He wished he could go to sleep, but that just wasn't a function he had anymore.
He studied his core curiously, trying to determine just how different he was now that he had absorbed Ember. The first thing he noticed was just how much bigger his core had grown. It looked like his crystal had physically integrated Ember's. It was slightly larger than before, the smooth facets glimmering in the light. There were no new splashes of colour, though Zack hadn't seriously expected that to change. He was firmly blue-green.
The size was the biggest change, it seemed.
"Come on, Zack. Get ahold of yourself. Focus. You've got work to do," he muttered, trying to pull his attention away from his core. It was hard to think about anything else, though. He couldn't help but picture his fellow cores shattering as humans stuffed them full of more aether than they could handle.
He wished he had someone to talk to about this, someone who understood his concerns about cores. It was clear that nobody else really felt the same way about them as he did. Chandra and Greg full on abandoned him. Alex was only sticking by him because they were friends—that and leaving Zack meant going back to looking for a shitty retail job. Archie was more or less an extension of Zack, and more inclined to push him towards understanding his emotions than just simply feeling them.
Zack didn't need to understand anything. He already knew everything he needed about the way cores were viewed by people.
"Time to move my core room again, I think," Zack murmured.
With an effort of will and a twinge of mana, Zack got to work purging the room of all its furnishings. There was mostly just the desk and chair behind it, but he devoured them all the same. Moving his core was one of the harder tasks he managed. Unlike the other objects in his dungeon, his core wasn't something he could simply absorb and respawn as needed. It was the beating heart of his dungeon, and to move it was to essentially reconfigure the entire mana flow of his structure. But it was a necessary evil to continue ensuring his safety.
He didn't trust Snow or his men not to check every room they had access to, and Zack's core room was technically accessible by the manor. He needed to move it somewhere inaccessible, or somewhere Snow wouldn't think to look.
The burrow was the obvious choice. It would be well guarded, thanks to higher-level mobs populating it, and Archie would be there to personally defend Zack in emergencies. Since it was the second floor of the meadow and incomplete, nobody even knew it existed yet. Even if Snow had the most up-to-date intelligence on the dungeon's affairs, there was no way in hell he'd know about the burrow.
Moving his core was a delicate art. He couldn't directly pick it up, but he could move the surface it rested on. Carefully, he tore a chunk out of the desk as he devoured it, letting his core rest upon it. He quickly wove mana into cushions to keep the crystal from rocking off the chunk of wood then carefully lifted it through the dungeon. All these extra precautions paid off, until he made it to the lobby.
Jean-Claude could move with greater care and alacrity than Zack could by simply hovering the wood, so he ordered to kobold to take the crystal and spawned a wisp to escort him down to the burrow. Jean-Claude happily obeyed orders, scampering off with the crystal reverently held in both hands. Zack used the momentary downtime to start crafting his new core room.
He chose Archie's boss room as his entry point, since the only people he wanted to have direct access were Archie and Alex. He made no door this time, but rather started digging a hole through the wall and spreading his influence through it. One of the requirements for a core room was that it was at least open enough to allow his mana to circulate through the dungeon. He couldn't physically cut himself off, or he would starve his influence of mana.
He burrowed a three foot deep tube, no wider than two fists held together, through the wall. Satisfied, he started widening it by absorbing the earth until there was enough space for Jean-Claude to stand. He fed some more mana into the walls to reinforce them, and create shelves, then ordered Jean-Claude to place his core atop them.
Satisfied, Zack conjured earth to fill in the wall, leaving only the original tube as his direct connection to the rest of his dungeon. Despite his physical body being functionally buried in the earth, it didn't trigger a sense of claustrophobia in him. On the contrary, he felt safe and protected down here.
There was a slight downside of hampering his ambient aether absorbtion, but that was a small price to pay for protection. Besides, he was constantly absorbing more aether than he could use, so having a bit less to work with wasn't necessarily a bad thing in the long run.
The issue of his immediate safety dealt with, Zack turned his attention back to populating the burrow. The toadmen were already making themselves at home, but despite their outfits and appearance, they looked a little out of place. A quick search through the new patterns he acquired from absorbing Ember was enough to reveal that he had just the thing his toads needed to more properly fit the theme of this floor.
He conjured shovels and pickaxes for them to wield, the patterns taken directly from Ember. There was an empty room off the side of the entrance, and Zack decided this could be a fun place for his toadmen to work. He created veins of metal ore running through the walls, and larger stone nodes for them to chip away at. They wouldn't actually be mining, but simply performing the act to give the illusion of mining.
In an effort to further sell the illusion, Zack spun up a few spawners inside the walls and nodes. They would pop out metal ores after a few solid hits, and on rare occassions they'd spawn a precious gemstone of some kind. Mostly quartz or rubies. Zack quickly modeled out a mine cart for the frogs to use, and then set a despawner inside of it.
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[Despawner]
[Perk Required: Forge Heart]
[Once a certain criteria is met, this node will automatically despawn objects or mobs within a certain radius. If the object despawned is not created by your dungeon, you will automatically attempt to learn the associated pattern if it is not learned.]
"Essentially, once the cart is filled to a certain limit, the items will vanish and be replaced with prize tokens," Zack murmured. "That way, delvers are incentivized to let the toads work so they can get some tokens!"
He even erected a sign that said as much. If people wanted to fight the toads, they were more than welcome, but he made sure that if they were left uninterrupted the toads would spawn a couple tokens once per run.
With that dealt with, Zack returned his awareness back to his lobby. He wanted to keep working, but he did promise he'd let Archie have control of the burrow. Already he had overstepped that promise too much, and besides, there were other areas that required his attention.
The prize counter needed to be repopulated with items, which was an easy enough thing for Zack to do. Bob was standing behind the respawned counter, looking for all the world like an action figure. Zack paid him no mind as he spun up the replacement prizes. Thankfully, the spawners survived the blaze, so he didn't need to repair them.
This period of downtime did, however, give Zack the opportunity to create something he had been putting off for far too long. With Greg gone, his prospects for acquiring new patterns of materials were limited. That meant he needed a different way to get them.
He constructed a new kiosk off to the side of the prize counter and spun up a new kobold to man it. This kobold had shiny copper skin and dull grey eyes. Zack dressed them in baggy pants and a loose fitting tank-top—both of which were patterns he absorbed from Greg's gym bag. Like Bob and Jean-Claude, he gave them a voice and a few quick pre-programmed triggers.
"Hmm, you need a name, don't you?" Zack murmured, as he stared at his shiny new kobold. "How about Farra? You look like a Farra."
Farra nodded in excitement, hopping from foot to foot. Unlike Bob, who was decidedly more docile, or the gentlemanly Jean-Claude, Farra had a distinct feminine look to her. That struck Zack as a little odd, since he hadn't actually tried to make her female. He didn't think it was necessarily a bad thing, but he did quietly order her not to breed. He wasn't sure the kobolds were even capable of such a thing, but after the spider incident he had zero intention of risking it.
Using a combination of despawners and spawners, Zack created an elegant system for his newest station and taught Farra how to use it. The despawner would absorb any item placed upon the kiosk's surface when Farra pressed a button. The spawner would then issue a number of tokens depending on the quality, type, and rarity of the item absorbed.
If it was something small and generally useless, the spawner would award a single token. Larger and more useful items would award additional tokens, with further prizes awarded if it was a new pattern or if it included a material Zack didn't already have. The spawners wouldn't award any tokens for objects created within the dungeon, though people were more than welcome to try.
The idea was that he could reward people who brought him new and interesting things, while simultaneously not revealing what he did or didn't already have. He gave Farra a few quick canned responses so she could explain how it worked, then left her to get acquainted with the station.
The trade-in kiosk built, Zack turned his attention to the forge. With Greg and Chandra gone, he needed someone to man the forge and the front desk. He decided that Jean-Claude already did a good enough job interacting with customers, so the point of sale system was best served by him. The forge, though, was another matter. Weapons were simply too large for any of the kobolds—except maybe Bob—to handle and dole out. Zack needed something else, something bigger and stronger to handle this station.
Conjuring the kobold model into the air before him, Zack observed it quietly as he thought how best to improve it. Obviously the first thing he tried was increasing its size, taking it from three feet tall to six. Without changing the proportions, that gave the kobolds a top-heavy, fat-headed look. He quickly set to work resculpting, fixing the proportions until they were much closer to an orc. Thick arms and legs, a wide chest, and a stoney face.
Stone even seemed the best material for its skin, giving it a hard, rocky hide. He set two rubies into its face for eyes, in honour of Ember, then spawned it in front of the forge.
[Forge Draconid]
[Level 10 Monster, Dragonoid]
[The evolved form of a kobold, this Draconid is capable of withstanding the extreme heat of a forge.]
[Cost to create: 15 mana]
[Status]
[Health: 100/100]
[Mana: 25/25]
[Stamina: 50/50]
[Strength: 15]
[Endurance: 15]
[Agility: 8]
[Dexterity: 7]
[Intelligence: 10]
[Wisdom: 5]
Zack nodded in approval, and quickly gave the draconid some clothes that matched Greg's usual work outfit. He ordered her to get to work at the forge kiosk, and then realized that she was, in fact, a her. Like Farra before her, he hadn't meant to make her female. He wondered if that might be something to do with absorbing Ember, or if he was just in the mood to balance out his dungeon in Chandra's absence.
"I guess you need a name, too," Zack murmured. The draconid watched his disembodied conciousness curiously, tying her leather apron around her waist as she prepared to get to work.
Despite his best efforts, the only name he could come up with that seemed to fit her was Ember. He wasn't sure if that was just his grief at losing a fellow core, or if there was something else at play, but it just felt right.
Ember the forge draconid seemed to approve of the name, and got to work making weapons. Unlike Greg, who simply spawned the weapons as needed, Ember seemed to have a much deeper understanding of how the forge worked. Deeper even than Zack, he quickly realized.
She spawned a sword in the forge, waited for it to glow red hot, then pulled it out with her bare, stony hand. She set to hammering the blade on the anvil with her heavy fist, occasionally quenching it in oil. The act did nothing to change the quality of the weapon, but upon closer examination, Zack noticed a new flag on the sword that definitely hadn't been there before.
[Quality: Common]
[Progress towards next rarity: 2%]
"I guess that's one of those abilities I got from absorbing Ember," he muttered. At mention of her name, the draconid glanced up at him, but quickly returned to her work.
Zack idly wondered what improving the weapon quality might do for his basic weapons, but decided that might be a task better suited for another day, once Ember actually succeeded in upgrading a weapon.
With all the basic improvements dealt with, there was one more matter Zack wanted to attend to. He was level fifteen now, which meant he had an extra boss flag to spare. That meant it was time to get started on adding a new wing to his dungeon.
Except he didn't want to add a new wing. The meadow, warren, and manor were covering many of the various dungeon crawler fantasies. Though he had set aside space for a new wing in the form of a tundra, he decided instead it would be a better idea to add a new floor instead. Seeing as how the manor was already his largest room and contained both an unchallenged secret boss and the skeletal shaman miniboss, Zack decided to add a new floor to the warren.
He wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to do with it just yet, but it was the most obvious expansion he could make. He added a tunnel at the end of Chorus's boss room that led deeper into the depths, and proceeded to start hollowing out a new tunnel in the darkness. There were still a few hours before they opened up for the day, and Zack wanted to make best use of his downtime.
After all, there was no telling when the next threat might round the corner and try to attack him again.