“…[Status]!” he shouted as the gravity of the situation weighed on him. In front of him, a screen appeared in a style that reminded him far too much of the game.
Dungeon Status —
Dungeon Core Rank: 1
Dungeon Core Health: 64%
Soul Points: 0
Abilities: [Status], [Map], [Mark], [Projection]
Attack Spells: [Thunder Shock], [Cave-In]
Creature Spells: [Enthrall Creature], [Engineer Dungeon Organism], [Heal]
Dungeon Spells: [Possess Dungeon Creature], [Call to Arms]
In front of him, a floating holographic screen appeared. It was blue and plain like all the others, but the names and terms caught his eye. They were from Dungeon Heart again, and the spells centered around the modification and taming of creatures were undeniably from the game. There was no other place or origin that he knew of.
The thing continued its lecture, uncaring about the notification of the attack on the dungeon. He turned to look at it and realized that it was a dungeon fairy. His dungeon fairy.
“To use any of the abilities and spells, you just need to say their names, just like you did with [Status]…”
“The dungeon is under attack, what do I do?” Jacob cut off the dungeon fairy as he tried his best to keep himself calm. He had just escaped death, he wasn’t going to idly let another fatal event happen to him so soon.
“There are many things you can do,” the dungeon fairy started. “You can use your [Map] and [Mark] abilities to mark the enemies, or you can give verbal instructions…”
“Then go defend the dungeon!” Jacob shouted. The dungeon fairy, like a robot, reacted to his words immediately and left the room housing the dungeon core.
Jacob returned to the status screen and looked through it again, this time realizing two very crucial problems. The first and most important was that the amount of soul points he had, a currency used in the game to power spells, was at zero. This was a calamity; while there were challenges where the player started off with no soul points, these were among the highest difficulty. He hadn't ever tried one of these 'no starting soul points' challenges, much less beaten them.
The other problem was the health of the dungeon core. The max health and current health he was used to was replaced with a simple percentage that sat at 64%. This problem could be even worse. It took soul points to repair the dungeon core — and if this was truly based on Dungeon Heart, he won’t gain the soul points needed for a while.
He turned to the dungeon core, and realized that the coarsely hewn gemstone that glowed and pulsed looked destroyed or ruined rather than raw. The closer he looked at it, the more he realized that the surface looked like it had been melted or burned away with acid, creating a painfully tortured texture.
Breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out. He could do this. He had seen videos about people beating these sorts of challenges. First, though, he needed to make sure that the dungeon fairy survived this attack. That thing was the only defense he had, if it died — that was it. There was nothing he could do then.
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“[Map],” he said remembering the dungeon fairy’s words. The status screen in front of him collapsed and transformed into a 3D map ripped out of a holodeck from a science fiction movie. The tubes made of light simulated the caves with gray, aside from the little bit of his dungeon that was marked blue.
In a tunnel a fair distance away, there was a simulated figurine of the dungeon fairy made of white light surrounded by several red figures in the shape of rats. He rose himself far off the ground and used the map to help him rush to where the rats and dungeon fairy were attacking.
He discovered that the darkness in the caves was strange, as if his eyes could see in the dark. The underground tunnels twisted and turned in ways that would have made him lost if he didn’t have a map. He even had to push himself through solid stone to get to the fight, and while he was intangible the feeling of the different minerals phasing through him was uncomfortable.
He found the dungeon fairy surrounded by several vicious rats, a couple parts of its body unraveled into a cotton or cloud-like static. He didn’t have the power or knowledge to know the health of the dungeon fairy, but he assumed that the unraveling represented injuries. From his knowledge of the game, the dungeon fairy can tank a few rats and kill them. That was too risky though; there also were far too many rats.
“Fairy! Stop tanking hits! Kite the rats for a little bit while I come up with a solution!” The dungeon fairy reacted and its clumsy fighting instantly changed, like it wasn’t able to think or strategize for itself. The dungeon fairy turned intangible and invisible for a few moments before appearing a decent distance away and shooting a small ball of purple energy.
The dungeon fairy had the power to become invisible and intangible, but if none of its other abilities were being used. It was also slow, meaning that it could only shoot out a single attack (if it was lucky) before the rats reached it.
Without any soul points to cast spells, he could only create a strategy around the fairy. He looked down at his map to try and think what to do. A tactic surfaced in his mind from the game, one that he wasn't sure he could do. As much as he hated to, it was the only method that he knew of that would help.
Dungeon Heart was a 2D tile-based game, and if the enemy couldn’t fly or burrow, it was possible to trap them. One way was to create walls all around the enemy and essentially bury them alive. The other way was to use pits to isolate the animal or adventurer; as long as the rats didn't have a ranged attack, pits allowed the dungeon fairy to fight without fear of being injured.
The issue was that in the game, terraforming was a slow process. Here, he didn't have a clue.
“Dungeon Fairy,” he shouted, “how do I terraform?”
“You use the ability [Mark], either with or without [Map], to create blueprints that I will follow. Unfortunately, there is nothing more I can say to explain it to you.”
That wasn’t helpful but Jacob didn’t have the time to be annoyed. He searched his map and realized that the dungeon core needed the most protection. Creating a pit at the entrance of the core room would further help protect him and the dungeon while also helping kill these rats.
He arrived at this location and closed his map with a mental command. He then said, “[Mark],” and felt his mind shift, like his neurons connected to something foreign. The only way he could describe it was like a retro console connecting to a newly inserted cartridge. There were new feelings and senses from this other side that he couldn’t begin to describe.
The world around him changed, transforming to solid colored simulations of the cavern around him. He had entered what the fanbase called ‘blueprint mode,’ which allowed for them to give detailed terraforming commands without right-clicking every tile they wanted to change.
He intuitively knew how to use this ability. He stretched out his hand and pushed against something, causing an orange wireframe to appear and sink into the ground. Through arcane gestures he didn’t understand, he shifted and altered the wireframe to form a hole into the earth that the rats would be unable to cross. He hoped they wouldn't be able to cross.
“Dungeon Fairy, come over here quickly and dig this pit!” he shouted. It opened his map and watched the slow, glowing fairy on its approach, followed by the small army of rats. The dungeon fairy could pass through walls without any affect on his speed, but the rats had a strange, almost supernatural ability to navigate these caves. It was like they could sense the path towards the dungeon core.
That made the situation much worse. The dungeon fairy managed to wander to where it was needed and began to modify the dungeon. A soft white light, radiated from its hands and caused the stone to melt and deform similar to when the dungeon entrance was being created. The process was slower than he expected, and it didn’t take long for the rats to appear and attack the fairy.
This plan wasn’t going to work.