Araxes held court in the center room, where both Cora and he had first awakened, back when the dungeon was just a tiny vestigial thing struggling for survival. He stood upon the raised dais in the center, the place that had been Cora’s seat of power and… Now was his. He was explaining, as best he could, what had happened and what the new status quo of the dungeon seemed now to be. And as he spoke, he looked out across his new… Subjects? Allies? Something more?
It seemed like the entirety of the dungeon had turned out. Dozens of denizens filled the room, with dozens more pouring in by the minute. And when the central chamber filled, they crammed into the side tunnels. It reminded him of his coronation day, so long ago, when after a long and bloody war he had finally taken up the mantle of ruler of the small nation he had carved out with his own bare phalanges.
The mobs stared at him, shock and reverence on their faces, if not perhaps fealty. The non-mobs, the ones who either had never been part of the dungeon or who Cora had spawned, looked at him with slightly more suspicion. In the same way that sticking one’s hand into lava made it slightly less useful for picking up objects.
That was alright. He didn’t blame them, nor did he begrudge them their mistrust. From their point of view he was an amoral fiend who lamented his loss of power, now granted power. They probably thought he was going to go on a murderous rampage. Or perhaps seal them all within this tomb and watch as they slowly expired over months and years of starvation and suffocation.
He admitted, privately, in the deep wells of his own mind, that there was a certain charm to the idea. Hundreds of years of being that malicious, sadistic, utterly charming rogue of a bastard monarch had left their indelible furrows in him, and probably would not fill in any time soon.
But no. He had given his word.
“So that’s the way it seems to be,” he finally concluded in the deafening silence. “I have not done a thorough examination and deep-delve through my menus, but it seems that somehow or another, I have gained control over the dungeon in much the same way Cora had. Greater, if I’m being honest, because it seems I have also unlocked many of the features that were hidden behind a combat-focused menu, which I can only assume means that I have inherited and integrated Sally’s portion of power as well.”
“You’re the dungeon now?” That was from young Nathaniel. The elf had scarcely left his side since Araxes had woken up. “Like, the entire dungeon?”
“It appears that I am fully–or nearly fully–integrated into the dungeon’s systems as an integral part, yes,” Araxes said with a nod.
“And what exactly does that mean,” asked Jackson Tolliver, his one gimlet eye fixed on Araxes like the world’s smallest lighthouse.
“To begin with, as Cora before me, I appear to have total control over spawning and placement of new mobs or Dungeoneers. I have a direct connection to the essence of the dungeon, and can spend it as I see fit on those things which have not been relegated to the Guardian’s control. I cannot build new rooms, I cannot spawn traps. But I do appear to have several options regarding both offense and defense that Cora did not. I am still exploring those.
“It also appears that I have an expanded repertoire of skills and spells relating specifically to creatures and mobs spawned by the dungeon. I can only assume this is because I have integrated parts of both sisters into the dungeon core itself. It costs me a tithe of stored essence to use them, but… Ah, that reminds me.” Araxes flicked open a menu screen and scrolled down quickly before landing on the power he wanted.
Full Heal
Essence Cost: 10
Completely heal a single unit for all of its HP, and remove any negative status effects
Cooldown: 1 day
This power is upgradable. Cost to next level: 500 Mineral, 10 Crystal, 50 Essence
He felt power leave his body as he activated the power, and there was a slight pulse through the dungeon itself.
“What did you just do?” Annie Tolliver demanded.
“I have just healed Quentin of his injuries and afflictions,” Araxes said amenably. He turned to Nathaniel and nodded once, “he should be wakening soon. You should see to him.”
Nathaniel’s eyes got big and round, and within moments the elf was shoulder-checking his way through the crowd like an Orcish Slaughterball champion as he fought to get to the exit.
“The rest of you,” Araxes said, turning back to the crowd at large, “rest assured I am both in control of the Dungeon and of myself. I require you to resume your duties. Keep the dungeon running, keep the people safe, keep on as you have been. I will explore more of my powers, and I will relay any pertinent discoveries to you over the Dungeon channel.
“Oh, which also reminds me,” Araxes added, “I have deduced the reason behind the information blackout we seem to be experiencing. While the dungeon is traveling, it appears to function as a sealed biome, separate from the Essence and existing instead on its own essence reserves. So all our powers and abilities will still function as normal within the dungeon and the bubble created by Tolliver’s submersion tactics, but we will be unable to affect or be affected by the world at large until we ‘surface’, as it were.”
“No messaging,” Bugruk growled from his wheelchair. “No wonder we couldn’t reach Sam.”
“But where did Cora and Sally and Pearl go?” asked a voice from somewhere in the throng. “What happened, and why are you suddenly the dungeon?”
“Ah. That.” Araxes drew in a deep breath, clasped his hands behind his back, and projected his most regal bearing.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
============================================================
His name was Craddock, and two months ago he had been one of the three best cobblers in Melloram. He wasn’t a large man, built small and wiry, but he had big hands with long fingers that were surprisingly adept at getting the fiddliest bits of the footwear that was his livelihood to sit just so. He had not grown up in Melloram, but he had lived there for the past twenty years, and it was his home as surely as the sun rose in the east every morning. It was a fine, peaceful little town. And with King Araxesendenak’s plan to bring a new dungeon nearby, his trade was sure to increase considerably. All in all, he’d had little to complain about and much more to look forward to.
Then the Quake had happened.
That’s what the survivors called it. It had struck without warning, had wrecked a few houses and shaken some teeth, but had been relatively harmless. What it had unleashed, however, had been anything but.
The Revenant had killed hundreds of his fellow citizens. Many of them were people he’d known for years. It had slaughtered them wholesale at the start, and then piecemeal and targeted afterwards, taking the strongest of them and draining them dry for its own purposes. Craddock was not high-level, but he had practiced his craft long enough to no longer be beneath notice either, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the revenant set its eyes on him. He prayed, daily, for someone to save them. But the town’s messages went unanswered, and their lord remained silent in his fortress.
Then the boy, Tolliver, had come boiling out of God’s Thumb with rage and violence on his heels, and had swept into town like an avenging angel. The revenant had been vanquished, the town saved, and the fallen mourned.
It was only in the later weeks that the information came out that the boy, Tolliver, had been at the center of it all. And while it had not been his fault, strictly speaking, that the Revenant had come, he had not been utterly clean of the affair either. But it was a thing he could not have known, and he had rescued the townsfolk, and so they were willing to be charitable, most of them. Even the families who had suffered loss, most of them did not blame the boy. It was a tragic set of circumstances, to be sure, but little more than that.
But then things kept happening. Minotaurs had attacked the town. Mobs from spawn points long dormant had arisen and made incursions on the outskirts. And a dirty great war had been fought on their doorstep! Tolliver and his dungeon had done their best to defend Melloram, but it soon became clear–to Craddock at least–that the enemy was only here because the dungeon was here, and because Tolliver was with it.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The Revenant may have been a mistake. Well and good. But the further incidents… The presence of the dungeon, and Tolliver, near Melloram was something that was actively putting the town in danger. Worse, it was causing a rift in Melloram’s relationship with its lord, and that was even more dangerous a circumstance. Araxesendenak was a fine lord when he was happy with you. He was hell in the offing when he was not.
And now… This.
“And that is the state of affairs,” Councilwoman Milthorne said from where she stood at the front of the crowd gathered in the square. There must have been a thousand men, women and children gathered here, filling the available space to bursting and spilling over into the alleyways and shopfronts. They were the citizens of Melloram, and they had come to hear just what the hell was going on here.
The news was… Less than good.
“Are you saying we’re stuck here, Councilwoman?” A voice from Craddock’s left called out, sounding equal parts outraged and scared. “Without a way back?”
“The dungeon residents are working on that very problem, Lewis,” Milthorne said, somehow knowing the man’s name. “I am confident that they will come up with a solution soon. In the mean time…”
Craddock stopped listening. It was going to be another politician’s speech about how they needed to pull together, and would be followed by the assigning of jobs.
And there would be no one held accountable. Not for this, not for the slaughter the revenant brought down, not for the war which the town had been dragged into, not for the destruction wrought when the Lich King had come to exact his revenge. Craddock’s shop had been one of the buildings destroyed in that fight.
And now, yet again, the dungeon had visited calamity upon his home.
He felt his teeth grind together as a quiet anger began to stir within his breast.
=======================================================================
“What I can say, without fear of contradiction,” Araxes said into the thundering silence, “is that I am not going to turn into some slavering tyrant hell-bent on revenging myself for any past slights–”
“Good,” said Rashun, the young kobold standing right at the edge of the raised Dais, glaring right at Araxes with the guileless eyes of youth.
“Thank you, child,” Araxes said, tipping his head to the boy. “It will take me some time,” he continued to the room at large, “to fully come to grips with my new capabilities, and in the mean time I shall do my best to ensure the smooth and casualty-free operation of the dungeon. I have sussed out some small things–the ability to heal ailments being one of them. Another is that, as long as the ‘supplies’ of the dungeon last, you will all be able to access and utilize your skills and abilities as normal. As long as the supplies last, we will be able to defend ourselves.”
“Best of all,” Araxes said, allowing a smile to stretch across his features, “I have discovered that I have control over the runes Tolliver inscribed into the dungeon and surrounding town. Or rather, I have control over what they do. It took me a little while to understand the methods, but I am now quite confident that I will be able to steer and surface the dungeon and re-establish our connections with the outside world.”
“What?” Annie Tolliver muscled her way to the very edge of the dais, eyes locked onto Araxes. “You can get us up there? Why the hells haven’t you done it yet? My boy’s waiting for us to go get him!”
“To say nothing of the need to find out where Cora and Sally have gone,” added one of the mobs–Thrash, Araxes realized the big orc was called as information on the mob poured into his brain.
“We should also try to drop the town off somewhere,” said someone else. “They’ve had enough trouble because of us. If we can disconnect from them, it’d probably go better for them.”
“Assuming the other me doesn’t vaporize them for some perceived slight,” Araxes said, nodding, “I agree. And that is why I started the ascent process before we gathered here. Within the next few minutes we should return to the world at large and re-connect to the essence. And at that time we will be able to take better stock of the situation.”
======================================================
Craddock found himself moving forward through the crowd, approaching Councilwoman Milthorne even as the woman continued to hand out assignments and placations to the crowd around here. They must pull together, she said. Work with the dungeon denizens to regain their place in the world, however distasteful it might be to them personally. The dungeon had protected them from the revenant, and from the Lich King’s ire. And now the town would need them again, to return to the world from this strange un-world the dungeon had dragged them into.
And after that, perhaps they could part ways.
It wasn’t enough.
Craddock breached the ring of empty space around Milthorne, where the woman’s personal space had created a sort of bubble for her in the crowd. He did not do it violently, or with any sort of malice. But as soon as he stepped through the last layer of crowd and into that empty space between them and her, the murmur of voices stopped and Milthorne’s voice hitched and faded.
“Joseph,” she said to him, knowing his name just as well as she did the rest of her town. “You have something to say?”
==================================================
“The one caveat to my newfound power,” Araxes was saying to the Tollivers as they too crowded forward around the dais, “is that I appear to need to be inside this specific room to access the bulk of them. I cannot, for instance, control the dungeon’s path outside this room. I am unsure if that was a design flaw in the original core, or if Cora somehow changed things within the dungeon’s structure to funnel the most critical pathways to this room.”
“So,” Jackson said, frowning, “I have a question. What happens if you get killed now?”
Araxes blinked. “What?”
“You were attached to Cora before, and that set up some kind of feedback loop that meant you kept respawning when you died. What happens if you died now as the dungeon? Are you still functionally immortal? Or has that changed now that you are the thing that has been keeping you alive?”
Araxes stared at the elder Tolliver for a long moment. Then drew in a sudden sharp breath and let it out in a huff.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” he said in a much more subdued tone.
“Might be a good idea to find out,” Jackson said.
============================================================================
“Councilwoman,” Craddock said, and his soft voice carried across the square, “Before the dungeon came, we were safe and secure under King Araxesendenak. We had our health, our wealth, and promise of an increase in both. Since the dungeon, there has been nothing but pain, misery, and slaughter.”
He turned from Milthorne and let his eyes roam the crowd. Everyone was looking at him. Every gaze held pain, worry, fear, loss. He knew those emotions were mirrored in his own.
He turned back. “We cannot simply continue to act as if the dungeon is a thing that must be borne and endured. We cannot allow the boy, Tolliver, and his ilk to yet again bring calamity down on us.”
“Hang on,” that was the guardsman, the one who’s name Craddock did not remember. The one who had taken into his home and bed one of the orc women from the dungeon. Craddock did not begrudge him that comfort in these times, but neither was he fool enough to think that the guard’s bedmate did not influence his thinking.
“Sam wasn’t responsible for what happened. Not the Quake, not the dungeon, not what happened after,” the guardsman continued, coming up to the edge of the circle in which Craddock now stood. “Everything he’s done has been to protect this town. It was Tolliver and his dungeon that saved us from the revenant. How many more of us would have been fed to that thing if he hadn’t acted?”
“And yet every single one of the disasters he has ‘saved’ us from, he has had a hand in causing,” Craddock shot back without heat. He was too tired for heat. All he knew was weariness, a bone-deep ache that just echoed with one word. Enough.
“We have seen our friends devoured by the undead. Our neighbors destroyed by monsters. Our family slaughtered by the very creatures the dungeons drew here. I cannot be the only one to say ‘I cannot endure more’. Can I?”
“And what would you have us do?” asked Councilwoman Milthorne from behind him. “What other options do we have at this time? I welcome any you might have, Joseph, but I cannot see any for myself.”
============================================================
Not like a leviathan breaking the surface of the deep, but more like a magician conjuring himself into existence out of thin air, the Dungeon, God’s Thumb, and Melloram materialized once more in the world. The complex appeared in the middle of what had once been a fairly non-descript valley, and settled itself in amongst the existing flora and fauna with very little fanfare. Almost nothing changed with its reappearance.
‘almost’ nothing is not the same thing as ‘nothing.’
As soon as the dungeon reappeared, as soon as the trailing leads of its connection to the essence reconnected, a subroutine set in motion in ages past and activated only quite recently engaged.
>>Dungeon Of The Last detected.<<
>>Sleeper Protocol Engaged<<
>>Initiating Handshake<<
>>Locks Released<<
>>Engaging Overdrive Systems<<
Power rushed out from the stored essence the Five had set aside thousands of years ago, and rushed through the eddies of the world and into new hosts.
Many, many new hosts.
========================================================================
Craddock’s eyes lit up with a golden light, light that he could see flaring all around in the eyes of the other townsfolk. Even Milthorne, when he turned back to her to give her the answer his head and heart both proclaimed were correct.
“We must destroy the dungeon,” he said. And he reached for the power within him, power he only now realized was at his call.
And around him, he saw others reach for it as well. It flowed into them, suffused them, strengthened them. It was power he had always known, power he knew now, and power he could wield.
As one, the townsfolk turned and began to march towards the Dungeon entrance.
==========================================================================
“I’ll dig deeper into that,” Araxes promised. Though not, he decided, by getting himself killed. One didn’t need a brain the size of a castle to see the myriad ways in which that was a bad idea. “But fir now, I– Char? Something you wanted to say?”
Several of the other mobs turned away from Araxes as his eyeflames lit on the little kobold woman, and several of her kin including young Rashun, who had made their way to the edge of the dais. They looked up at him and met his gaze as if they’d synchronized their movements beforehand.
Their eyes burned with golden light.
“Destroy the dungeon,” they said in perfect unison.
Then they charged.