Alissa now had control over the checkpoint two with her push to Isabella. With that handled she began the process of turning the area into a real resource extraction point, adding numerous mining points as well as forest features with the stupidly large and solid fungi she harvested.

Considering the sheer size of the caverns she was encountering and the unwillingness to over specialize these first caverns she spread everything out. Growing the stone into forts and watch towers, creating water features and rivers around the room.

She also placed numerous small bands of goblins about the place as trash mobs to be an early warning system. The majority of her mainline production was going towards economic units rather than military. Builders and the modified version for mining, as well as more and more micro and nano swarms.

It was becoming painfully obvious to Alissa that things were not entirely functional in her domain. Something was missing, while she had a close and currently inseparable bond with the core, she lacked… something. The core was supposed to be more than a magical rock, it was supposed to house some kind of… intelligence?... will, a will might be a better description.

The core was empty. And that left her to fill the gaps with workaround bullshit. While she had the abilities of the core, she lacked awareness and overall control. She shouldn’t have been the primary entity, but somehow, she was. Again, if she ever got true technology up and running the problems would go away, for now though all she could do was work with what she had.

As time went on Nova was becoming more and more silent, her focus being drained by having to process the increasingly complex swarms flowing all throughout the domain. She was also instancing herself so she could provide support for the kids as they had no AI’s of their own. If she had even primitive computers this might be manageable, or if the swarms were properly programmed machines rather than magical bullshit creations.

The important part was that Isabella had taken a beachhead in the caverns beyond checkpoint two. That meant this room was “secure” and now she needed to make it into an actual environment to function. Adding numerous creatures and biodiversity, plants and prey animals, predators and the goblins.

Around the spread-out resource points she placed her constructs. The constructs would guard and actually gather the resources, then send it to Vlad. Those points did need to be spread to optimize the mana absorption that fueled their growth. The ecosystem was there to fuel the chamber with more mana from the conflicts and keep Alissa from having to drain her reserves to power the place. The added creatures also helped purge the corruption from the area. Win-win.

Large quantities of captured goblins were being funneled into her main goblin cavern, and wonder of wonders she began to see some forms of useful production from her goblin minions. What they wouldn’t do themselves they had no problems forcing their slaves to do.

Honestly all that meant was that the goblins were slightly more productive and slightly less wasteful. There were the barest hints of an absolutely tyrannical and unreasonable economy showing up. The slaves mostly kept the livestock, “farms”, and production up and running. After this phase of work was done Alissa focused on the production of proper weapons. Having a wood analogue in the fungus let her upgrade her creations weapons, right now they were made of stone or flimsy bone.

The bones that were harvested lacked the flexibility of wood making them rather fragile in the brutal press of battle. She also was lacking horn or other materials that might be easily used. Bronze spears and weak bows and crossbows began to make their appearance. She had underestimated the size of the caverns by a silly order of magnitude. Battles were much more likely to occur in basically open field conditions rather than the tight confines of a tunnel fight.

The king of the battlefield, the humble spear became more standard length rather than the short version she had originally designed, and the ranged weapons were underpowered simply due to the constructs inability to use a crossbow with a few hundred pounds of force (100lbs = 45 kg) same for the bows. A hundred or so yards (91m) max effective range, truly pitiful. The fletching for the ammunition was a dried kelp/seaweed that grew in the waterways, but accuracy was low at anything beyond 30-50 feet (9-15m).

Well, when she had better creations and materials, she could make that into a far more reasonable range and power.

Other than these big changes it was business as usual as she spent most of her time practicing with mana and training with the kids and a number of other annoying admin tasks.

***

Vlad at check point one was finding his job to be rather superfluous as he was having no problems whatsoever with maintaining the flow of goblins into the rest of the domain and supporting his family.

His concerns lay with the two unexplored entrances in his cavern. An odd room with seven total tunnels leading to it. One went to the now dead Necrarch’s room, another too the chamber of mole-rats, CP2 and 3 plus the core room. The remaining three were vertical changes, one going up and another down.

He was building and working towards securing those areas, but for now all he could do was let the scouts and hunter-killer constructs crawl down. The goblins he sent via a rope failed horribly, and the fall was too far for a goblin to survive, he had tested it.

The worrying part was that the below chamber was releasing far more corrupt mana than normal. The network part near that opening was almost entirely oversaturated, leading to an excessive appearance of expansion to corral that into something more manageable. The concerning part was that the only time he saw that much at once was when living beings died in great numbers, releasing the corrupt mana into the world. Which was then pulled in by the domain’s low density of corrupt mana.

Since they weren’t present down there it was odd to see such an anomaly.

***

Isabella was reading the reports submitted by Maria while sitting on the elevated platform 100 meters off the ground and above the entrance. A perfect observation platform with walls and a view of the battle ground. She was kind of jealous of her sister’s situation.

Her sister was having a good deal of fun. Fun she wasn’t allowed to participate in or emulate on her side. Alissa had declared this entrance as a war zone. The front line and not a place to play around. The goblin opposition lacked anything resembling strong leadership that put her in a bind as they simply weren’t playing by the rules that Maria’s opponents used.

So, war it was. She sent out her own goblins in large warbands to actively patrol beyond her defenses. Whether they died or were taken captive was irrelevant they bought time and did their own fair share of killing and eating. The presence of so many hostile goblins made food for her forces a minor concern. The continual grind of combat also leveled up the goblins on both sides nicely, the difference being that she sent most of her hobgoblins back to their tribe as breeding stock. Whereas she targeted her enemy’s hobs with overwhelming numbers, deployed her cavalry or sent a unit of constructs in to delete them. Fewer hobgoblins left the battlefield than entered.

It was carefully planned attrition warfare. Something she shared her mother’s distaste of, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of options. She had thousands of goblins and a few hundred constructs, her opponents had at least ten times her number in this cavern alone. That wasn’t a deal breaker, but the constant flow of goblins like a river from the entrances on the other side was worrying to say the least.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That the goblins usually moved in groups of 50 or more made this a little more difficult than what Maria faced even if her sister tended to fight superior quality enemies.

Fighting here more resembled fighting a natural disaster, or disease than a traditional war. The only lines were the ones she enforced, the swarms of goblins did more or less whatever they wanted with little rhyme or reason.

The attrition was fine for the moment as it let her fortify the entrance and build up her reserves, along with distributing the new production crossbows. The ability to build short, fat towers to dominate some of the key terrain was a big plus. The key point was that the domain, and its entrances were secure for the first time since Alissa had woken up.

Isabella also used her own magic and the dungeon creatures to create a terrain naturally hostile to invaders in this ridiculously oversized cavern.

The main concern she had was with the pseudo-city opposite her position. It could hide a lot of unknowns; she had already seen new creatures that the goblins used as slaves with her exceptional vision.

Well, she would just have to see what happened.

***

Back in the core room Karl was working in his shop to develop and expand the usefulness of his magical operating system. The simple chips and the enchantments worked well enough, but he wanted something a bit more advanced. After his discovery he decided to work on the major upgrades of the constructs themselves, a method to bridge the broken gap between them and the core.

His mother was hesitant to develop the constructs too far without some experimentation. As it stood she still had the ability to disable and destroy them if they went crazy or some random BS happened. The concern she raised was that the constructs were considered living beings connected to the core, rather than beings that the domain improves but under her control. If they could weaken or outright sever the link to the core, yet still benefit from the domain’s natural improvement of living beings inside it, that would be ideal.

Constructs shouldn’t be ‘alive’ the way the current models were. *cough* at least not without a hell of an insurance policy keeping them in check.

It was the old dilemma of a machine uprising. Something that rarely happened, but that it did at all, was the concern. These things were alive, but not intelligent or sentient. Living in a domain that did freaky shit to improve the things living inside it. If the constructs gained intelligence and decided not to obey what then?

Could they be controlled or influenced the same as others or would their different minds make that irrelevant? Peaceful or hostile? Would they want their own society? Maybe these questions were far fetched but did any sane person want to test that theory on the front lines.

It was part of the reason they were kept in reserve, the most growth happened during combat, production issues aside some of the constructs had been showing “ghosts in the machine”. Odd personality, favoring weapon types and inefficient attack patterns. The almost emotional response to the necrarch’s aura, even if it bled over from Alissa. They were made of a energy injected stone at the time, does stone feel fear?

These sorts of questions made the desire to have actual programming for the golems to fall back on much more important.

***

Carmilla had her own project, in a different part of the goblin room she had carved out a separate island with her mom’s permission. Not only was she going to focus on taking over the ranching duties, hopefully freeing the nearly silent Nova up for more work. She was also going to run an experiment regarding goblins.

The hypothesis was that goblins could potentially be domesticated enough to be useful. Unlike the wild goblins that they currently had she was aiming to create and at least semi-intelligent and cooperative goblin force. Alissa was the only one who could claim control of the goblins on mass, her implants and will could overwhelm their desires and instincts. The rest of the kids had problems with controlling large groups beyond convincing them to be non-hostile.

Since the somewhat broken relationship between them and the core was a problem what about a bit of social conditioning and brainwashing? Neither the vampires or their mother was under the illusion of their current setup being a good long term plan. Eventually they would need something better than goblins, if the link to the core was repaired and they had the control they felt it should have over its creatures they could use the other monsters to fill the gaps.

Right now, they had goblins, the only creatures with the numbers and utility limited though it was to stave off invasion. They were also the only tool users in their arsenal.

Simple answer. Make the goblins better, more obedient, actually trained, hard working and well equipped, with a dash of organization thrown in. Goblins were low on the intelligence scale, but they were just stupid not brain dead.

Carmilla was going to throw an entirely new batch of goblins onto the island and raise them from scratch to be the best she could manage. Brainwashed fanatics, if that was what it took. She had by now a good idea of how goblin society operated, so if she made herself into something like a god in the goblin’s eyes from day one, then continued to carefully mold them through social engineering…

Carmilla smiled as she made her plans and prepared the work area.

***

It had been several cycles since Altieria had notified her superiors of the dungeon’s existence and she had been joined by a decently large force of her people’s elite fighters. A full forty dark elf warriors, mages, and clerics plus their own slaves to use as fodder.

“I don’t think trying here is a good idea.” The lead warrior commented as they watched groups of goblins slaughter each other on the other side of the cavern.

“Why not its not like they could stop us. At worst it will be annoying.” That came from one of the masked mages who refused to reveal their names to anyone.

Altieria interrupted before the argument could break out again. They had been having a similar one for the past few cycles while waiting for everyone to gather up. “This isn’t a dungeon dive and we are not here to conquer or challenge the dungeon. We are here to figure out what is going on. It is inevitable that we will end up fighting, but attacking headlong into a fortified position… In full view of the goblins here. That is asking for trouble. The dungeon has to have other entrances, we will look for those rather than attack here where the dungeon expects it.”

Tsk “Why bother, it is newly formed and weak. The goblins will learn their place when we unleash a few powerful attacks. The dungeon is all that matters and now its right in front of us.” Replied the mage.

“It’s not like we can’t take a look. I agree with our warriors however that attempting to breach the dungeon here is foolish regardless of our chance of success. Or do you believe that you and your can challenge the core if it becomes angry? What about facing several bosses at once?... Don’t bother answering, we all know that is impossible. A small group will raid here while the others scout for another entrance. Maybe some mind magic will reveal what we need, at worst we can see for ourselves how strong the dungeon domain is.” Altieria outlined a basic plan.

“You invite misfortune with these idiotic delays.”

Altieria prayed for patience. “There is a boss here, we are not prepared to face such a thing right now. I also saw a roving boss before your arrival. If we have to face the core guardian, we will fail. Thousands of goblins with no concern for their lives can you stop that? No, we will be careful and get what we need. The goblins here have failed to abide by the rules of dungeons with their incessant invasions, the dungeon responded. Now we have a battlefield, yes while we wait for the scouts, we will form parties and test its strength. Yes, we will take the time to purge our corruption, and perhaps enough time to grow inside the dungeon’s domain.”

The warrior spoke up. “That also runs counter to our purpose here.”

“No, it really doesn’t. We are here to investigate, gain resources and ensure that the dungeon remains stable. With the vanishingly unlikely possibility of opening some form of communication. The dungeon is here, that in and of itself is all we need. As long as it remains stable higher powers than us will find a way to make everything work. We make our offering knowing that the dungeon is likely to replicate it, especially down here. We charge our spirit stones and see if we can figure out anything truly remarkable about this dungeon other than its location and ability to handle far too much corruption. We have the means to communicate as long as we don’t get trapped, meaning that the time we spend is mostly a matter of convenience. Our leader will want good information before making a move they wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions without proof.”

Here the cleric jumped in. “Stop quibbling about minor details. Altieria was put in charge of this mission, she speaks with our master’s voice on this matter. If she fails, our master will make his displeasure known without needing our help. Her plan is sound and does not conflict with any of our goals, any of our goals large and small. We need to get into the dungeon proper, going through a fort while the dungeon is upset is the height of stupidity especially if another entrance is available.”

Altieria sent the scouts to the surrounding tunnels looking for any connections including going through the City of Pillers. Then she selected a party from the gathered members including leaving behind a force to extract them if things got difficult. The warrior and mage would lead with the cleric taking up command of the reinforcements. Altieria wasn’t a commander, she knew just enough to defend herself. She would let the professionals do their thing. Her job was to make sure that most of the issues were planned for and that these commanders got the support they needed to do their jobs.