For everyone except me, the next few days passed quietly. The goblins were exhausted from their exertions. Even the ones who hadn’t been on either of the mission teams more or less collapsed, their bodies finally calling due the debt incurred over their long march south. I let them have their rest. I even spared the azoth to conjure a few more down-stuffed mattresses, which proved enormously popular. The goblins would sleep three or four to a mattress, which was less crowded than you might think on account of they were so short. It still wasn’t ideal, but I really couldn’t spare the azoth to give everyone their own mattress.
Why not? Because while everyone else was recuperating, I was frantically but furtively planning my anti-Abzu defenses. I’d been watching him like a hawk, a portion of my awareness devoted to him at all times. He hadn’t made any moves yet, but I knew that if my attention slipped off of him for a moment, whatever perception-baffling skill he had running might make me lose track of him altogether. I couldn’t even relax when he left the dungeon, which he did at least daily: he could slip back into my domain without my noticing. That wasn’t idle paranoia talking, it was a fact — I’d seen him wander off into the woods at dusk, and about jumped out of my pericardium a few hours later when I noticed him sitting by the campfire as though he’d never left.
I’d wanted to let my azoth pool refill at least halfway, to give me an ample buffer for emergencies, but the Abzu situation had put an end to that plan. I’d been spending azoth about as fast as I got it. I was faced with a design challenge that would have been tremendously interesting if the stakes weren’t so high: how do you defend against a threat you won’t see coming?
Any plan I concocted couldn’t rely on the goblins. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them: I just didn’t know how dangerous Abzu was. Throwing my minions at him might not accomplish anything except getting them killed — but I figured there was at least some chance that Abzu would leave them alive after he’d dealt with me if they hadn’t gotten in his way, unlike human adventurers who would butcher them all. No, better that it was just me in danger.
That left me with two options: environmental obstacles and nonsentient minions. I had to assume that nonsentient minions would have the same problem I did — Abzu’s perception filter — so I concentrated on environmental obstacles. The goal wasn’t to actually block him from getting to my core — if Abzu really was a cultivator, the odds were good he could just blast through any barrier I put up with a sword laser or some bullshit like that. I just needed to know he was coming. Once I did, I could fall back on something I knew was effective at taking out more powerful opponents: I was gonna drop the roof on him.
Towards that end, the first batch of obstacles I’d created was a series of tripwires attached to bells, scattered throughout my third-floor labyrinth. I didn’t have high hopes for them, though. I’d done my best to place them unobtrusively, but I figured a seasoned survivalist like Abzu would still spot them easily. Even the pitch blackness of the labyrinth wouldn’t be much help, since like all the other goblins he had [Night Vision].
Completing my first floor had given me another idea, though. I knew I had to have a viable path from the outside world to my core, but boss arena doors either didn’t violate that rule or were an exception to it. Why not try more doors? There were plenty of dungeons with internal doors in games and webnovels.
I’d chosen the mouth of my core chamber as the site of my first attempt at an internal door. I envisioned a hatch, set flush with the wall and swinging outwards — just another pain-in-the-ass obstacle on top of the flooded arena, the pillar, and the vertical gap to reach the door. Literally on top of those things, in fact. At first I’d thought to build the whole thing out of metal, like the door to a bank vault, but this almost immediately proved impractical. The cost to create objects from raw azoth seemed to depend primarily on their mass: a certain volume of metal was more expensive than the same volume of wood, and wood was more expensive than down mattresses. The gate to the hillfort had eaten almost a third of my azoth pool: a solid metal vault door would take much, much more. I accepted that it would have to be another wooden door, at least for now. Stress made me impatient, so rather than wait until I’d respired enough azoth to create the whole door at once I manifested and assembled it piece-by-piece. The nails, braces, and hinges were all of that same matte-black metal I’d created before — I thought it was probably iron, but I wasn’t sure. The body of the door itself was pale wood, almost the same shade as the limestone around it.
Finally, the moment of truth had arrived. I lifted the door with [Dungeon Domain] and set it on its hinges. The pins fell into the hinges, the thick deadbolt slid home, and it was done. The entrance to my core chamber was blocked.
No error message. Success!! Doors were a go!
As I looked at the door, though, the warm glow of triumph and the fugue of creation began to slip away. In their wake, I was left with an unpleasant realization. Building this thing had taken me the better part of two days and a night. I had only the dregs of my azoth pool left, perilously close to another bout of azoth exhaustion. And that was all for one door. This project had been far too costly, in azoth and therefore in time.
Persephone, you might ask me, why did this not occur to you at any point during the two days and one night you spent conjuring this thing piece by piece from raw magic? Well, look, I wish I could say that I had a good excuse, but I didn’t. I dealt with stress by throwing myself into projects, and when I threw myself into a project the rest of the world might as well not exist.
Alone behind my new door, in the privacy of my core chamber, I let out a sigh that no one heard. Whatever. Maybe I should take a step back and let the stupid work its way out of my system. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of other problems I could be trying to solve instead.
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The smell of woodsmoke and pork filled the air. Last night, Striga had killed one of the hogs that farmers released into the woods during the lean seasons of fall and winter to forage for themselves. They would be recaptured with the help of hunting dogs in the spring, for fattening and slaughter. Not this one, though.
She felt conflicted about it. This was some planter’s own property that the owl had killed. The goblins had been positively gleeful to receive the carcass — it was the first time she’d seen many of them crack a smile. Striga, too, had been warmly received, although the occasion had nearly been spoiled when one of the goblin men clapped her on the shoulder congratulatorily and she almost tore his throat out. The owl hadn’t known what to make of the goblins’ enthusiasm, seeing it only as a threat.
Pacifica hadn’t known what to make of it either. It clearly wasn’t just about the food. She’d seen them make what she assumed were prayers or gestures of thanks over other game, like the rabbit Striga had dropped on her the first night. By contrast, several of the goblins had taken turns savagely kicking the hog’s dead body before they began butchering it. The second-youngest of them, the one with the crossbow, had flipped both his middle fingers at it when he was done, backing away with a smirk. It had struck her as cruel and mean-spirited, all the more shocking for its contrast to their surprisingly gentle conduct up to that point. That the goblins did not mind being party to theft and stock-rustling, that they celebrated it — it seemed to confirm everything she’d ever heard about the monsters, about how they hated humanity and all its works.
Perhaps sensing her confusion, the goblin with the club arm — Malik, she now knew his name was — had begun attempting to explain it to her, using pantomime to help surmount the language barrier. It hadn’t been entirely effective until Persephone had stepped in to translate.
“They destroy crops,” Malik had said. “Our gardens, they come and root through the soil, eat everything or ruin it. Some even attack goblins. When we hunt them, the humans call it theft, say that the pigs belong to them. In our parents’ time, they said to the humans that had settled near us that if the pigs belonged to them, then they shouldn’t let ‘em loose, that they were making it hard for us to live and it wasn’t very friendly behavior. At which point you all basically told us to fuck off.” He’d laughed. “Which sounds about right for humans.”
She hadn’t known what to say to that. After the hog had been butchered, Teekas, who seemed to be some kind of leader among the goblins presumably owing to her high level, had told — okay, she’d asked, not told, it hadn’t been an order — Pacifica to help Malik take the lean cuts and dry them, so they wouldn’t spoil and could be stored for the winter. He’d seemed annoyed by that at first, until Teekas had said something to him that Persephone didn’t translate but that, given the glance he shot at her from his one good eye, was probably something to the tune of “I know you don’t need the help, I just want you to keep an eye on her.” That had mollified him considerably, though, and he’d been friendly to Pacifica after that. They’d passed several not-unpleasant hours together. Once they’d assembled a drying-rack from fallen branches and built a low fire, Malik had apparently taken it upon himself to begin teaching her the goblin language. She suspected, from the wickedness of his grins, that he’d been teaching her the crass versions of some phrases. Around mid-morning, yawning, he’d retreated to the dungeon to sleep on that ludicrously soft mattress, leaving her to keep an eye on the fire. That was all she’d done today, was keep an eye on the fire, alone on the dungeon’s hill in the weak sunlight.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She hadn’t spoken a word in hours, and the only sound had been the crackling of the fire and the rustling of branches in the wind for just as long, so when a voice from just over her shoulder chipperly said “Hey, girl!” she jumped a good several inches and reflexively spun around. There was no one behind her. Of course there was no one behind her, it was Persephone’s voice. “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” the dungeon continued. “Whatcha up to?”
Pacifica gestured at the drying meat with one hand, the other pressed to her chest. “Just- just watching the fire,” she stammered, pulse pounding in her ears. Her limbs felt at once weak and electric. How long had it been since anyone had snuck up on her? Since [Prey’s Awareness] had let anyone sneak up on her? She couldn’t think of a single time since she’d gained the evolved skill — well, except for Striga’s first attack, and her capture by the one surly-looking goblin that now bore the title of [Child Snatcher]. But certainly her parents hadn’t been able to surprise her in years. Not when she could hear every step they took, every tiny shift in their tone or volume, could even feel their nearness in the air in some indescribable way.
“Huh,” Persephone said. “That must have been pretty boring. I’m sorry, I didn’t think to give you anything to do to keep yourself entertained.”
The absurdity of that statement was enough to completely dislodge Pacifica from the spike of sudden fear that had impaled her. “It… that’s alright,” she said. “I usually have chores, or I have to handle my parents when they want something. This is the least work I’ve had to do since I don't even know when. It’s…” She prodded the low embers with a stick. “It’s relaxing, actually.”
Relaxing. Speak of absurd statements, there was one. The past two days she’d spent as the captive of monsters were easily among the most peaceful and quiet of her life.
“So, uh, how about you?” Pacifica asked, to fill the silence. “What have you been doing?”
“Ugh, I don’t even want to talk about it,” the dungeon core said. “Wasted a bunch of time and azoth.”
“I’m sorry,” Pacifica said, not sure what else to say. “That sounds frustrating.”
“Yeah,” the dungeon core said. “I’m kind of kicking myself about it.” They sat in silence for a while before Persephone spoke again. “So, not to drop a heavy question on you or anything, but what are your plans for the future?”
Pacifica drew her shoulders in, hunching down a little. “I dunno,” she said, stirring the coals again. “Get married to a second or third son. He won’t inherit his family’s land, so I’ll be a more attractive match since he’ll come into the farm through me. Hopefully that’ll get me a decent sort from decent stock. We’ll take over the farm from Mom and Dad, let them rest. Work hard, clear more land to plant a bigger crop, until we can afford to hire some hands. Use the hands to clear even more land and plant an even bigger crop. Then just… keep doing that until I die, I guess. And I suppose I’ll need to have children somewhere in there.”
“You don’t sound very excited by the prospect,” Persephone said.
Every time I think about it, I want to kill myself, Pacifica thought but did not say. “Future’s never really struck me as something I need to plan for,” she said instead. “I know where my road’s headed.”
“Would you change it, if you could?”
Pacifica looked down at her feet, face hot. “No,” she said thickly. Yes, of course, she thought, but I can’t tell you that. I can’t show you that desperation, that weakness. You’ll take advantage. You won’t respect me anymore.
“Alright,” Persephone said. “Just thought I’d ask. I wanted your help with something, and I was trying to figure out what I could offer you as payment.”
She wasn’t considering it. She wasn’t considering it. “What kind of something,” came a strangled voice that she realized was her own.
“I need redblack salamander clay,” the dungeon core said. “I dunno if you know what that is.” Pacifica shook her head, and Persephone continued. “Okay, it’s a kind of clay. It’s red with black mottling, kind of like a salamander — hence the name. The goblins tell me you can’t find it around here. It’s quarried in the foothills, further up the river. That’s at least a week’s journey there and back. I can’t spare the manpower — well, the goblinpower — for that, nor could I guarantee their safety if I sent them.”
“And you want me to go get it for you?” Pacifica asked, a sinking feeling in her chest. Why did she have a sinking feeling in her chest? She wasn’t considering it!
“What? No, I need, like, a lot of it. You couldn’t bring me as much as I need. No, remember how you were telling me about that town to the northwest?”
“Nikolai’s Ford, yeah,” Pacifica said. Nikolai’s Ford was a logging town and trading post, and served as a base camp for many of the bands of adventurers that hunted monsters on the frontier of human territory.
“Right, that one. I was gonna ask you to go try and buy the clay for me there. Maybe hire people to go upriver and harvest some, if no one has it on hand. It’s far enough from Planter’s Bend that they wouldn’t know you there, right?”
“That’s right,” Pacifica said slowly. “With what money, though? If I have to hire adventurers, that’s not cheap.”
Azoth grew thick in the air, a sizzling un-taste on her tongue, as an oblong ingot of gleaming, pale metal appeared from midair and dropped into Pacifica’s hand. “I can’t just crank those out whenever I feel like it,” Persephone said as Pacifica stared at it. “But I can crank them out. That is, hopefully, pure silver. I may also need to trouble you to consult an alchemist to make sure I got it right, but assuming I did, I can make one of those about every half-hour. So, if you give me some time, money won’t be an issue.”
Pacifica hefted the ingot experimentally. From the weight and the size… she was no [Merchant] or [Silversmith], but this had to be at least a dozen shillings’ worth of metal. Blackwater Farm only brought in five or six guilder a year. At twenty shillings to the guilder, this was… Heaven shit down her neck, she was holding more than a month’s earnings in the palm of her hand. And Persephone could make two of these an hour? That was…
She wasn’t considering it. She wasn’t. But if she had been considering it, she might have been considering that this was the sort of money that opened doors. She could hire field hands, expand the farm, reinvest the profit in more field hands, and never have to work her own land another day in her life. For that matter, fuck the farm, she could buy an apprenticeship — become a tradeswoman, live in comfort in town. Hell, she could buy a horse. She could leave.
Pacifica’s fingers slowly closed around the silver ingot. “What do you need the clay for?” she asked. She could see her reflection in the smooth surface of the metal. She couldn’t name the expression she was making.
“I want to set up a formation that will let me respire azoth more quickly,” Persephone said. “As you may have noticed, I am a giant lump of meat with no limbs. I need azoth to do pretty much anything. Hell, I’m spending azoth to have this conversation with you.”
That seemed reasonable enough on its face, except that Pacifica knew what the “anything” dungeons were said to do was. Birth armies. Darken the land. Call down cataclysms. And this dungeon was right on the doorstep of Planter’s Bend. Of her home.
Home.
Was it home? That place where no one had helped her, where everyone had just turned their gazes away? Where she’d had less time at ease in the last two years than she’d had in two days out here?
Did she care what happened to Planter’s Bend?
“What are you going to use the extra azoth for?” she asked. Her knuckles were white around the silver ingot.
“In the short term? I dunno, a bunch of stuff. Probably mutate some more animals and level my goblins up so that we don’t all just get murdered when the adventurers show up. Build more walls. Set some traps. Get some actual indoor plumbing going, that’s overdue.”
“And in the long term?”
Persephone was quiet for a moment. “I’m going to destroy the Great Chain of Being,” she said.
A slightly hysterical laugh escaped Pacifica. There it was. Monsters, the enemies of Heaven. Spawn of chaos, despising order and loving wickedness. It was so stereotypical as to be comedic. “Why?” she couldn’t help but ask. “I know you talked about a dark crusade, but you don’t seem…”
“Evil?” Persephone asked dryly. “Like a monster?”
“Yeah,” Pacifica said weakly. She should have just kept her mouth shut and not asked about the long term. Left well enough alone.
“Pacifica, I’m a disgusting lump of meat. I live in a hole in the ground, and people are coming to kill me because my body is worth a lot of money. The Chain won’t even call me by my name. Why the fuck do you think I want to destroy it?”
Pacifica thought of the pig, again, and how the goblins had beaten and kicked its unresponsive corpse, venting their fury at a foe that would never feel their blows. She thought about churned mud where a garden had once been. She took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. And I know what you can offer me as payment.”