Achievement Unlocked!
Birdbath
Condition: Add a water feature to your dungeon.
+10xp
Achievement Unlocked!
Food Chain I
Condition: Have a minion be eaten by another minion 10 times.
+5xp
Achievement Unlocked!
Survivalist I
Condition: 2+ of the following:
– Survive a full night alone in the wilderness.
– Construct a shelter in the wilderness without assistance.
– Start a fire in the wilderness without assistance.
– Survive a weather event in the wilderness.
+5xp
Level Up!
Dungeon Core Lv.1 → Dungeon Core Lv.2
Dungeon Core Lv. 2 → Dungeon Core Lv. 3
Base stats increased
Some secondary stats increased
+2 skill points
It had been a productive night. I’d spent the rest of it binding every animal I could find as a minion – even the bugs, and let me tell you there are a lot of fucking bugs in the forest – while I waited for my cave to flood. The achievements and the experience points all came at once, right as dawn broke over the horizon. I was sure the timing wasn’t coincidental, because there had definitely been more than ten incidents of food chain participation among my minions over the course of the night. It made me wonder whether the sense of dramatic timing was automated, or whether some unseen entity was sat at the system’s controls, watching.
My domain’s radius had expanded significantly with the successive level-ups, and my azoth pool swelled. No such luck with my hit points, though. Ah well, c’est la vie pour un donjon. With a thought, I collapsed the tunnel to the stream, cutting off the flow of water. A few fish swam around the pool: a few more hadn’t survived the trip and floated belly-up. I’d have to do something about that eventually: the living ones didn’t have anything to eat, and I’d feel bad watching them starve to death surrounded by the corpses of their friends. Another problem for the future, I guess: for now, I had more skill points to spend. I opened up the menu, and –
Hey, wait, were those fucking goblins?
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It had been an awful night, and the day was shaping up to be worse. Nar-shesh’s lungs burned in his chest. His legs felt like they might give out from under him at any moment, but they’d felt that way for the last several miles too. Blood dripped down his arm from the dog-bite, its bandages already soaked through, and crusted his hand shut around the haft of his knife. The cheerful burbling of Ergiza’s baby, strapped to a cradleboard on her back, provided an incongruous contrast to the shouts of their human pursuers, who had been steadily gaining on them for the past several miles – a fact not-unconnected to the exhaustion of Nar-shesh’s legs.
It wasn’t as though he thought they’d made the wrong decision. The band had needed to migrate south: they didn’t have the supplies to make it through any but the mildest winter, and for the past several years each winter had been harsher than the last. He’d voted to move. Everyone had voted to move, except for one or two holdouts. It was just that between them and the goblin lands along the Serpent River stretched at least a week’s travel through human country.
Which led to their current situation. A cry came from behind him, as Darkazgu’s bad knee finally gave out and sent him sprawling to the forest floor. His niece Kadash wheeled to help him. “Leave him!” Nar-shesh spat, furious at himself for the cruelty of saying so. Furious at Darkazgu for his weakness, at Kadash for her stupid sentimentality, at the bloody-minded savagery of the humans that hunted them like animals.
“He’s right, girl, leave me,” Darkazgu groaned as his niece bent to carry him. “Keep running. You’ve got to live.”
“I won’t leave you,” Kadash said, steely resolve in her voice. She did not shake even slightly with the effort as she straightened, bearing the old goblin in her arms. “If staying alive means abandoning family, then I’d rather-”
Whatever Kadash would rather was cut off by a whistling sound, and then a gurgling sound, as a crossbow bolt buried itself in her neck. “NO!” came an anguished scream – from Darkazgu, from others, possibly from Nar-shesh himself. He couldn’t say. He couldn’t look, either. He turned to run like his life depended on it.
Obviously, it did.
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“Cor, they’ve all taken off running again, Arnul. The hell’d you do that for?” Geoff whined, bending over with his arms braced against his thighs to catch his breath. His face was ruddy with exertion, sweat dripping from the black curls of his beard.
“Relax, Geoff my lad,” said Arnul, the group’s leader, with a patient smile as he slung the crossbow back over his shoulder. “They can run all they like, they’ll just tire themselves out sooner. No need to rush. Anyway, that was the one that killed Marius’ dog. I could hardly let it get away with that, could I?”
Marius, standing next to a man who looked enough like him that they were certainly brothers, wore a twisted scowl on his face that suggested he would have rather done it himself, but said nothing.
“Got more go in ‘em than most, this group has,” grumbled the fifth man of the five-man hunting party, a bald man with an axe who loomed head and shoulders above the rest. “Most greenskins would’ve dropped already. Bloody pain, is what it is.”
“I’ll tell you what, Bill. When we catch up to them, which will be within the hour, you have my word on it, we can leave a few of them alive so you can express your frustration to them,” Arnul said with a smile, like a parent indulging a child. “Sounds good?”
Bill grinned, toying with his necklace. It was strung thick with goblin incisors, and wrapped twice or thrice around his thick neck. “Aye, Arnul. I reckon that would ease the ache of it all,” he said.
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Okay. Okay. Holy shit. They just killed that guy. They fucking- holy shit, that goblin has a baby on her back. Goblin baby, not human baby, it’s not like she’s running around with a stolen baby, that’s her baby. What the hell do I do here? What can I do?
Regardless of the potential nuances of the situation, I felt comfortable concluding that the five armed men hunting down a dozen or so goblins, mostly unarmed and including children and the elderly, were the bad guys. When I turned my attention to them, a status bar popped up over each of their heads.
Arnul Aricson [Goblinslayer] - Human Warlord Lv. 17
Geoff Ingleholm - Human Warrior Lv. 9
Marius Mercator - Human Hunter Lv. 5
Docens Mercator - Human Rogue Lv. 7
William Wilhelz [Butcher] [Goblinslayer] - Human Warrior Lv. 15
Yeah, I was getting a very particular vibe from these guys. I was also getting that their leader, the crossbowman, was a full sixteen levels – no, wait, sorry, forgot I just leveled up, a full fourteen levels above me. That was not good! Any action I took here that might alert them to my presence would mean certain death for me – but if I did nothing, I’d be leaving the goblins to Billy the freakin’ Butcher, who I now noticed wore a necklace of what I assumed were several dozen goblin teeth. Cool. Cool cool cool. Awesome.
Fuck!!!!
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“Teekas!” Nar-shesh hissed as quietly as he could. “What are you doing?!”
Teekas had staggered away from the group towards a thicket of bushes atop a small hump of earth. “We need to hide,” she said, in between sucking breaths of air. “We can’t…can’t keep going. Gonna collapse. And they don’t have…any dogs left…” The goblin fell to her hands and knees and dry-heaved twice before rising unsteadily and creeping into the thicket.
Nar-shesh looked over his shoulder. The humans hadn’t crested the last hill yet: they had a few seconds, maybe. He knew Teekas was right. It had been a stupid idea to try and outrun the humans in the first place – their stamina was the stuff of nightmares – but they’d just lost Lekubi and Gasir and everyone had been panicking. The idea of hiding in a hole and waiting to die didn’t appeal to him, but neither did collapsing from exhaustion and waiting to die.
Teekas’ head suddenly popped back out of the bushes. “Hey, there’s a cave back here!” she said. “C’mon! C’mon!”
The exhausted goblins moved with desperate energy, rushing into the thicket. Nar-shesh did his best to stop them from trampling the foliage as they went, to disguise the signs of their passage. Once everyone else was in, he spared one last look around before following.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
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Shit! The goblins were in the fucking dungeon! On the one hand, this was good, if they successfully hid from the hunters in here then that solved that problem, but on the other hand if the hunters found them in here I was turbofucked. And that wasn’t even getting into the question of whether the goblins, if they survived, might decide to crack my core anyway for that sweet sweet loot. I didn’t think they would, but how could I know for sure?
Whatever. One problem at a time. I began frantically scrolling through my skill list, looking for anything I could spend my points on that would help with camouflage, concealment, defense, anything.
The goblins whispered a few words in their language to each other as they crept deeper into my cave – it didn’t sound anything like what the humans were speaking, but I couldn’t understand a word of either. Their status bars, I noticed, were different from the humans’ in one significant respect.
Goblin Lv. 1
Goblin Lv. 2
Goblin Lv. 1
Goblin Lv. 0
Goblin Lv. 3
The goblins, like me, didn’t get names.
This world was really starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
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“Aw, now where have they fucking gone,” Geoff whined as the group crested the hill. Indeed, there were no goblins in sight below them. “We’ve gone and lost ‘em, Arnul!”
“Geoff, what am I always telling you? Relax. They’re exhausted and on their last legs, they won’t have gone far,” Arnul said, clapping the younger man on the shoulder and strolling down the hill, undaunted.
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“There’s a drop back here,” Enshunna hissed to alert the others. “A deep one. I can’t see the bottom. Sides are pretty steep too.”
“Quiet!” Nar-shesh hissed back at her, his ears flared as he stretched his hearing to the utmost, listening for their pursuers. Feet rustled through the fallen leaves as the humans descended the hill. “They’re outside.”
The air in the cave was suffocating with tension. No one moved. No one breathed.
Ergiza’s child burbled from its cradleboard.
Three or four people simultaneously whirled on Ergiza, whose eyes were wide with panic, and made various sharp gestures that communicated things to the effect of “shut that baby up right now or we’re all dead.” Hastily, Ergiza unslung her child from her back and began tending to it. The little goblin’s face wrinkled. Parental intervention, while not unwelcome, had come an instant too late. As Ergiza struggled with the baby’s swaddling, the rest of the group watched in horror as the baby took in as deep a breath as its tiny lungs could hold, and let out a wail. Ergiza’s hand clapped over the baby’s mouth before its cry had fully begun, but the damage was done. The tense silence of the forest had been broken. Nar-shesh felt his stomach sink. This was it. They were all going to die here.
“
Ergiza began to sob.
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I watched, mind blank with panic, as the human adventurers entered the cave. The three goblins that had weapons out of the dozen or so survivors shuffled forwards, raising knives and a hand-axe in shaky grips. The others backed away fearfully, towards the pit. I needed to do something, and quick. But what? I’d barely skimmed my new skill options, stress turning the words to gibberish before my eyes, so I had no silver bullet for this situation. I read frantically.
[Dungeon Domain]
Prerequisites: Dungeon Core Lv. 0+
Cost: High
Duration: Indefinite
Keywords: Class-locked, Domain, Modal
Gradually reshape your surroundings in a large area around yourself.
– ACTIVE: Reshape your surroundings as you please (with certain restrictions).
– PASSIVE: Azoth cost significantly decreases, xp gain decreases, rate of effect decreases. Surroundings are automatically reshaped.
Reshape your surroundings. Reshape your surroundings. Something about that tugged at my mind. Something…
Butcher Bill had reached the goblins. His axe went up, then down, with a wet sickening thunk, splitting his chosen victim’s skull. Every goblin that wasn’t crying was either screaming or deathly silent, at this point. The goblin with the knife and the injured arm was swiping wildly at one of the human brothers as he backed away. The other knife-wielding goblin charged directly at the crossbow-wielding human with a desperate shriek, and got a bolt in the chest for his trouble. The impact knocked the poor little fucker clean off his feet, head over heels, health bar empty before he even hit the ground.
With a desperate cry, the goblin with the crying infant in her arms turned and ran for the edge of the pit. As she did, it was like a dam had broken: the goblins, apparently having decided that death on their own terms was preferable to death beneath the hunters’ blades, turned to throw themselves over the edge.
Reshape your surroundings. Not “move soil and rock.” Not “remodel your cave.” Reshape your surroundings.
The idea took shape in my mind just as the first goblin’s feet left the ground. Time seemed to slow as she hung impossibly in the air over the pit. I had to move quickly. [Fast Shaping], time to earn your keep. With a mental yell of exertion, I slammed my azoth out into my domain. Not just the earth – the water, the air, the trees, the fish swimming placidly in my cave, the worms tunnelling in the earth, space itself.
The water, though, specifically, was the important part here. Suffused with my will, it moved, boiling up from the pillar chamber like a whirlpool in reverse. In defiance of gravity, of fluid dynamics, of common sense, it filled the main shaft. One foot deep. Two feet. Six feet. Ten. There was nothing left in the pillar chamber but a layer of damp mud along the bottom. A wall of water filled the doorway, held in place by nothing but magic and desperation.
At the same time, I took hold of the roof of my cave, and this time I did dig, not merely pull on the landscape as I’d done when opening my main shaft and the pillar chamber. I carved parallel furrows along the edges of the cave roof, stretching along its length. Rock split, dirt parted, the whole mass held in the air only because it hadn’t yet had time to fall. My azoth meter drained precipitously as [Fast Reshaping] pushed [Dungeon Domain]’s speed to its furthest limits. In the pillar chamber, I saw my heart-body lit up from within, surrounded by a searing aurora of magic in motion. Its arrythmic spasming had ceased. As I watched, the heart gave a single, powerful beat, and I felt it.
The last knife-wielding goblin stood alone against the five humans. “Jump,” I whispered to myself. “Jump, you little shit, just be a coward for once in your pathetic life so I can save you. Fucking jump.”
By some miracle, he did. I watched as his face fell, his courage failed, his heart broke, and he turned to run, seeking death but leaping unknowing into life.
The hunters rushed after him, but couldn’t bring him down before he jumped. They immediately began bickering with each other. One of them even shoved another before their leader barked irritably for quiet. He moved to the edge of the pit. A crystal at the front of his crossbow glowed with magical light, like an underbarrel flashlight on a rifle. It was strikingly incongruous – I wondered, for a moment, where they’d gotten the idea to do that, and if I was the only person who’d come to this world from elsewhere. He pointed the beam of his lightstone down into the pit, revealing several stunned goblins doing their best to stay afloat in the water I’d used to cushion their landing. With a smug grin, he turned and said something to his followers, then strung a fresh bolt on the crossbow and took aim at the goblins below.
That was when I tore the roof of the shaft open.
With a deafening splitting of rock, the top of the hill opened like an iris, and sunlight poured in. It was a beautifully clear fall morning, and wisps of cloud scudded briskly across the blue. Everyone looked up in surprise, with gasps or shouts of alarm or what I assumed were curses.
A new, valid path to my dungeon core having thus been created, I went ahead and dropped the roof on the party of adventurers.
You killed Arnul Aricson [Goblinslayer] - Human Warlord (Lv. 17)!
You killed Human Warrior (Lv. 9)! Bonus xp from kill streak!
You killed Human Hunter (Lv. 5)! Bonus xp from kill streak!
You killed Human Rogue (Lv. 7)! Bonus xp from kill streak!
You killed William Wilhelz [Butcher] [Goblinslayer] - Human Warrior (Lv. 15)! Bonus xp from kill streak!
Level Up!
Dungeon Core Lv.3 → Dungeon Core Lv.11
Base stats increased
Some secondary stats increased
System access increased
+9 skill points
Achievement Unlocked!
Punching Up I
Condition: Defeat an enemy 5+ levels above you.
+25xp
Achievement Unlocked!
Punching Up II
Condition: Defeat an enemy 10+ levels above you.
+50xp
+1 skill point
Gained [Underdog]
Achievement Unlocked!
Pentakill
Condition: Achieve a 5-kill streak.
+50xp
Achievement Unlocked!
Ten and Counting
Condition: Reach lv. 10
+1 skill point
Level Up!
Dungeon Core Lv.11 → Dungeon Core Lv.13
Base stats increased
Some secondary stats increased
+2 skill points
Achievement Unlocked!
More Will Come
Condition: Survive your first delving.
+1 skill point
Achievement Unlocked!
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies
Condition: Defeat a party of adventurers with crushing damage from a trap.
Gained [Trapper]
Achievement Unlocked!
Overkill
Condition: Deal more than twice an enemy’s health in damage at once.
Gained [Overkill]
Skill Gained!
[Humanslayer]
You have killed 5+ [Humans] ([Monsters] only). Tiny increase to damage against [Humans].
Skill Gained!
[Friend to Goblins]
You have made yourself an ally of [Goblins]. [Goblins] are friendlier.
The end of the clamorous stream of reward notifications was marked by the sound of Arnul’s crossbow splashing into the water.