The rest of the preparation time that the tutorial gave them passes slowly. Doyle tweaks a few things about how his monsters fight but overall just focuses on filling in his territory with stone. Ally takes the time to read more while glancing at the countdown. She occasionally gives Doyle an update. When it gets down to only having an hour left Doyle has filled all the excess space and put into place a law so that as his territory expands the new void gets filled as well. With not much else to do but a good bit of world energy left he goes into overdrive. Focusing intently on his core room walls and their toughness. Without the tutorial holding him back these efforts manage to raise his creation skill by two levels.
With only a minute to go Ally counts down the seconds. At 30 seconds the entrance portal and the temporary tutorial portal both flicker out of existence. At 15 Doyle gets a sense of movement despite all his senses telling him that his dungeon hasn’t budged. At zero everything goes black, even Doyle’s sense of his territory is gone.
Only a moment passes though it feels like an eternity and then everything is back including the entrance portal. Though the portal is now changed. Before it was as if looking out into deep space but now a different scene greets them. A wide plane of grass spread out on the other side with the occasional tree to break up the view. Though to the right a forest can just be seen on the edges of his view. To Doyle it appears they are either on the top of a small rise or on the edge of a hill as while there are ups and downs to the terrain his portal sits above it.
Doyle shows the scene to Ally and she laughs, ‘I hope we are just on a hill or something. We would laugh about it later but at the moment it would be frustrating if we miss out on a lot of adventurers just because our entrance ended up floating in midair.’
Doyle flashes a darker shade for just a moment, ‘eugh, that would be annoying. Though from what I can see, even if we are off the ground it shouldn’t be by much. More important to us is I think we are in vision range of a couple towns. See over there by the forest? Those dark smudges might be houses.’
Ally nods, ‘could be but whatever else that on the other side is definitely some sort of town. Those blocky tall shapes should be multistory buildings. The only question is if either have people in them yet or ever will. While the system attempts to save everyone it can, the population will have taken a nosedive. Plus it has been anywhere between one to five years that humans have been gone and things aren’t going to be where people left them. Either from time or the fact that terrain shifts around when the world gets remade.’
‘Huh’, Doyle thinks on it for a second, ‘that would make sense. The system only arrives as magic does so wouldn’t have much time to record what things are supposed to look like. And it would explain two towns being so close together. We are only just far enough away from either to make walking to us inconvenient though with stat boosts even that isn’t quite true.’
Ally grimaces, ‘Yeah, this is closer than I would prefer we start. Later on when we get popular a dungeon town could pop up and with not one, but two towns right next door might stunt the growth. Then again, who knows how your people will handle dungeons to start with. The tutorial tries to instill a general message of don’t mess with a dungeon unless it messes with you but people are greedy.’
‘At least we are close enough to the forest that we should get some critters in before any sentients make their way out here. The dungeon pulse should have happened when we were blanked out and most nearby animals will come because of the energy released. While over all animals won’t be more aggressive, you could say they have an agenda now even if it is more of an instinct. They will seek sources of power so they can potentially grow into a monster or at the very least a magical beast.’
Doyle tilts to the side, ‘what is a magical beast? I understand monsters well enough but you just made a distinction between the two.’ Ally shrugs, ‘even under the system it isn’t that well defined. You can just assume that if the system doesn’t recognize the animal as a monster but it has some magical component then it is one. Horned rabbits are a good example. While they are pests their horns form from the energy they can’t use. This means depending on what energy they take in will alter their horns properties. A rabbit that develops one from snacking on a mystical herb that helps with burns will have a horn that soothes burns when applied to them.’
‘Useful yes but not economical. A lot of the energy goes to waste so it would always be better to just harvest the herb than to feed it to a rabbit. This is a big reason they are a pest. Dungeons like you are one of the exceptions as your herbs grow back fast enough for everyone to share. Though it will take you having mystical herbs in the first place before people go after your rabbits as well.’
Doyle nods, ‘hmm, makes sense. Though I am sure as with anything that involves magic there are exceptions to the rules.’ Ally smirks, ‘Well of course there is! What fun would magic be if it couldn’t break its own rules occasionally.’
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And with that they both quiet down to watch the surroundings. Their first visitors are simple insects and other such things. They don’t even count as invaders so Doyle is able to station a goat at the entrance to stomp them. Because even if they aren’t invaders he can’t just deconstruct them. This gains him another pattern but it is clear the system doesn’t note them as worth a dungeons attention. The pattern doesn’t even mention what it can summon with the simple name of prey insects.
It even includes the insects which eat other insects and the bees that came in for the flowers. With that oddity Doyle turned to Ally who assured him that if any of the insects ever mutated into a real threat, the system would recognize it as a separate pattern. While having the bees count as harmless doesn’t feel quite right to Doyle it doesn’t stop him from spawning a couple hives around the dungeon. He has clover all over the place so it only makes sense to him to have a few bees. Though he doesn’t want invaders to keep smashing his hives so creates them set into the walls like his rabbit warrens.
The excitement of stuff entering his dungeon even if they are just bugs soon wears off though and so Doyle and Ally turn back to the dungeon proper. He still is getting 250 energy an hour and the walls won’t thicken themselves. A couple days pass like this and besides a couple of rabbits that oddly enough added to the horned rabbit pattern nothing else has shown up. Doyle has even started to question if the towns in the distance are empty.
Finally three days after he opened up shop they can see a small group of people approaching. The group is dressed in an odd mix of sports gear and leather armor but despite that do not look ready for a dungeon dive. They jump at the slightest rustle in the grass and more than once someone tries to head back towards the town next to the forest before being stopped by the others.
As they get closer, the situation becomes clearer as Doyle picks up snippets of conversation. It took so long for anyone to come check him out because the two towns had argued over who ‘got’ him. Only once they realized neither side was backing down and both were equally close did they decide on a joint venture. The weak group of chaff now approaching him wasn’t a representation of the local level of strength. Rather, they were the weakest people from both towns who still wanted to be adventurers just so neither side would get a leg up on the other.
Ally and Doyle both groan at these revelations. If there is one thing they don’t need, it is politics stopping people from coming around. Ally rubs the bridge of her nose with one hand while waving the other around. ‘I left court to get away from politics for a while. Not that I didn’t expect it to come about after a while with a dungeon. In fact, it was inevitable. Dungeons are too important of a resource. But not this early on!’, She whines. ‘We will have to give them something good so others are willing to go against whoever is in charge over there. Any other world and I would say drop more coins but who knows if they even realize how important they are yet. Look at them! They look half starved so how could they even worry about a copper coin. Goodness gracious, the people in charge might even be blockading the system generated shops for all we know making coins worthless.’
Doyle brightens up as something she said clicks, ‘they do look half starved, don’t they? In fact, I bet if someone is playing tyrant over there, a lot of people probably are. And you know what? Everything in our dungeon can drop food people won’t mind eating. Even the kobolds tend to just drop horned rabbit meat most of the time.’
Ally covers her mouth with her hand, ‘Oh, oh you’re right.’ Her mouth curls into a slightly sinister smile, ‘we are a decent food stockpile at the moment aren’t we? How could I forget that part of why cities form around dungeons. A dungeon that drops food and has water available removes a lot of threat from a siege. Not much of a problem right now but it works just as well to provide food in hard times as well. Which this definitely will be for most of the world.’
‘Any livestock would have died or become able to defend itself while humans were away. That and with how new adventurers can strip a region bare of low level food monsters things must be tight. Until someone steps up to prevent over hunting and some people get enough levels to go after more dangerous prey, not even farming will work out so well.’
Doyle nodded his core, ‘just the fact that the first room has horned rabbits hopping around might be enough to attract people to us. However I don’t trust whatever fools are in charge over there. We need to do something so the news of food being here spreads to the general populace. From the sounds of it we are dealing with two groups of bullies over there so we need some of that group to make it out. Though not just anyone but rather those who wanted to escape earlier.’
Ally claps her hands, ‘yeah they at least look willing to go against whatever orders the group has been given. Though we need some way to let them escape.’ Doyle shifts back and forth while he takes a closer look at the group. ‘Hmm, it looks like the ones trying to escape are dressed a little better? None of them are in full leather but they at least have good boots. Actually, those three who have tried to escape are the only ones with leather boots. I guess I could get my monsters to prefer attacking those that don’t have them?’
‘That would work’, Ally agrees, ‘but you can’t make it too obvious. If anything, we might just want to split them off from the group and have them run away first. We just have to make sure they get some meat before then. You might even want to get the assassin vines to let the group pass through without any attack so people feel safer. You do that and we can focus on our visitors, they are almost here after all.’