When Duke arrived back on the Iron Reaver, he found the hold to be a sickening mess. There was blood and viscera splattered against the walls, some bits even dripping from the ceiling. The three women were arguing about who was going to clean the mess up. He smiled as Aurelia kept insisting that Duke would clean it all up once he got back.
“There are bone fragments stuck in the air scrubbers. We’re going to have to replace half of our filters, and I don’t have that many spares! Do you know what this place is going to smell like in an hour? In a day?” Mira was getting increasingly agitated as Aurelia seemed to be completely unconcerned. The fact that Aurelia wasn’t covered in gore like the other two women might have contributed to their irritation. Sometime it paid to be at the center of the blast radius of an Ability.
Duke raised his voice slightly. “Aurelia’s right. Cut her some slack.”
All three turned to face him. Aurelia beamed while the other two glared. At least they did until Duke activated a CLEANSE and a RESTORE over the entire ship. In a matter of seconds, they, and the entire ship, were all clean and had their clothing and items returned to perfectly working order.
“How in the name of Creskin did you do that?” Mira asked incredulously as she stared around the ship’s hold. Decades of wear and tear had been repaired in a matter of seconds. The scars in the flooring from when Malakai’s Star Sniper mech had broken free of its clamps during an assault drop were simply gone. For that matter, the barely welded clamps were now completely whole again.
“Magic.” Duke replied, schooling his face to hide the grin that was trying to spread across his face. Of all the powerful magic he had access to, this seemed to impress people more than anything. Mira’s next statement took Duke by surprise.
“You are going to make us rich!”
“I thought we were deeply in debt.” Duke responded.
“If you can do this to any ship, you are going to put a serious dent in the business of the shipyards. Can you do heavy repairs as well as all these minor ones?” She was getting excited.
Duke thought about it briefly before responding. “Yes, I can do heavy repairs, but if I take the business away from the shipyards, they are not going to be happy with us at all.”
Lya jumped in. “Quite right, Duke. That’s why we are going to do it through the shipyards. Can you imagine the reputational boost they would get if they could repair an entire ship with heavy damage to new condition in a single day? No one could compete with that level of service.”
Duke nodded in agreement. “I never thought of the Ability as a way to make money, but you are right, I could get through a shipyard’s entire repair roster in a single day. But I also do not want to do that for any extended length of time. There is a huge cosmos to explore, and I want to see as much of it as I can. Even the desolate and uninhabitable spaces.”
Mira stopped Duke. “Look, I know we haven’t known each other long, but we just survived our first battle together and there is an awful lot about it that I just don’t understand. Why do you want to come to these uninhabited areas anyway? There’s nothing here. And what were you doing on the last planet?”
Lya nodded along. “You called yourself a Dungeon Emperor. Does that have something to do with it?”
“Well, that sounds a bit kinky.” Mira mused, giving Duke an unreadable look.
Duke put all the minerals that he had poured out back in his INVENTORY. He then headed up to the bridge without a word. Curiosity grabbed the others, and they followed him up. When he got there, he sat down at the navigation station and turned around to face the rest of them. They all took seats and turned to face him.
“OK, Aurelia knows almost all of this already because she is my girlfriend and has been through more with me than either of you could imagine. That said, I’ll start from the beginning. I am not native to Teldin, and, quite possibly, not to this universe. Where I came from magic was the stuff of myths and legends. Settings like this ship are much more familiar to me even if we didn’t have anything quite this capable in space. I was brought to Teldin for reasons that are still not really clear. But what is clear is that I grow in power much faster than anyone else I know of. And there are forces at work way in the background that have some agenda.”
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The nodded along, not interrupting, so he continued. “The price on my head was issued by the forces that brought me to Teldin. They got pissed when I slipped from their grasp and took on a new sponsor.”
He could see them on the edge of their seats as he continued. “My new sponsor is the Overmind.” He paused for dramatic response but neither seemed to understand what that meant. “Neither of you know who the Overmind is?”
“Never heard of him. Is he a big deal or something?” Lya asked.
“The Overmind has dominion over all dungeons.”
Again, blank stares. Mira turned to Aurelia and asked, “Is that his kink, dungeons?”
Aurelia stared back at her blinking before responding. “It’s not a kink. Its something a whole lot more than anything like that.”
Mira responded. “You’re good looking and all, and you are a seriously hot girl, but I’m not into it. Sorry. I’ll just pilot the ship and mind my business. They’re all yours, Lya.”
Duke shook his head at the direction this was going. “Have you never heard of a dungeon? An opening in the world that leads to another dimension where you can fight monsters, solve puzzles, and even earn loot?”
“That sounds like an EDITS.”
“A what?”
“An EDIT. You know, An Extra-dimensional Individual Tunnel System.”
Duke and Aurelia exchanged glances. “Might be the same thing.” He surmised. “Anyway, the Overmind has dominion over all such places and as his sponsored individual, I have access to a lot of dungeon-related magic. What I am doing on these planets is planting dungeon cores to grow dungeons. The more I can plant, the greater a power boost I can potentially get.”
He could see by their confused faces that a demonstration was in order. “Take the ship down to land on the planet. We’re going outside for a demonstration.”
Mira shrugged and sent the ship down to the surface. As they descended, she asked, “so, what are we going to do with the heavy cruiser? It’s not like we can fly it into your local space station no questions asked. Mind you, there are places you cold do just that, but I don’t think you want to go to any of those.”
“I was thinking we would just let the Landassians know where the ship was so that they could pick it up. Maybe pick up some goodwill from them in the meantime.”
“I would sooner strip it down for parts and build a new ship of our own than give it back to those bastards.” Lya’s voice had gained an edge that would cut steel. There was a deep-seated anger underlying that statement.
“There’s a story there which we will get into later, but for now, we are landing. Everyone suit up. There’s not much of an atmosphere out there.” Mira simply triggered her suit to go into environmental mode and she was ready to go. Lya did essentially the same. Aurelia looked around, completely lost and Duke simply watched the others.
Lya and Mira saw Aurelia’s plight and helped her out of her armor, into a shipsuit and back into her armor. They both looked at Duke who smiled and asked, “You all ready to go?”
“What about you? You putting on a suit and coming along?”
Duke smiled. “No, and yes. In that order. Shall we?” He headed down to the hold and the boarding ramp.
As the ramp lowered and the shimmering field of energy kept the ship’s atmosphere in, Duke started for the ramp. Mira grabbed his shoulder to stop him. “Put a suit on already. There’s nothing to breathe out there.”
Duke chuckled. “I’ll be fine. I’ve already been out there if you don’t remember.”
“But how? How can you step out there without a suit?”
Duke smiled, meeting her gaze. His voice took on an enigmatic tone that spoke of things grand and unknown. “I am the Dungeon Emperor. Breathing is a luxury, not a necessity.” With that, he stepped down the ramp and onto the planet’s surface, her hand falling limply from his shoulder as she gaped at the man casually strolling onto the desolate, dusty rock of a planet without any protection whatsoever.
They all followed Duke out onto the planet’s surface to find him looking around and apparently doing some form of measurement with his hands. Lya muttered into her suit’s comms crystal, “What the heck is he doing?”
Duke’s voice came back to her from what sounded like behind her. She whirled around, not seeing anything. “I’m making sure this doesn’t interfere with the ship at all.”
Mira quickly agreed, “I’m on-board with that plan.”
Duke smiled as he walked about a hundred meters from the ship and planted a dungeon core he had been creating and pouring additional Mana into, until it was humming in his hand, clearly at the peak of its capacity. The core quickly expanded, forming a small hill with a cave opening. In all, the hill was about ten meters tall, and the cave opening was a roughly circular opening four meters wide.
Mira muttered, “OK, a hill with a cave in it. Not bad work for an earth-manipulator.”
When Duke gestured for them to follow him into the cave, he was followed by a pair of shrugs and one enthusiastic Aurelia. “Come on, you’re gonna love this!” She raced ahead of them into the cave. The other two followed more quickly than they had started, drawn in by her enthusiasm.
When they stepped through the opening, they found themselves elsewhere. The opening had led to a massive underground cavern with a ceiling high enough to fly their ship around. The floor of the cavern was another hundred meters below them and they stood on a cliff looking out on a world unlike anything they could have expected.
Below them was a primordial jungle filled with activity that they could occasionally catch glances of. Some creatures were moving from tree to tree, deftly swinging on long arms while large birds took to the air above the trees, occasionally heading their way to take a curious look before turning away.
Duke smiled as Aurelia deactivated her shipsuit and the other two quickly followed suit. They marveled at the damp, earthy air that filled their lungs. He interrupted their wonder with a simple statement. “Welcome to your first dungeon. Would you like to run it and see what loot you can get out of it?”