I knew I made it sound like I made a grand escape in the last chapter but it’s more like I moved over and started going around in circles. Then the other realization came in, my realm expands over time. Well it’s less that it can expand, and it’s more like the realm will expand to the amount of energy that I have available. So while it is expanded from before it’s not all that much bigger. It takes a couple of days for my actual first loot drop and I win myself a whole copper coin, of which I’m obviously going to spend it all in one place. Eventually I find out why none of the rewards have been making it to me, and then I close that loophole that lets the realm extractor work on my income.
The undead correspondingly start attacking my realm with some frequency now, and most of them are demolished when my realm is overloaded and the shades surge to punish the overcrowding. The most interesting part of the surges is that the overflow is converted to coins upon conclusion. I am nudged by the grandmaster but asking him if he wants to have the before extraction arbitrated ends the legal discussion. The next day the numbers are more than it ever was before, and it is apparent that I’m not allowed to save up my coins for a card pack. It takes for the influx to arrive at its new equilibrium.
The main area that the Grandmaster directly controls has by this point been scrubbed clean. His delvers have been trying to control the presence of the randomized periphery and after not being able to expand into it long term have settled on minimizing it. This works great until they get to the yellow gate. The first trigger it and get scolded by causing a new expansion, so they elect to bypass it and move though to the area beyond. This reveals the other complication, the size my dungeon has to work with is fixed and it’s not on a per floor basis. It is a volume limit and a placement limit once the space is set up. So removing all the rooms and things above only moved them beyond the yellow gate.
The assaults continue to cycle for several weeks afterward, and I continue to gain essence, and even with this off and on I gain some racial levels. For each level my total area limit expands and so does my dungeon. More and more miasma is being blown into my dungeon to the point where I just gain access to necrotic slimes to deal with it. I keep my new slimes off the first floor to minimize the chance at overflowing onto the surface. I’m monitored for several days by the delvers on behalf of the untrusting undead lords. The spawn points ended up being in the periphery when they did happen on the upper floors. The potions using the slime can remove or mitigate miasma related debuffs, so they ended up being really popular by most delvers.
The potions become a rallying point for the anti-undead sentiment, and the undead use it accordingly to monitor the activity of the groups using the potion. The other thing the potion did is much more subtle, and I only caught it because one of my upper floors went away. The potion’s purification effect against miasma interacts with the undead lord's use of the same miasma to hold his realm together. This all comes to a head when the grandmaster drops by with his army and requests to have a chat. He then proceeds to reorder the foyer to make it a better meeting room.
Myrry and Colic join me as I arrive on the first floor for the meeting. I can feel the meeting being broadcast, so that I can assume that the local hive knows Myrry is here. By this point I’ve managed to become level nine and the next level will breach me up to tier two. “I suppose some congratulations are in order, Lord Walker. You have been successful at pushing up your level with the main crux of the essence being from the fools at the bottom of the tiering chart. I know you were not paying attention but you have already slain three Pyg tyrants in addition to the Orc tribe that you won against handily. I am considering bringing in more things but with the standard risk assessments from my court, I cannot take the risk so readily.”
In the pause I think for a bit and then say, “Must be dragons then.”
“Indeed, I have one of them in card form, and the rest of their scouring circles for me to miscalculate. What is your opinion on receiving said card?” Both of our entourages are aghast in his directness.
I pull up the binds I used back when I was with Arthur and his friends, on the undead creature and the gid. I then calibrate it to project the initial outcome of any card placed into it and turn it over to the grandmaster. The undead lord connects the card in and harrumphs, so I ask, “Not to be?”
The grandmaster pulls out another card and checks against it, then pulls out a third card. “Take and bind these two, as I need to know if they will be enough to keep the cost of suppression manageable.”
I take the fire slime and frost slime cards and bind them in. Both were really nice cards apparently as it improved the amount of amplification I can have for slimes. “They are in.”
The Grandmaster takes this as his cure to check the original card again, “So close, well, it just passed, so I have a week for it to stabilize which gives me a margin of two days…” I feel a telepathic pulse and then he gives me the dragon card. I bind in what I can and then pace the monster to be dealt with.
“Are you sure that was wise?” asks Colic.
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“I approve,” buzzes Myrry, “We even got a thirty percent bonus against it.”
I instruct Merry to fight the dragon if that is how she feels, and the meeting disbands. We are all soon back to safety as the dragon rampages through the lower levels. Its devastation exacerbated the entire situation and turned my entire dungeon into a space littered with environmental hazards. The difficulty increases were mitigated by my resistances increasing over time. I’m not sure of my grasp on time as I start hearing the lord’s chatter talking about a draconic invasion. Ragnar was released by the draconic invasion and has made it his point to ruin my day before dealing with the dragons. This fractured his court as the paladins disagreed.
The paladins pulling out of Ragnar’s domain exacerbated the conflict, as they are against both the undead and the dragons present. None of the lords help the paladins either and they knew that was coming, as discretion if the better part of valor in an event like this. Antonio drops by and leaves me a card containing barley to bind in. They do come back later expecting more but after they get a delver to poke through the yellow gate controls they determine that most of the energies from the barely went in my biome generation. My surface is a hive of activity, as the paladins clear out the monsters and control it to be their base of operations.
Inky arrives and asks for the help of the rest of my servants, they go siege the dragon for a bit and then return. The elves start crafting javelins for what I assume is a rematch. Inky calls for help again and when the elves return they are without the spears, obligating them to craft more. The paladins use a delver to bypass the yellow gate to check in on the dragon. And then they return to the surface, as the cycle continues. The dragon starts to thrash, as the bindings tighten, and the spear wounds must be adding up. I feel the dragon improve the affinity of the attacks used against it, in a futile attempt to make the attacks hurt less. Such tactics prove futile as Apocynum returns with a level in dragon slayer.
The parts of my dungeon altered by the dragon’s presence are encapsulated by blobby and converted into the final bit of essence to push me up to tier two. Given that this tier one is treated as a remedial tier this isn’t that surprising. Given that the average starting level of one of us who have made the crossing is level twenty, my starting at level one isn’t that great. On the other hand that level is my personal level not my realm level for once you cross realm level seven there is a qualitative shift in the composition independent from the separation between tiers. This is exacerbated by the fact that telling someone’s tier only works for their non-class levels, though you can look for class levels it spits out a lot of false positives from all the high level farmers and the like.
All this to say that everyone knows I tiered up; and the responses are immediate as they are jockeying for a new up and coming minor player to take the heat off of a more established player. I wouldn’t mind helping with more of that if most of the entities present were not monsters. Still the paladins have been pulling the other people toward me and have started with the outlying members of the other groups. They have also been making a mess of the current political situation, though I do suppose that the radicals do have a tendency to come on top in a civil war.
This is why paladins tend to be separated, and why they have lost a tenth of their number to the other forces ganging up on them to diminish their threat when the major conflict concludes. Not that the paladins are sitting idly either, as they are enacting plans to slow down the undead enough to protract the conflict to bleed the monsters harder. Antonio and the head paladin come down, thinking that Antonio can introduce the head paladin and mark the zealot as trustworthy. I send up Myrry to converse with the pair, and the head paladin looks at my scrying sensor.
“You do know that if we win that we will control you via access to your surface.” I regard their threat for a moment.
“You take the risk, you deserve the reward. But beware, the same people who call for it to start tend to have different skills and mentality to what is required to maintain the victory beyond when the original challenge is gone. For that I suppose I will be waiting to help.” The head paladin, having experienced exactly what I’m threatening him with laughs as he leaves.
Antonio, chasing after him, gets to the entrance as the paladins and the undead face off. “How did your discussion go over? You seem elated, should I check if I should threaten as well?”
“Wait, you delivered the threat and he counter-threatened you and the undead lord wants to escalate?” Antonio demonstrates he is just utterly confused with his comment.
“There is something to be said for calling out my bluff to my face, young lords tend to be much more cowed. Also [SMITE EVIL].” The head paladin unleashed their skill early, putting out its use early to make the Lord of the local undead have to make the calculations on his status instead of letting him move freely and catching him out later. It makes such a mess against both sides that the war is going to protract even longer as there is no longer enough of an army to hold the dragon long enough to deal the damage. Wait, that must be how Apocynum won against the dragon I was given. Looks like I could be more aggressive against the monsters I place down in card form.
I check back at the battle and the entire battle is covered in dragonfire, and broken fortifications. The undead lord slew the dragon and turned its corpse into an undead behemoth. Two more dragons showed up to pick off the weakened stragglers, and most attempted to enter my dungeon to avoid round two. Eventually the dragon pair got bored and left, leaving a smoking crater where the battle took place. Then everything shudders as I’m on the move again, and the undead lord leaves the paladins so utterly diminished that they will not be a threat to him for a while. Antonio lies dead at the entrance, his body a crisp, while the head paladin survived, battered and broken off of the main section on the first floor. The husk laughs as it rips off its sundered armor and flesh that it was welded to, and then puts out enough healing to restore itself to full health. Then she puts on a dress and leaves in a disguise I’m not even sure will hide the head paladin.