George laid on the dirt floor, aching from combat, exertion of using spells, and laughing aftwerwards. He watched the two lizardmen slowly get up on their feet, and he could hear something approaching them, if ever so slowly.

He turned towards one of the corridors and saw a green slime slowly oozing towards the dead spiders. The first time he saw the slime, he was curious, and that curiosity didn’t wane yet.

He slowly got up, trying to get a better look at the slime. He moved closer to it, clearly seeing its dark green, rocky core inside the bubble of slime that was protecting it.

The slime surrounded a dead spider, the carapace dissolving quickly as the ooze made short work of the corpse. It didn’t take long for the gooey slime to darken in colour, now becoming more olive instead.

There were a few more slimes coming from the corridors, and the dead spiders were completely gone after at most a few minutes. George wondered what would happen if he were to touch one, but decided against it after seeing how quickly the corpses were dispatched of. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption that the slime was toxic, acidic, or both.

At that moment, the slimes spat out a few nuggets of metal on the dirt, and George curiously took one. It was similar to the coin he had in his pocket, a featureless circular lump of metal.

Picking up the other pieces strewn on the floor, George was now five ‘coins’ rich, even if he didn’t know how much they were worth if anything.

He asked one of the lizardmen that were idling by. “How much are these things worth?”

He realised he hadn’t learned either of their names.

The lizardman came up to him and plucked the coin with his rough fingers, then eyed it intensely.

“It could be melted down into something useful, maybe. We have seen these before, and the invaders seem to have them in throngs, but we don’t know what for.”

He bit on the coin, the metal giving way to the sharp teeth. “It looks too thin for anything useful, would have to get smelted properly. But I don’t know much about it.”

The lizardman handed the now deformed coin with a side of saliva to George, at which he just grimaced. “You can keep that one.”

The lizardman shrugged and put it into a pouch on his hip.

George looked around the cavern, now devoid of spiders. There were a lot of webs around, and the egg sacks laid in corners. George approached one of the sacks slowly.

The spiders didn’t seem all that useful, but George didn’t really want to do anything to the sacks. If there were smaller spiders inside and he pierced it, they’d just end up with crawlies on the floor that would get in the clothes.

“Do we burn them?” He glanced at the lizardmen and pointed at one of the sacks. He wondered if slimes would come again if they did so.

“Although it may not look like Grrrg, the Hunting Spiders are a part of the Guardian. We probably should have avoided killing them in the first place.”

George finally learnt how the spiders were called, at least by the lizardmen. If they were hunters, he wasn’t sure of their efficiency.

He was curious by what the lizardman meant about the spiders being a ‘part’ of the Guardian. He remembered Kr’tcha telling him that the “Guardian was everything around them”, but couldn’t put his finger on what exactly that meant.

The Guardian didn’t seem to be a Deity, and he wasn’t sure what exactly it did, but the Grolari seemed to indirectly worship it as something more powerful than them.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

If the spiders were a part of the Guardian, and the Grolari were dependent on it, what did that make him exactly?

He touched the left side of his face, remembering the tattoo on it that sprawled towards his neck. There was so much more he needed to know.

And he didn’t know of the time.

“Let’s just go back then, I guess,” George sighed as the three of them picked up their weapons and left the now almost empty cavern, just as the light on the ceiling gave out.

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The Dungeon was confused. There were a few traces of life next to several rapidly disappearing ones. The fleshbags weren’t supposed to be fighting one another.

The dying creatures were nothing special, and he could see that investing more in the Spiders was a futile effort. When it was a fledgling, the Spiders just appeared nearby, and it had considered that they would be enough to start with.

It could feed off their dormant energy, slowly growing in size and influence in the ground while the Spiders lived and died on their own accord.

The first invasion saw the Spiders being killed left and right, while only a few invaders had died. The loss of life was nowhere near enough to be comfortable to the young Dungeon.

The slimes were made to clean everything up after all the death. While the Dungeon revelled in death, it didn’t appreciate being surrounded by the remains of it after the energy was siphoned from the bodies.

The slimes seemed to be suitable for that task. It didn’t know how or why it knew how to create slimes, just that it did.

In essence, the slime was a really minute version of a Dungeon. Just like the Dungeon stored energy in its cores that it hid around the caverns it had to make, the slimes protected their little core in, well, slime. They fed on the dead, and in some cases the living, just like the Dungeon did, and the Dungeon of Skull Mount was proud of making the few varieties of slimes as it developed and learned.

It wasn’t until long since it had started living that the Dungeon learned that some humans could be bargained with. They seemed to have a love for metal and ore, particularly in incredibly thin circle shapes.

Compressing useless metal into small lumps wasn’t particularly hard to do, and making the slimes carry them was even easier.

Distributing the lumps to the humans was a tricky task. The Dungeon hoped that it could protect its cores by giving the Humans some when they killed anything else inside, from Spider to fleshbag, to another invader. The latter seldom happened to the Dungeon’s lament, as that would mean fewer invaders to worry about.

Some people would pick up on the metals, and leave the Dungeon alone when they killed Spiders in the few upper chambers. The Dungeon was happy with this arrangement but still wished more invaders would die in the process. It would grow much slower if it had to spend time giving metal away for no apparent return.

But there were only a few people like that approaching the Dungeon. A lot of them seemed intent on the cores.

And such was another large group that approached it from the west, especially so soon after the previous one.

Traps would need to be set again, and the fleshbags inside put to use again. The large number of fleshbags near one of the cores seemed to be doing quite well off, and no invaders reached them yet. They even managed to make weapons similar to the invaders’ and distribute them to other fleshbags.

Maybe the fleshbags could be rewarded more for keeping the invaders in check. They even managed to lose less than usual yesterday. But right now, they needed to be put to use again.

Maybe later though, as the Dungeon needed to focus on the defences and the group seemed far away still. The western side seemed easier to see far into than the others, but it didn’t know why. The Dungeon learned a new trick, though. The invaders didn’t like being on fire. And fire was easy enough to make.

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Kr’thra wondered where George stormed off, his fleshy face turning red as he did so. The humans Gaz’Ruk told about seemed dangerous and menacing, but George seemed helpless at times. He couldn’t even fight properly and seemed to be lost.

She had wondered how he got here, or why. And why was he intent on learning about the Goddess that much, then throwing it all away.

She knew Humans were a different sort, but George was different from them still. She could feel something weird about him, but could also feel that he was a part of the Guardian just like everyone in the tribe was.

He still needed to be watched more before he could be trusted completely, and she would definitely do that.

He was useful, that was for sure, as what Gaz’Ruk told her when he got Varash back from near death was unimaginable. They knew of magic, sure, they’ve encountered Humans who used it as well, and many of her friends fell to it, but it was the first time they had someone that used that kind of magic on their side.

She felt a tingle down her side. The Guardian would be calling them again soon.