As I approached the planet below me, I seethed in rage.

How dare they! What gives them the right!

Nothing! Nothing, I say!

And yet, the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful. An endless cycle where those that have, get more and more while those who lack lose more and more.

But fine.

If they want to play that kind of game, I can play along. At least, for as long as it’s necessary.

And then they’ll be the ones getting ripped out of their day to day lives.

But first, I need a starting point.

The self-titled gods that ripped me from Earth and pulled me into their world made no pretence at what they want from me. To be a Dungeon Core for them.

Sounds good at first, doesn’t it? Wrong!

So very and utterly wrong.

They do not care about me, nor the undoubtedly thousands of other souls they summoned previously.

No, all they want is a mindless little slave that’ll produce hordes of weak monsters for their champions to battle and grow from. There’s no glory in being a god’s Dungeon. There’s no growth in it, no potential. No dream of unimaginable power.

No, just a simple slave without a will.

But I’m gonna show them. Oh, how I’ll show them!

They made a mistake this time in picking me.

I may not have a unique advantage to the other poor souls that came before me. I don’t have a perfect memory, I don’t have a cheat ability to take advantage of, I don’t have a god’s blessing or eldritch knowledge to draw upon.

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No, I have none of that. But what I do have can be so much more deadly. Maybe not in its immediate power, but that’s a part of its unique strength. It’s sneaky, at least in the beginning and once it get rolling, it’s often too late.

It’s my strange little obsession. Some may have called it weird or even creepy, but I don’t care. Especially not now, when it may allow me to take down some bigots with overinflated egos.

Which is why, instead of searching for a place with natural resources like a river, forest or mountain to begin building my dungeon, I’m instead painstakingly combing over the landscape below me, searching for that perfect environment to serve as my starting point.

I have no idea if I would have been able to find the correct spot as a human. As far as I ever researched (which wasn’t that deep), it’s pretty inconspicuous. Thankfully, my newly gained dungeon senses helped with that.

While I could exactly scan the complete underground area, my sense did manage to penetrate a couple of metres into the earth. Enough for another new part of my senses to tell me exactly what kind of material I was looking at.

And there it is. Asbestos.

The fabled construction material of many horror stories. Used due to its relative cheapness while still being quite tough, but also a great thermal and electric insulator. The problem?

It’s an insidious, slow killer.

And I was going to build my dungeon out of it.

Decision made, I reached out with my new and strange dungeon instincts, initiating the process of forming my core and thus becoming a proper Dungeon Core.

It didn’t take long for a small hole to form in the asbestos riddled earth. That small hole then expanded into a small cave in which my core began to form.

Mystical energies of the world gathered into the small underground space until something gave and they condensed. Where the energies mingled just moment before now stood, or more accurately, floated, a smallish pyramid made of iridescent crystal.

It was about a fist sized tetrahedron. Or a d4, as it’s known among fans of a certain roleplaying game.

Either way, I was now a fully formed Dungeon Core. I was also on a timer.

It was a small mercy the gods gave me, the only mercy. A small, excruciatingly small amount of knowledge about this new world I now found myself thrust into.

And thanks to it I knew. I knew that the process of core creation, of forming the body that I’d inhabit wasn’t just for show. The energies involved were immense and most anyone with sensitivity for such things would take notice.

I had, more or less, a month to prepare my dungeon for invaders. Probably less.

And so, I got to work. There’s no time to waste.