Miles away, on a small hill that just barely poked over the jungle, Ki Jung whipped his head towards the explosion of sound from his lookout post. He scrambled to pull out his telescope, his young hands trembling in fear and excitement before peering through the lenses at the shredded vegetation formed by the blast. He watched in a mixture of amazement and not a little bit of fear as an archway of rock rose from the ground, the grey stone and spiked edges setting off the boy's imagination.
It took Ki Jung several seconds to understand what he was seeing before remembering his grandfather’s words. He could hear the old man now, his voice still strong despite his age.
“If you ever see anything strange out there, something unnatural created by an unseen hand, you come here - you hear? You come here and you tell me what you saw.”
“But why, grandfather?”
“There are some things in this world so wonderful and terrible that it changes everyone around it. But never you mind about that.”
With a shout, Ki Jung dropped the telescope, one of the most valuable possessions in their village, and dashed off with all the exuberance youth could give him, flying down the hill and towards his grandfather's hut.
----------------------------------------
Recovering from the explosion was a simple, but expensive task. The rock around the blast had not just cracked, but shattered into gravel, forcing me to absorb it before manifesting new stone. I was very, VERY careful with the order I manifested the stone, but there were no more incidents, and in short order I had my dungeon good as new. The only downside to the whole incident, besides the hit to my pride, was the mana loss. Stone shards that had once been manifested stone were scattered around the dungeon, out of reach despite being invested. For an ENAD, it would have been like having their leg fall asleep because they got drunk and didn't move for 36 hours. I could feel the stone, but moving it was impossible.
After the ground was level, I had a large clearing absolutely devoid of vegetation. Ryia said that was actually a good thing, it would cause us to be noticed more easily. Small blessings. Once reconstruction was finished, I set to work on making an archway, something that could be noticed and recognized as an entrance to a dungeon. It would be the first thing any ENAD saw of me, the first impression that would set the stage for all that came after, the cover page on my book, my first magnum opus. Ryia wanted me to create a jagged stone mouth, with stalactites around the edges to complete the theme I would set going forward. I thought that was a bit cliche and told her so.
“Ha! Since when do you know what's cliche? Anyway, until we make the dungeon there's no point in trying to make some grand statement about it.”
I conceded the point, and soon a looming stone mouth with teeth sharper than nature could manufacture was stretched high into the forest. For now, it was only about half the height of the canopy; once my dungeon was ready, I would expand it until it could be seen from far into the distance.
“Great!” Ryia exclaimed. That seemed to be her favorite word. “Now for the hard part. Mobs.
“There are three ways to make a mob. The first is to infuse a dead creature that isn’t too messed up. You can fix whatever killed it, then reproduce that creature for your dungeon. You’ll have to tweak their mindset a bit to make them stay in the dungeon and attack everything in sight, but that won’t be too hard. The second method is to manufacture a mob, either changing a blueprint you already have or creating a new one from scratch. This is how monstrous abominations are made, but considering you have no idea what you're doing, I'm gonna stop you right there. The last method is extremely complicated and requires a magical matrix, but it's how golems and elementals are created. You really shouldn't mess with that stuff unless you know what you're doing. The last four ghost apocalypses can be traced to a dungeon screwing up a magical matrix.
"To do any of this, we're going to have to lure a creature in here and murder it as cleanly as possible. That usually isn’t too difficult unless you’re stuck somewhere especially desolate, but you really lucked out with this jungle. Just wait for night and some creature is bound to come investigate. An "accidental" nudge to a stalactite and you should have your first mob.”
As night fell, I could hear the jungle come to life. Shrieks of birds mingled with the shills of insects and the bellows of larger beasts to make an ungodly racket that was somehow calming. I was no ENAD, none of the creatures out there could harm me, so I could fully appreciate the primal beauty without fear.
As it turned out, it wasn’t some ferocious predator that had the privilege of being the first living thing to enter my dungeon. It was a member of the greatest, most expansive population on the planet, one that could conquer beasts even humans would fear, whose strength was nothing less than miraculous. It was… (Drumroll please) ... an ant. When I told Ryia, she laughed so hard I thought I'd broken her.
“Well, I guess it would work. Size it up and make a bunch of them and they could be a good mob.”
The only problem was that even with all of my power I had limitations on what I could do when a living creature entered my domain. Just like how I couldn’t absorb a living creature, directly influencing the area around it was much more difficult. However, the area that was tamper proof by me increased, and decreased, based on the size of the creature. None of that particularly mattered, as I infused the ant directly. The thing glowed for a moment before it froze, the only moving part of it its antennae, twitching through the air.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Having a living creature invested with my mana was... strange. The ant was now a part of me, a part of my “body” if you will. At the same time, the ant had its own instincts and desires. For an ENAD, it was comparable to getting so mad you slugged your boss. Sure, you should technically have had full control over your muscles, but that doesn't mean you could have stopped. Ryia said that eventually I would be able to control my creatures manually, but that would only come with immense time and practice.
After I had the creature's blueprints, I told the ant to make its way down to my dungeon's lowest chamber before I started work on my ant army. I could see immediately that simply making the creature large wouldn’t work. Insects didn’t have lungs per se but had thingies that pulled oxygen from the air and directly into the ant's tissues. If I made them larger, all that would happen is it would take about two steps and die of oxygen deprivation.
To fix this, I either had to change the entire respiratory system of the ant or somehow get more oxygen to it. I solved this problem by stripping oxygen from the air until the concentration was high enough to support them. It wasn't a perfect solution, and it placed a hard cap on the maximum size of the ants, but it would do.
The ant was about three feet tall, its surface a glossy black. Its eyes were dark orbs on a smooth chitin face that led to a pair of sharpened mandibles. I had also sharpened the tips of the ant's six legs, causing it to make a “ting ting ting ting ting ting” sound when it moved. When I was sure it wasn’t going to fall over dead, I checked on the progress of the original ant. It was, as you would expect, not making good time. I belatedly realized there was no need to make the little thing crawl the whole way. Once I had infused it, I could manipulate the area around it without a problem, same for any creatures I manifested. Sure, the sight of a tiny ant being whisked through a dungeon on a moving stone platform was odd, but there was nobody around to see it.
"Granite, are you personally moving a single ant through your dungeon?" Well, almost nobody.
"We have to respect the father of whole new generation of killing machines!"
"That's... actually a good point. Carry on."
Ryia's love language is death; speak that and you can get away with anything.
----------------------------------------
Miles away, on the hill his grandson had so carelessly dropped the almost irreplaceable telescope, Akira Jung peered through the lenses of the device, examining the stone archway in the bright light of noon, his bald head beading with sweat at the oppressive temperature the sunbeams brought.
“Can it truly be? A dungeon, out here? No, it must be some remaining ruin from a civilization long past.”
----------------------------------------
I was feeling pretty good about myself. Overnight I'd managed to accumulate a small army of ants, filling the dungeon with the metallic sound of their steps. Although I had managed to lure several more insects in, Id stuck with the ants for now. When noon came I had about twenty ants which, taken together, were a force to be reckoned with. Although I had spent a good portion of my mana making them, it seemed like mana well spent. Now all I had to do was wait.
----------------------------------------
An ant, braver than the others, approached the entrance to the dungeon. The ant wasn’t sentient as such, but it did have a sort of primal cunning. It knew that the Queen of this lair had not told it to leave, but it was not expressly forbidden either. It approached the blinding light that was the entrance to the domain, its large eyes sensing the increase in luminosity as its antennae twitched in anticipation of the new things it could discover. Granite had sealed the entrance to his dungeon to keep the infused air in, so the ant could not yet smell all the things the world offered, but instinct guided it anyway.
Just inside the entrance to the dungeon, a single, small, harmless pebble lay. It was an ordinary pebble, just minding its own pebble business and thinking pebble thoughts. As the ant approached the entrance one of its legs, guided either by blind chance or the hand of fate would never be known, skittered off the very edge of the pebble, creating the tiniest of sparks as the dungeon sharpened tip shaved the barest portion of stone from the rock. The tiny spark looked around at the big wide world, living its short life to the fullest, when it suddenly realized that it did not need to die alone.
WOOF.
Turns out there are to major disadvantages to striping oxygen from carbon dioxide. One, it reduced the CO2 content, which was needed by plants to survive. An annoyance, but nothing major. The second, and much more import disadvantage was that it left an annoying amount of combustible carbon dust floating around. In the pure oxygen environment of the dungeon, the normal burst of flame that would have resulted was morphed into something that could shatter stone. In half a second the entire dungeon was a roiling inferno. The pressure built by the roiling inferno had nowhere to escape to, and by the time one and a half seconds had passed the air pressure of the entire dungeon had tripled. By the two second mark, Granite's seal to keep the air inside of his dungeon, never meant to stand up to such force, snapped.
----------------------------------------
Akira Jung squinted as a form began to approach the entrance to the archway, before the entire opening was suddenly a mass of red rapidly burning to white. He barely had time to stare at the blaze before a torrent of roiling flame burst from the entrance with such force it crossed the clearing with enough force to flatten and ignite several trees. The flame lasted only a second, but in that second Akira could have sworn he saw the forms of demons writhing, sinking into the ground as the blast subsided. For a moment, the world seeming to recognize the sheer insanity that led to this moment, before the calls of birds and trilling of insects resumed.
“Well, that’s a new dungeon all right. I wonder what it is that makes them so distinctive.”
----------------------------------------
I wheeze equivalented as fire infused mana hit me like a shot glass to the kidney, looking at the smoking remains of my dungeon through a haze of red. Every living thing in it had been scoured from the face of the earth, leaving only ashes where my aspiring murder bugs had proudly marched a moment before. And for the first time in my rather short life, I acutely felt the lack of my curse vocabulary.
“Why?" I coughed equivalented, expelling another handful of fire mana. "Just…why?”