Chapter 7
DECISIONS DECISIONS
The week passed more slowly than Igmail preferred. The stone got more comfortable over time due to his efforts and Sophie’s miraculous ability to tan furs over the stove, but it was still stone, and it still made his neck hurt. The group had made a lot of progress on the bunker though, and Igmail even finishing his chosen wall and started to work on condensing the stone the others mined into his floor. At the same time Igmail also diverted a little bit of effort into making the floor smoother and softer, more pleasant to sleep on.
The week passed more quickly than Igmail preferred. Igmail quite enjoyed having people to talk to in his isolated hole, the current conversation about the city expansion being one example.
“Hey Nolan, what about you? What do you think about the expansion?” asked Igmaill, Nolan being the only one having yet to express an opinion.
“It’s a pain in the butt, that's what it is, but I’ll probably be able to buy my apartment outright by this time next year. All that forest pay is nice, and I reckon’ property value is about to plummet,” Nolan said thoughtfully.
“Not so much,” added Johan. “The new outer wall district will be cheap, sure, but the inner districts are safer, and people are willing to spend a lot to avoid some monsters.”
“Heh, scrubs,” heckled Igmail, referring to the people so incompetent at everything that they got assigned to scrub blood off the outside of the wall. “I got a room inside the outerwall. Probably the safest spot in the whole city, surrounded as I am by warriors. Plus, it's free! All my living expenses are on military gold,” Igmail playfully bragged as he pretended to lean against an invisible wall with his hands behind his head.
“That's just sad bro,” said Johan in a pitying tone.
“Do you need a hug?” asked Nolan, looking sympathetic.
“I got some tips if you want ‘em,” Sophie added savagely.
Igmail sat up sputtering, “No, I do not need your pity! I’m staying single on purpose I’ll have you know!” Igmail added with exaggerated defensiveness. It was an old stereotype that the military only allowed unattached soldiers to use military bunks, so sleeping in the wall was basically admitting you were single. Added to the fact that the high mortality rate among young adults made most people marry young, it was a relatively embarrassing thing to admit singleness at twenty three and a half.
“I’m gonna end up tier eight anyways, and it’d be sad to outlive my wife. That's all,” Igmail said as a joke. Nobody ever really believed they’d end up tier eight, at least, nobody who’d finished their training year.
The banter continued short into the night, none of them willing to sacrifice too much sleep when sleep could be the difference between living and dying out in the jungle. It was the next day when the knock on the door came. Nobody but Igmail was working, conserving energy for the trip back to Flourish, so it was relatively easy to hear the resonant boom of someone alerting them to their presence.
Igmail, the good host his mother had scared him into being, was the one to open it.
“Sergeant Withers, good morning,” said Igmail with a hint of surprise.
“Stone, nice to see you’re alive,” Withers responded with equal surprise and a bit of droll amusement. Igmail finished opening the door, revealing his most recent house guests. “You all ready to go?” asked Withers as he spotted his payload.
“Sir yes sir!” the soldiers shouted in response.
Withers sighed and mumbled something under his breath that Igmail wouldn’t have caught just two weeks ago; “Reject two promotions and I still gotta deal with this crap.” Hearing that, Igmail put the pieces together and realized that Withers was a tier five. Sergeants, as a rule, must be at least tier three, and tier requirements increased sequentially from there, so a sergeant plus two promotions would be tier five. Tier fives could also live to be three hundred, so Withers must’ve been around for a while to look fifty like he did.
“Welp, let's get a move on,” Withers drawled as the others began to exit the bunker.
Sophie led her troops in their parting words, offering the soldiers’ thanks for his help to him.
“Welcome back anytime,” Igmail said. “I’ve enjoyed having people around.” And so Igmail was alone once more. Igmail closed the door. His words to them were true, he had enjoyed having some company, but he was still a little relieved that he could have some personal time again. At least for now, it was a weight off his chest to be alone again. Or so Igmail told himself.
Igmail really got to work for the next week. Seeing how much could be done with a little bit of help, his newest hallway as evidence, really motivated him. Putting in his full effort Igmail condensed all the loose rock into the floor and then started in on the hall that Sophie and crew had started digging. He expanded the walls outward but kept the end of the hall unaltered, instead making thin layers of stone extra brittle, then just pulling out chunks of it before reinforcing the floors with it.
The hall made it a full extra foot before he started expanding it into a room. Additionally, Igmail pushed the ceiling up by a couple inches, giving him room to swing his spear more freely.
‘It’s been a good week,’ Igmail thought as he laid in bed. ‘So why am I so unsatisfied? I’ve been here a month, and for all that time I’ve never let a monster out and this place is already so much more comfortable and safe. I’m doing good work, so what's missing?’
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‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ thought Champion as he smashed a gigantic snake into the ground head first. The stone cracked before its skull could but the job still got done. He was alone at the moment, already on floor eight and only growing stronger. It had turned out that all those tunnels on the fifth floor connected to entirely other dungeons, his connection to his Master informing him spatial magic shenanigans were involved, so he had left Arty there to stem the tide of monsters trying to retake the top five floors.
Arty had experienced a large boost in power after killing the cockroach, the experience revealing a shard of his name. The improved intelligence that resulted meant that they could sit down and develop a crude sign language together, which was how they had communicated. Arty’s naming was not quite like what had happened to Champion, but similar.
If sapience was a palace to be looted, then Champion had kicked open the front doors, grabbed the king by his feet, and shook him upside down until the king admitted where he kept his most valuable jewels. Arty, meanwhile, had wandered in as a guest and was in the process of admiring the king’s art collection.
It was slower, but Arty was gaining a depth of perspective in a variety of things, while Champion was hyper focused on just one thing: combat. And Champion did a lot of combat while Arty was busy refining his rock collection.
He’d killed moles, he’d killed bats, he’d killed panthers by the dozen. Cockroaches, giant spiders, plague rats, fungal octopi, and even snakes made an appearance in his piles of dead. Eventually, he had just stopped bringing his kill back up to the surface, so everything his master received was from Arty. More than anything else Champion wanted to fight and grow, so those smaller matters of logistics fell to the wayside.
At the moment Champion was in a smaller room, about the size of the main room of the bunker rather than the caverns he had started to encounter more frequently. Around him was a very familiar sight, dead monsters. He sat and cultivated for a few moments, eager to repair the damage he had taken before moving on. He was vicious, not stupid.
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Igmail got up on the first day of the next week and realized he had three problems. As for the first: he had an extra transport hoop. It was standard procedure to rotate them in for repairs every few times the guards changed in the bunker, so Sophie had brought her own and then promptly forgot about it. Igmail was reinforcing under the bed when he discovered it.
The second problem was that monster production had diminished. Igmail had ordered his gorillas to rest and cultivate if advancing would guarantee their deaths, but their primary objective was still to advance. Therefore it was unusual for them to stay still for a week at a time as the lack of monster variety indicated that they had. Until they died and Igmail felt his soul bits returning monster production shouldn’t stagnate for as long as it had. The only answer Igmail could think of was that he simply wasn’t being brought the bodies for some reason.
Third was that Igmail could make another gorilla, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. Thankfully, though, those three problems solved each other. Send the other transport hoop and the knowledge of how to use it with his new gorilla and bam, all three problems solved. So that's what he did.
Connecting his body and soul directly, Igmail took a chunk of stone out of the new room he was making and shaped it into his gorilla. While he was forming the logical matrix of his golem Igmail made sure to include instructions on how to use the transport hoop and an order to spread that information to the other gorilla golems. A sort of magical software update.
His exhaustion after making his third dungeon golem meant he slept well that night, better than he had in the past week.
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The gorilla was rather confused. It had come into being not an hour ago yet it was already on the third floor of the dungeon with the ring.
‘Dungeons are supposed to have monsters… Right?’ the gorilla questioned internally, though not in so many words. His existence was very confusing. His primary objective was to… touch other golems? Teach other golems? Help other golems? Somehow, his mind was telling him to do all three at the same time and his simple thought process just couldn’t understand the idea of knowledge transferred through contact with other gorillas.
However, that did not stop him from fulfilling said objective. He was just being very careful about it. Afterall, order 2273 said to be careful about unknowns, as they may be a danger to the primary objectives. He was very self aware in that way.
Eventually, he reached the fifth floor and found his first… ‘student,’ his connection with Igmail provided. It was sitting on the ground at the bottom of the stairs fiddling with rocks. It had several piles of roundish rocks, each having slight variation in coloration and shine, and as he watched the other gorilla added another yellowish rock to a pile of similar rocks. It sparked slightly as it impacted the pile.
With his task set aside, the other golem turned to the young golem and did a funny looking sign, not that either gorilla had a sense of humor. Igmail’s newest construct, following orders, went up to the golem-who-played-with-rocks and tapped it on the shoulder.
‘Woooaaah,’ thought Arty and S in sync.
Arty, frustrated with all the effort he had put into making a sign language, furiously shouted ‘We could do this the whole time!?’ within his mind.
‘Yeaaahhh? You didn’t know?’ asked S curiously. He had just realized the barest sliver of his name, so his thoughts were smoother than before.
‘No. No I didn’t. I am very disappointed in that fact,’ thought Arty in response.
‘That's sad. Well, I better get moving,’ thought S as he broke contact with Arty, more interested in fulfilling his objective than having a conversation.
Surprisingly, S didn’t feel that connection break when he lost contact with Arty, though it seems more strained. Their ability to hear each other fell off sharply without touch but S still hear Arty when he yelled ‘Wait! You're not ready for the monsters down there, even if Champions got a good hold on ‘em. Guard this door for me and I’ll take it to him.’
Sensing the truth of Arty’s thoughts, S consented, which is how Arty ended up finding Champion on the eighth floor with his fist through a giant snake and his spear stuck in a giant rat. Champion’s reaction to learning of all that wasted effort was somewhat more subdued than that of Arty’s, but Arty still felt a bit of schadenfreude at witnessing it. Ultimately, however, Champion decided to wear the ring and collect his kill as he went.
Learning of their new brother S, Champion also asked Arty to show S the ropes a bit before coming to join him for the tenth floor.
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Flourish Army Logistics Center
James was having a bad week. He’d been convinced to join the logistics officer betting pool and his favorite to win was a total flub. Not a single monster had been tossed through the hoop he had put his money on. James’ job was to find which portals had sent monsters to be processed and haul them to the butcher floor, so he should know exactly which hoops would produce the most, but somehow a sure bet on a dungeon suppression crew had resulted in nothing.
Even as he stood there despondent, staring at the room in question, drops of brownish blood began to manifest from the ceiling. A mole was tossed through, then a bat, and then a couple panthers. Even as he watched a veritable avalanche of monsters flew through the portal into the large room. A huge smile lit James’ face as three whole floors of dungeon monsters won him a rather sizable bet.