Chapter 4
ESTABLISHING A ROUTINE
When Igmail woke up it was the next day despite the fact that he went to bed early the day before. This time he woke up with some energy, near immediately sitting and washing the sleep from his eyes. He finished breakfast with some enthusiasm then started his therapeutic yoga for the day.
He went through his routine with more vigor, maintaining a slow and relaxing speed but moving with a strength that surpassed that of yesterday. It was not entirely unexpected to Igmail, his strength of body and mind always made some minor improvements after he crafted a golem. The strain of it was a very effective exercise.
However, despite this fact, he probably wouldn’t be making another any time soon, as recovering the bit of soul matter that he transplanted was a much longer process. It would happen, however, and then he could make another. Additionally, when his current gorilla died the strength of its soul would be added on top of his own.
Overall, Igmail’s ability was very good exercise, which was why he was able to pass the tier three exams and become capable of solo operations sooner than most of his peers. This tremendous benefit was partially offset by the lack of direct combat power his ability gave him, however, which was why he was formerly assigned to improving the wall.
After his restorative yoga Igmail went through his spear forms, at full speed this time. The cramped room wasn’t exactly meant to contain a six foot and change dude swinging around a seven foot spear that weighed in at forty pounds of compressed stone, so he added several dents and crumbles to the walls and floors. Mercifully, his amenities were spared.
With his daily spear practice completed Igmail started right in on his secondary duties. He collected all the monster bodies his gorilla had generated and tossed them through the transport hoop, noticing that there were quite a few this time, including a couple shadow panthers. With his main duties attended to Igmail started working on the bunker itself. Flourish had decided that the bunker was too small and too easily breached, so they had Igmail working on it while he was there.
Truthfully, Igmail was glad to have something to do while he waited for his gorilla to die. Otherwise he would just be sitting around with nothing to do if there wasn't a gorilla golem to create. He started work with the damage he had just done, compressing the loose bits back into the floors and walls. Then he began to alter the density of the stone around him, increasing the density to lower the volume and thus create more room in the bunker.
He first started with the wall adjoining the dungeon room, saturating about a square foot of area four inches deep with his mana and pushing it away from him. The result of about a half hour’s effort was a section of the stone wall that was indented about two inches in and about twice as dense as before.
Yesterday he could’ve done it faster, but with a significant portion of his soul elsewhere his mana generation had dropped. He managed to get about an eighth of the wall done within eight hours of work. Next he worked on comfort items. By the time his mana was starting to hurt to use he’d ended up making the stone of the bathtub conform slightly to any pressure put on it. He then used the newly improved tub, his experience being a lot more comfortable this time, then went to bed satisfied with his day’s work.
Igmail woke up to the gentle glow of the light crystals the next day, managing to awaken early this time. He did his yoga, each movement smoothly flowing into the next just as the body flowed into the mind, the mind flowed into the soul, and the soul flowed into the body.
Igmail did his daily spear practice, marking the walls a little bit less than he did yesterday. He proceeded to toss the bodies of his gorilla’s kill through the transport hoop. He compressed the walls a bit more, managing to do just a little bit more than he had yesterday, the change proportional to how much his soul had recovered.
He made his hole in the ground just a bit more comfortable, softening the floor less than he had the tub,m but still enough that he could walk barefoot on the tough and rough stone. Then Igmail went to bed, satisfied with the work he had done that day.
The next morning Igmail was positively cheery when he woke up, and went through his yoga routine with a serene smile on his face. He did his spear forms, only making a couple nicks in the fragile stone of his chamber, which he soon repaired. He cleared the bodies from the dungeon, positively giddy at the paycheck he’d receive from all these monster cores. Then he worked on the wall, almost half finished compressing that side, and made the stone of the sliding door embedded within said wall more slippery so that it’d be easier to open using the handle and harder to open from the other side.
Then Igmail went to bed content, and woke up the next morning to do it all again. Without noticing Igmail had slipped into a comforting routine, and it was like this that his first week at Dungeon 4-12 passed.
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The gorilla was getting tired of getting attacked while he was meditating. He would settle his cerebral matrix into the task of improving his body through stone alteration then a dang panther would jump out at him and break his concentration. It’d been a day since he’d finished the first floor and he’d yet to get in more than four hours of good meditation in all that time.
Frustration was new to the gorilla, but he reasoned that it was natural for the magic his master used to create his mind to grow. Everything else about him did, after all. However, the novelty of emotion wore off quickly, and the golem decided to make a change.
The gorilla was made so that cultivation would be his go to source of self-improvement, but his master had also left room for him to come to his own conclusions on the matter, so the yet to be named golem decided to switch it up a bit.
Instead of mindlessly trying to make his body stronger, he would instead mindfully make his body more skilled. So that’s how the gorilla decided to start practicing with his spear. He quickly came to several realizations, swinging a sharp stick around in a confined room with a big pit in the middle. First came the thought; "I need to work on my foot work, else I’ll keep falling down the stairs.’ Then came the thought; ‘Spears are bad for confined spaces. Too long. They don’t utilize my strength adequately. Why would my master teach me this?’ The last question was not, in fact, deriding Igmail, but rather was a genuine inquiry from a curious magical mind.
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The answer came to him just a few hours later. A mole had run up the stairs and immediately darted to the back of the room, on the opposite side of the hole leading to the second floor from the Spear-illa. Instead of having to move across the hole to mush the mole into paste, the seven foot long spear allowed the golem to stand in place and stab something on the entirely opposite side of the small room.
An example was all the gorilla needed to come to a conclusion; ‘Area control! That's why! My master knew I’d already be good at mushing monsters, so he gave me something to help against monsters who are good at keeping distance! I’m inherently deadly at grappling range, but bad at killing anything further, so Master taught me the spear to cover for that weakness.’
The gorilla was very confident in the completely wrong yet somehow still correct conclusion. The truth was that Igmail had never fought in a dungeon before, and thus hadn’t considered the challenges of doing so, but that didn’t diminish the fact that it still worked in the gorilla’s favor somewhat.
‘Alright, I got this then. I don’t need to bother with all the bits of technique about keeping my enemy at range, it works to my favor if they don’t, so let's instead focus on using the spear to extend my reach,’ thought the gorilla. He immediately got to work. He chose five random spots on the wall, floor, and even ceiling and started to practice consistently hitting them. As it turned out, he was fantastically bad at it. He could usually get his thrusts to hit in a one foot radius of the spot, but considering that the target was no more than ten feet away, stationary, and he was using a tool that was basically a sharp stick, that was pretty terrible.
So he practiced a lot. The gorilla stood in the door to that tiny room for three whole days just practicing his aim non-stop. On the frequent occasion that a monster appeared they would become the target practice. Within that time he got much better. The magical structure forming his mind was already predisposed to being skilled with a spear, so it adapted quickly.
Pretty soon the gorilla could kill the panthers and bats with his spear on a consistent basis, whereas they had previously been too small or fast. He was looking at the corpse of a bat he had speared in the neck when the golem felt pride for the first time. He was proud of his accomplishment, of how he had taken what his master gave him and brought it further.
‘This. This is what I fight for. I fight to feel the pride of advancement, of taking that which used to be daunting and turning it into just another day. It is my master that I fight for, but this is why I fight,’ the gorilla thought in what was perhaps the longest continuous sentence he had ever had that wasn’t directly about how to kill things.
In that moment, when the realization of purpose of and identity crystallized in the mind of the gorilla, something resonated along the bond he shared with his master. A piece of knowledge hitched a ride on the bond between souls and slammed into the gorilla’s mind with such force that his whole being felt the tremors. Suddenly, with absolute certainty, the gorilla knew his name. ‘I am Champion, a representative of my master’s will for violence. I will be the bloody envoy he sends to the horrors of this world, the herald of their end and the perpetrator of it.’
Power rushed through Champion at this epiphany, emerging from his mind and igniting his soul with power. Power which then rushed into his body, sharpening the detail of his features and the quality of his stone. With a stronger body came a clearer mind, which once again ignited his soul in a self reinforcing loop.
Eventually the reaction tapered off, but like a pebble tossed from the bottom of a hill to the top of it, Champion’s power fell from its high to rest at a spot still higher than when his epiphany began. With his newfound strength Champion immediately moved to teach the dungeon that it would regret drawing the ire of his master.
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Toto was on the top of the wall. His spiraling loop had brought him to walk among the parapets instead of the interior of the wall. He liked walking on the top of the wall more than any other portion of his loop, the sky was nice and the work was easier. He only had to reinforce the very top portion of the wall, the other bits were out of his reach. It left him time to think. The main topic of Toto’s pondering was his new brother.
Igmail, Champion, and Toto all shared a soul, and Toto wasn’t near so internally inattentive as his master, so Toto had felt the creation and naming of his brother. Toto thought back on his own naming. It wasn’t nearly as special as Champion’s. His adolescent master had treated him as a pet at first, not that his intelligence at that time would’ve indicated anything else, so he had been named after Igmail’s imaginary pet monkey.
The meaning of his own name had revealed itself in drips and drabs over time, almost like he was human. It had been about six years since it had really cemented itself. Toto, the loyal assistant. Toto, the moral support. Toto, solid as stone and even more reliable. Toto thought it was a good name.
Eventually Toto’s twice ponderous path reached a portion of the wall where he could see the construction in the distance. Well, at this stage it was more de-struction than con-struction. He could see in the distance where large patches of trees and vegetation were rapidly rotting away, probably under the power of a tier five. The resulting ash and dirt was then stirred into the soil by earth mages, enriching it for farming purposes.
Toto could see the people on watch all around the forest clearing work party, and as he watched he saw flashes of light and speed that would indicate that monsters were being fended off. He saw the glowing spec floating over the middle of the city, a tier eight on over-watch for any threats that a clearing party couldn’t handle themselves.
It was the first time most of the city had ever seen a tier eight, there were only five or so in the whole city and they were all rather reclusive. Each might could’ve blown a hole in the wall by their lonesome as well, so most people were fine with that. Having seen and cataloged the efforts at expanding the city, Toto turned his ears towards those around him.
Usually the wall was patrolled at intervals, but with all the monsters that expansion stirred up there were instead two members of the military standing guard every fifty feet. He passed three sets without hearing anything interesting, but on the fourth pair he listened to he heard a notable fact.
“Hey James, shouldn’t there be more monsters?” asked a younger looking guard in standard armor. He looked green, perhaps he had just finished his training year.
“Ya know Rob, I’ve noticed that myself. I’ve been around long enough to see the last one and we’d’ve already killed twice this many monsters by now with how long we’ve been standing out here,” said an older man with salt and pepper hair. He stood more confidently than his partner and the insignia on his chest indicated his status as a tier three. “I put it down to the dungeon suppression crews. Nothing to worry about.”
Like with everything else Toto heard, he noted and cataloged it in case it should be useful at some point. In his soul he hoped James was correct.
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James was not correct. Far off into the forest there existed a beast. It lurked in the shadowed tunnels of its mother, gestating. This prince of beasts was waiting, training, growing even as the progenitor gathered an army. Why spend its forces piecemeal when it could overrun those pests all at once?