Chapter 11
HOUSE TOUR
It had been exactly four months since Igmail had started living in his bunker, and it was nearly unrecognizable from back then. The biggest change was its newfound spaciousness. That was what Igmail had worked on most since his ascension to tier four: extra room. The main room had been expanded into what used to be the weight room, the walls knocked down to combine the two. The weight room had been wider than the bunker room, so the original room now acted a bit like a foyer into the rest of the base.
A decent amount of the removed stone came from simple compression, but Igmail had started making a gorilla each half-week or so after his rank up, so a lot of the stone went to that as well. The bed Igmail had shaped sat in the corner, with the cot folded up underneath it, and the singular stove had been transformed into a full kitchenette. It had been disassembled and reassembled into a stove top, just the one for now, which was incorporated into a new L-shaped counter occupying one corner of the room.
Additionally, the new sink was also part of the same counter, perpendicular to the stove. It had taken a bit of work to repipe it, but Igmail got it done. Several cabinets and drawers were carved out of the stone of the wall and counter both, full of Igmail’s non-existent silverware. The dinner table and chairs, still made of stone, sat in the middle of the wider part of the new room, near the kitchenette for easy access to food.
The garden room had also gotten an overhaul, expanded using the seeds that his first harvest had created. It was nearly triple the size of before and produced more food than Igmail could eat, though he made sure to store the extra in a specifically modified cooler cabinet he kept in the kitchen. The stone was altered to suck up heat and release it elsewhere, a change made to thermal conductivity and absorptivity made so that the air stayed more brisk there than elsewhere.
It worked by having a rather thermally conductive panel of stone on the surface, taking in all the heat it can. Behind that panel was an even more conductive panel, and so on and so forth until the first panel was positively chilly, all its heat sucked out. The heat was then routed to a node of stone on the surface of the hill with a very low specific heat capacity, meaning that it released heat quickly.
On the topic of heat, Igmail had finally gotten around to doing something similar to the rest of the base, exploiting his heightened fridge making abilities to create panels which drew heat and condensation from the muggy atmosphere and routed it into a drip watering pipe for his garden.
His garden had, thanks to Igmail’s tender care, flourished in all the extra space. His regulation of the soil and the ever increasing ambient mana in the bunker meant that his plants were growing faster and stronger than ever, each and every one coming to hearty harvest in just under two weeks, with some growing faster than even that. Carrots, potatoes, beets, and soy, one and all grew well under his loving gaze and green thumb. Of course, a lot of Igmail’s garden wouldn’t be possible if the plants hadn’t been engineered, the climates they required were simply too disparate in some instances.
Igmail’s soup had thus increased in complexity greatly, with many veggies and spices having found their way into his perpetual stew. Onions, turnips, potatoes, and rosemary were the most notable additions, the others being rather small in quantity. Some of the veggies had turned into mush after weeks of being slow cooked, but it simply added thickness to the broth. Additionally, the gorilla Igmail had tasked with bringing back food had come back with a boar that possessed a stoney hide.
It was surprisingly good, the boar, once it stewed for a couple days. Cooking monster meat for any less of a time was an endeavor destined to fail for those that didn’t possess specific skills and abilities geared towards cooking, it was simply too tough and too heat resistant in most cases for it to be palatable. Igmail’s method was just about the only way to make monster meat tender without having specialized equipment or skills.
In addition to his new mainroom and his expanded garden, Igmail also made a new weight room to replace the old, and a new shower attachment to his bathtub to go with it. At this point, Igmail’s bunker had almost all the comforts of home, except his parents that is. “This place is coming along nicely,” Igmail said quietly to himself as he surveyed all the work he’d done. With the size of the main room, garden, and new weight room combined, he was halfway to hollowing out the hill in which his bunker was set.
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Messenger was having a blast. He’d just finished delivering his master a meal and he’d already received a new assignment from Scholar; go to the north advance party and retrieve all their loot. After staying behind while the others had cleared the twenty fifth floor Scholar had decided to do so permanently, focusing on organizing the orderly transfer of monster bodies and commanding the younger gorillas instead of combat.
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With the slow down of the monsters traveling through the boss floors, Champion had come to the realization that the reinforcements he was receiving weren’t strong enough to survive past the twenty fifth floor for any length of time and stopped accepting new members into his party. A back up of several gorillas were just hanging out on the fifth floor, so Scholar decided to whip them into shape by sending them in groups to explore the tunnels, the ones through which the monsters normally came. They started with the fifth floor tunnels for now, Scholar’s inner completionism shining through.
Only Messenger was held back, instead focused on using his custom made sled to quickly haul the corpses the teams generated back to the central hub of their operation, bringing one to Master on occasion as well. He liked his job quite a lot; not dangerous but still useful was practically his motto at this point. It was a nice gig.
This assignment also made Messenger the best informed gorilla in the whole dungeon, seeing as he was the only one to see all the golems in the dungeon on a routine basis. Consequently, he knew that the advance party was pretty much stuck on level thirty, some type of water level judging by the fish pulp they sent up, he knew that there were two other parties of five gorillas exploring other dungeons, and he knew that there were seventeen gorillas in total.
He also knew that it was taking longer and longer to reach the other dungeon parties, but that was fine with him. Messenger loved traveling, and he loved the satisfaction of bringing a full cart of corpses back to Scholar after a hard day’s travel. Even his body of stone sometimes struggled with the weight he pulled, though the discovery of the wheel aided him significantly.
Anyways, in all his musing Messenger had arrived in North Dungeon, though he still had a bit of travel to go to receive his delivery. Down he went, collecting monster bodies on the way, all the way to the twelfth floor where he found the North Advance Party, NAP for short. They were resting near the stairs when he caught up to them, their leader Pummel practicing his overhead blows on some rocks.
He managed to smash a rock right as Messenger walked in, shooting fragments everywhere. ‘Hey,’ exclaimed Mapper, another member of NAP, ‘Don’t shoot Messenger!’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ sent Messenger in response. ‘Bring out your dead, though, I’m in a rush.’ And so went most of Messengers interactions with the other gorillas, a situation he was content with for the moment. On the way back Messenger once again noticed that it seemed like he had to walk farther and farther each time he traversed one of these tunnels, but thought nothing of it.
It was magic of the spatial variety according to Scholar. It was a lingering enchantment that compressed the distance between two places, essentially making them closer together, and that was about as much as any of the gorillas could figure out about it. After all, space was not a rock, their skulls could crush it no problem, and thus no further study was needed. And least, according to Champion.
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Champion was starting to get frustrated with this floor. It’d been going so well too. After his ascension to tier four he and his team had been blazing through the floors, less than a day each floor despite the increased difficulty. And then he’d gotten to this floor, the thirtieth, and realized he couldn’t swim. All he did was sink. It was an advantage in that he could fight almost like he normally did, but a large disadvantage in that he couldn’t freaking get over this wall!
No problem with the monsters. Crafter’s spears took out those rare few fish who chose to attack at range and everybody else could hold their own in the water, though they were a bit slower. But one thing they could not do was traverse the obstacle in front of them. In front of them was a ravine. It wasn’t meant as an environmental hazard, no, it was an ambush spot for an octopus like creature, with the average adventurer simply swimming right over it, but Champion and crew weighed a couple tons each.
In the water it was impossible to traverse the ten feet of length and twenty feet of height needed to progress, they simply weighed too much. They just could not generate enough speed to overcome the water resistance. Poor Dash had tried, and it took them hours to get him out. They’d been forced to sit there and settle for stopping whichever fish chose to swim through while a bridge was being built.
It had been a good training opportunity though, the resistance of the water pushing their bodies and skills to limits they hadn’t experienced before. If it wasn’t for that, Champion might have just had a few rookies come down and help form a living bridge for the party.
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Flourish Army Logistics Center
James was having a very good week. Not only had he won a rather sizable betting pool, he’d also been promoted. The very transport hoop which he thought would be the biggest bust of his betting career ended up being the biggest win by a factor of several times. No other hoop had produced even a fraction of the amount that it had, and for being the person to make such a discovery so promptly, he’d been promoted to manager. Not that he had to manage very much, but still. The pay was better.
It really was ridiculous though, just how much was flowing through that hoop. It was a twenty four hour a day job to manage it, and it wasn’t just hauling bodies either, James also needed to figure out what tier beast a body was before he could have it sent to the right processing floor. A tier four earth boar, for example, was simply too tough to process with the same equipment as a tier one deep mole, and plenty of both had been coming through in recent times.
The low end and high end of the monsters the hoop transported were so disparate that he was put in charge of an appraiser specifically to tell which corpse should go where to get processed. James was kinda confused about the army’s train of thought when putting a trained tier three in the command of a tier two grunt not even done with his draft, but money was money, and it’s not like the job was high risk.
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‘Heh,’ thought Samurthabec, being careful not to transmit her thoughts as she peered at the stalled gorillas. ‘I’ll show her and them. I bet they never even see this coming. I bet he never sees this coming. Muah ha ha. Muah ha ha ha ha!’