The world was a sea of light, bright light, in every color under the sun, and more he’d never seen before, swirling around him, reflecting off what might have been glass, metal railings, and other objects he could barely describe.

Thomas grimaced internally, as for some reason, he was unable to actually move. That was bad.

What was worse was the oddly solid “thump, thump, thump” of someone rapping their knuckles on his head. The figure was weird, largely unidentifiable amidst the shimmering colors and lights.

It looked roughly male, but given that the only feature on them he could currently identifiable was what might have been a pair of dragonfly wings that looked oddly metallic, Thomas didn’t trust even a single thing he saw.

“… -key, wakey, little core. I know this is weird, you’re probably missing your real fairy, and I really don’t know what in the name of the Celestials is going on, but the world has kinda lost its mind and if you’re at all interested in continuing to live, you should start making defenses, ‘mkay?”

Ok, what?!? There wasn’t a single part of that sentence that made sense. Shit, this was weird. Just. Plain. Weird.

The whole affair made about as much sense as the mess he could see. That was to say, it didn’t make any sense at all.

“I should be able to start helping once my damn spear starts working again, but I don’t know when that’ll be or how powerful it’ll be. So, chop, chop, pretty please do literally anything.”

The being seemed to slump, but Thomas still couldn’t see properly. Hell, he couldn’t even move.

“Ok, so, no response. Let’s take it from the from the top,” The being sighed, “Wakey, wakey, little co- …”

And now that little speech was being repeated.

Thomas tried to say something, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even feel his body. Locked-in syndrome?

“Please, just … I’m in here, alright?” Thomas thought, hoping against reason that the message would be heard.

“Yeah, no shit you’re in there. How long have you been awake?” the being asked.

“Beginning of the last speech … I think,” Thomas cautiously, “thought” at his conversation partner, hoping that he hadn’t imagined it working.

“Damn, that mana wave really knocked us for a loop, didn’t it?” the being sighed, doing something that might have been an irritated head shake, but to Thomas, it appeared like a strange shift in its posture that caused the surrounding lights to shift.

“So, where are we, how long have you been here, and what can you build?”

“I have no idea about anything, I can barely see, and you’re hitting my head!” Thomas complained, and this time, the being seemed surprised, jerking backwards and … falling?

It seemed to fall for a long time, from a height that should have killed it, yet the being had started flying before it had fallen even halfway towards the ground.

OK, what?

Thomas hadn’t been able to move at all, and then, without moving, he’d somehow been able to shift his vision towards the ground to follow the being, yet he hadn’t moved, his field of view had just sort of … slid around?

“Just try to adjust your vision to filter out various arcane energies, and then … wait, did you just say ‘head’?”

“Yeah?” Thomas said, somehow even more confused. How was that of all things confusing to the being?

However, that tip with the “filter” had made sense … somehow. It had been non-specific, non-sensical, not something he should have been able to turn into an actionable, uh, action, but it had worked.

All he had to do was think it, and the world obeyed, clearing up in an instant. More than merely clearing up, if he was entirely honest with himself. The “being” that had been fluttering around him turned out to be a goddamn fairy of all things, looking like a young, Caucasian man with raven black hair, wrapped in what was either a rag or a ragged toga.

Either way, for a chunk of red cloth that had clearly been roughly torn from a larger piece of fabric, it looked a hell of a lot less silly than one might have expected it to.

But that was barely even noticeable when compared to the pair of dragonfly wings on his back, glittering bronze as they hummed through the air.

So yeah, a freaking fairy, hovering in the middle of the room, and Thomas was, weirdly enough, floating, with his vision oddly able to rotate around some kind of central point he couldn’t look at.

… Until he figured out that he was able to detach his “eyes”. It was an incredibly weird feeling, as though he were somehow pulling his actual eyes from his body, yet somehow having them remain attached to his brain to the point where he could look at himself without the aid of a mirror.

Yet the weird feeling, the impression of him doing something unnatural, impossible, was fading rapidly as he looked around, moving his point of view around like a drone. A drone he was somehow controlling with his mind, and it felt normal.

Just like riding a bike, you never unlearned it.

Or swimming, for that matter. The moment you were back in the water, all the knowledge you need would rush back to you.

Except he’d never actually learned to do any of this, once he figured out he could do something, the proper “muscle memory” came to and stayed with him.

With the various “arcane energies” filtered out, he could actually look around at his surroundings.

Light blue carpet, a massive, life-sized, plastic model of a blue whale cracked on the ground, glass cases both intact and not, taxidermied animals, a set of strange armor with a crimson cloak alongside a spear, mammalian fossils … all in all, it did track with his last memories, of wandering through the London Natural History Museum. Except for the armor, that was weird.

Either way, he’d been in the museum and after that things went more than a little fuzzy.

Between the … whatever happening and him waking, a whole lot of things had clearly gone exceedingly wrong. There sure as shit wasn’t supposed to be blood everywhere, but where on Earth had the people/bodies gone?

Sure, there were plenty of predators that dragged off their kills, or maybe someone had decided to get the people out of here, be they alive or dead, but it was still decidedly strange.

Eventually, he was unable to avoid looking at himself. He’d tried to not even think about it, aware, on some level, of the fact that something had to be incredibly wrong with his physical form, but he’d tried to avoid even thinking about it.

He didn’t just not feel his body, he’d been able to turn to look 360° on all axes, and it didn’t take a genius to imagine that if he was able to look left, right, up, and down, while floating in the middle of the air, no less, and the area he was moving around seeming far smaller than even his skull … something was wrong. He had to look.

As he’d already expected, what he saw wasn’t his human body, nothing even close to it. A smooth orb of golden stone, around the size of an adult’s fist, hovered at what looked like hip height for a human, with no apparent means of support keeping it there. No wires, no updraft, no nothing. Maybe it had a core made of some kind of magnetic metal, and there were magnets buried somewhere around here?

“Hello?” a voice asked, somehow echoing in his head, clearly audible even though the fairy was all the way next to the core, a good three meters from where Thomas was “looking” from, and the question had been asked in a low, albeit annoyed, tone.

How often had the fairy tried to catch his attention?

“Sorry, I was looking around,” Thomas explained, before finally introducing himself, “My name is Thomas, I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m some kind of rock … I think?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“A Dungeon Core,” the fairy corrected, “My name is Elias Graystone, though I’m more commonly known as Elias of the Crimson Sea. I’m from Dretalora, that’s a far-off world that’s usually drowning in enemies, be they monsters or void beasts, but since this is clearly not my home, that doesn’t really matter.”

Fluttering over to the empty piece of armor, Elias made a throwaway gesture at it.

“So, I know this is going to sound weird, but I’m not actually a fairy, the mana wave turned me into one, stuck me in here, bonded to your core. I used to be human, and that used to be my armor. As you can see, I cut up the cape into something I can wear because that’s just for show, but the rest of the armor requires my old rank to be useable, and I’m currently reduced to your E-Rank, so … that’s not gonna work.

“And like I told you, the spear can adjust to my rank, and when it does, I’ll be useful, but it’ll take a while for that to happen, so if this is your Dungeon, start recreating your defenses. And if you’re as lost as I am, make new ones. But we’re obviously sitting ducks here and now, and I doubt you’re any keener on dying than I am.”

“… How?” Thomas asked. The whole “I used to be human but now I’m a fairy” thing was something for later, but s

The fairy seemed to freeze before meeting Thomas’ eyes.

Or he tried, the fact that he was staring at the crystal rather than Thomas’ point of view was somewhat ruining the effect.

“Ok, what do you know about being a Dungeon Core? At all. What can you do? Do you know how to make anything, or do you just not have any patterns?”

“Uh … I can look around and can send my field of view flying around?” Thomas replied, “But when I woke up, I couldn’t even do that, I think I can figure things out if you point me in the right direction.”

“Alright, let’s try that, but keep in mind that I’m not an actual Dungeon Fairy, you’re going to have to work with me here. Also, I’m not going to teach you to become a slaughterhouse, I won’t help you with that, but I’ll teach you everything else I know, at the appropriate time.

“First, go look at your Status, see if you can share it with me or describe it for me. It should be accessible by you wanting it to show up, saying ‘status’ or just in general calling it up,” Elias began, then rattled off another ten or so other options.

So Thomas tried those. All of those.

“No, it’s not working. Something always starts to happen, but then, it just sort of … fizzles out.”

“Weird,” Elias commented, stroking his chin before staring at an empty spot of air and finally “slumping”, which looked incredibly strange as he was still hovering in midair, wings beating furiously, “I can’t access mine either. That … that’s not supposed to happen, but it’s not disastrous. The status is just a reflection of your actual body, all your abilities are still there, but we’re going to have to do this by feel, now.”

“Do you think it might be because we both used to be human?” Thomas asked. It seemed obvious.

“Mayb- … did you just say ‘both’?” Elias raised an eyebrow, “Seriously?”

“That would explain everything, right?” Thomas asked.

“Assuming I believe you, why are we suddenly different? Also, I’m not entirely sure I believe that. I’m currently E-Rank, I can feel that, but I can also tell I still have my full power locked away somewhere. You’re a true E-Rank, and that mana wave should have wiped you from existence.”

Alright, what on Earth was up with that? Thomas wondered. Why was the fairy being so weird about that?

“And why on Earth would I pretend to have been human?” he asked, prompting Elias to almost fall out of the air in shock. In fact, he barely caught himself a few centimeters above the floor.

“Because there are a million things a young core shouldn’t be told about because they could accidentally wreak havoc with those ideas and concepts, and pretending to be a fully mature human instead of a Dungeon Core which, quite literally, cannot be emotionally mature prior to C-Rank, might get me to spill the beans, so to speak,” Elias shrugged.

That made sense, weirdly enough. If Elias was knowledgeable about Dungeons and aware of the fact that normal Dungeons, apparently, tended to be emotionally immature. Unfortunately, this now led to the issue where anything Thomas did would be perceived as “being part of the deception”.

And as desperately as Thomas wanted to verbally tear into the fairy about dismissing him like that, he’d just spotted vines creeping across the windows high above, watching them grow in real time. Elias had mentioned that they needed defenses, and issues of humanity aside, he seemed to know what he was talking about.

With barely suppressed annoyance, he ground out, “Can we just table this whole discussion, and get to building defenses? What are those, how do I build them, what’s the best place to put them?”

This time, Elias decided to get straight to the point.

“Do you have any patterns remaining? They’re what you create objects or monsters based on, you should be able to feel for them in your core, they should feel like, uh, materials and creatures?”

Feel for them in your core … it should have been a useless instruction, a general order that didn’t do jack shit to explain how he should do it. But for some reason, merely knowing that something was possible meant he could figure out how to do it. As if Thomas had access to someone else’s muscle memo- … core memory? Nope, that sounded wrong, so maybe rock memory? Procedural memory?

Ah, who cared, as long as it made sense. Which it didn’t. But he could still tell that he didn’t have any of those “patterns”, information which he immediately relayed to Elias.

“Ok, so absorb something. This entire room is your domain, you can eat literally anything here and recreate it. Carpet, stone, one of the taxidermied animals. Grab an animal, we really need some defenders.”

Thomas briefly considered, then absorbed the hippopotamus. It was the closest, but also probably the best choice in the room. The only exits from this room were tiny, too small for a rhino or elephant, and while the various mouse deer might be cute, they weren’t exactly going to be useful in a fight.

On the other hand, hippos, especially the African variant he had here, were nasty as fuck, usually ranking amongst the ten most dangerous animals in the world regardless of which criteria you used.

Once more, the entire process was entirely instinctive, with energy flowing smoothly from his core, across the intervening space, and sinking into the taxidermied monstrosity and breaking it down into sparkling motes of energy … along with chunks of the railing that separated the exhibits from the path the visitors would take, some glass shards, bits of carpet, the podium the exhibit stood upon, and chunks of nearby exhibits.

Not to mention that he’d scooped up everything inside the hippo.

With Elias instructing him, it should have been simple enough to summon it. Should.

Reach into your core, grab the pattern,

Then, he should place a replica in the real world, and fill it with power … but when he tried, it turned out to be very, very tricky. What had once been an empty void was now utterly stuffed with crap. Every single material he’d “eaten” was in there, or so he assumed, considering that there was so much stuff in there getting a proper overview was utterly impossible. He’d also spotted an elephant pattern, for some reason, even though he’d only eaten a small part of it.

“If you can’t find it immediately, maybe look for a sorting function. Or see if you can move the patterns, push everything you’ve already looked at to the side.”

Yeah, Elias wasn’t much help either. Thomas had already been using standard “search tactics” from the beginning. And the whole-ass “system”, whatever that was, wasn’t working, which meant that any kind of automated, well, anything, was decidedly unavailable.

Eventually, after at least five minutes, Thomas had managed to push all the trash to the bottom of his core and keep it there, then held a few useful materials above those, and managed to sort to hippo into an entirely separate portion, where he could simply pull it outside his core, automatically creating a copy.

… Which he couldn’t see in the real world.

“And once it’s outside, just pump some energy into it,” Elias instructed, and Thomas obeyed.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and, then part of the floor “popped” in an explosion of gore.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to summon your creatures while they’re overlapping with other solid objects,” Elias said after a long moment.

“But I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“Thomas, did you ever stop filtering out your ability to see supernatural energies?” Elias asked after another long pause.

Instead of replying, Thomas just did what the fairy had advised, focussing on allowing himself to see what he was doing, and finally placed a wireframe outline of the “monster” in question a centimeter above the floor, right-side up, and poured mana from a rapidly dwindling pool into it.

And then, the big, tubby, block of fat, muscle, and destructive power manifested.

If there was ever an indicator that Elias was from another planet, other than, you know, him outright saying so, his reaction to the hippopotamus would have been Thomas’ biggest clue.

“What exactly is that bucket of lard supposed to do?” he asked, hovering in front of the beast’s closed maw.

Oh, big mistake.

Taking control of the hippo was easy enough, Elias had already mentioned that a core could normally control their summoned monsters, and the process was smooth as silk.

As the top of the hippopotamus’ head rose to reveal the inside of its gigantic maw, Elias’ jaw dropped.

“Hippos are practically invulnerable to any creature in their home environment, and only the strongest handheld weaponry can take them down,” Thomas explained, “That jaw of theirs can tear through basically any creature they’re likely to encounter, and they’re also a hell of a lot faster than they look. A human wouldn’t be able to outrun one without an insane head start.”

“Standard human,” Elias corrected, “Humans can grow to be capable of some insane things, but you’re clearly yet to see that. Or maybe you did and just forgot. Dungeon cores are tough as hell, but there’s a big difference between what people like me start out as, and what they become capable of in due time.”

“Yeah, regardless of that, you’re now a winged little smartass,” Thomas muttered.

“Whoa, where did that come from?” Elias held up both hands defensively as he fluttered backwards.

“You treat the idea that I was once human like a joke,” Thomas reminded him.

“Yeah, cause that’s not possible,” Elias retorted, “Dungeon cores come into being at F-Rank with animal cunning and the ability to absorb and recreate matter and living beings. Then, at E-Rank, where you currently are, they can directly control their monsters, and create conditions under which certain orders will automatically be given. At D-Rank, you’ll gain the ability to fuse materials and creatures, until eventually, you’ll hit C-Rank, gain full human-level cognition and fine control over your manifestations.

“I know you’re capable of coming up with a lie like that, but I also know that you can’t have been human, or be able to think like one!”

Oh, that was it!

Thomas gathered his mana, preparing to manifest another hippo a hairs-breadth from Elias’ back to scare him, but in the end, that didn’t quite work out well. As in, it didn’t work at all.

He’d spent a few moments to try and make sure he didn’t accidentally summon the hippo on top of the fairy and kill him, but then, the wireframe had winked out. Not only that, but the energy field pervading the room, his “domain”, he assumed, had grown oddly … solid, as if to tell him that he’d no longer be able to change anything within.

And then, he saw the towering figure pushing its way into the room.