How did the saying go … if you pay in peanuts, you get monkeys?

And Thomas wasn’t paying his critters anything, so how could he be surprised that his new area was turning into a literal monkey house?

These damn monkeys were a mess. Most of Thomas’s creatures had some kind of aggressive instinct, being big animals ill-suited for retreating, who had to confront predators head-on. Hippos, giant sloths, sauropods, even the scolosaurus had some degree of built-in combat instinct.

Spider monkeys … not so much.

They were the kind of small and populous critters that died to predators en-masse, surviving not by being the fastest or strongest, but being faster than at least one other guy.

He could force them to fight, but the sheer amount of effort required was tricky. The only other realistic way to get them to engage was to have them backed into a corner.

Well, that wasn’t quite accurate, they did fight, but they were very, very, bad at it.

Should he switch to his other small monkey pattern? Capuchins were more aggressive as a general rule.

However, the thing about Dungeon monsters was that even if they all came from the same pattern, they could have slight variations in personality. Perhaps he could find a specific monkey with a good personality and use him as a new baseline, ensuring that the variations were all based on a suitable being?

But that would take time, and he had no idea how much. Or maybe they’d become more aggressive naturally as they gained the power to defend themselves, but he wasn’t holding his breath on that front.

Which left Thomas with an annoying choice to make.

Should he continue the search for a suitable Spider Monkey, or use what he already had?

He already had Capuchins leveled to F-Rank, and the Dungeon Avatar power they possessed already should be upgraded to Dungeon Relay when he created a Capuchin champion, but they, as a species lacked something that practically defined Spider Monkeys as a species.

Their tails, specifically, their prehensile function, which made them practically a fifth limb. They even had a hairless patch on the underside for an optimal grip.

Capuchins were also smaller, making them less ideal even if they were better suited in terms of personality.

But either way, he wanted a small monkey as his Champion Ambassador-slash-Subcore-Courier. For several reasons.

First, a small critter originating from a jungle would be perfect for traversing the environment outside, and it wouldn’t attract attention the same way a larger creature would.

Second, since this creature would be his main connection to the outside, it needed to fit anywhere and everywhere he might need it. And unless a meeting was being held in an air duct or a similarly cramped space, a small primate would be able to fit.

And the third reason was psychological. They were cute. And while Thomas was a big fan of cute critters, this time, that wasn’t why “cute” was important. But rather, the subconscious biases that afflicted humanity.

An adorable creature would serve to lower people’s guard, even when they were doing their hardest to keep their guard up. People thought that cute things were harmless, and would go to extreme lengths to pet them. All one needed to prove that was to look up some statistics on animal attacks.

In addition, a monkey would be easy to lock away or “contain”. A cat crate would do. Sure, a regular plastic box would require some hefty reinforcing, but either way, it would be easy for someone to lock down the monkey until they decided whether or not to accept it as an ambassador. Even better if they only thought that the monkey was contained.

And on top of everything else, he could see if he could find some cute outfits for his monkey ambassador.

But he was getting ahead of himself. First, he needed to get his monkeys to a reasonable level of power and do so soon.

He gave it two days, and if he didn’t get any visitors by then, he’d make an ambassador and send it out, come hell or high water. How long he had before that dragon empress became too powerful to confront was up in the air, but he needed to reach out to and warn the authorities ASAP. Even if they weren’t in a position to do the fighting for him, they should at least be able to help him lure her into his Dungeon.

Thomas just had to keep waiting, keep the smoke signals up with increased power in the hope that it would convey the urgency of the situation, keep watching for what happened. Looking out across the jungle to look for incoming humans while having his wyverns carry any critters they found onto the roof of the museum for his monkeys to take down.

And in the meanwhile, he kept himself busy, decorating his Dungeon, adding more foliage nets and pitfall traps.

Until eventually, finally, the Spider Monkey pattern hit F-Rank and was immediately upgraded.

Thomas had long since selected what power they would get. It was a simple one, with an equally simple name.

Snatch.

It allowed its bearer to teleport an object they could see, that they could easily lift with one hand, which was not restrained by another being, to their hands, essentially granting them infinite munitions as long as there was anything around. And this power would be perfect for stealing healing potions and the like. Teleporting things out of someone’s hand was unlikely to work, but off their belt?

Perfectly viable and potentially deadly, if he had them steal the right thing.

And that just left one more question open. Would his creatures act the same now that they had a proper power?

The original owner of this power had been another monkey, a small one, built for scavenging. In fact, that had been the original purpose of the power, stealing food guarded by others, snatching parts of bigger predators’ kills, and so on.

So would the combination of newly acquired strength and their creator’s will turn them into worthwhile combatants, or would they remain as they had been, prey?

Finding the answer to that question turned out to be a little trickier than expected due to the fact that there were barely any creatures worth hunting left.

Alaxia’s scout or even, potentially, scouts, had probably terrified most critters into submission, throw in the hunting his wyverns had been doing, there was just wasn’t anything big and strong left. That he knew of.

Thomas sighed, parcelled off a group of ten monkeys, and sent them out to go look for something to hunt. They wouldn’t grow for kills outside, but they might at least be able to encounter something that the wyverns had missed, that they could cut their proverbial teeth on.

And if they all died, well, the monkeys were cheap and he didn’t seem to have any imminent incoming threats that he needed to keep defenders in place to deal with.

Thomas continued to ride along one of the monkey’s minds, watching what was happening from up close. Though unlike when he was doing this inside his Dungeon, he only had minimal control. He was merely along for the ride, as if he were in the world’s most advanced 4D cinema, feeling every motion of the primate’s body as the verdant foliage flew past.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He was no stranger to seeing the jungle, but that was from afar. Through the eyes of an avatar stationed at the door, the camarasaurus barely seeing the green through the door, or one of the rooftop sentries.

Not from the ground amidst the trees. The canopy was glorious, beautiful, but the view from down there was downright terrifying. The way the sunlight was blocked out, darkening the entirety of this new world, the countless unknown sounds, the cries of unseen creatures, all of it would have been strange enough had this been his first foray into a regular jungle. But this was a supernatural hellhole, filled with creatures of unfathomable power and nightmarish temperaments. Even though he wasn’t there in the flesh, it was still scary.

Or maybe that was just the monkey his mind was riding along with. These were creatures of the canopies, using their four standard limbs and their tail to leap from branch to branch in ways that trapeze artists could only dream of. Being on the ground like that was utterly terrifying to them.

But were there really no monsters around? Nothing that he could send the monkeys to face? Come on, there had to be something!

The distance he could send his creatures beyond his domain had increased after hitting D-Rank, but not by so much that he could reach completely new areas.

So he just kept sending out the group of critters in his best approximation of a search grid, hoping to run into something eventually.

However, when it was finally time, he didn’t see the monster. His first warning came when one of his monkeys just vanished, removed from his senses completely. The rearmost one.

Thomas immediately sent this information to his monkeys, warning them, ordering them to prepare for combat, and releasing them from his direct control.

The previously orderly formation exploded into chaos the instant his mental iron grasp let up, primates shooting every which way.

Utter chaos, with none of them taking full advantage of their new powers. None of them except one.

That particular monkey was nothing special, being a direct physical clone of the rest, but it seemed smarter.

It wound up growling at the jungle cat, which was sitting down below with a spider monkey hanging from its jaws, then calling out to its fellow dungeon creatures with a weird hooting noise.

So even while what Thomas could only describe as a hyper-jaguar began running up the side of the tree the monkey was perched on, all of his critters began to attack. Nuts, stones, the occasional small twig, all bounced off the big cat’s face.

Damn. They might have a power, but they didn’t yet have the strength to land powerful impacts with their projectiles. Nor could they do much damage by straight-up dropping stuff.

The issue with the latter in particular was terminal velocity, the technical term for the speed a falling object achieved when air resistance equaled the pull of gravity and acceleration ceased.

It was a common myth that it was possible to kill someone by dropping a coin from the top of the Empire State Building. And well, that didn’t work. The terminal velocity of a coin was reached after falling for fifteen meters or so, so it didn’t make much of a difference whether you chucked a penny out of a sixth-floor window or, well, off the Empire friggin State Building.

And getting around this limitation required a few tricks.

For example, you could throw something with such speed that the projectile not only flew far faster than its terminal velocity, but was also sufficiently quick that by the time it reached its target, air resistance would not have robbed it of its lethal power.

But you could also create a more aerodynamic projectile, whose lower air resistance meant that they could reach higher speeds. As Thomas was now planning to do in his Dungeon.

Or … or you could use something heavier, whose mass increased the downward force exerted by gravity, thereby increasing terminal velocity.

That last option was what the newly established “leader” did. Without any prompting. In a way that Thomas hadn’t even known the “Snatch” power could be used in.

By using both hands to snatch something, one raised the mass limit to “anything you could grasp with both hands”.

And where small, walnut-sized projectiles had fallen short, an alien coconut-equivalent thunking against the hyper-jaguar’s head did the trick.

The big cat was suddenly detached from the tree, falling back down towards the Earth … until it suddenly came swinging back towards the tree and started pulling itself back up. Reeling, maybe? The motion was strange as all get out. What on Earth was going on he- … oh, now that was cool. The beast’s claws were attached to its paws by some kind of thread that it was currently spooling back up to return to its previous position.

Thomas wanted that power. He wanted it bad.

For its utility, of course, but the fact that it was cool as hell didn’t hurt either …

But that was just one monkey with a good idea, and monkeys didn’t have any highly evolved language on par with what humans had. They could communicate, however, conveying a concept like what the lead monkey had done with words alone was beyond them. They learned by seeing and mimicking, the reason behind the saying “monkey see, monkey do”.

The jaguar burst through the upper branches, tearing one of the spider monkeys apart with its claws while the others scattered, hurling whatever they could get their hands on.

One small problem, though. The monkeys weren’t strong enough to throw the coconuts very far, dropping them worked much better, but with all creatures at the very top of the tree, that wasn’t an option.

What followed was a high-intensity game of “Ring Around the Rosie”. Two more monkeys died in the cat’s jaws in the process, but the lead monkey was rapidly figuring out new tricks. Leaping to the thinnest branches on the nearby trees made it far harder for the jaguar to follow, which had to find something a little sturdier to hop onto.

Apparently, while its claws were sharp as hell and could be used like grappling hooks when embedded somewhere, slinging them into a tree from afar didn’t work out nearly as well.

So it was falling back, step by step.

Until a flick of the predator’s paw sent the claws through the air like deadly rope darts, a lethal blade attached to strings that could guide them from afar.

One more monkey fell from its perch, trailing blood.

But the second time the cat tried that, it didn’t go so well when the wire got tangled up in branches.

Thomas started chuckling when he saw that. There didn’t seem to be a quick way to retrieve it, otherwise, leaping over and hacking apart the offending branches seemed like a very ineffective way of dealing with the issue.

So the jaguar didn’t try that again, instead trying to catch the monkeys the old-fashioned way, unaware that they were leading it towards the museum. Soon enough, it’d be dead, and Thomas would have both his creature, and his monkey champion.

Hopefully.

As long as the monstrous predator didn’t catch up.

But it was slowly closing the distance, and the monkey leader was slowly falling behind as it ever so often turned around to chuck something at its pursuer.

And it was gradually getting lower, closer towards the ground.

What was it doing? And would his interventions just distract it at a crucial time?

The answer to the second question was probably no, sadly.

Eventually, it was starting to look as though Thomas was about to lose his new favorite monkey, until the jaguar finally leaped, flinging itself straight at the monkey, which had just started jumping higher again. And was currently in midair, unable to dodge. Or so it seemed.

But another coconut thing manifested in its hands at the last possible second and slammed into the jaguar’s nose with an ugly crunch. That whole “no evading” thing went both ways, obviously.

And the cat was now completely off-balance, thrown off its original trajectory, and was currently plummeting towards the ground in a fall that would be crippling even if it wasn’t fatal.

But this was no ordinary cat and its rope-dart-claws laid open the monkey’s back even as it plummeted earthwards. Fuck!

The monkey landed heavily on a branch, its lifeblood running down onto the wood from ragged gashes in its fur, skin, and the muscle below.

There was but one bit of good news. The jaguar had just hit the ground like a meteor and was currently lying there like a broken doll. Still alive, but in bad shape. Thomas dispatched a T-rex to fetch it and get it into his dungeon, while directing his remaining monkeys to carry their “leader” to safety.

There, he’d already prepared a healing potion for it. Normally, he wouldn’t spend such resources on a single basic monster, but this thing was not basic. At all.

Once it was safe, he’d use his monkey army to power-level the spider monkey pattern to E-Rank while preserving the “leader” deep in the Dungeon, and then turning him into a Champion.

And he’d already picked out a name.

Jan. After Jan Zizka, one of the brightest military leaders in history, despite his relative obscurity.

The Bohemian General had lost an eye in his youth, and later his second one due to illness, yet even completely blind, he’d never lost a battle.

However, unlike many other legendary figures of military history, he’d almost always fought at a numerical disadvantage, with “inferior” troops made up of farmers and laborers, rather than professional soldiers.

But his enemies, they’d had those professionals working for them. The Teutonic Knightly Order, the army of the Holy Roman Empire, he’d beaten them like rented mules. Jan Zizka had faced three crusades in total.

He. Hadn’t. Lost. A. Single. Battle.

He’d also revolutionized warfare through the invention of war wagons on the European battlefields and begun taking advantage of the existence of gunpowder weapons.

And when he’d lain on his deathbed, brought low by illness, he’d made a final request that, in Thomas’ mind, made him one of the most impressive figures, ever.

He’d had his corpse’s skin removed and turned into a drum, so he could continue to lead his people even in death.

Rest, little monkey, I’ll take care of everything else until I can make your spirit immortal, Thomas mentally promised.