Power leveling a specific creature pattern was difficult when Thomas wasn’t getting any visitors, but there were ways to get around the issue. Throwing money at the proverbial wall. Well, in this case, the money was also proverbial, but the principle was the same.

He made sure to fill ninety percent of his command limit with proper defenders, using only the smallest fraction of his available subordinates to power-level his monkeys using whatever options he had available, however much it cost. The Dungeon was already so stuffed with defenders that it was ready for any reasonable enemy, and that it didn’t matter whether his mana pool was completely full or utterly empty when trouble found him.

So Thomas spent his power like water to keep the trickle of experience going.

Small critters, from birds to monkeys had been his attempt at luring in visitors. He sent them out of his domain, as far as humanly possible, to the point where his senses barely told him that they were still alive, let alone specifics about their status, and then recalled them.

When they were still alive. Which was far from a given.

So many times he simply lost the connection, having it vanish without warning or apparent reason as something tore them apart.

Some didn’t even return, seemingly having decided to try their luck in the wild.

But he was spending mana so quickly that he was losing it more quickly than it was regenerating. Eventually, some of his “scouts” encountered other creatures, and a fraction of those even managed to return to the dungeon pursued by another creature that the spider monkeys then literally stoned to death.

Initially, the process was an inefficient mess.

Countless creatures died without him getting anything out of it, often not even receiving information on what was out there. But eventually, he started to narrow down where his creatures were dying, assuming that was where predators could be found. And if creatures died in the areas around those, chances were these were that the predators in question were of the pursuit variety, as opposed to using ambushes, since the former was more likely to chase his creatures.

So those creatures were what he tried luring, refining his process all the same. Splashing monkeys with blood before they left to attract hostiles, instructing them to “act injured” if their destinations were close enough to the museum that he could control them some, and so on.

Unfortunately, the threats in some areas seemed to have been satiated by what they’d already caught before he got his act together, but others fell right into his trap, fat and happy. One by one.

When that stopped really working, Thomas started experimenting with other avenues. Namely, carcasses.

He had quite a few scavenger patterns, so he summoned some, and used them to figure out what combination of smells attracted them the most, then summoned a massive pile of offal, perfectly formulated to attract as many creatures as possible, and pushed it out of the door to let the smell spread as wide as possible, not have its dispersion constrained by the narrowness of the door. Also, scavengers would be more likely to approach something out in the open, as opposed to entering an enclosed space.

For half an hour, Thomas forced himself to stay put, waiting to see if anything actually showed up, not wanting to accidentally scare away anything that did come to check this stuff out.

And while he waited, he plotted. Drawing up a plan that took a page out of nature’s playbook.

Large predators herding prey into tight groups, then tearing straight through those swarms with a mouth full of food.

In this case, it would be less of a matter of concentrating food and more getting the “victims” into a position where they could be hunted in the first place. But it was still based on how dolphins tore through migrating sardines off the coast of South Africa, and Thomas was pretty sure that certain birds also used these tactics against flying insects.

He sent out a group of t-rexes into the jungle and had them fan out before returning to scare the creatures now between them and the jungle, driving them towards the Natural History Museum.

It … it did not work out the way he’d hoped it would. This was a jungle, and most creatures here could climb, which the dinosaurs couldn’t.

And anything that couldn’t climb was likely big enough not to need to. Forest elephants, for example.

How could he counter that? What other ways did he have to drive every living creature in the jungle before him … except maybe a forest fire? His t-rexes were part dragon, weren’t they?

Thankfully, the first thing he tried to ignite was a massive, living, tree and when he asked Elias about how to improve his fire-starting potential, the fairy had vetoed the whole thing. With very good reasons behind it. The potential for the fire to spread to stuff Thomas didn’t want destroyed to pissing off creatures who hadn’t deigned to act at all until now.

And what if the smoke or flames hurt people in the city beyond?

No, the wildfire plan wasn’t going to fly. Or rather, it would have achieved the desired goals, while also causing a whole lot of other stuff to happen that was less, well, desirable.

Which left Thomas with his old tricks.

Dead bait, dangling live prey in front of where he assumed predators were, and chasing creatures into his reach. Once close enough, Thomas could just use a wyvern or another monster to grab them, toss them inside, and have the monkeys kill them.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Daylight faded as dusk came, and the red sky of evening faded into night.

Thomas had expected the already slow experience gains to come to a grinding halt at that point, and the only reason he kept going was that as a Dungeon Core without the need to sleep, he didn’t have the siren song of rest to distract him. Therefore, he just kept on doing what he was doing. But if he’d still been human, he’d have jumped into his bed in a heartbeat.

But the thing was, jungles never really slept. There were some diurnal critters, and a handful of crepuscular animals that he saw during dusk, but there was also a ton of nocturnal activity.

Before, Thomas had always assumed scenes in movies about jungles at night had had a ton of extra sound added in post-production, with some director going “it’s too quiet, slap on some random jungle sound file” and the editors complying.

But now that he’d spent time in a jungle, he found out that they were actually that noisy. And since most of those sounds were caused by animals, he knew that had to mean there were creatures responsible for this. Creatures he could hunt.

Lots of them. Scavengers, mostly, which hadn’t quite put together the chaos of the day with the sudden appearance of reeking meat carrion. Or at least, the chaos didn’t put any of them off.

It made sense that there were so many scavengers out at night. It was marginally safer to then, and when scavenging, one could take one’s time locating food as it didn’t move or run away the way prey would.

Of course, after the first few creatures had been snatched up and dumped into the Dungeon, the scavengers became more cautious. Likely, something about the fresh blood or disturbed earth was tipping them off.

And his monkeys were still only within spitting distance of E-Rank.

Step by bloody step, they edged closer, but even so … it was painful, truly painful to watch this going on.

Blood and carnage you weren’t directly suffering from, like a video game or movie, could be entertaining. And having “invaders” that weren’t a threat to him was nice-ish.

But at some point during the night, things had gotten boring, the process winding up on the same level of “interestingness” as watching paint dry. Even when something was happening, it was still just mechanical responses to a stimulus that he’d seen a hundred times before.

This would be the last time Thomas could do something like this for months, possibly even years. All the easily accessible prey had already fallen to him. All he could do was hope that what was left would be enough to create his new champion.

The first rays of dawn were visible to his creatures on the roof by the time he did manage to make things happen.

Some kind of eight-limbed tree cat monster-thing dropped dead, head caved in by a dropped stone, and the spider monkey pattern was finally able to be upgraded.

But instead of upgrading the entire pattern, he focused the power into a single creature. His now fully recovered favorite monkey of all time.

That particular creature had been sequestered off into the closest thing to paradise that Thomas had been able to create, waiting. He wasn’t able to give a specific designation to a specific creature unless it was a champion, but he’d been calling this particular paragon of monkeykind “Jan” for most of the day.

He mentally reached out and pulled him into his core, keeping him there, and pouring all the accumulated power meant to uplift an entire species into a single individual.

The E-Rank power was obvious, and had been selected almost from the start. Dungeon Relay, which was essentially a ranged version of the Dungeon Avatar ability, making Jan his ambassador to the outside world. And it would even allow this specific monkey to grow outside Thomas’ Dungeon. If he was able to take something down by himself.

And for D-Rank, Thomas would hand out the same power that he’d already decided to give his regular Spider Monkeys when they hit E-Rank again. It was a variation on telekinesis he’d found in a local predatory bird that might only work at point-blank range, but was powerful. The original holder of this power used it for defense, pushing projectiles one way while dodging in the other, but Thomas planned to use it in another way as well. Offense.

His monkeys could also “summon” projectiles for throwing as long as anything that fit the bill was within their line of sight. And that would put the projectile close enough to their holder to add telekinetic force to their attacks’ momentum.

He wasn’t entirely sure where to go from there, but he was pretty sure he’d be able to come up with something suitable by the time that question needed to be answered.

However, a mere “power” was only the start of what it meant to upgrade something to champion.

This was a chance for him to upgrade Jan on a fundamental level, with him just needing to think about what he wanted to change and if it was at all possible, that change would automatically be done.

So that was what he did.

First, the fur was enhanced to have the same properties as spider silk, and added more hairs, so that cutting attacks would wind up gathering hair before themselves and wind up having to push through a layer of spider silk hairs before they hit the skin.

Secondly came the internal enhancements. Toughened bones, denser muscles, adjustments made to increase survivability. And some hefty defenses meant to prevent whiplash to ensure Jan survived when someone or something punted him away. Despite his power, he was rather small.

Thirdly, he upgraded something he hadn’t touched on his other champions. Jan’s pool of available energy to fuel his powers. That limited his ability to make further adjustments, but Jan was tiny. The physical alterations had been cheap.

And finally, Thomas made some cosmetic alterations.

Jan got a pair of shockingly blue eyes, almost human-looking, at a larger than normal size to make him look just that little bit cuter. And then he got a large white patch on his chest, reminiscent of what a tuxedo cat had.

That combination would ensure that even amateurs would be able to identify him at a glance. It also looked great.

Overall, Jan had become an absolute beast.

Thomas observed the monkey rocketing through the mass of vines in the geology section like a pinball, hurling nuts, rocks, and everything else he could repurpose as a projectile at every target the Dungeon set up.

Of course, his lethality would heavily depend on the quality of the available projectiles, but overall, he wasn’t just dangerous, but he was extreme killing power condensed into a tiny package.

Thomas watched the antics for a while until he finally returned his attention to the outside world.

Now that Jan was at E-Rank and a true blue champion, Thomas could stop exterminating every creature he could possibly reach. Sure, he might be able to get a tiny bit little further, but was that worth the cost of permanently destroying the ecosystem around him, and potentially cutting himself off from animal delvers for years or decades to come? He felt that the answer to that question was a decided no.

So he sent a few giant sloths out there to shovel the mess back into his Dungeon where he could absorb it and later flood the outside with water to clean the stairs.

Of course, that was when the military truck burst out of the treeline, causing Thomas to reflexively freeze up, having his creatures likewise stop moving. Like the proverbial deer in headlights, though right now, he was feeling more like when he’d gotten caught sneaking booze as a teenager.

“Okay, what on Earth happened here?” Inspector Abrams asked as she got out of the car, looking at the mess with a mixture of fascination, confusion, and disgust.

Yeah, what on Earth had happened here? What would he explain it as?