My dear lovely readers. If you are an old timer, welcome back. You’ll recognize much from my other fiction. If you are new, welcome. Let me introduce you to the rules of this game. I will write, you will read. Of that, I am confident. Beyond that, you will note that this fiction is tagged with the notorious Reader Interactive tag.
I know, I know, but hear me out. The way it will work is simple. Our little dungeon core will create floors, spawn monsters, and do all the funky little things that dungeon cores do, but if and when she levels up, her next ability will be determined entirely by you. At the end of each chapter there will be a poll. In this poll there will be several abilities that will determine the future of the story.
Each ability will be real. There will be no Ability A: spawns flowers, Ability B: Create butterflies, Ability C: Spawn Greater Lich. All paths are viable, and I strongly encourage you to make your case for the ability you want in the comments. Sometimes I may fumble, but that is not my intention.
You can find a more detailed description of how tiebreakers are handled, how to suggest abilities, and more in the end note of each chapter.
That being said, let us begin with a kidnapping...
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Within a dimly lit room on the third floor of a vacation beach house, a group of bikini and swim trunk clad adults clustered around one of their number who sat hunched before a flashing monitor. The monitor strobed, creating harsh shadows that danced over plenty of bare skin still glistening from the salty ocean waves. On the screen itself, an avatar dashed around in a simulated environment, dodging spells and unleashing mayhem in nothing more than cheap rags and a wooden stick.
The entire room flared red, and the the onlookers roared, urging Stella, the diminutive female in the gamer chair, on. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, nimble and graceful, and the room was lit in blues, greens and finally a gentle gold.
The group fell into a hushed silence. Their breath held as the mechanical clicking from the keyboard intensified, and the final phase of the final bossfight began.
From the back, a tall, dark and handsome man in swim trunks and a towel that hid his stygian ringlets stepped in.
“Jeez guys. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think y’all were trying to bring the house down,” he chortled with a charming grin. The smile faded slightly as he first glanced at the group, then at the dark, wet footprints imprinted in the plush rug. “Uh, hey guys, y’all know this is a rental, ya?”
One of the faceless onlookers shushed him, slapping his bare shoulder repeatedly as she pointed towards the monitor. “Shush! Stella’s almost there.”
Stella — I — spun back for the briefest of moments. There was just something about his voice that made it so that I couldn’t not look. Especially with his chiseled—
The audio cue for the boss’ smash attack played, and I whirled back around without even getting a good look. My eyes narrowed as I stabilized my position, but I couldn’t help a cheeky little grin lift my lips as butterflies danced in my stomach.
He was here, and I was going to win.
Warning: If you are not reading this story on Royal Road, it has been stolen, and this constitutes copyright infringement. Please contact the author, Flamebeard, on RoyalRoad immediately.
I dashed behind one of the two remaining destructible pillars in the room, and frowned as it crumbled to protect my flimsily clad character. My character wasn’t precisely naked, but he might as well be. That was the beauty of a Blue run. Beat the game with only blue items. No rares, mythics, or legendaries to raise your defense. No awakened skills or aura stacking to supercharge your damage. Every battle became a slog where even the slightest mistake meant failure. It was the ultimate embodiment of mastery. It was—
“Dude, you didn’t prepare at all,” he said in his oh-so-deep voice full of indictment, and my stomach dropped. “How the heck did you get this far without even a single rare?! You should have at least some mythics by now. I can tell you, the full Rapture set makes this trivial. You should die, and I can show you where you can farm it up.”
My eyes flickered to the ‘Nightmare Hardcore’ in bold letters on the bottom left of the screen.
“That’s not the point,” I blurted out as I shot him a glance. He was leaning over that dumb broad whose fake tits pushed the boundaries of material science with every breath she took. She leaned into his pecs, eyes looking so far up into her lashes it was a wonder that her optic nerve didn’t snap from the strain.
A meaty hand clapped my shoulder and the onlookers roared. I spun back around to see my character get slammed across the arena, and I hastily popped [Last Stand].
Too early, I gritted my teeth as I focused everything I had on the game. The run was still salvageable, but without [Last Stand] I would have to conserve the last destructible pillar until the boss used its [Void Surge]. That meant...no mistakes.
“See,” he said. “That’s why you gotta wear a set for this fight. When I did this, I managed to three shot this boss, haha. Anyway, make sure to clean up the water when y’all are done.”
I stabilized, getting back in the rhythm of the fight, but I could feel him turning away, and my dumb monkey brain wasn’t having any of that. I had to get him to see what was so great about this.
“Wait...I’m doing this on purpose...Don’t you want to keep watching?” I blurted out, then immediately turned beat red and hunched down in my chair. I desperately wanted to turn and see what expression he had on his face, but I couldn’t risk the run for such a passing fancy.
“Yeah, stay and watch Stella crush this boss,” one of the onlookers said. What was his name again?
“Alright,” he said, grudgingly and I internally cheered. The battle was going well. I was in the rhythm and it just felt right. “I just don’t get why you would do this on purpose. It just makes it harder to win.”
I sat up straighter, “it’s about the challenge. I’ve beaten this game a long time ago - we all have — so we gotta to come up with restrictions to make it interesting.”
“Yeah, but how can you find that fun? Isn’t that just super frustrating?” He said, a cold chill to his voice. Was he mad?
I ignored his tone, and smiled, turning my head slightly so that he could see my expression properly. “Well sure, but to me it’s all about choice. I choose to be restricted, and that just makes the rules interesting because they force me to come up with crazy and niche interactions to overcome challenges that were never designed to be beaten with my weird rules in mind. Restriction is the mother of creativity, right?”
I ducked behind the last pillar and grinned as the [Void Surge] washed harmlessly around my avatar. I dashed back into the fray, watching in rapture as the last sliver of the bosses titanic health bar dipped down with every one of my precise strikes.
A hand grabbed my wrist and my character staggered to a standstill.
“Oh yes, you will do nicely,” a voice as cold as ice resonated in my ear as I watched the screen go gray and I lost all control.
“Wha...wha...” I stammered turning from the monitor. I looked up the arm restraining my wrist to the face of tall, dark, and handsome, except my eyes glitched or something because his face was replaced by soulless black eyes and cruel beak of an emperor penguin. I blinked, rubbing at my eyes, but the blur didn’t go away. I glanced at the others, and I couldn’t see any of their faces either.
“Come now, don’t you worry your pretty little head,” he said, lifting me up by my wrist and leading me out the back door. I followed, rubbing at my eyes, in confusion.
“But what about the game?” I asked. A fog had descended on my mind, and the brutal clarity that had been present not a minute ago was but a distant memory. “I gotta...go back. Try again.”
“You shall play, and play, and play. The greatest game of your life!” he cackled, and I blinked. His voice was totally different, cold and harsh, with none of the soothing baritones I was familiar with. “My brethren and I shall enjoy watching you struggle with great delight.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage as he took me through the house and into the kitchen.
Three large men in suits turned to us as we entered. My heart jumped into my throat as I took a closer look at them. Each one sported the noble visage of a penguin. Beady black eyes glinted above beaks sharper than they had any right to be.
I whirled to...what was his name?
He smiled at me, revealing a tongue covered in fleshy daggers.
“Its quite alright my dear, you are already quite dead.” he cackled.
“Can’t get more dead then dead, can ya?” Another dapper penguin chortled.
“Dead?” I murmured, not even sure myself if that was a question or not. The fog thickened, and I couldn’t muster much energy to care about...anything really.
“Not for much longer!” The third crowed.
“Come! Come. Onto the island!” said the fourth.
I shambled onto the cold marble in a daze. I lay back, feeling the icy stone leach the heat from my body. The fog rose, and suddenly it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. The four penguins looked down on me, and I noticed that each had little green text floating above their heads.
“An...on...level...one?” I murmured, in a vain effort to stay awake.
“Hush now,” the first said.
“Close your eyes.”
“It will all be over soon.”
“You mean...it’s just beginning!”
Darkness enveloped me.
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I floated in a black sea, reluctant to wake. I was warm, fuzzy, and tired in a way that could only be described as Saturday morning after a heavy snowfall. A blinking notification irritated my perception. I ignored it for a time.
It continued blinking.
I gave in.
The words — if nothing else — did wonders to dispel the horrific dream and raise me from my stupor. They were less literal characters in my vision, and more intrusive thoughts. Each word beamed to my lethargic mind with little care for whether I wanted to perceive the words myself. As I focused, I realized that the words weren’t in english, so much as I was translating the thoughtforms into understandable characters in real time.
The words themselves were familiar. I had read enough dungeon core stories to understand what had happened, and what was happening. The sheer excitable emphasis imprinted on each phrase wasn’t something I had expected, and the method of gaining mana seemed esoteric, but I was confident that I could deduce what manergic induction meant in time. All the dungeon cores in the stories eventually did.
The words faded from my mind and for the first time I payed attention to my perception. Not vision, for it wasn’t directional. More...an awareness. Proprioception. Like the feeling of knowing how my body was oriented even if my eyes were closed.
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A perfectly spherical chamber of smooth stone surrounded a small gemstone that floated at the centerpoint of the sphere. A gemstone, which I instinctively knew was me.
Consumable Artifact
Level 1
+7 life
Changes maximum level to 14
The notification tickled my perception but — after a brief perusal — I dismissed it. The words all made sense, but I wasn’t ready to understand the meanings behind them. For the time being, I turned my attention to the more mundane material world.
Veins of rust red and coppery green snaked their way through the polished gray stone. Little flecks of blue dotted the surface, giving the rock the appearance of a starry sky. The stone was cold. How I knew this, I did not know, but considering that the room was also black as pitch, it wasn’t all that big of a surprise.
As a dungeon, I wasn’t just the crystal flipping the bird to Newton. I was the entire space. Crystal, rock and everything in between. It was all me. I knew where everything was, what it was made of, and...if I focused, I could get a feel for how much force the stone around me could withstand before breaking.
I focused deeper and realized that the chamber was entirely devoid of air. A vacuum, except not. In the space between, gossamer-thin blue fibers — not unlike the mycelium of a fungus — originated from my crystal in a dense web that anchored the floating crystal to the walls.
In a strange way, the little fibers reminded me of the microcilia that certain types of bacteria used to scoot around. The thought comforted me, reminding me of home in a way that was hard to quantify.
Still, despite my familiarity, it took me a shocking amount of time to come to terms with the situation. I died? How? Why did I get reincarnated as a dungeon core? And did it have anything to do with that strange dream about...penguins?
As I sat there ruminating, the stuffiness from earlier surged. A claustrophobia bordering on pathology invaded my consciousness, sending all higher order reason to the winds as my primal lizard brain took over. The walls loomed. I couldn’t breath. I needed air.
I lashed out.
A blue radiation glow pulsed through the microfibers and they flexed. Rock crumbled to sand, and the smooth walls of the chamber became pockmarked in a blink of an eye.
I barely noticed as waves of paranoia and panic crushed me.
Nothing mattered. Nothing but air.
Another pulse radiated out of me. This time, the change was drastic. Instead of a proverbial ruffling, my fibers grew. Spears of microscopic blue impaled the hard stone, and the stone shattered. The earth shook. Dust billowed out as sand, gravel, and boulders collapsed towards me.
I clenched, animalistic in my panic, and a dizzying kaleidoscope of blue fibers exploded out of my core and slammed into the falling stone. Rocks a hundred times the size of my little crystal shattered and were thrown to the sides as my grasping tendrils reached up. They dug through stone, then dirt, and finally air!
Fresh, pure, lovely air!
With a violent hiss, the pure ambrosia flooded my chamber and every one of my little cilia rippled in pleasure. The blue glow faded, and my fibers relaxed, latching onto the walls of my new tunnel as if nothing of note had happened.
For a time I just breathed.
It didn’t take long for me to bury the remnants of the panic in favor of wonder. With the barest thought, I had dug through solid stone, and the earth shaping abilities of the dungeons from all the stories came back to me. My cilia rippled in excitement as I imagined everything I could do. For once, I could create...worlds. Not just adventures in the theater of the mind, but real, physical spaces full to the brim with wonder and intrigue.
But I was getting ahead of myself. If I was going to do this. I was going to do it right.
[Status]
< Level: 1 Mana: 1/10 Creatures: 0/0 >
< Upgrades: 0 Upgrades pending: 0 >
Not much information, but there was much I could deduce. I was level 1, which was pretty standard. It didn’t give me any information on how that related to the average — or even median — level of sentient life on this world, and I couldn’t focus in on any of the entries and get a more detailed description as was common in some dungeon core novels.
Mana was at one out of ten which was all sorts of confusing. There was nothing on regeneration which meant I had done some manergic induction during my little freakout without me realizing it. Too bad I didn’t know what it was that I did. Regardless, I had to figure out how to gain mana if I wanted to level up. Annoyingly, I had done my little panic attack before checking my status, so I didn’t know if I had started at ten and used nine in my little freakout. A quick ripple of my cilia a second later showed that wasn’t the case. Or if movement did cost mana, the cost was small enough not to be noticeable on my status.
More exciting and informative, was the creatures entry. I had no creatures, but the second zero indicated I had a maximum capacity. That, in addition to the fact that mana seemed to only be used to level up, meant that it was possible that creatures in this world were permanent. I would need to figure out a way to increase my maximum count somehow, but the secrets to that were likely hidden behind the Upgrades entry.
I was excited, but I forced myself to close my Status. It wasn’t helpful to keep speculating until I got more information.
Instead, I studied my entrance. I couldn’t see anything past the range of my cilia which made for a very limited inspection, but I could glean a few notable observations. The microscopic blue hairs extended several meters out of the side of a sheer mountainside. Light from a sun — or suns if that was a thing here — bathed the cliffside in gold and caused the little blue speckles to sparkle in a dazzling display of beauty. Some sad clumps of moss dotted the cliffside, but other than that there was no life anywhere near my entrance.
Amusingly, I couldn’t see flat ground below my entranceway, which meant that I was relatively high up. At the very least it would make entering my dungeon difficult when the inevitable adventurer came looking.
The only other aspect of note was the behavior of my cilia. They had naturally spread uniformly across the stone and air, except for a few patches where they curled around the sorry moss clinging to cliffside as if scared to touch it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the gossamer threads to penetrate the small plant life. It was as if, from the perspective of my cilia, the moss was harder than the stone it was clinging too. Of course, I could kill the moss easily enough, which I did, by crumbling the stone underneath them, but a quick check at my mana showed no change.
I was partially relieved at that. Even though it was far from conclusive proof, having to kill things to level up would have been a drag.
But that still didn’t explain how I—
A little salamander-like creature with antennae and overly large eyes scuttled down the side of the cliff and into my perception. I watched in fascination as my cilia distorted around the little creature in a bubble a full handspan from the surface of its scaly skin. Without my express consent, my cilia rippled, and pulsed blue. The blue traveled up the fibers, through my tunnel and into my gemstone as the little bugger crawled out of my perception.
Ahhh....manergic...induction? That made perfect sense.
I knew all about electromagnetic induction, where an electric current could be induced by passing a wire through a magnetic field or vice versa. Manergic induction must be the same thing but relating to mana. Instead of a magnetic field, my cilia formed a manetic field and instead of passing a wire through...I needed to pass living beings through.
That changed...everything.
It meant that unlike all the stories, I didn’t have to kill any adventurers that entered my depths. I just had to get them to move a lot. That didn’t preclude killing, as physical combat would definitely produce a heck of a lot of mana, but it implied that the optimal strategy was coexistence. If I could somehow convince a city of people to settle inside my depths I would get mana every time one of them rolled over in their sleep.
The salamander thing returned from down below and snuffled at the moss, running its antennae over the scraggly plants.
It also explained why I had gained a point of mana during my expansion. There wasn’t much moss on the wall, or life in general around me, but there was no reason why I wouldn’t gain mana if my manetic field moved in relation to the living beings rather than the other way around. Which meant...If I could somehow form a sky island, I would be able to float above cities and rake in the dough.
The little bugger crawled into my tunnel and I instinctively tried to widen it for him, but found my cilia to be numb and unresponsive near the little critter. They pulsed mana to me, but for the time being they were out of commission.
It all depended on the upgrades I’d get. I stared at my status in eager fascination as the salamander explored my tunnel.
My mana slowly ticked up, as I carefully blocked off my core behind a rough cage of stone before the salamander could get close enough to paralyze me. I had read too many stories not to protect what was my only vulnerable part.
Stone moved like water under my command. I watched — still fascinated by my own powers — as blue glowing cilia pulled together rocks and fused them together into a solid whole. Immediately the claustrophobia returned and I quickly poked several holes to make a cage. It would appear that I needed access to the air no matter what.
As the salamander crept deeper, my domain near my entrance became accessible and I surreptitiously blocked off my entranceway with a similar grate. It wouldn’t do for my only source of mana to leave before I’d leveled up once or thrice.
I felt a low lying panic and began to work on making the grate bigger but was stopped as my control fizzled. The salamander had returned from its inspection of my tunnel, and just like that, my immense control over the stone was gone.
My cilia rippled in satisfaction as the little creature sniffed out the stone bars and my mana continued to tick up. Obviously trapping a large group of living beings and forming an ecosystem would also work, but I would much prefer a peaceful coexistence. Less drama, and the fact that living things paralyzed my power meant that inviting anything that I didn’t trust into my domain was hella spooky.
Suddenly little sparks jumped between the salamanders fleshy antennae and arced out to zap the bars, leaving a black scorch mark and hairline fractures. I froze, proverbial eyes wide as another honest to god lightning bolt zapped the stone. The salamander pawed at the bars, dislodging a chip. Then unleashed another zap.
Ha! This was amazing. I watched in fascination as the little creature dismantled my grate. This was magic, and the thoughts of what creatures I could get to populate my dungeon spiraled out of control, then ground to screeching halt as I realized that my ‘defense’ of my core was not nearly so sturdy as I had initially believed.
The outer grate cracked, and in a flash the salamander dashed out. Just as it left the edge of my range my mana ticked up for the final time.
I idly repaired the grate as I checked my status. I didn’t want to be disturbed while I chose my upgrades.
< Level: 2 Mana: 0/89 Creatures: 0/0 >
< Upgrades: 0 Upgrades pending: 1 >
I was tempted to immediately jump into the upgrades but I promised to myself that I would do this right. Which meant being methodical.
I was level 2, and the mana required for the next level had spiked by seventy-nine additional points. Why seventy-nine? I did not know, but it implied an extremely steep curve, or at the very least an odd one. Even if it only required an additional seventy-nine mana every level up, the amount of mana required would quickly grow ridiculous. On the other hand, my experience generating mana were limited to a salamander walking through a tunnel for a couple of minutes, so a lot was still up in the air.
My creature count hadn’t increased, which almost confirmed that I would need to use the upgrades to increase it.
Speaking of. The upgrades. I focused on it, and the menu changed.
Summon Kobold:
+5 to maximum creatures
180 minute cooldown
Summon Nothic:
+3 to maximum creatures
300 minute cooldown
Summon Shock Wisp:
+4 to maximum creatures
225 minute cooldown
Three summons. Kobolds, Nothics, and Shock Wisp with no further descriptions. Kobolds I was familiar with. Scaly lizard-like humanoids. Tending towards traps and usually had stone age weaponry. That didn’t guarantee that these kobolds would be like that, as some kobolds were furry and more dog like. Regardless, what I did know is I would be able to have five of them, and respawn one every three hours.
That confirmed that mana was not related to summoning creatures, and the only constraint on creatures is their respective skill’s cooldown.
Moving on, I had no idea what a Nothic was, and poking at the menu did nothing to appease my curiosity. The name sounded cool at least. Gave me horror monster vibes.
Lastly, I didn’t know what a Shock Wisp was per se, but I could make a pretty good guess. Likely a lightning attuned elemental of some kind. It might be along the lines of a will-o-wisp focusing on illusions and the like, or it could be more like a sentient ball of magic.
What I did know was that Kobolds would allow me to have the largest number of creatures, with the shortest cooldown on respawning. That implied that Kobolds were weaker — on a per individual basis — than Shock Wisps, which were in turn weaker than Nothics. Assuming that the creatures were balanced, which wasn’t at all guaranteed.
I had always been partial to the zerg approach. Quantity has a quality of its own as they say. Plus there was no reason why I couldn’t fill the maximum creature count with a different creature. Say for example, I’m able to summon a dragon later. If I chose Nothic now, I would only be able to summon three dragons, while if I chose Kobold, I would be able to summon five.
On the other hand, its hard to beat quality. I didn’t know what a Nothic was, which made the choice uncertain, but three bigger, badder creatures is a lot harder to deal with in a narrow tunnel, than five smaller, weaker creatures.
Of course I was making a bucket load of assumptions, but I had to if I was going to get anywhere.
Lastly there was the Wisp. Lightning. Magic. It was appealing. Plus, I bet that lightning was harder to deal with than any physical challenge. At least it would require more specialized gear.
My mind drifted back to the lightning salamander.
Or perhaps, it wouldn’t be harder to deal with. If every dumb lizard was able to shoot lightning bolts, I couldn’t imagine the knights of this world walked around without some kind of insulation beneath their armor.
Frustrated at the complete lack of information, I worked some to clear out my tunnel to the surface and reinforce my grate. It was downright fun, working the stone, and I got lost in the work as I thought.
Ultimately, the choice was impossible. I didn’t know the current meta. Did it favor swarms of enemies? Was magic over powered? The list of questions was endless.
What I did know was that the system offered me three choices that appeared — at least on the surface — as two extremes and a middle of the road option. Extremes could be the best option, but they could also be the worst, while the middle of road option had the least amount of risk attached to it.
I chose Shock Wisp.
...
Nothing.
The interface stubbornly floated in my vision.
I focused hard on selecting the option, but nothing I did confirmed the selection. In frustration I jabbed at Summon Nothic, but once again nothing happened.
A ripple passed over my dungeon as I ineffectually jabbed at each of the options. Kobold. Nothing. Nothic. Nothing. Shock Wisp. Nothing
I jabbed harder, my cilia flared, a visible reflection of my anger, when suddenly, an option was chosen.