Christina, Gella, and Kellar sat at a round table with drinks in hand in one of the newly created restaurant bars of New Hope; the one-of-a-kind town that had popped up within the bounds of the dungeon. They sat with a young woman — a girl really — whose doe eyes placed her as one of the newcomers who had been streaming in over the last few days.
New Hope had experienced unprecedented growth due to the efforts of Gella and Kellar. At first, it had taken some convincing to get the malnourished and weak slaves to enter the dungeon, but as the town grew, the difficulty waned. It only took a brief look to see why.
New Hope was a haphazard town, with little organization as to make a city planner cry, and yet, there was a magical charm to it. It was in the near blinding light of the sun that shone for many more hours than it should. It was in the gentle green light that the dense canopy let through, somehow filtering the sun to manageable levels. And it was in the people. They wore a fragile happiness on their sleeve as if this was the first and last day of their lives. It wasn’t, but this very innocence allowed them to frolic in the woods as if drunk in the first place.
But if you were of ancient origins, you might notice something more magical about the burgeoning town than these mere mundanities. It was a subtle change in the basic physicality of the world. Something that made the wind blow and the water sparkle with glee. An invisible energy that seeped into the denizens of the town rather than being drained from them as had become the norm.
“I just wish Soulwrest would do more,” Gella grumbled into her mug. “I mean it’s just sitting here while we go out every day and rescue heaps of people.”
“It raised you...what? Three tiers? Or was it four? Remind me again how that isn’t helping,” Christina replied sourly.
“Relax, my friends,” Kellar interrupted. “We shouldn’t doubt the Lord’s intent. They aid us in precisely the correct proportion.”
“Oh come on, Kellar. You have to admit that this would be a whole lot easier if a horde of monsters cleaned up all the—”
“Don’t you dare encourage a Dungeon Break,” Christina rebuked. Her anger was almost a tangible force that pushed down on the rogue. “It is bad enough what you two are doing out there every day. The number of innocents who would suffer from that would be uncountable.”
“And if a Dungeon Break is the Lord’s will,” Kellar said, a hint of iron passing over his calm appearance. “Then a dungeon break is what must happen.”
“Why you—” A vein pulsed in Christina’s forehead and it almost seemed that she would leap over the wooden table to strangle the other man. Difference in tier be damned.
“Yeah, alright,” Gella slumped over her mug, placing an apologetic hand on Christina’s to calm her. “I dunno. Just think it would be cool is all.”
“It would not be cool!”
The group descended into silence as the crowd of people drowned out the gentle racket of the forest around them. The one child amongst the four stared wide-eyed at each as if unsure if she should say something into the silence or not. Before she could conclude, the waiter stopped by with several more mugs balanced on a tray.
“Another water?” asked the waiter to the table of the town’s heroes. “I have here a sample of our finest water that has been aged for three whole days.”
“Oh, you have to try some, Ashley,” Gella said as she grabbed her mug and leaned back. The previous argument momentarily forgotten.
“Ok,” Ashley said softly, accepting the mug from the waiter. She took a gentle sip, paused, then guzzled the rest as if she was dying of thirst. She placed the mug down, dazed and disappointed, only for the waiter to set another cup down with a knowing smirk.
“Wow, it tastes...”
“Divine,” Kellar rumbled, taking a conservative sip of his own. His usual calm returned and he closed his eyes in contentment.
“You guys are weird. It’s just water.” Christina grumbled then sighed. “What I wouldn’t do for a beer right now.”
“Speaking of,” Gella leaned forward with frightening speed. Ashley flinched at the sudden motion. Both Kellar and Christina glanced at the young girl with concern, but Gella was oblivious. “We need beer. Lots of it.”
“Uhm, I guess?” Christina raised a brow. “May I ask why?”
“Oh, not just beer,” Gella leaned back, again with a motion that appeared to skip the intervening space, and waved her hand flippantly. “Lots of stuff. Um. Mattresses and shit. You know? We’re living like savages right now and it would be nice if you could help organize things a little.”
“I don’t think the people you are killing daily would be particularly open to a trade deal,” Christina said. “Besides I can’t leave, you’d be better off stealing the ‘mattresses and shit’.”
“I meant you could organize our people to make all the things that we are missing,” Gella replied, unaware of Christina’s sass or ignoring it. “The land is super bountiful and our people are pretty skilled in a bunch of stuff so it can’t be that hard. Just needs a little push I think.”
“The land is bountiful indeed,” Kellar clasped his hands on his stomach. He looked at peace, with half-lidded eyes that lazily surveyed the canopy as if on the verge of sleep.
“Yeah, that,” Gella vaguely gestured at Kellar as her eyes pleaded. “Could you please?”
Christina eyed Gella. “I don’t think you understand what you are—”
Christina’s speech stuttered and her ear twitched. She turned to the busy street and casually cast [Minor Shield] just as a child stumbled and fell face-first to the floor. The skill absorbed the minor impact and the kid rolled to his feet and rushed on, oblivious that anything magical had happened at all.
“—asking of me,” Christina continued, turning back to the table as the others belated turned to see what she had done. “I have no experience in gover—”
“Oh! Right!” Gella snapped her finger and pointed in the direction the kid had vanished. “A school too. The normies got scared, so I think only you and I have experience using skills and it would be awesome if you could teach people.” Her expression darkened. “Well, mostly you and I.”
“I would love to help but there are so many problems with what you are asking,” Christina said. “Even if I had the experience of organizing an entire town it would never work. I’m not like you. The people don’t listen to me nor do they like me. I was never a slave and they avoid me like I have the plague.”
“Ehh, they’ll get over it. I think you should do it.”
“You are not listening Gella,” Christina shook her head. “I’m not fit for this job. Find someone else.”
“There is no one more fit,” Kellar said, raising his hand as Christina turned on him. “Peace. Let me explain with a question: How many knives does Gella wield on her person?”
“What does this have—” Christina sat back with a huff, brushing off a leaf that fell onto the table from the canopy, as her ear twitched. “Seven. What does it matter?”
Kellar closed his eyes, smiling gently. “The Lord has gifted me true sight in my prescribed mission. Every day I go out, and I find that it is precisely what I need to achieve the most good. More would be wasteful. Less, insufficient. To do Lord’s will, the Lord has given me enough. For you, the Lord has granted omniscience. An unparalleled power that can’t be more fitting to guide our people into prosperity, yes?”
“It’s not omniscience, it’s...” Christina gritted her teeth, glancing to the side with an irritated frown.
“Think about it?” Gella said, placing her hand on Christina’s imploringly.
“Fine,” Christina pulled her hand back and threw back her water with a look of distaste.
“Awesome!” Gella clapped her hands, looking around. “Now onto more important things. Where is that waiter?”
“Ms. uhm...Gella?” Ashley said into the sudden silence. The careless rogue glanced at the girl, her tier-five aura pressing down on her like a physical weight. “You worked with my b-brother right?”
“Hmm? Yeah, we did. Though it was for a different thing.”
“Can I uhm...help?” Ashley asked. She peeked up through her lashes before dropping her gaze as it accidentally met with the high-tier rogue’s.
“You want to come help free more slaves with me?”
“Absolutely not,” Christina said at the same time.
“Yes?” Ashley said, phrasing it more like a question than a statement, glancing between the two near-legendary figures before her.
Just then, an ephemeral shape fell from the canopy and landed on the table. It was a foot tall, squat, and humanoid with a huge head relative to the rest of its body. Silence fell on the group as the creature’s uneven black indentations where its eyes should be looked soullessly around.
“Is that a Woodsing—” Ashley started, only to be shushed by the others.
The Woodsinger took a step and then rotated its head a full 180°, before letting it snap back into position with the sound of rocks falling down a cliff. Then it leaned down and touched the table. Its form faded like a dying ghost as a silver wave washed over the rough-hewn boards. Instantly, the grain of the wood popped out, its color returning to a lustrous honey-gold as the table’s legs grew roots that dug into the soil below. At the center of the round table, a small sprout burst free and grew several inches before unfurling a fragile green leaf proudly to the sky.
The group watched the spirit of nature vanish for a moment of contemplation.
“She comes with us.” Kellar broke the silence with his deep voice.
“Don’t be daft,” Christina snapped, “she isn’t even level seven. She stays here.”
“This was a sign. The girl helps.” Kellar opened his eyes to look at Christina. Despite the massive difference in tier, it was Kellar who felt a shiver creep up his spine from the force of Christina’s glare.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Fine she helps, but she does it from here,” Christina sighed. “Dammit, I’ll find her something to do.”
Just then a tremor shook the earth. Everyone grabbed the table as branches shook and leaves fell from the canopy. Gella cursed and Ashley gasped. Around them, more than one resident fell to the shockwaves passing over the earth.
“What was that?” Gella shouted into the din.
Christina sent a fearful glance towards the mountain — and the center of the dungeon — and whispered to herself. “It’s doing it again.”
Despite the din and Christina’s hushed tone, Kellar heard her words and smiled.
“Ask and ye shall receive!” Kellar proclaimed to Gella who shot him a confused look. Kellar laughed — loud and free — as he jumped onto the table and raised his arms grandly. “Fear not, my friends! And behold, the Drums of War!”
Several minutes later, another earthquake shook the land.
----------------------------------------
Placing my fourth floor around the human camp was a great idea. The Woodsingers were a hit, and the people were already coaxing the creepy little dolls to make them tree houses. And boy were there a lot of people. Two-hundred and forty-seven current inhabitants with an expected increase of forty-three per day. That number was only accelerating, as Gella and Kellar grew more comfortable with their powers.
On the other hand, I was less than happy with the Woodsingers. They were...limited.
Woodsinger
Level: 17
Level Acquired: 22
Life: 1/1
Resistances: -60 to all resistances
Nature Manipulation: 1 physical damage to self
Their stat sheet was confusing. With life capped at 1 no matter what I did, and no attacks to speak of, it was obvious that Woodsingers were useless in combat. They didn't gain any life from my equipped gear, and their ghostly body meant that [To Dust] didn't trigger. To add salt to the wound, their resistances were abysmal to the point of being comical. It seemed like such a restricted minion slot as even if I tried to fuse the Woodsingers with my existing summons to make up for their weaknesses, the resulting creature would be strictly inferior to any of my existing designs.
The only silver lining was that the creepy little spirit-doll-things accelerated the growth of my forest tremendously. Everywhere I looked, the little guys were kamikaze-ing into dead wood or existing plant life with equal exuberance. They also helped in the human department as their presence calmed the newcomers faster than I thought possible.
Overall, I had mixed feelings about this new summon. On the one hand, Woodsingers were optimal for growth. Larger forests and calmer human inhabitants were perfect for a peaceful route, but...it just felt restrictive. At least with the Treants, I could get them to fight. The Woodsingers were hardcoded to a very specific style and that irked me. The real problem was that I didn’t have any fun ideas on what to do with them. It felt like the best — and only — strategy was just to dump them into my forest and let them generate bucketloads of mana over time.
Despite the Woodsinger’s valiant efforts, my levels had been slow in coming. Most of my mana income I directed into new cilia to expand my domain so it was expected, but even then I should have been gaining more than I was. It took me nearly a whole day of redoing my calculations and searching for the problem before I noticed that my tier-1 cilia were leaking. It was a subtle thing, but as the sliced-up cilia absorbed mana from souls, some of the mana oozed out like some kind of gross slime. The effect was more pronounced in the center of the human town where my cilia had to travel farther to dump into my more stable high-tier cilia.
The result was a net neutral mana differential in the human town and the manifestation of a rather interesting feedback loop in the humans. They would lose mana to my cilia and then reabsorb it from the air only for my cilia to reabsorb the same mana. It didn’t have much of an effect unless they absorbed foreign mana which made them slightly punch drunk. Any physical activity close to others increased the foreign mana intake as well as partaking in mana-dense materials. Water, apparently, had a pretty high capacity to store stray motes of mana. Especially stationary water in barrels or ponds since the lack of movement made it impossible for my inefficient tier-1 cilia to coax the stuff out of the liquid.
I suddenly had a weird image of a bunch of people doing a rain dance around one of their precious barrels of water to ‘charge’ it. The wind danced as I laughed merrily at the imagery.
At the end of the day, the terrible to nonexistent mana gain from the human village didn’t matter. Despite gaining hundreds of human inhabitants, the greatest increase in my mana supply came from the trees. 1,347 young saplings had joined the cause and all of them were gaining experience rapidly due to [Eternal Spring]. I was uptiering them piecemeal, but many were already capped at the end of their tier. Because of this, I had made the executive decision to leach a little extra moolah now and let them grow unhindered later.
To do so, I had come up with a nifty little device that produced gentle tremors every ten minutes or so. The device consisted of a big rock reinforced with Transparent Alumina in a hollow underground chamber. Every ten minutes or so, I lifted the enormous stone several meters — using a set of pulleys and braided cilia rope — before letting it fall with a bang. I could trigger the device more often, but that would drain the trees faster than their souls recovered.
Was it the most elegant solution? Ehh. Don’t knock it if it works. Perhaps sometime in the future, I would come up with an automated system, but for now, I was okay with triggering the machine manually.
Thank god for Kellar though. I had been a little uneasy about using the earthquake device in case it drove away the humans, but the little zealot had made the earth-shaking sound like a good thing. It hadn’t taken the people long to start climbing my most ancient trees to get away from the worst of the shaking. All I needed now was to introduce pointed ears into the gene pool and I would have the perfect elves.
It was also hella cute that he thought that the earthquakes were my signal to start fighting. I mean, I could. Maybe. But the whole point was to begin the snowball. Increase mana production to increase the volume of my domain, which would in turn increase my mana production. The feedback loop would accelerate to the point where there were so many trees in my domain that I would be able to do anything.
< You have received a Prayer: +7 mana >
I winced as a part of my mind detached and was forced to focus on a scene of pain. Chains. A whip cracking. More...unsavory events.
I was forced to witness it all.
The prayers hadn’t been so bad before when most of them had come from already escaped and jubilant slaves. The word had gotten out since then, however, and suddenly slaves still imprisoned were praying to me. It hurt. They asked for things. Begged me to save them. Again and again, there was little I could do to help. They were too far, and I was too weak. Every time I cut the connection after taking their meager prayer I felt a part of myself die.
Frustrated, and slightly cross-eyed from witnessing at once a green paradise and a grim dystopia, I triggered another small quake.
< Mana 11,521/11,521 >
< You have leveled up! >
< You are now level 24! >
< Mana 0/13,368 >
The mana requirements were really starting to add up. Nearly an extra two thousand additional mana required for level 24 as compared to level 23. It didn’t feel so long ago that each level had required under a thousand.
< Upgrade pending: 1 >
Let’s see what the options were this time.
Resolute Technique:
Damage enchantments may apply to damage penetration
One for All:
+1 to maximum gear slots
Adamant Weave:
Resistance enchantments may apply to maximum resistance
The upgrades had cycled back to item-centric ones again. [Resolute Technique] and [Adamant Weave] were both direct upgrades to my enchantments. How big of an upgrade depended on the magnitude of the enchantments, but even a minor increase to maximum resistances or penetration would be a huge boost. For example, a 10% increase to damage penetration equated to a 40% boost in damage against a target with 75% maximum resistances. Against one with 80% or even higher the effect would be magnified.
[One for All] was the boring but flexible option. Having an additional item slot would give me more flexibility in my items. I would be able to have four items of differing resistances which would allow me to protect my minions from a wider variety of sources. Or I could stack damage and make my minions lethal at the drop of a hat. Realistically, [One for All] would also equate to a roughly 25% boost in offense or defense, since I already had three gear slots.
If I assumed that the three upgrade options were equal then that would mean I would be able to craft between 5 to 6% damage penetration or maximum resistances. Perhaps more since those options weren’t as flexible as [One for All].
It was all speculation but any of the choices would be a solid power boost. I dismissed the window and scanned my domain. Everything was in order. My cooldowns were down and my minions were dutifully prowling. Even my bosses were doing great. Cortana was in the midst of an animated conversation with Christina and Tank was happily impersonating a statue in the sky.
“Blppfffff.”
Ahh Betsy...
“Ppllurffffff.”
Betsy, dear? What are you doing?
“I’m copying her,” My fearsome Beholder stared into her spyglass as she pursed her lips and blew a raspberry. “She’s so pretty!”
Curious, I panned my perception up and noticed...nothing. Betsy though was panning her spyglass as if her life depended on it, so I joined her and saw a faint distortion in the air, dancing in my upper reaches. It was a small pixie or sprite of sorts. Ephemeral and magical in the way that only a transparent creature could hope to be. Most disturbing, the creature was entirely invisible to me. Not because of any complex magic, but because it was sneaking in between the strands of my cilia with impeccable grace.
Fascinating. I would have to remedy that weakness.
“Mama, can I play with her? Please, please please!”
I examined the strange creature in the sky for several more minutes before I let Betsy ‘play’. It was trivial to give my boss a hard bark shell that I could fill with mana so that she could exist outside of her designated floor.
Betsy rushed out and I worriedly watched as the colossal beholder chased the tiny air-sprite-thing through the air. They danced and twirled, making music with the air and otherwise enjoying each other’s company. The creature seemed peaceful. It didn’t attack Betsy, nor did it exhibit any violent tendencies. If anything, it was playful, but I resolved to keep an eye on Betsy while she played with the thing.
< You have received a Prayer: +1,499 mana >
What the hell?
My attention was grabbed and I found myself inside a dank prison. No! A polished antechamber. My vision split as drab gray stone walls surrounded me at the same time as painted white walls. It was nauseating, and I forced myself to focus on the single constant in the room. A pale mountain of a man with powerful slabs of muscle obscured by greasy dreadlocks hung from chains in the center of the room. In the clean version of the room, a priest wearing robes I had become all too familiar with had both hands raised as he focused on some sort of spell, while in the prison version, millions upon millions of insects crawled over every surface as they chewed and ate at the prisoner's exposed flesh.
The vision stabilized and I forced the two separate streams of thought to separate. The truth was revealed to me and the insects faded as I realized that the horror was all a grand illusion. One so powerful that the man’s soul was convinced of its veracity. His eyes were shut tight and he twitched constantly, vainly trying to escape the millions of chewing mandibles.
To whomever it may concern. Help. If you can.
I winced at the power of the message beamed directly to my psyche. Whoever this man was, he was powerful and had somehow pissed off the church so bad that they were...torturing him. Illusions of bugs biting relentlessly seemed like an odd choice, but whatever. Though...now that I thought about it. Depending on his tier, there was a chance that they physically couldn't harm him with more traditional methods. Regardless, if this man was against the church then I’d help him. Especially with such a great gift of mana.
With an effort of will, I funneled his massive gift into a single thread which I wove into a rigid mesh. I wrapped it around his shining soul and imprinted upon it a pair of functions.
First, should he wish, the man could sleep. Fall into a soul-induced slumber not even the greatest of pain would wake him from. His only weakness was his mind and with this, he could escape. Second, I granted him an ounce of my own perception. I wasn't so arrogant as to assume I could form a perfect shield against illusions with a construct existing in the soul. The mind existed outside the soul after all. Instead, I imbued within him a single living strand of cilia that he could tap into to determine what was or wasn’t an illusion. I could do nothing for his chains, for they weren't artifacts and so I couldn't steal them with [Soulbind Artifact], nor did I have the strength to empower him to any degree that would matter. Instead, I granted him what I thought he lacked. The ability to fight back, should he so choose.
The man’s eyes snapped open, completely ignoring the insects crawling over them as he let out a hoarse guffaw. The sound startled the priest whose spell stuttered, but by then my vision faded and I found myself looking down upon my domain.
Good luck to whoever that person was.
Only two thoughts circled my thoughts as I contemplated the vision. One, the man hadn’t known who I was. His prayer was directed to anyone who would listen which was such a strange observation that it stuck in my mind. Secondly. That vision gave me the perfect way to destroy my enemies’ supply lines and morale in one fell swoop.