Gormund the Harsh looked on from the Union’s castle walls, pondering their next moves as the horde just outside the valley moved in. He never imagined that he and the elves would have to ally with each other just to keep from being wiped out, let alone the gnomes and the minotaurs. He guessed it was for the best he did though, lest he and his people ended up like the hobgoblins of the east. Poor bastards.
A hand on his shoulder nearly had him going for his war-scythe, before the dainty fingers clued him in to who it was. “Evalla, now’s not the time to grope me.” From the corner of his eye, the elven princess simply let out a coy smile, dragging her hand down to wrap her arm around his. “Oh come now, no last-minute love making before the big battle? I’m sure I can turn that green skin even greener.” Seeing her teasing not faze the orc warchief, the smile falls from her face, looking out onto their enemies alongside him. “...do you think we can win?”
“Yes...but not without casualties.” She simply hugs his arm tighter at his response, taking a deep breath before speaking once more. “You’ll be on the front lines, won’t you?” The orc snorts at the question, despite the grim atmosphere. “Of course I will, a Chief cannot tell his people to go to battle for him without being willing to risk his life along with them. Besides, it’s not like I’m a young one, I got my title for a reason. I’ll be fine. Once this is all over, you can go back to teasing me, don’t you worry.”
The elven princess gives a wet chuckle at his words, looking up to him with a glimmer in her eyes that can’t be explained away as just the magic in her form. In a quite forward move, she grabs Gormund by one of his tusks and yanked him down to her height, nearly tripping him over. Before he can complain, she kisses him, sparks of mana flowing from her to him. Evalla lets go and breaks the kiss, ears flushed as she speaks. “There, for luck.” Before he can respond, she runs off, the door leading down off the wall slamming behind her.
Gormund blinks for a moment, before looking down at his hands. When he clenches them into fists, sparks of lightning scatter across his skin, and he grins. She gave him a Blessing of Lightning, and she got a kiss out of him for it too, the little minx! Chuckling at the game they play, he looks out over the wall once more, just a bit more hopeful about the outcome of this war to end all wars.
[End Transmission]
“Well well well, looks like things are heating up for Gormund and Evalla! So tell us James, how do you feel about the lovebirds as their Dungeon Master?” The screen pans over from the spokesman to a young man, currently even more flushed in the face than Evalla was. “Well, uh, I’m not exactly surprised, really. Evalla has always had odd tastes in men from what I’ve seen-” A harsh laugh sends the camera panning over to another face, this one of a middle aged woman. “Oh please! That was right out of a corny fanfic. Either your girl has a fetish or I’ll give you my Xeno starter!”
With a laughing audience and an even more flushed James, the spokesman speaks up once more. “Yes yes, let’s not poke into their love life too much. For now. But tell me, what do you think your chances of winning are, Samantha?” The now named woman crosses one leg over the other and leans back in her seat, practically screaming ‘I’m better than you’ with her posture. “Oh it’s certain, as far as I see it. Yeah James-boy here has some good tech and magic, but I’ve got numbers and specialized species on my side. Not much an explosion can do when half your enemies are explosion-proof!”
Shaking off the embarrassment, James comes to his own defense, giving his opponent a challenging glare. “That may be so, but all your monsters do is charge forward, no sense of tactics at all! Just you wait and see, I’ll show you what I can do.” Oooh’s abound in the audience at the proclamation, though Samantha just gives James a cocky smirk. The spokesman simply turns to the camera, a businessman’s smile on his face as he speaks. “Well, you’ve heard it here folks! The Humanoids Hero James vs The Swarm Queen Samantha in this Season’s finale of the national Dungeon Wars!”
Corrin shuts his T.V off, rolling his eyes as he bumbles about in his kitchen in the morning. It was his turn to make breakfast, so he made some basic scrambled eggs and toast, setting the coffee maker up. Not for himself of course, he can’t stand the stuff, he just gets some crangrape juice out of the fridge for himself. Adjusting his glasses, he looks over at the holographic projector hanging in the living room.
“Hey Eva, what’s on the schedule or today?” The projector lights up, and his V.I. forms from the light, just a symbol of a pair of secretary glasses right now. She probably was feeling as sleepy as he was. “It’s actually a free day today, your teacher canceled class. Apparently her daughter got sick so she took the day off.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. Tell her I said I hope she gets better?” The glasses give a wink, which would be disconcerting if they weren’t the cartoonish type of projection. “Will do boss.” “Mmm, smells like eggs...” Corrin’s roommate Rick finally slouches out of his bedroom to get some food, yawning while his V.I. Darin flickering into visible sight in the projected space next to Eva. Darwin seems to have gone with a green curvy wave for now, matching his humans dyed, curly mop of hair.
“So, what’s new in the world after my long slumber?” Ignoring the polite sense of pouring a cup, Rick just takes the entire coffee bowl with him to the table as he sits next to Corrin, shoveling eggs into his mouth in something just parallel to a civilized manner. Huffing at his friend’s casual decorum, Corrin holds out the remote in preparation of Rick's reaction. “Samantha and James are about to have their Dungeon War finale.”
Nearly choking on his toast, Rick forces down his bite of toast and snags the remote from his grip, rushing to turn the T.V back on. “What the hell man, why didn’t you warn me!” “Because I like seeing you suffer. Also because I figured Darwin would have reminded you.” Rick turns to glare at Darwin’s avatar as the thought comes to him, and the rolling wave does the closest thing to a shrug it can. “Hey, don’t look at me! I did try to remind you but you were half asleep and just told me to turn off the alarm.”
Grumbling something about having traitors in his own home, he finally turns the T.V on and turns it back to the right channel, eyes practically welded to the screen as the final battle between the two Dungeon Master’s forces unfolds before their eyes. Corrin personally takes the time to make use of the projection space, finishing up some homework to fill up the hours as he only half-heartedly pays attention to what’s happening on the screen.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
It isn’t until midday that the Dungeon War finally ends, surprisingly James’s humanoids actually do take the win, though not without cost. Nearly all of his people were killed in a last-shot maneuver to take out the Grand Hive Queen, taking advantage of their Hive-Mind trait to send the entire opposing army into disarray. Without an organized mind to lead them, they went into a directionless frenzy, killing more of their own than the Union. “Man, what a fight, huh?”
Corrin merely shrugs, still more focused on his work than anything. “Eh, it was kind of obvious what was going to happen. Samantha hasn’t spent a lot of time directly inhabiting her Grand Hive Queen, probably was too impatient to re-learn how to move in a new body. With James only having humanoids though, he could slip right into a minion or even between them easily, which helped a lot in that initial push.”
Rick simply stared at his friend as he casually dismantled the strategies of two professional Dungeon Masters, shaking his head in exasperation as he finished. “You see, this is why I think you should give Pocket Dungeons a shot. You’re one of the only people I know who doesn’t have it even as just a casual player! And you’re really good at strategy too!”
Corrin simply sighs, sliding his work out of the space and turning to Rick. “Look I just never really got into it, ok? It just feels like it would take away from school, and you know I need top marks to get into a good Astro-miner company.” Rick gives him a blank stare, speaking in deadpan as Darwin and Eva look on amusedly at the oft repeated argument.
“You’re either on top of your classes or ahead in them, without fail. And most of the day-to-day monitoring can be done with Eva.” Rick closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, already sure of the refusal to come. “Look, is there any reason not to get the game? Hell you can treat it as a training platform or whatever if you want. I really think you can win some tournaments though, maybe even go Pro! Wouldn’t some extra cash be nice if you can get it for basically nothing?”
“...You know what? Fine.” The room goes still for a moment, Rick not processing for a second before jerking his eyes open to stare at Corrin incredulously. “Wait, for real!?” Corrin sighs wearily before responding, Darwin and Eva looking at each other just as surprised as Rick. “Yes. I’ve got nothing better to do today, all my work for the next week is in already and I don’t have class today. I’ll buy the game, if you buy my game packs for me.”
Rick jumps up from his seat, hooting and hollering and doing a little dance while Corrin just chuckles at him. “Don’t know what you’re so excited about, if I’m going to do this I’m going to buy exactly the game packs I want, and those will be coming out of your pocket.” The green-haired man just sticks his tongue out at him as he responds. “Jokes on you, The whole gang had a betting pool on if I could convince you before the end of the month! I’m about to be rich for like three days before I spend it all!”
Laughing at his friend’s strange sense of humour, Corrin just gets up, puts the dishes in the sink, and heads to his room to get ready to head out. “Whatever man, just get ready to go, if I’m doing this I don’t want to waste any more time than necessary!” It doesn’t take long for him and Rick to head out and hop on the nearest mag-bus, and even less time to find a store selling Pocket Dungeon stock.
Stepping inside, Corrin immediately heads over to to the register while Rick ambles about the store, looking for any packs that could help him with his own Dungeon. “Hello, I want to buy a download of Pocket Dungeon, please.” The woman manning the counter raises a brow at seeing someone who hasn’t bought it already, but shrugs it off and pushes a V.I. connector over closer to him. “Alright, have you V.I. connect and I’ll have them download the default software. Do you know about our Pocket Dungeon booster packs?”
“Yeah, I was planning on getting some, just wanted to buy the download first. My friend’s paying for the packs.” Sticking his arm out over the connector, Eva popped up from his smartwatch and began the transaction. Little streams of ones and zeros flowed into her avatar in a rainbow of colors, soon coalescing into the iconic Pocket Dungeon logo just above her glasses before being sucked into them. Of course the whole thing was just for show, the transaction finished attoseconds after he put his watch over the connector, but he liked the little things like that.
With the basic game downloaded and Eva decompiling and incorporating it into her systems, Corrin takes a walk around the store to see what he could buy to spice up his Dungeon. The Leyline+ and Mo’Magic Types booster packs he added to his list on the spot, having more magic in his Dungeon world could only be a good thing in his eyes. He also got a biome variety pack and at least 3 different material booster packs, he loved the idea of having tons of material options for his creatures to use. Lastly was the Monster Starter pack section.
This he took a great deal of care to go through thoroughly. The default monsters were great of course, and he probably would use a few of them at some point, but these options could make or break his Dungeon in developing something good for tournaments like Rick seems to think he’ll be so good in. That and he wanted to buy an expensive Monster Starter or two, since his friend seemed so confident that he’d be getting a ton of money from his betting pool.
“Hmm...Oh, Crystalline Group starter, that could be fun. Shade Species, that looks good, maybe this Warg Species too.” Just as he’s about to walk out of the aisle, one last image for a Monster Starter pack caught his eye. It was something called a Conceptual Group, a group of spirit-like monsters. Instead of being elemental spirits like forest or fire spirits though, these were based on metaphysical concepts like being hungry, or bittersweet memories. Basically they were illusion or enchantment traps given life.
Adding them to his list, Corrin grins cheekily as he starts walking back towards the counter. “Eva, send Darwin and Rick the bill, would you?” Chuckling a little from his watch, he sees the list of his too-be purchases roll of the screen. He counts down on his fingers from five, and right as the last finger drops Rick can be heard swearing up a storm, growing louder as he gets closer to the counter as well.
Once he sees Corrin, all Rick can do is grumble and head over to the counter, shoving his arm over the connector for a second before stomping over to the store exit. Corrin breaks out laughing, following behind him as they leave. “Not sure what you’re so mad about, aren’t you going to be rich?” “Fuck off!” “Aw don’t be like that, it was your idea!”
After much teasing and joking around, they both eventually make it back to their apartment, thankfully Rick had gotten over his pouting, more excited to see Corrin make a Dungeon world. “So, how are you going to lay it out? Knowing you you’ll lay all the materials out nice and orderly for extraction, have everything in their own little areas and all that.”
Snorting at Rick’s attempts at teasing him about his neatness, Corrin simply shakes his head as he sits down on the couch, replying as Eva starts the projector up again and starts running his brand new Pocket Dungeon game. “No, then none of my creatures will ever learn how to deal with conflict. I’m going to go with a decently natural and evenly spread out world. Of course, I’ll put in plenty of oddities, you never know what will spark a Sub-Species or Variant. I’ve got to admit, I’m a little pumped now.”
Rick pats him on the shoulder as Corrin picks out the first save file in his game, the huge amount of world customization menus popping up as he does. “Yep, this is a whole new horizon for you. Can’t wait to see what you do!”