The assorted leadership of the Red Dungeon looked on in horror as every piece of rotten meat, bone, and even congealed blood began to pull itself towards the center of the battlefield. What had been consumed by the crawdads during Snips assault was gone, though the remaining bones tumbled and floated towards the growing mass. What remained of Arabella’s company tried to destroy more of the undead flesh, but found that it just continued to move no matter how small it got. No one in the dungeon had any kind of true destructive magic, [Fire] or [Acid] were tags that had not been unlocked.
Lotus charged forward with her wave of fairies, aiming for the necromancer to try and disrupt his spell. Though as the first of the fairies began to set him alight with magic, he had already stopped his chanting. The dry and cracked lips split with a wide smile, oozing blood from multiple points as the adept necromancer met eyes with Lotus. Those vacant sockets still able to hold the smugness of victory. The necromancer spread his arms wide, accepting his destruction as he knew that his job was done, and that the dungeon would be doomed by his hand. This bastion of life and hope would become another hollowed out husk of what it had once been.
Lotus slammed against the necromancer, punching with her untrained muscles as tears began to well in her eyes. She was furious, and there was now no way that she could stop tragedy from befalling her home. They hadn’t even been a proper dungeon for more than a month before she ruined everything. Why did she have to run her mouth and say with such confidence that they were going to win? As her punches against the necromancer continued, the corpse began to deteriorate into dust. Raising both fists high into the air, she slammed them down on the husk’s head, letting out a scream of anguish as the skull was pulverized.
Behind her, the unholy construction grew even with the efforts of Red’s few ranged defenders. Slowly bones began to melt into one another, making an alien lattice that stood far taller than any creature of the natural world. Then, like serpents escaping a fire, skin and meat began to crawl up the bone to find purchase in it. Flesh turned into liquid as it molded across the body of the construct, squirming and undulating as blood forced into collapsed veins. The few remaining zombies that had survived Lotus’ assault were dragged into the mass, melting into the flesh like powder slowly enveloped by water.
Glut roared as he tried to slash apart the berserker before the ungodly forces of the necromancer pulled him away. The foul thing gave an ungodly smile, wider than the face was built to give as the corners of its mouth ripped open wider and wider. The eyes of the zombie were bloodshot from the rage, but slowly changed to a strange otherworldy blue glow. The berserker allowed the slice of glut’s axe through its form, the two pieces falling to the ground before being pulled through the air despite gravity’s protests. It flew and distorted, melting like a snow-cone under the unforgiving summer sun. The mass of skin and flesh merged with the rest, aiming to create this ungodly abomination.
Arabella gave out a call for all melee to stand back, seeming to understand that the magic was making it to where the summoning could not properly be interfered with now that the spell was done. The masses of the Red dungeon began to circle around the growing thing. Snips was giving out words of affirmation, trying his best to keep the troops rallied against the monstrous foe that was forming. He was trying his best, as even his heart was pounding with an abject sense of fear radiating through it.
The creature took shape as the last bits of meat and flesh fused with it, even some bodies from the fallen soldiers and fairies. The most disturbing thing was the flash of gold on its right hand, the discarded claw of Snips having been integrated as well. It was a hulking mass of meat and bone, towering at nearly twenty feet tall and looming over the gathered army. No head graced its shoulders, rather its torso acted as a kind of nerve center. A slobbering tongue escaped a mouth located where the gut of the monstrosity should have been. The stench coming off of it and the odd bubbling shape of the tongue suggested the entire appendage was made from the collected organ meat of all those it absorbed. Within that mouth were rows upon rows of ribs sharpened into a seemingly endless maw of fangs.
Leathery brown flesh the color of conventional footballs coated over the squirming pink meat of the beast. Muscles formed under the skin, stretching it until rips formed in its arms. Slits appeared across the pectorals of the creature’s chest, before opening to reveal a wide arrangement of eyes. Many of the now searching spheres were milky white, belonging to the zombies that had started this mess. Others were full of brightness and color, seemingly those that had been stolen from the dungeon’s fallen. There were even a few small black eyes that were the lost ocular organs of the crawdads that had fallen in battle. The creature’s many eyes glared at those around it still living, raising its arms into the air before slamming them down into the earth, shaking the far off branches of the Alchemical Oak, whose base was only a short run away. It stood on two stumpy legs similar to elephant’s feet, causing the creature to require further support from its arms. It dragged its blood dripping knuckles against the ground as it forced itself forward, the creature taking in air before letting out a deafening bellow to signify the start of its fury.
Raid Boss Activated!
Dungeon Core dormancy halted.
Time Stopped
Activating in Low Mana Mode
Awakening
Red groaned as he began to reappear on the battlefield, blinking and touching his face as he realized that he was still there. A smile began to creep, joy of saving his friends, the relief of not losing his dungeon. He was about to look around when a splitting pain entered his head, suddenly information was rushing into him as the system corrected an error. His mind was flooded with a wave of data beyond anything he had ever experienced in his life. He saw through the eyes of every creature on the battlefield, feeling their memories and experiencing every part to play. He was the soldier fighting on the front line and dying to dragonborn zombies. He was the fairies swarming at Lotus’ command, at the same time he was also Lotus gazing upon the message that had caused this shift in the battle.
His head and floating hands collapsed to the ground as he screamed in the way only those that craved death could produce. The screaming escaped his avatar and shook his dungeon down to the core as he clawed at his face with his crystalline hands. It was too much information coming at him in such quick succession, operating still in the simplistic brain of a human meant he couldn’t handle the torment coming to him. The flashes of clarity were no help, glimpses of memory and emotion filling him to the point of bursting. If any of his creatures had been awake to hear that noise, their hearts would have surely been broken at their creator's suffering.
Warning! Core Stability Decreasing!
Activating Temporary Suppressants
Red was flailing on the ground, praying for a death by his own hands that would never come to him. Then a cool placid calm washed over his mind. Suddenly the stream of information condensed, slowly filtering into his mind as his emotions were dulled. Whatever the system had flooded him with had done the job it was looking for. His emotions and the stream of consciousness were suddenly reined in to the point he could pull his avatar off the ground. The first thing he noticed in his dulled state was that he did not fully reform into his chosen Avatar. Instead he had the hands and head he remembered using when his mana reserves were almost to zero.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Why didn’t I get more mana from the fight? Did I lose mana?” He asked the system with a frown, believing that he should be in a much more detailed form at the moment rather than in his low energy mode.
Dungeon Status
Dungeon is currently in War Mode, meaning it can neither use mana or direct troops when the flow of time is active. Dungeon consciousness was reactivated for the second round of combat.
“Alright, so if I am in war mode still then the memories that I am getting are correct.” He muttered with a frown before he turned away from the Alchemical Oak and toward the creature that had just finished forming. He could feel a pit in his stomach as he realized that the situation was even more dire than his creatures realized. The massive hulking form of flesh and bone had a series of tags over its head as well as a name that denoted its danger.
[Raid Boss][Possessed][Enraged][Epic] Haunted Flesh Golem
The creature was an undead construct made from every bit of death that it could find within the dungeon. The epic tag meant that at its base form it was already as powerful as Lotus in her princess form, but the other two tags were actually effects from absorbing the remaining special zombies. It was enraged because of the berserker it had swallowed, and the spirit that regularly haunted the zombies on the battlefield was now calling the shots inside of the thing. It was a monumentally dangerous situation, and because of the suppressants, he could not panic or curse like he normally would have. “War Screen.” He demanded the open air, knowing that he would need to get to it.
War Mode Activated
Enemy Forces:
1 [Raid Boss] Flesh Golem
Auto-Generated Enemy Special Units:
N/A
Enemy Leadership:
N/A
Allied Forces:
7 Soldier Fae
5 Scout Fairies
19 Fairies
22 Crawdads
1 GemCraw
2 Rock Lobsters
1 Metal Lobster
1 Slime
Allied Special Units:
Princess of Poison Lotus
Brave Warrior Snips
Archimedes Vampiric Raven
Mage Captain Arabella
Bulwark Glut
Leadership:
[Free] Princess of Poison Lotus
Brave Warrior Snips
Mage Captain Arabella
Bulwark Glut
Leadership Bonuses:
1. Hold Court: Gather round ye huddled masses to hear the royal decree! A royal in attendance is able to unify their subjects under one banner. +50% Unit Cohesion, -10 Group Size Requirements
2. Off with their heads!: Someone has been painting the roses blue! Or was it red… A royal in attendance is able to declare a number of enemies equal to their ascension level. All selected enemies will receive additional damage from allied forces. Slots: 4/4
3. Inspiring Presence: A brave hero rallies the troops! +25% Health to all allies
4. Leadership: A leader is not made, they are born. A true leader is a force to rally under. +25% Damage dealt to enemies.
5. Bulwark of the Damned: A sinner knows no pain other than the abandonment of heaven; and the embrace of hell. Allies being defended by {Bulwark Glut} receive an additional demonic damage to their next attack equal to the amount {Bulwark Glut} absorbed.
Unit Groupings:
Soldier Fae Company; 17/20 (+10)
Fairy Swarm 32/30 (+10)
Crawdad Swarm 32/50 (+10)
“Alright, so we lost a good bit from the battle, most of the weaker troops had their forces reduced by a bit. That doesn’t mean that we are dealing with that huge of a deficit. It just means that we can’t be going for the superiority in numbers approach. That thing is obviously some kind of undead siege engine. So just piling attacks on it isn’t going to be enough.” He said as he floated over to the horror show that was his enemy and began to examine it from all angles. He was still processing the now slow stream of memories, looking through the eyes of all his leadership.
There were two fundamental aspects of combat that Red had never learned in all his iterations as a dungeon. In his previous lives, he had never got to the age where skills and tags were actually relevant to mana generation. It was always the simplistic method of tossing bodies at the problem until it went away. That was good for a dungeon that only had the occasional dire rat or low level adventurer come in and start mucking up the place. It was a different matter entirely when you had organized strategic combat.
“First things first… I can’t keep looking at different organized character sheets and pretend they all mean the same thing.” He said with a sigh as he brought up a blank character sheet for the three kinds of individuals that he was capable of having within his dungeon. He would make a template and have it applied to all creatures, that way there wouldn’t be any more confusion on his part. Then he could get to his master plan of how to deal with the beast.
Dungeon Individual Sheet
Name:
Type:
Species:
Tags:
Title:
Age:
Passive Skills:
Active Skills:
Height:
Weight:
Mood:
Ascension XP:
Level:
Ascension:
Description:
Red gave a sigh of relief, finding that the system didn’t mind him renaming specials to skills, or adding sections that didn’t previously exist in the previous iterations. He would have thought that the system would be more cantankerous, rigid and unwavering despite the need for innovation. Instead it seemed amiable to any changes that Red needed to improve his experience, which was thankfully consistent across the board regarding the system.
With that small annoyance out of the way, he applied the template to all creatures within the dungeon, the processing taking only a few minutes before the changes were done. “System, give me a full list of all Dungeon Individuals, and give me a way to filter it by tags.” He said with a devious grin as he cracked the fingers on his hands, the crystal projections giving the sound of snapping crystals rather than popping joints. The exact menu that he requested appeared before him, it being exactly what he needed for the job at hand. “Time to get to work.”