Four gods sat at a table together. They laughed and joked as they worked to rebuild the dungeon. At their touch- at their cards- the world bloomed before them as change took root. All but one was engrossed in the work, as Joulo sat quietly and watched her friends toil away. She had seen something that made her completely forget what she was doing.
She tasted the poison still on her lips. Her stomach rumbled. Her eyes fixed on the god that did this to her. She saw Mask as he slipped through the crowd.
Her friends noticed the shift in her mood. They followed her eye line, saw the god, and nodded to each other. Myriad, Trench, and Tylianna all departed from the table as they moved through the crowd. It only took a few minutes before they returned with a fourth god in tow.
Despite being dragged here, Mask took his own seat without complaint. He set his briefcase down and silently stared forward. He looked over to Joulo for a brief second before he looked away in a panic. There was hunger in her eyes.
“So,” Joulo started.
“Yeah…” Mask finished.
Myriad slammed down a bunch of cards on the table, which made Mask jump in his seat. The deck Myriad had found was one full of skeletons, an army that made their way towards the dungeon. With four gods staring at the newcomer, he eventually cracked, unable to take the silence.
“I wasn’t supposed to come back,” Mask offered. “The goal was simple. Come over, tell you about the demon, leave. Now I am working overtime for this.” Any confidence he originally had failed as he pleaded for forgiveness.
His tone made everyone cast quick glances of confusion around the table. They were full of questions, but Joulo didn’t care. She stared through him, unconcerned with the woes he presented.
“You’re a god,” She stated coldly. “So don’t give me these excuses. This was an assassination attempt.”
“But it wasn’t my idea!” he said through sobs. “I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m an accountant, not a god. What do you think my domain ‘god of the godless’ even means? It means I’m here by accident and that the mortals below who are obsessed with demon summoning keep giving me stuff to do.”
“But you still brought an army,” Joulo stated simply.
“Only because my job is to do things the actual gods don’t want to, just because it’s not in their domain! I am here to make deals for the cultists of the world, and the biggest one is the one that killed your sister. They want to finish the job and roped me into this!”
Joulo was the god of inheritance, not forgiveness, but she knew if she forgave Mask for everything he had done, then maybe she should be. She didn’t want to, but the looks on the surrounding faces told her she had more important things to worry about.
Everyone was worried about her. They were worried about what she would do, and who she might become; however, Joulo had her own plans. She had her own life to live.
A life she would be sure to live, regardless of a family of necromancers or their god-slaying intentions.
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A desolate empire stood abandoned. Every day a lone wanderer tended to what once was. She repaved the roads and made sure they would be strong enough to survive when people returned. Every day she toiled, but it was for not.
Until today.
Footsteps followed by the smell of a familiar magic. At first, the Empress thought it was her family finally coming home, but the brood chambers stood silent. The larva she had carved from bone and flesh lied still in their cacoons, gestating.
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She followed her ears past the chambers of the generation to find the source. An army of bone, made up of hundreds of people stripped of their flesh. Animated not through tendons and the contraction of muscles, but through strings of dark magic that held them upright.
It was an army of the undead, ruled by an unseen lich.
Their mastermind may have been unseen, but as the Empress got closer, she realized she was the same. The skeleton’s march trampled plants and slimes, but never found the Empress, who had gotten closer in her curiosity. The army didn’t see her as a target because she was already dead.
With tattered wings of royalty, she could not fly. With a soft shell of a moth that never saw the sky, she could not run, but she could climb. She could climb onto the limbs as they passed over her, and ride to wherever they headed.
Deeper into the dungeon, past the entrance to the Core’s lair, they continued their stride. They treated the dungeon as if it was just any sort of terrain, but the Empress saw the war they battled with every step.
The magic that animated them was strong and imposed its will on the surroundings. Surroundings controlled by the dungeon, and the master Core at its center. They did battle, each trying to consume the other.
But the Core backed off. It was hesitant to fight a battle it knew nothing about. The Empress listened closer and heard the Core speak to System.
“Do you think they are harmless?”
> Answer: At no point in history has an undead horde had good intentions.
“They are just doing their own thing, so maybe we shouldn’t stop them?”
‘No,’ the Empress thought. ‘They don’t attack now because they need something first.’
She listened and thought. She prayed and peered, but the skeletons continued their march until nightfall. They had reached their destination. In the true center of the mountains, the dungeon called home- towards the northern edge of the dungeon’s domain- they had found what they needed.
The Empress was once a priest, and though she had given it up to become a mother, some of that stuck with her. They were instincts long since buried, but they came rushing back in an instant. They had found a place of power.
The stone of the earth itself wreaked with mana that was not the dungeon’s. It was pure and refined. In such a perfect state that the only way she could describe was intoxicatingly divine.
As the skeletons draw at their pickaxes and dug, the Empress knew what their goal was. They were making a church in this holy sight. It was the only explanation.
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“The skeletons are digging,” the Core thought to itself. “Must really like dirt.”
It watched the tools they used, specialized for destroying the ground. They turned trees into planks and constructed simple scaffolding to hoist up the stones they freed from the earth to be shaped into blocks and stacked.
The Core had already learned a lot about tools, and the steps to complete a project, but to see non-human creatures do such a task was marvellous. It realized it could do something similar. It just needed a closer look.
Birds flew overhead, but were shot down. Each time they respawned they would look for a blind spot to get closer, but the skeletons were too vigilant. They refused to let the dungeon get a closer look, which left only the Core’s fuzzy mana sight.
The Core realized it needed something stronger. It needed a detective to open an investigation and figure out what their goal was. It would take time to get Vault to burrow under the skeleton’s base to get a closer look, but there was no way around it.
Unwilling to wait, however, the Core peered through the eyes of an insect it had almost forgotten about. A small royal moth who had snuck into their ranks. Their mana was at a constant war, but it passed over the Empress who had blended into the horde. She got a closer look at the stone blocks the skeletons carved.
Cursed mana flowed through the stones until a deep red liquid poured out. A liquid similar to-
> Understanding Increased: Blood
“I already knew about blood,” the Core blew away the message. “Red water people have and bugs don’t, but since when do stones bleed?”
> Unknown
> Warning: Corruption has reached 10%, ‘Essoteric’ classification of Core has changed
> Core’s subspecies has changed to new designation: Broken
* Mana control has been debuffed by 30; now at 26
* Error: Instinct Package “Hunt, kill, consume / Grow, expand, conquer,” corrupted
> Corruption now at 11%
The Core was fine. It didn’t understand why System panicked so much. It could feel discomfort at the center of its crystal as a wound featured, but that was nothing to worry about. Mana poured out of its body in haphazard ways that were hard to move to its will, but nothing stuck out as wrong.
If anything, it filled the Core with more desire. A base level instinct it had forgotten it had. An absolute desire to
“HUNT. CONSUME. GROW,” the Core chanted to itself. “BREATHE. CONQUER. BECOME.”
It wanted to consume those skeletons and become them. It needed to conquer and consume. There was nothing wrong with being broken. It just needed to ask permission first…. or did it?