The Lord flew high above,
As graceful as a dove.
He was free from rules,
Not counting syllables, but ghouls.
Each beat of his wings were a rhyme,
But the lack of a song felt sublime.
No structure to be limited by,
Only the wind on which to fly.
He danced through the trees, to ambush the undead,
They had nets, but ever out of reach he said-
“The sound of my song will be your end,”
“As I rid you of life each time I descend.”
They threw their net that soared like a jet,
It whistled through the air and became his duet.
They wrapped around each other, as it stole his breath.
They wanted to capture him, but it was his death.
His life burned out,
As the cancer killed this scout.
He respawned in his home tree.
With a flap of his wings, he took to the sky with glee,
As the skeletons below him tried to attack his nest,
Unaware that this immortal structure was just an address.
He left them in the dust, too many to fight directly,
He found the forest, as he screamed ‘protect me,’
The trees responded in kind,
From the fog in which they were enshrined.
The skeletons that tried to follow met their end
As the trees turned their bones to dust.
The skeletons fell back home to defend,
As the Lord found a tree that he could trust.
“They attacked us,” he sang
“With such force, they came like a gang.”
“The Core is silent as his monsters fall,”
“But this forest can fight, as it covers the dungeon in its sprawl,”
“You are its master and its heart. Please save us,”
The tree moved without sound,
Till he was at the center of a mound.
Echo traveled to the heart with the bird in tow,
As the dungeon’s lair laid just below.
If Echo had a plan, he did not share,
But the hope kept the Lord from despair.
They sat, Echo unwilling to explain,
But it was hard for the Lord to remain.
His heart grew dim as the cancer ran its course,
But he would be back with force.
They would strike back,
The army would know what it meant to attack.
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Hours had passed by as the Core couldn’t move. The wall had not moved, and the trap had not budged, but the Core had. His mind was rooted, but his crystalline body withered.
Mana kept leaking out as he starved just because he couldn’t focus enough on keeping it inside. He was stuck, and going to die. Not just trapped in the weakness of youth, but forced to face the consequences of old scars and bad choices.
The concept terrified him.
How could everything he ever built be destroyed by a wall? If he died, it wouldn’t just be his core that withered, but the entire mountain range and everything that he sustained by cycling mana. A small voice crossed his mind to just give up. It whispered about how everything would be better if he just stopped ruining everything. For a moment the thought was tempting, before the Core realized something important.
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He wasn’t Baros. The voice of his soul was one of a pathetic quitter. The Core was close enough to human to make his own choices. He chose violence.
He bucked and screamed, as he continued to fight long after it was clear nothing would change. He doubled his efforts as skeletons dragged the trophies of their kills past him. Useless, he was stuck, just another trophy mounted to the wall.
His efforts were in vain because he wasn’t smart enough or strong enough. It didn’t matter what he chose to do if he lacked the power to act.
“How could I ever save them if I can’t even save myself? I’m not Baros, yet I can feel his depression. I could have been great, but my weakness is a burden on those around me.”
The emotions spiraled, the darkness in his mind consumed more and more as it shrouded his ability to think.
Then, the darkness in his heart spread. Useless, dying, unable to do anything for himself…
> Corruption of Core has reached 24%
He was useless, but a new emotion crept in. Hunger.
Absolute hunger.
The mana that was his life blood slowly dripped out of him, uncaring about the circumstance. It left him weak, but above all it left him with a desire as old as he was. He wanted to feed.
He recited the mantra of instincts, once forgotten, then poorly remembered.
“HUNT. CONSUME. GROW”
“BREATHE. CONQUER. BECOME.”
He took a deep breath to consume the mana, but there was only one thing left to consume. Himself.
He was the feral beast that gnawed off its own leg to survive. He ate the only mana he had, his own. It cycled and cycled, and with each breath he wheezed new life into a single moment. Like drinking his own blood, he killed himself for a single moment of substance. A single moment to act.
> Corruption of Core has reached 26%
The cracks in his body spread and deepened. Mana poured out as the fog pulsed and glowed. The lair that his body sat filled with the aimless mana, and like a river it found direction. It flowed through the tunnels, unwilling to change or compromise every time it found something to sweep along.
The ants burned, so full of mana they ignited.
The river breached the earth, as it spewed into the forest. A bird that sat in a tree found themselves at the center of the mana river, each hit with so much mana that it burned away most of their bodies.
> Understanding Increased: Charcoal - The charred remains of wood with its impurities burned away, allowing it to burn brighter.
> Understanding Increased: Petrified Wood - Minerals have replaced the wood aspects of the tree.
> Understanding Increased: Fossilization - That poor bird.
There were no thoughts. The river flowed, guided by a thoughtless hand as it pushed closer to its destination. To its master.
“HUNT. CONSUME. GROW”
The dungeon shook, as the mountains trembled.
“BREATHE. CONQUER. BECOME.”
His breath became a river that would conquer the stone. The earth rumbled as trees were uprooted in the madness. The wall continued to stand.
The Core was trapped, and he was enraged. The wall continued to stand.
The river of mana met the fortress. The trees it had guided to this point met the wall. It bowed, but continued to stand.
Logs slammed into the stone. The force of a dozen trees at full sprint caused it to crack. Stones fell loose, as the Core found the noose loosen. The mana that protected the wall flickered as the force of the dungeon did not give up.
It couldn’t- he couldn’t give up- Afterall, the dungeon was hungry.
The wall gave way, as the protective shell of the skeletons crumbled. It was a meal ticket, and the Core was starved for mana, he didn’t care how it happened, he just wanted food.
No, he demanded a feast.
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Echo felt strange in his new body. He had stone for bark, and his crystalized branches lacked the leaves he so often associated them with. It wasn’t strange for his form to change, as his existence was as mutable as his surroundings, but never had a mutation so blatantly mocked another.
Without an identity to call his own, he had taken many rolls. He was a tree in the forest, the oldest tree that sired every tree around him, and a monster that never had the same powers twice. Perhaps the change was temporary, but this one felt different. He was an ancient tree, and he had fossilized just like the ants that lived beneath his roots. A random chance mutation, but it had happened several times. Was this his own identity, or was it something an architect of life had planned for him?
Though he pondered his life, and a being higher than the Dungeon Core that created him, but he knew those thoughts were irrelevant. They were trivial, not in scope, but how they affect his life. It didn’t matter who he was or what he thought, but only what he could do as a soldier.
His actions held the weight of his life, and he had an order to lend his weight to.
Under the Core’s orders, he followed the river as it guided him to a new destination. One of stone walls that formed a sheer cliff. He didn’t need to think. None of the monsters caught in the flow of the river that was the Core’s anger needed to think about what they were doing. They only acted- as one- as a forest.
His roots struck first as they burrowed into the foundation, but others followed suit. They slammed into the wall as he tore it apart at the seams. Miniscule cracks in the wall formed, which only gave his roots a weakness to exploit. The wall fell, but the dust it kicked up was nothing to the fog that snaked its way into the fortress with them.
Cloaked in the fog, the trees advanced as fast as their roots could drag them. It was slow now, but with hundreds of trees, they were an unmoveable object that became an unstoppable force. By the time the skeletons realized the wall that fell wasn’t an accident, it was too late.
They grabbed their axes and tools, but it was too late. Echo had transcended- had crystalized into a greater form. He could hear it as the System spoke in his ear.
> Crystal Body - Ability to channel mana increased by 20 points
> Title Evolution prerequisites met, “Ancient” evolving into-
> Error - fossilization mutation lacking prerequisite of death
> Attempting to Patch….
> File Location Corrupted (just like everything else)
> Error deemed above this System’s pay grade. Proceeding to Ignore.
He listened to these words, eager to see what happened next, as he ground a skeleton to dust under his roots. They had surrounded the forest as it encroached onto their stolen land. Axes in hand, but the ones that had tried to chop him down found their tools useless against his stone exterior.
The ones towards the back learned from their companions’ mistakes and grabbed pickaxes to deal with him, but it was too late for the ones that had made the mistake. With a swing of his branches, he shattered any bone worth his attention and fed on their bone marrow.
He devoured the energy that animated them, and the power of necromancy and its ability to give life to the dead affected him in odd ways. Leaves sprouted along his branches as flowers bloomed. Here in the dead of winter, where only the surrounding conifers had any life to them, he was in full bloom.
No longer just a copy of someone else, he felt alive in his limbo of undeath.
In his ecstasy, he was paralyzed as the battle raged around him. Trees fell, their thick sap slow to fill cover their wounds in the cold. Skeletons fell, but there was always more behind the first, as anyone not turned to dust would just reanimate to join the death march.
His moment of joy was washed away as someone drove the piercing point of a pickaxe into his side. A deep crimson leaked out of the wound to mix with the blood that covered the ground. If the skeleton was surprised to see blood in the tree, it didn’t show it in the half a second before Echo used a branch to pick it up and swing it against a stack of nearby stone blocks, shattering its skull.
He stared for a moment at the blood on the ground. In a battle between trees and skeletons, somehow the ground had been soaked in the gore of life. He drank in the scenery, literally, as he saw the source of the blood- the stone blocks he had chipped with the skeleton’s skull. The wounded stone was gushing out the same liquid.
He wanted to ask why, or how he had become the same stone, but it was never a question he got to answer. The fortress had been cleared of skeletons, and a new order came from the Core.
“Hunt those who are not welcome. Kill everything, and feed upon what remains.”
The words turned the forest into a frenzy, and he was wasn’t one to idly watch. The Core had been freed, and oversaw the carnage as it pushed them to keep going.
The living delvers were smart enough to seek the various safe zones when they heard the forest rumble. A tactic of survival the skeletons didn’t know about. Birds flew overhead as they located new skeletons, and watched as they were hunted to extinction. Many trees fell, but they were claimed by the dungeon’s ecosystem and would be repurposed into new life eventually. Similar to the skeletons, the dungeon ability to recycle ensured that both sides would keep reincarnating until one was diminished into oblivion. It was their personal mockery of the circle of life.
It was the perfect system of revenge as mana flowed through the dungeon. Fresh from the kills of the unwanted invaders. They were a tide, and the skeleton’s forces eroded underneath them. Their existence destroyed and every ounce of mana consumed, with what remained being driven into the soil to fuel further growth.
They were truly a forest.
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> Understanding Increased: Necromancy - the taboo ability to control the dead, as they are animated with a fraction of life.
> Core Corruption has Reached 30%
> Warning: safe levels of corruption surpassed. Cascade Imminent.
> Please take corrective measures immediately - actually, never mind, no one even reads these.