The one good thing that came from the intrusion to her dungeon was that Fia gained more mana. Sure, more health and stats was good and all, but her mana finally reached a new threshold that allowed her to summon stronger monsters.
The [Skith] and [Brown Bear] would cost her 400 mana to summon, as well as any other monsters around their strength, but the other day when she thought about summoning an [Ettercap], she felt that it would have taken somewhere around 900 mana to summon. She had just barely gotten that amount, considering she could use both her mana and the core’s mana for [Spawn Monster]. Her current mana maximum was now 452.66. She’d be running on fumes after a single summon, but it would be worth it.
So she had done just that, and summoned an [Ettercap]. Activating [Spawn Monster], the normal rainbow-flames of mana coalesced in her palm, then shot out to the ground in front of her, growing larger until the monster stood above her, about four feet tall, or about a foot taller than her. It was humanoid in shape, having two arms and two legs, ending with two fingers and toes that were more claws than manipulating appendages. Two chelicerae-like fangs jutted out in front of the thing’s mouth and it had two large black eyes and two smaller black beady eyes behind those. It was a leathery, bulbous creature that hunched over and looked almost like a farmer with a beer gut, and its bluish-purple skin would make it harder to spot in darkness. It was ugly, but it was her first humanoid follower. She immediately set it to work, telling it to take the pickaxe, and to go off to continue mining out the tunnel.
[Ettercap]
Level 50 Humanoid Spider Monster
Ettercaps are humanoid spiders that serve as tenders, feeders, laborers, and watchers over spider colonies, as a shepherd would over sheep. Though they lack high intelligence, they are smart enough to follow orders of more intelligent creatures like Arachne better than other spiders under their control.Though they are not shaped like spiders, ettercaps share many similarities in both looks and function, being able to spit and spin spider silk from their mouths, climb walls with ease, ignore webs when moving, sense vibrations along webs, and see perfectly in the dark like most other spider creatures. Ettercaps are not the soldiers of a colony, though they are not incapable of combat either, their claws and bites both being powerful enough to easily kill any un-Awakened, and they can even fashion garrotes out of their webs to strangle enemies.
Fia sat down, feeling woozy, dizzy, drained, and empty. Being low on mana was not a fun experience, but her mana slowly ticked up which was a relief. Her dungeon was on a leyline, and thus she had greater mana regeneration here, but if she were in a low-magic zone, she would feel worse and worse over time without any mana until it eventually made her very sick. People rarely died directly from lack of mana, she wasn’t even sure if it was an actual possibility. But she would indeed have been sick for days if not for the high mana regeneration of this area.
Keeping watch over her status, she seemed to be regenerating a point of mana every two minutes or so. Her core was also regenerating mana independently of herself. At that rate she had just under four hours until she was full again. When she was lower leveled with only 50 mana points to spare, it was under half an hour.
While she waited for her mana to slowly climb back up, Fia spent her time looting the three bodies and dragging the corpses to the spider graveyard. She told her minions they could eat the corpses if they liked, though she wasn’t sure they actually needed to.
Her loot pile expanded with some miscellaneous clothing, armor, and a robe. Nothing high quality or enchanted, all F tier trash. A spear, a new shield, two short swords from the scout, a bow and a quiver of arrows. They only had their gear on them, no backpacks or anything. Maybe they had a camp set up in the forest somewhere, but she wasn’t about to go looking for it. The mage did have a single weak mana potion and a single weak health potion on her, so she obviously kept those.
She also had the body of the killed [Web Weaver] taken to the [Spider Graveyard], where a new [Bone Spider] spawned a little while later. She replaced the killed web weaver, and even summoned a few more when her mana allowed, bringing the total number of them up to ten. Her orders for the ten spiders were to build more webs. It seemed like simple busywork, but it was important.
The floors and walls of the cave were covered in webs from the previous inhabitants, but not completely. Judging by the small loot pile they had before she became the dungeon master, and by the uncompleted webs, they had likely moved in a few days before she had become captured. She would finish their project. Spiders and spider-adjacent creatures like ettercaps could feel vibrations through webs, or in some cases just magically know any creature touching a web that is connected to a web they are touching. This meant that the more webs there were, the faster and more accurately her monsters could respond to threats. Not to mention that the webs were sticky to most creatures and would hinder their movement through the cave.
Before nightfall fell, she managed to summon a second [Ettercap] and told it to help the first in excavating the tunnel. The first could mine with the pickaxe and the second could move stone out of the way.
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Day six was spent the same way. Two more ettercaps were summoned, all four now working on creating a room at the end of the tunnel. The web weavers continued spinning webs, and the skith guarded the entrance to the cave. The stone pile was starting to get large, and it was already much taller than she was, but she didn’t know what to do with it. Most of the stone in the pile was small pieces, not big chunks, as the brittle stone broke off in small pieces when hit with the pickaxe. It was more like a pile of gravel and fist-sized rocks, rather than larger stones that could be turned into brick or flagstone. Sure, she could meld it together with [Manipulate Earth], but then the bricks or whatever would still be quite brittle. Not quite ‘break with your bare hands’ brittle, but definitely ‘kick down this wall’ or ‘smash with a mace’ brittle. Depending on the stats. A higher leveled person could definitely break them with their hands, but then she’d have larger problems than someone smashing through walls in her dungeon.
Besides, decoration was secondary. It would come later. She needed a new room, and she needed it soon. The first one would be a temporary loot stash, rather than keeping it all in the cave. The second one would be a crafting room. If she could get some kind of forge going and start finding ore, she’d be able to make more tools, and speed up her progress by a lot.
Day seven and eight came and went. The room at the end of the tunnel was finished, and she had the ettercaps backtrack and branch off from the tunnel. A new tunnel and a new room were the current goal, though her plans changed whenever she finished moving the last of the loot pile to the newly created room.
Notice! Minimum room requirements met. [Loot Room] room created.
[Loot Room]
Adaptive Room Room Level: 1
A loot room is the holy grail of a dungeon for those who don’t wish to destroy the core, but also don’t care about harming the dungeon’s future productivity. Dungeons may have one loot room or several, depending on the size, but they all share one thing in common: Copious amounts of loot.
Level 1 Effects: Common F-tier non-enchanted items taken out of the dungeon by intruders will respawn in the loot room after 1 day, as long as they were originally taken from anywhere else in the dungeon except for the loot room.
Huh? She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. Dungeons were popular for generating loot, they were economic sources of all sorts of materials for this very reason. She shouldn’t be surprised they had the ability to literally duplicate items. And yet, she was surprised she got something like this so early.
She didn’t understand how this helped her, however. Was the System trying to incentivize her to attract more people to the dungeon? How would more looters and plunderers help? Why would she want them to take items out into the world and tell everyone ‘hey, you can get free stuff here’? Even if she got the items back, it made no sense…
She pondered on it for a while. There had to be a method to the madness, right? If she were to delve into a dungeon, what would she do? Assuming she didn’t make it to the end, but she got some loot, she might turn around and leave. But it still seemed like a flimsy defense. Or maybe it was the opposite? Sure, attracting more people meant gaining more experience and leveling up faster. It also meant toeing a dangerous line, like balancing on a tightrope. Lean too much into it, and you die.
It also didn’t seem too exploitable by her at the moment. She couldn’t use it to duplicate items for herself. An intruder, an enemy to her dungeon, would have to take something out of the dungeon. Then a day later, a copy of the item would magically reappear in the loot room.
It did give her some ideas for traps, now that she thought about it. If she wouldn’t have to be so stingy with her loot, she could definitely use some stuff as bait. Not to mention that bear trap she had. And weren’t spear traps a dungeon staple?
Yeah, she definitely had some ideas.
The next day marked day nine, and her dungeon was starting to actually feel like a dungeon. It had traps.
They were surprisingly easy to make, though they were quite primitive. The first one she had set up was a spear trap, though she had liberal help from her ettercap minions in the creation of it. She had them make a tripwire out of webbing, barely visible to even her eyes, that would pull a stone-shaped trigger holding back the spear, which was under tension from a separate net of webs, holding it in a hole in the wall. She shaped the trigger and the hole with her cantrip. Simply put: step on tripwire, spear lunges out. She even tested it twice, both times had the spear fly out and clatter against the other wall a few strides away. It probably wouldn’t go through any real armor or be that lethal since it didn’t have a whole lot of power behind it, but a lucky neck-shot or even a light spear wound to the gut would be better than nothing. And if the spear got stolen, well, it would reappear in the loot room!
She also created a few similar traps with swords hanging from the ceiling by two different threads, one longer and one very short, holding it against the ceiling. Tripwires ran along the cave floor connected to the shorter web, so that when stepped on, the shorter web would detach from the sword, letting it swing freely on the longer web. She would have preferred axes, but she only had the one.
She also had the ettercaps place a few hunting snares around the cave, loops of webbing that would close around any feet that fell inside them and yank upwards. They were counterbalanced by web-sacks filled with stone from the excavated stone pile. Not to mention the bear trap placed at the entrance of the tunnel in the back of the cave.
Lastly, she hung the coin purses, each filled with clinking coins, from the ceiling in thinly-veiled web sacks. They were transparent enough that you could tell what was inside easily, but thick enough that they would stick to your hand and just generally be annoying.
Perfect.