Violet was having an odd week. He didn’t know why the dungeon had stopped spawning creatures, but he had a sneaking suspicion that the dungeon was tired of watching the two young people making drama and had decided to force a change in the visual scanner content. Now the dungeon was sending waves of attacking creatures against the human fortifications. Violet had grown attached to the humans trapped in the dungeon, and there were several of them that he didn’t want to see hurt. Violet was ashamed to admit to himself that he mostly didn’t want his main source of entertainment removed.
Violet wasn’t so concerned with ideas of “murder” or “mercy”. He knew that dungeon morality was not meant to match that of humans or fairies or whatever. “Dungeon Morality” had been his least favorite class of the classes he had actually attended. A bribe to post-graduate fairy had revealed the secret to acing the final exam in Dungeon Morality: Dungeons should try to kill the highest number of people. As far an anyone could tell, dungeons were natural, alive, and had the same right to exist as anything else under the System. Knowing it was natural for a lion to kill lambs didn’t make it easier to watch, however.
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Jan spun her staff and crushed a millipede that had slid through a gap in the fence. She dropped the staff and whipped here sling around to shoot a bat out of the air. The bat went in a basket for meat, the millipede was thrown back over the wall. The ravens might pull its carcass apart later, in the gap between waves. The wave of attacking creatures wasn’t quite finished, so Jan kicked her staff up into her hands and stood ready. She hoped there wouldn’t be any snakes coming over this section of the fence. She hated snakes.
An hour later, an older harvester replaced Jan and sent her back to the cooking fires to eat and then rest. When the attacks began, the dungeon people had been spread across three dungeon floors. Hana had reacted immediately and the existing preparations had helped, but a handful of harvesters had died in the first hour. Hana had pulled everyone back into the apricot orchard in the delta worldlet and ordered Dan to get a few people building a fence while the others fought the creatures. As Jan trudged back through the water and sand, she glanced up at the scars on the apricot trees. Dan had to cut several branches from each tree to build most of the fence. The end of the first wave had given everyone the opportunity to criticize Dan for the decision to cripple their food production just to build a fence. Hana had defended Dan’s decision and send everyone to cut branches from the large vine to build more fence and hopefully slow down the spawn rate of the dungeon creatures.
Jan handed off her basket of meat creatures and picked up her rations of meat and a single apricot. She heaved a dejected sigh. They had been fighting in shifts for five days. The dungeon monsters were not strong, but there were so many of them. Between each wave of creatures, the large vine regrew its branches at an alarming speed. Members of each shift were tasked with pruning vines as fast as possible before the start of the next wave. Jan didn’t know how much longer she could continue fighting. The endless fighting had improved her Staff Fighting and Sling skills, and a few of the harvesters had increased their level, but Jan was sure that something would break down soon.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
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In the dungeon mind space, the dungeon instincts oscillated back and forth between a complete drive to grow and a complete drive to satiate the hunger for experience. The information bundles remained drained and miserable, which the mirror star reflected and spread to the entire space. The grow sessions focused on vine damage before working on claiming more space from the void, so the evergreen vine slowly retreated back across the captured space instead of completely dying.
The bat bundle absorbed whatever sensory input rain fell on it. The bat was aware of the attacks on the intruders, though there were no eyes available to send visual data. The bat did not want to attack intruders, the instincts of a bat told it to flee large creatures and hunt small prey. The snake bundle was also aware of the attacks on the intruders. The snake sensed that the large intruders were not food, and the flying food was too well protected to ambush. As the attack waves wore on, the snake instincts told it to give up and turn around. The jellyfish drifted.
The mirror star picked up the feeling of give up and spread it around. The other bundles, drained of energy and feeling hunger, had no resistance to give up. The spider curled in on itself. The frog and salamander closed their eyes. The butterfly stopped flapping its wings. The apricot tree dropped its leaves. The moss shriveled and turned dry. The foundational plant instincts stopped pumping so much water through the dungeon vines or pushing vines and roots to grow. The mirror star picked up all of these actions of surrender and reflected them out, intensifying them as bundle resonated with give up.
The dungeon instincts struggled again to direct its mental energy. Dungeon cores are not meant to give up, so the instincts found a similar directive: stop. The dungeon core stopped actively pulling mana from the void and dimmed to the strength of a candle. The dungeon vine stopped growing and repairing. The void-claim mechanism ground to a halt. The flows of mana separating the dungeon spaces from the void slowed and frayed. The dungeon instincts stopped draining mental energy from the rest of the mind space. The mirror star spun slowly, reflecting stop and give up around the mental space, reinforcing the actions of all the mental entities.