Having been forced to sit in a cramped, dusty, and very poorly ventilated room for an hour straight, Buck wasn’t exactly sure what reality was. His head had been through quite a bit, oxygen deprivation likely one of them, yet what standards were there for the effects? Headaches? He certainly had one of those. His eyes hurt as well, though that was more to do with the dust still very much inside them. Yet… hallucinating to an extreme level wasn’t something he’d heard of being common.

Sitting down on the floor and trying not to move at all, the [Druid] tried to consider his point in life. He had accepted becoming a slave to a talking ant mere days ago, had feasted on nothing but raw meats which tasted rather peculiar, had attempted to play fetch with a creature made entirely out of the water, and had then been forced to breathe in stale air for a very long time. Was it all one big delusion? If so, it was a rather convincing one.

Then again, delusions were meant to be a bit less realistic with the shoulder pains. The initial feeling of something biting him hadn’t hurt too hard yet the attempts to make it stop certainly had. The moment that Buck had put his hand on his back in an attempt to wrench off whatever small bug had started to feast on his flesh, his entire arm had flared up in pain. Perhaps that should have stopped him from continuing his attempts to start with, but he was never known to be logical. If he did something and it hurt, it must have meant he wasn’t trying hard enough. Yet that feeling of something ripping apart… it should have been an obvious sign of something being wrong.

And that even the walls were requesting that he stop moving must have meant something was truly going wrong. If the objects formerly seen as entirely without a mind manifested sentience just to pass along a message to him, Buck was very well going to take it. He understood the mechanics of [Earthen Elementals], knowing that some had missions they needed to fulfil. And he was not going to allow one to manifest fully just because he didn’t want to stop moving by himself. Those things were too deadly as it was. Having them be to stop his movement would only make it so much work.

So there he ended up, the man trying to debate on whether or not breathing deeply was alright. It moved his shoulder around, after all. And his heartbeat, thundering along as it was, could surely not be helping the process either. But, both parts of his body weren’t able to be stopped, any attempts at doing such a thing likely ending up with Buck having a longer-than-intended nap.

Time passed in silence. Some minutes at first but those quickly moved onto a few tens of minutes. Buck did his best to stay still, even if it was quite hard at first. His shoulders ached as if it was asleep at points, an itch suddenly there as if it craved to be moved. The Druid never did fulfil those desires, of course, not even when they came back with spurts of pain. Having already felt such a cutting edge before, ignoring it the second time around wasn’t impossible. And that was what he did.

Yet such a long time spent in silence had one unfortunate side-effect. It allowed Buck to start up his thinking again. And what exactly did he think about it? Well, it was nothing but the fact that there was no dangerous ant around to look at. Mother Carapace, as it had so demanded that he call it, couldn’t be heard, seen, or sensed. There were even Mana-Tendrils hanging around. And no ants could be heard scuttling around outside in the cave either, making the man doubt that she was mingling with those again. But then… where exactly could they be?

Dead was the likely answer. That’s what Buck couldn’t stop thinking, at the very least. He had talked about the Warden coming around himself, the possible army of soldiers marching in on them. With how much talking there had been about keeping up appearances, the Druid had only guessed that it included taking the Dungeon for themselves. There were riches in, after all. And such an idea would require an initial search inside.

And how did such a search end? It ended with killing the so-called boss of the dungeon. There was no real doubt who that was, Buck only having seen one entity worth being called that. Mother Carapace herself. While he feared it for reasons other than it just being powerful, there was no doubt that power was certainly part of its repertoire.

So the guess was that the demise of the boss had occurred. That wasn’t the worst of tragedies. If the Dungeon followed the normal rules, a new boss would likely appear within a few hours or days. Buck had even heard tales about how one could simply wait outside a boss-room for a few minutes before it would reappear in the same place as before, yet those had never been validated. Trusting drunk adventurers at a bar was never something one needed to do anyway.

But… no matter the time needed for the ant to reappear again, the Druid was left with another question that had plagued its mind. Mother Carapace was out of commission for a long time. That meant she couldn't protect Buck if the situation required it. Not that she would, but that didn’t matter at the current moment. The issue was that she wasn’t present. She wasn’t there to communicate with him.

And she had been the only entity to have done so during Buck’s entire stay at the cave. Which begged the question of who exactly had written that message on the walls? A golem? That had seemed a smart idea at the time but it wasn’t working well with the fact that something was actively making changes to the Druid’s body. Something was manipulating his insides with a constant feed of Mana. For better or worse mattered little. What mattered was that something intelligent other than Buck and the ant was able to observe and manipulate the room he sat in. And he had no idea who it was.

In a normal situation, this would have ended up with the man freezing his body and waiting until the danger period was over. Unfortunately, when a sentient mind was given that emotion for nearly an hour, the ‘danger’ part of the feeling wore off, curiosity filling the gap nicely. While the entity manipulating him behind the scenes was very likely dangerous to interact with, the Druid wanted to know more about them.

“Hello?” was the first attempt to establish some form of communication. Not that it worked too well, the sensations of his back being dead not changing at all. Whatever that was messing with his muscles either hadn’t heard him or didn’t care. “Can anyone or anything hear me right now?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Nothing responded to that either. There was always the chance of the entity being deaf so that was annoying. The man had gotten the attention of it before it problematized the modifications but there was little desire to repeat that act. Way too much pain from it. Instead, some ideas needed to be tried out, the first of which was easy enough.

“I know you are there so can you just talk back for once?” the Druid said with conviction that wasn’t as true within. There was no real surety if it was even present. There was a legitimate chance that the ant had just made some runes that acted as a sort of protection. It wasn’t the first time that the man’s body had been ripped apart from within either, so it could be that the process just wasn’t that complicated to do anymore. Buck wasn’t sure.

What he was sure about was that nothing was answering him. Which was annoying since he very much wanted one. It was almost to the point where he wanted to accidentally stretch a bit back to take cure of the current itch but he wasn't sure if he could fake it. Instead, he decided to try out the closest approximation of it.

“If you don’t respond, I suppose I can just start walking around again. It must not be that important if silence is more fruitful for you,” the man decided to try out. Some of it was improvised at the end after not getting an instant response but he thought the point had come across just as well. And, wouldn’t you know it, something came back after mere seconds.

‘This is a response. Cease movement for one hour,’ could be seen scribbled onto the wall in front of the Druid. The time it had taken between the first and last appearing was long below a single second. Whatever had made the sentence was most certainly not slow-minded.

“I don’t think I can, if I have to be brutally honest with you,” the man said, happy to see some amount of communication starting up. “This position has been killing me for the last ten minutes. My legs are likely just gonna give up on me at this point.”

That wasn’t a total lie. Sitting in a lotus had seemed like a good idea at the time yet the Druid had not been keeping up with his stretching routine. The stiffness was fighting back with every moment, some of it making it more powerful.

And then like nothing had happened, that feeling of itching was gone from his back. Buck could feel no real difference in the area it had originated from. Using his left hand to feel for any spots, he found nothing either. Pristine skin and whatever under it was as fine as ever. Yet… the scratching of the wall nearest to him was easily heard.

‘Move out of your current position and move into one which you can stay in for more than one hour. You have ten seconds to fulfil this command,’ was scratched onto the wall. It was for longer than the one before it, taking up nearly double the space. Those constraints were perhaps noticed a few moments after the druid had read them, the text disappearing into the wall as they had never been there, to begin with. How smart of the entity.

“I don’t think any position is going to last me one hour, but I suppose I can do the one which I can hold for the longest,” the Druid said before promptly moving out to his so-called bed. It was more just a gathering of leather bundled up into a small pillow and laid upon the moss. While the aforementioned looked to have needles, their lack of attacking the man-made it possible to use them as semi-decent bedding. And it also worked perfectly in making him feel comfortable enough when lying down on it. “There. You can start it up whenever you please.”

That prompt was not taken lightly, the shift in the man’s back muscles being instant. A hard intake of breath met the movement which came around on instinct. It hurt quite a bit, those very same movements not being aligned with whatever was being done inside him.

“Perhaps be more gentle when starting after a smaller break,” the Druid suggested with gritted teeth. “It might save us both pain and time.”

Above the man, a few new letters appeared, together spelling out ‘your suggestion has been noted for future reference.’ The words were pretty smart for an entity that hadn’t used many words at all initially.

“Now that we’re on talking foot, I need to ask what exactly it is that you’re doing,” Buck questioned, happy to have somebody to talk to. And with the lack of movement other than his tongue, he suspected the entity would be fine enough with it.

‘Improvements,’ was written on the ceiling. The word seemed to be dug into it far enough that some small amount of dust came down onto the man. It cleared before it ever hit though, some force taking it out of the thin air.

“Improvements to my body?” Buck asked, trying to get something more than just a one-word response.

‘Yes,’ was written, the entity clearly not understanding the man’s goals. Whatever.

“That’s fine with me, I guess,” the [Druid] stated, knowing full well that he wouldn’t have been able to say no, to begin with. “Though I do have another question that I have been meaning to ask. What exactly are you again? I can’t think of you as another one of the ants and those are the only things in here.”

‘I am everything around you.’

“That doesn’t help me much here. I’ve got a lot of stones, but you aren’t that.”

‘No, I am not.’

“And I can see a few mineral ores to the side but you can’t be that either.”

‘Indeed.’

“And since you were so broad about it, I can’t expect you to be the air either.”

‘That would be very hard for me to be.’

“But you just said that you were it all at once somehow.”

‘That is very true.’

Buck spent a moment letting that one sift into his mind. There were some translation issues somewhere around what had been asked or answered.

“So you see that what you are saying is contradictory, right?” the man questioned, trying to make sure they were both on the same page.

‘It is not. I have not lied.’

“But you kinda did. You said you weren’t the air but then you also said you were the air. That’s either you changing your state of being very quickly or you not meaning what you said at all. Which is it?”

‘Neither. I am only connected to the air, stone, and minerals for they are of my creation.’

… Ah. The Druid suddenly had a better idea of who it was speaking to. Which was horrifying seeing as the aforementioned entity was supposed to not be capable of speech.

“Am I to understand that you are the Core of the Dungeon?”

‘Yes.’

At some level, Buck knew he should have expected that.