Chapter 4

Pan’s next hurdle would be planning a way to kill the mage, and either destroy or bypass his minions. To form a proper plan, Pan needed to gather intelligence. Right now he had no way to spy on his master, and he was afraid to push his control into the mage’s quarters.

He started to devise a way to spy on him without alerting him to his presence. Pan had noticed he had the ability to see through the eyes of his minions, and give them command that they would carry out to the best of their abilities. He had also noticed that his creatures could leave his cave, but his connection to them would be severed, although they remained his, and would return later when they completed whatever it was they wanted to do outside.

The most common minion to leave his lair was the dungeon ant workers. They often left the cave on orders from their queen, and would return with plants or insects in their jaws. Without Pan even coming up with the plan they were expanding the list of summonable minions, all in an effort to feed their ravenous queen.

Pan decided to use this ability to spy on his captor. He had no illusions about the usefulness of a three inch long ant as a spy, they would surely draw attention. He would create his spies from scratch. Or almost from scratch. He was going to use flies as a template after all.

Flies were currently the most useless of his minions, and served as the garbage men and a food source for the rest of the cave. Even the herbivorous beetles would kill the flies when annoyed by their presence.

He had a suspicion that a fly would not be noticed in a necromancer's quarters, after all, his profession was all about dead things. For his newest experiment, Pan summoned a new fly. He wanted it to look as much like a natural fly as possible, and blend into the background.

First, he strengthened its muscles, and made it much quicker than a normal fly. He halved its reaction time, and increased its intelligence slightly. He boosted the strength of its exoskeleton and shrunk it so it was just as strong, but was lighter and more maneuverable.

Next, he went to the big changes. He created a new region in its brain that would record everything it saw, and was able to be accessed by him. Its eyes got the most attention out of everything. Its eyesight was pushed beyond even human vision, and could have read a book from dozens of feet away. Its dark vision was increased, and it would be able to see hundreds of feet with only the light of a single candle.

When he was finished, Pan realized he had spent over five hundred mana improving the flies, his most expensive project yet. He was quite please with his Scout Fly. When he checked his summon list he was surprised to see the fly was ranked as a tier 1, but as a support monster. It also has a low level identify skill. That was the first he had seen a creature have a skill, as all of their traits were innate abilities based on their species.

He supposed this was the reason for its high mana cost to create, but it only cost twenty-five mana to summon one. He summoned four more of them and started testing out their abilities. He sent all but one out of the cave to explore, and he had the last one use it’s identify skill on the residents of the cave.

The skill didn’t provide any more information than the dungeon menu, but it was useful nonetheless. The skill instead interpreted the relative strengths of the bugs as the levels he was familiar with as a human. His strongest was the enormous centipede, with a level of thirteen. Even as a human, Pan had never reached level ten, and he knew the giant bug would have killed him easily.

The queen ant was a surprising level three, but the worker ants didn’t have a level since they were still too small and weak. Despite her level, Pan supposed a level one human could kill her because of her size. Pan did have plans to increase her size when he had enough mana to reach for a tier two dungeon monster.

Pan was pulled from his ruminations by the return of his scouts. When they returned he received a dump of information from their memory banks, and after some time spent pouring over it, he had a decent idea of the surrounding area. It was mostly forest, with the only difference being a small creek a few hundred yards from his entrance.

Pan was reasonably sure there were no settlements close by, but his human body had been brought here from his family's farm, so he was reasonably sure there was some sort of settlement within a day or two. Maybe more if the necromancer had a mount.

Admittedly, the information wasn’t that helpful, but this scouting expedition had been a proof of concept mission. His next step would be infiltrating the necromancer's domain, and deciding how to move forward from there.

The next time the man entered and left his heart chamber, pan started putting his plan into action. He created a very small tube leading from his cave, into a hole on the far side of the podium the mana crystal sat on. The man never went past the podium, so Pan had no fear of him discovering the entrance.

He immediately felt a rush of mana pour into his heart as his room was connected to the outside. The mana grew denser, although it wasn't as dense as the bottom of his cave as mana flowed through the cave like water and concentrated at the lowest point. His regeneration tripled as mana from outside nourished his cave. He released a mental sigh he had no idea he was holding, and a hundred pounds seemed to be lifted from his back. Dungeon instincts were bearing their teeth again, and he fought the urge to make the tunnel even wider. He did increase the width up until almost the exit, however, and the mana flowed slightly faster again.

While he was recovering from the new feelings, his scouts were already traversing the path he had laid out for them. When they reached the exit, they waited for the man to come again and collect his skeleton. Pan had nearly forgotten to summon it in the mad rush of mana fueled ecstasy.

After the man claimed the undead minion and filled the mana stone, the flies burst into action. They followed the man out of the cave, and pan lost contact with them. He actually felt nervous during the time they were away, and he hoped they wouldn’t be discovered. He had noticed a resurgence of his emotions as he gathered more mana and leveled up. Thankfully he had time to slowly come to grips with his new living situation, and hoped to make the best of it. After he brutally executed this presumptuous mage.

After a few more hours, and a couple skeletal summons, the scouts returned, and Pan was excited to review the reports, but after he finished something else.

Level 7

Unlock skill: Monster Imbuement

Need 2500_ mana for level 8

+20 Dungeon Points

Monster Imbuement

Dungeon unique

Synergizes with targeted evolution. Dungeon species can be gifted with innate abilities based off ones learned by the dungeon. A chance to earn abilities from each enemy killed in the dungeon. Ability will be related to the enemy killed.

Pan was interested in the new skill. It seemed he had gotten it because of his actions as a dungeon. He had already given the flies a skill, but this seemed different. He would be able to make creatures that naturally had access to skills, without the cost associated with them. The flies, for example, had to use mana to identify something, which was difficult for them since they could only store a very small amount. This skill should allow him to bypass that cost, and allow they fly to constantly use identify.

He immediately used the new skill on the flies and made the skill an innate part of their being. Now when they flew around they were constantly cataloging the information of everything around them, and the skill showed more information, such as current and max health, stamina, or mana.

After witnessing the success of his new skill, Pan refocused on the task at hand. He started going through the mountain of information his scouts had returned with. Luckily as a dungeon, his ability to process information had skyrocketed, and assimilation data from the flies was easy as breathing had been when he still needed to do that. It was just painstakingly slow to stitch together a map of the wizard's lair from the memories of the flies.

Pan was happy to notice the detail with which he could recreate the wizard's domain. Their eyesight was so good, he could’ve read the book open on the man’s desk. Unfortunately, it was in a language and alphabet he couldn’t comprehend.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Immediately outside his cave, there was a sort of laboratory, with an alchemy station set up. He had shelves covered in books and ingredients. There were bones strewn about to various states of dissection, and even a few items that the wizard had attempted to enchant. It seemed enchantment was not the wizard’s forte, as the items were quite weak, although the enchantments were quite vile, as expected.

They all pertained to drawing the life force or soul out of whatever they struck, and transferring it somewhere.. The weakness wasn’t in the effects, but in the number of uses they had. Each one only seemed to be good for one use before needing a recharge. The strongest one was the dagger he had been killed with, and its enchantment severed the soul's attachment to a body, and allowed it to be moved into whatever object the wielder desired.

This seemed to be how the wizard had put Pan into the dungeon heart, and it had some hefty restrictions on it. It only worked on sacrificed targets who were unable to resist, so it wouldn’t be very useful in combat. Pan was happy about that as it was a particularly nasty enchantment.

The next room was a hallway, and it had a bedroom off to one side. That was where the man was, hunched over some book and muttering to himself while being attended to by some of his minions. He had some sort of skeletal butler, without the uniform. There were a few other rooms, but they seemed to be mainly for the purpose of storing his skeletons, of which there were more than two hundred. The majority of them were expanding the rooms they were in while the rest carried the rubble out of the underground area. The area exited into a ruined temple, with the entrance to the catacombs beneath the ancient altar.

The skeletons were dumping the rubble out in front of the temple in a large pile. That was the extent of the flies scouting, but he did notice the temple was on a plateau in the middle of the forest. Pan guessed his cave was at the base of the cliff behind the temple. The grounds and the temple were very overgrown, and trees towered above its ruined facade.

Pan had created a nearly perfect mental map of the wizard's lair, and fit it into the instinctive map he had of his cave. He also included the forest outside his cave in his mental image of the surroundings. The level of detail was much lower than what he knew of his cave despite the eyes of his scouts. When he finished processing the information, and fitting the images together he was rewarded with a new skill.

Dungeon Map

An instinctive awareness of what the dungeon looks like. Anything can be added to the map, as long as there is enough information present. Any minions acting in mapped areas can be commanded and used to see.

His mental map suddenly shifted and he understood it much more completely. Everything outside the dungeon also became much more clear. He couldn’t see what existed out there, but when one of his ants traveled out of the cave, he was able to see everything it saw as if it was a part of his dungeon.

This was an incredibly useful ability. His revolt had a much better chance of succeeding if he could command his minions and keep track of the battle. Pan was feeling much more optimistic about his chances. Until he finished looking at the reports of the scouts.

The skeletons were not a problem, they all ranged from level five to ten, but the necromancer was another matter. He was level twenty-six. That was twice the level of his best minion. And he was a mage. There was no way he would be able to kill him with a full frontal assault. Even his centipedes would fall to the mage. The man was a necromancer, so his damage would be done through minions, much like Pan, but the man would surely know some high-level buff skills, and his minions could surely be strengthened to contend with high-level humans.

Not to mention the man would have some offensive spells as well. And with his high stats, he would have no trouble bypassing the armor of his tanks. His spells wouldn’t be especially penetrating, but the level difference would more than make up for it. Pan had not been expecting the man to be more than level fifteen. But he was not so lucky. A level twenty-six necromancer would probably qualify as a B rank adventurer, if any guild would allow a necromancer to live, much less join.

Pan was going to need some way to get around the man’s level. As a mage, he wouldn’t have a great physical defense, but Pan had no way to sneak past the guards. He would have to attack while the man was asleep, but there was no guarantee the man could be killed in one strike by anything he could summon. He was going to have to negate some of the man’s more powerful advantages, and to do that he needed options.

He gave his queen a task, and she immediately sent workers to carry out his orders. A stream of worker ants flowed out of the colony and into the cave. From there they marched into the forest. When they returned, they brought new plants and invertebrates back into the cave. Each one was killed inside the cave and the carcass was brought back to the nest to feed the queen. With the steady flow of new species, not to mention the excess mana, Pan decided to reward the ants. He selected one of them and got to work.

He made them bigger. Bigger even than the queen. These majors would be the defenders of the colonies, and at ten inches long, they were a formidable sight. Their jaws became more vicious. Their strength greatly increased. Their heads were large shields holding a massive pair of jaws, with enough armor to stand up to most punishments. Their abdomen and thorax were not as heavily armored as the head, but when behind their helmet, an arrow probably couldn’t even harm them. He named them Dungeon Ant Warriors. They were a tier 1, and a large step up from the worker ants. After he finished a few of the bigger ants also evolved into warriors. There were a little over two dozen evolved warrior ants now, and a few other worker ants were close to reaching the required mana.

None of the species brought back were immediately useful, but he figured he would eventually find what he was looking for. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew he’d know it when he saw it.

He planted all the new species of plants, and summoned any other insect he did not have in his cave. His cave was starting to become downright tropical. There was lush greenery sprouting up all over, and many vines climbed the walls. Massive six-foot tall ferns towered over the undergrowth, where thousands of insects fought for their lives. Further back where the mana was densest, the ferns were almost ten feet tall, and loomed over a clear pond almost ten feet deep at its deepest. In the pond many larvae swam, and were hunted by larger predators. On the banks of the pond, the mammoth centipede slumbered, absorbing mana and digesting its most recent meal.

There were very few woody plants, but some small saplings had sprouted and a few small bushes dotted the scene. They were dwarfed by the oversized leaves of some of the larger ground cover. But beneath these leaves was the desperate struggle of the tier 0 invertebrate competing for an evolution.

Pan was proud of his cave so far. It was teeming with life, even if most of them couldn’t kill anything but each other. He knew that as he grew, that would change, and he would become very deadly. For now, he was happy to watch the ongoing struggle in his cave.

A few more days went by, and the mage had well over two hundred and fifty skeletons. The man came into Pan’s cave and didn’t fill the stone. Instead, he stopped and cleared his throat to speak.

“I’m going to be leaving. I will be gone for perhaps a little over a week. I will not give you any mana to play with, and I expect this room to look exactly the same when I return. I am expecting losses, so be prepared to rebuild my army when I return.”

Pan wasn’t surprised. The man had obviously been building up an army for something. He was a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be getting mana for a while, but his passive regeneration was significant at this point. He could gain almost one hundred mana a day now, and it would all go towards killing this man. Preferably with some sort of “gift” when he returned.

The man turned and left the room and Pan watched him leave the temple through the flies. The man gathered his army and left the temple, walking down a road that extended in the opposite direction from Pan’s cave. Pan released a pent up mental breath, he was worried that the man would pass by the mouth of his cave. There was only a small chance he would notice something, but there was a chance.

With the man gone, Pan continued to do what he had been doing. The ant colony was bringing back new stuff, and he was waiting for something to stand out as useful. He had plenty of herbs and other plants with interesting properties, and many of those properties could be gifted to his residents with monster imbuement skill. However, none of them were helpful. What was the point in making his insects smell good, or be shiny? Some of the properties were useful, but were very weak, since they had come from plants.

There were minor regenerative effects, and buffs to other skills, but he didn’t want to waste mana on the weak versions. He would need to kill some animals, or potentially adventurers to gain any truly useful abilities. He was positive a troll’s regenerations would be a truly useful ability to hijack, and a theif's sneak skill would be way better than the minor stealth boost he could get from one of these plants. They were just potion ingredients after all.

He finally got something he was looking for. One of his ants brought back a wandering spider. He almost didn’t notice it since he was looking for skills to imbue into some monster, but he looked at its description, and it was exactly what he needed. The spider didn’t have anything he could transfer to another minion, but it had the most potent venom he had ever seen, and even better, was the bonus effects of the venom.

It wasn’t particularly deadly, at least not to humans, but it had killed at least two worker ants, and possibly a third. It took a warrior to carry it back, and it would’ve died too if it wasn’t for its impervious shield head. The extra effects were what put it over the top. Its venom would naturally suppress magic in its victim, and would also cause confusion. It seemed its natural prey had developed a way to cleanse itself of poison, so it developed a venom that would suppress its ability to clear the poisonous effects.

This venom was basically an anti wizard cocktail. And Pan wanted to kill a wizard. Even if the poison couldn’t kill a human, if he could suppress his magic and confuse him, he would be unable to buff his army or cast a spell to defend himself. Pan’s minions could kill off the skeletons, and the necromancer would be a sitting duck.

Pan immediately summoned a few of the spiders, and started to evolve one of them. He decided to go all out with his mana, since this would be his best and only shot at killing his captor. He only slightly increased its size to just over an inch in diameter with all legs stretched out. Its abdomen was almost perfectly spherical, and became a dark gray, perfect camouflage against the stone. It was furry, to keep from reflecting any light, and to break up its shape. It had very long spindly legs, but was very strong. Pan made it fast. It was the fastest thing he had ever made.

Its fangs grew, and became razor sharp. it could easily bite through human skin, and reach deep into its flesh. The fangs looked terrifying, at almost an eighth of an inch long they were almost half the size of its body. It was mostly leg after all. The venom's potency grew exponentially. He didn’t make it deadlier, instead, he made its ability to confuse and suppress magic much stronger. He knew there was no way to kill the mage with the spider, but he needed to be out of the fight for long enough to clean up his minions, and then kill him.

Pan improved its silk. The spider didn’t use it much when hunting, but pan knew it would be vital if the spider was to get into the best position to strike. He used one of the herb's properties as a topical anesthetic, and applied it to the spider's front legs. It could secrete the fluid from special glands hidden in its front arms.

Pan then used all of the imbuements he thought would be useful. The spider’s dark vision, speed, and stealth all were buffed. When he was done he had created the deadliest thing in his cave, even if it would have trouble killing any of the other tier 1 monsters, that was not its intended prey. It would have an easy time hunting any of the smaller bugs that hadn't yet evolved.

He named his creation an Assassin Spider, and it truly lived up to its name. It was ranked as a tier 1, but cost four hundred mana to summon. The one he had created originally cost him all of his mana, and it still wasn’t complete. He would have to wait for another three hundred mana to finish the upgrade. For now, he simply stored it in a secluded chamber.

When the necromancer returned, Pan would be ready.

Dungeon Menu

Level: 7

Type: Sentient Dungeon (Bound)

Name: N/A

Titles: N/A

Mana: 0/2500  (+0)

Rooms: 2

Levels: 1

Animals: 5122

Plants: 9812

Monsters: 42

Skills: [Dungeon Menu], [Dungeon Manipulation], [Dungeon Absorption], [Dungeon Creation: Level 8], [Dungeon Expansion], [Dungeon Summon], [Targeted Evolution], [Monster Imbuement]

Dungeon Points: 325

Achievements: Evolver