Manning

“Manning, how are we looking?” Ash, my bonded dungeon companion, asked from where she was sitting with her feet in a pond. She didn’t ask because I was up to anything, but because she was a bit bored. Ever since the raid on Annahmia, the dungeon town that sprung up after we settled down here, was raided a couple weeks ago, we’d had little-to-no visitors.

Ash, being a dryad, didn’t usually get bored as trees rarely do, but she had developed a people-watching habit recently. Apart from the lumberers and the occasional religious gathering, I had my own cult, none of the other villagers had had spare time to visit the forest or dungeon recently..

“From what I can see, the village is making a rapid recovery. The new townies seem to know what they’re doing when it comes to fast construction.” A powerful faction had come to the rescue after Annahmia was attacked, saving what they could of their possessions and killing or capturing all the invaders. They’d  even rescued a few villagers that had been kidnapped by the invaders.

Had they shown up even a couple hours earlier, they may been able to stop the devastation of the town, but the same could be said of the guards who’d been at the sabbath in my forest when the attack was launched. That wasn’t the case however, so now the town was razed and rebuilt, like a legendary phoenix.

“I’ve also finished digesting the last of the life essence from the raiders. We have more skills than I know what to do with, it’s a shame that we don’t have any sapient races like Cara… We could have our own warriors and defenders instead of a bunch of beasts who only know how to leap out of trees and charge.”

Cara was a co-located dungeon, the first person I met after I awoke with none of my memories. Her dungeon existed under my forest, allowing me to masquerade myself as a naturally occurring ‘enchanted forest’, whatever that meant, and live in the sunlight where I could flourish and grow a massive forest.

When I’d originally woken up, we were both inside of the same core, cramped and confused. I didn’t retain any of my memories from my previous life, apart from my command of the common language. Cara, however, retained all her memories, memories as a mage from when she was alive!

With her help, we managed to expand our core early on, eventually leading to us fragmenting the core in two so that we could be in separate areas. The thought was for us both to lead out own dungeons in the directions that we wanted as we’d had creative differences right from the start, her wanting to go deep and dark and myself wanting to feel the sunlight on the surface of my core.

Very quickly we realized that although we’d managed to house ourselves into two separate halves of a dungeon core, our dungeon influences, the borders of our domains, needed to be connected still. We were still one dungeon, just two halves of one each.

So that's how it was, I lived on the surface above her dungeon, growing my forest and ‘containing’ the evil darkness dungeon below me, Cara’s domain. Cara taught me magic while Ash and Brick, Cara’s counterpart companion, taught us about dungeons and how to grow and manage them.

Since then, Cara and I had set up the limits of our domain, claimed and evolved creatures, and even created a following. Cara had her ‘near-sapient’ race, the troglodytes, which she found hiding in a cave within her cave system and then enslaved, while I large amounts of forest critters I’d similarly captured and mutated into a fighting force. Of course, Ash and I also had the cult of Annahmia who were led by cult-leader Gladil, an elf that mistook my dungeon influence for a god’s influence. Their group was growing rapidly into a  recognized church thanks to my attempts to save them from the invasion they’d suffered.

Of course, the rescue would never have been necessarily had it not been for the racism rampant in the human dominated kingdom that my dungeon resided in, the Laevell Kingdom. Annahmia, the dungeon town, was originally founded by a small group of non-human sapients, elves, gnomes, and even beastmen, in accordance with a writ from the Laevellian king.

All the land along the immediate southern border, the border with the untamed wilds, was written off as ‘free-to-settle’ due to the numerous invasions from the ‘monster races’ like goblins, orcs, and the like. This group searched along the border for a safe-ish area to settle away from the taxes and discrimination they suffered from, and eventually were led to my dungeon.

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A nearby human settlement called Ostlind was jealous of the development of Annahmia, the were a town full of crooks, smugglers, thugs, and gangsters, all of which believed that the wealth of Cara’s dungeon should have belonged to them. The humans tried coercion, threatening, and even raiding caravans, in order to pressure Annahmia into ceding the deed to their new town. When all else failed, they hired a large company of mercenaries and scraped up their entire guard, along with more riff-raff, in order to raze the town to the ground and enslave them. From what I learned from memories I absorbed, they intended to blame the raid on goblins or the like, and then set up a satellite outpost of Ostlind in the same location.

Unfortunately, they didn’t predict that I would decide to value the lives of the townsmen, or that Cara would also come to their defense. The raiders were bullied into my forest by the new faction where they were separated and systematically slain. With each death, Cara and I both gained substantial amounts of memories, skills, and dense mana that I called life essence.

The mana was like a permanent addition to our mana-pools, expanding their maximum rather than just refilling them like if we were passively absorbing it from the air. This alone was enough for us to take the side of the poor defenseless townies and didn’t even account for the fact that they literally worshiped me.

Cara and I saved the town, and now we watched as it was quickly built back up from the ground. I did my best when it came to growing trees to be lumbered, growing more than I had previous per day as well as placing them closer to the entrance. I could have felled them as well, but I didn’t want the town to rely on me all the time. Some things they had to do for themselves.

In the last couple weeks, the townspeople had managed to build back most of the shelters that they’d lost to the fires, as well as several new dwellings. With the eyes of one of my owls, I was able to observe new people arriving every day as well as the swift construction. In my gut I felt that we would be getting a lot of visitors very soon, and that the dungeon was getting ready to spike in popularity. Cara managed to gleam several inspirations for traps from the people we’d killed and had made qualitative upgrades to the dungeon since the last time someone had entered, all in preparation for a flood of delvers.

“I was thinking, Manning, about the sapient races thing… You said that you found out we were located somewhere called the Wild Plains, right? Well, there should be all sorts of savage races somewhere that hasn't been tamed by the humans yet, right? Maybe we can ask Cara to borrow some troglodytes and send them out on hogs to negotiate with a few goblins. Savage races, as opposed to humans, love to dwell in dungeons. They are much better at absorbing ambient mana and can grow and evolve just from thriving in such a location, unlike elves and humans who need to kill beasts and absorb their essence. Of course, you’d need to convince them that you were a war god or something, not a sapient rock.”

“That’s not the worst idea. I don’t know how the humans would feel about running into goblins in the forest though, they might fear an invasion. When I refined the captain’s memories, I found out about the historical goblin raids that caused the king to give this land away in the first place. Still, maybe I could convince just a couple to come and work on evolving them to something new, like how Cara is fixing up her troglodytes. If they look less like goblins, the humans probably wouldn’t mind.”

As time went on, I found myself getting more in tune with my dungeon instincts. Things like ‘kill all adventurers’ were easily suppressed, I knew right from wrong and wasn’t really excited about killing innocent people anyways. Other things like ‘evolve creatures’, ‘contract sapients’, and ‘challenge all those who enter thy domain’ I found harder to ignore. Each one of those tasks sounded interesting and reasonable, which made it harder to just write them off as dungeon instincts acting up.

I was very jealous of Cara’s troglodyte colony. I knew she had enslaved them all, which was shitty, but they still fervently doted on her every word and believed that she was their stars and moon. I had my own religious amongst the people of Annahmia, but it wasn’t really the same. They worshipped the idea of me but had no clue who I was or that I was even a dungeon. I craved the intimacy Cara got from her flock, like a woman who was barren looking on at a large family.  

As I was lost in thought, I noticed a larger than normal group of people approaching the town and snapped out of my reverie to pay attention. The last time this many people entered the town at once, it was burnt to the ground. I didn’t see weapons brandished and they weren’t exactly trying to sneak up on the town, so I didn’t think it would be something so serious. Still, I wanted to get ears down there all the same. It was a shame I was unable to extend my dungeon into the town while it was empty, the river naturally eroded away at my attempts to spread my influence.

I could only watch with the owl and try and infer what their intentions were from their behavior and next actions.