----------------------------------------

"Cara, Ash says these two are just scouts. There are people who they are expected to report to, so we need to act casual."

It was the first time Cara had been spoken to by Manning since she pushed for their separation. She didn't think that he was angry at her, just that he was busy and maybe feeling a little hurt. Either way, his feelings were not her top priority right now.

Cara watched as the two Elves, because what else could they be, poked their heads into the entrance of her cave. She was not ready for visitors, they really should have RSVPed.

Hastily she closed off the entrance to the second floor with a very thin layer of stone to conserve mana and embedded herself into the wall at the end of the first floor.

The two scouts slowly descended the sharp incline of packed dirt that separated her dungeon from Manning's forest.

"I can feel the Sacred Tree's influence waning here Copper, something is down here."

"Shh, whatever it is we need to see if we can identify it and get out of here. That's what we get paid for after all."

No matter how this turned out, Cara accepted she was going to need to establish dialog with Manning again. Neither of them was prepared for this so soon, and they may have had better luck working together.

After the invaders had descended 20-25 feet, Cara could tell that they were getting apprehensive about the increasing shift in mana. Because her dungeon was in an enclosed space, the ambient mana felt more concentrated in the air and it tended to unsettle creatures who were not directly aligned to it.

"Look at this, the wall over here has veins of Copper and Tin. We could sell mining rights here and make some quick money." The fatter of the two elves, the one called Copper, seemed to be adjusting rather quickly to the shift. She didn't know if his affinity was just more closely aligned, or if the greed was helping him to overlook his discomfort.

"Be careful, don’t let your vice get you injured. How can you not feel that there is something inherently wrong about this place? This chamber looks too smooth to be naturally occurring, and if someone else already dug it out then where are their miners?"

As they were peeking around the room, looking under rocks and peering into the dark corners, one of the local spiders began its decent from the roof. Cara hadn't directly influenced the spider outside of claiming its parents, but just living inside of her had let it grow to a much larger size and increased the potency of its poison. Including the legs, her cave spider looked to be about the size of an elf head.

Just as it was getting ready to land on the head of the more apprehensive man, the young greedy one threw a knife from his side across the room.

"Oi! What's the big idea? You could have taken my eye out!"

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Calm down! There was something moving above you, it should be pinned to the wall behind you now."

Well, that could have gone better. The two slowly approached the spider as it trashed about in its death throes. It had been pinned to the wall with a slender knife by its abdomen and was not long for this world.

As the creature’s mana exited its body, two small slivers branched off from the invisible cloud it was forming above the creature’s corpse and floated into the elves. The rest of the meager mana coalesced above the spider.

It tightened and whirled as it attempted to form the pattern Cara had attributed with the spiders when the cluster hatched. Looking at it, there appeared to be enough mana and after a second, there was a clinging to be heard on the floor.

Copper bent over and searched for the sound while Gladil stared at the spider's corpse a bit longer in contemplation. The older elf dislodged the spider when he was convinced it was dead and stowed it in his bag. Simultaneously Copper jumped up in excitement.

"It's a Deci! The spider dropped a copper Deci, do you know what that means?" Cara couldn't believe that somebody could be so excited over a tenth of a copper coin. She still remembered the coinage of the empire she lived in, so when it came to allocate drops she was pretty set.

"We are in a dungeon. We need to get out of here right away and make our report before somebody else discovers this."

Just as she remembered, the appearance of a new dungeon was not something that happened frequently at all. The two argued for a bit about whether they should keep exploring like the young one advocated, or if they needed to get out with their lives to report. Luckily for Cara the two had no idea how unprepared her dungeon was and at the end of the day, caution won out.

* * * * * * *

I watched as the two ascended the incline back into the daylight of my forest. Copper seemed to be very annoyed by the fact that they were leaving without looting the entire place, and Gladil just seemed happy to be out of the hole.

Before leaving, the older elf walked back up to my tree, touched his fists to each other in front of his chest and bowed.

"Please bless our passing out of your forest, holy guardian. We wish you luck with your battle containing this evil and will return within a month."

The two departed the forest in the direction of the river and were gone much faster than they had arrived.

"Ash, what do we do? We need to be ready for when they return!"

I was lost and panicked. I could feel that Ash was not super comfortable with our predicament, and she took a second to gather her thoughts.

"I think that we need to slow our expansion Manning and work on reinforcing our creatures with the excess mana generated. Start by trying to thicken the forest around us, it will be our natural defense."

I started stimulating the growth of my forest and soon the only thing to be heard around us was the creaking of wood as the trees experienced a massive growth.

By the time I worked my way to the river I was running low on stored mana, so before I realized what was happening I had dipped into the 7% of dark mana that I stored naturally. I tried to pull back, but it was too late.

The three willow trees I had planted along the coast of the river drank up the dark mana like a starved plant in a rain storm and grew faster even than most other trees up until that point.

Soon I was sitting in the center of a grown forest, with flowers blooming ready to start seeing more and more trees.

I feared a bit for what that mana may have done for the willows, but now was not the time to worry about it, I needed to grow.

I had my insects set about pollinating the flowers systematically and started meditating to get my mana stores back up. Luckily, now that the trees were more fully grown they were emitting more excess mana back into the environment which made my recover rate go up greatly.

I hoped I could keep the explorers from realizing I was a surface dungeon if possible. Whatever was to come, I needed to have a chat with Cara very soon because we were definitely in for some trouble.