Gil'thuk

Gil had been trying to rile the colony up for a couple weeks. Ever since their battle however, the elders had been preoccupied with prisoner breeding, as disgusting as that sounded to Gil.

Their cavern had been mined into by a tribe of canine men, and they'd responded to this by slaying them all in their sleep. The night of the invasion had not been long past so things had not finished settling.

Nearly 7 days after the systematic slaughter and kidnapping Gil had started to notice changes in the cavern. The air felt fresher than it ever had before. At first, he'd attributed this to the new hole circulating more air, it was the only thing that made sense to him, but that all changed when the first plump bat crawled down his slope.

He ambushed it with his claws and teeth, making fast work of it. The raw bat was the best thing Gil'thuk had ever tasted and he ate it up quickly. Luckily there were more trespassers. Some of the largest grubs he'd seen started crawling down the slope, followed by more of the extra tasty bats. Gil had enlisted the help of 3 more of his tribesmen to slay and capture them all.

They stopped coming. The hunting party had only lasted a few hours, a few bloody hours, and was over far too soon. Gil'thuk was incapable of pondering this too long, so he went to sleep.

The next morning Gil awoke and ran back to the incline, salivating and waiting for more food to descend, but it never did. After crawling up he realized that the new hole had been sealed and the air no longer tasted as fresh.

He'd tried to get others to help him take the wall back down, but their language had so few words in it he could not express his thoughts. The others would rather spend all day sampling the fruits of the raids, the few women they'd managed to enslave.

Disgusting. Gil'thuk knew this was the way of his people, how they reproduced, but he could not condone it. Doubly so when there were such tasty morsels on the other side of the wall.

After spending a few days staring at the wall, he slowly forgot why he wanted the wall down. He knew it had to fall because that was the sole thought he'd had this entire time, staring at the blank slab of limestone. But why, and how?

He'd done this for two weeks, waking up and staring at the wall for a few hours, and then trying to enlist the help of any that he could distract long enough to bring it down. Nobody remembered that there was something on the other side of that wall, nobody remembered the hole. Only Gil'thuk knew he needed to demolish it.

One morning after waking up during his ritual sit and stare, Gil felt a thrumming. The air tasted fresher than it should, and with that taste his memory was jogged. On the other side of this wall there was the most delicious foods he'd ever tasted, better even than the lupines had been.

In a fit of sudden motivation Gil'thuk knew he had to take down the wall before he forgot again. He sprinted back to the village as fast as his misformed legs would take him and burst into the chieftain’s dwelling. Luckily the chieftain was not home, so Gil was able to steal his stone Warhammer.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

As fast as he could go, Gil ascended the inclined tunnel once more, and descended upon the wall with all his might. He swung the hammer overhead several times, over and over, aiming at the same spot and begging the universe for some small bit of fortune.

It worked.

The hammer broke through the wall, which appeared to only be about as thick as his palm was wide. He used the hammer to break a larger opening and what he could see through the hole only frenzied him even more.

There were tubular plants encrusted along the walls of a rounded chamber, as well the tasty morsels from last time. He even saw spiders, one of his favorite foods, and these were much larger than any he'd seen before!

He clawed the wall down at a speed that would impress even a mole, salivating and gnashing his teeth. When he'd widened the hole to about a fourth of his own size, he managed to reach through the hole with his entire arm and grab one of the growths. He wasn't much of a plant eater, but scavenging was his entire diet, so he wasn't about to pass this up.

Had his ability to remember anything been any better, he would have been baffled in the stark differences the room was displaying since he'd been there weeks past in the war party.

Instead he was just thinking about how crunchy those spider legs were going to be.

 * * * * * * * 

Cara

It was disgusting. Cara had never seen anything like this before, even in the few bestiary books she read as a child. 

At first, she'd assumed it was a kobold, a draconic looking reptile man, based on the clawed hand that burst through the wall. It was a sickly looking green with 4 talons, one of which looked like it behaved like a thumb. 

The hand grasped at her side of the thin wall, with the talons digging into the smooth surface spreading cracks along it. The hand started ripping away at the wall, intent on tearing it down as fast as possible. When the entire arm managed to get in through the opening and steal a mushroom, she knew it wasn't a kobold. 

She was able to see the creature properly now as it was standing on the small part of the tunnel she'd managed to claim before walling it off. She couldn't see it before because of the dungeon restraint that prevented cores from just walling themselves from the outside world. If she couldn’t access the area, it was no longer interactable for her. 

The creature looked to be like a goblin that had been melted in the sun, frozen again, and then bred with a lizard.

Walking on two legs, its skin was a sickly yellow-green, with scales along its spine that were a darker brown. It had taloned hands and feet, and a slight hunchback. 

Its head was entirely bald, and its face was deformed. It had a single large eye in the center of its head, two slits for nostrils with no nose and its mouth, which was lower than it looked like it should be, was gaping open and salivating. She could see no ears, and it had two or three rows of small sharp teeth, with a snake's tongue. 

It was entirely repulsive, but she wanted it. If she could claim it not only would she learn what it was, but she would finally have a near-sapient creature to defend her dungeon. 

Instead of it being cowed by the sight of her army, the mucus colored creature seemed reinvigorated and started smashing the hammer against the hole, clawing at it, and at one point it even bit a chunk out.

It crawled through the hole and the beasts swarmed it. It had little heed for its own safety, and although it's mana derma paled with each injury, it did not look like she would be able to dominate it before it succumbed to its injury’s. 

It was time to test her other theory. She'd somehow passively claimed a very large number of worms and her guess was it was because it consumed her mana enriched soils. Perhaps if she let it keep coming back to ingest her mana it would get easier. She just needed to trap it in her dungeon, so the effects wouldn’t wear off.

The rest of her warriors withdrew from the room as fast as they possibly could, and the monster followed them for a bit. As it ventured furthur down the tunnel she had her beetles loop back into the room and seal off the hole it crawled in from.