The second of Kandra’s mobs croaked. Not that it died - it let out a nice, loud ribbit that echoed through her dungeon. That caught her off guard. Some part of her that absorbed the pattern of the mournmouse knew that wasn’t right for the creature - so why was it doing that?
She went over the pattern again and found the problem. It was an interesting case. The mournmouse she’d absorbed had been in the process of digestion by something called a frog. The frog must have disgorged the mouse to make itself lighter and escape - but the creature’s essence had blended with the mouse. Now that she was aware of the taint on the essence, she could pull it out and absorb it. Not enough information for her to make a frog, but she understood what a frog was now.
The resulting creature was built like a frog, save it had the long tail of the mouse, milk white fur, and had a long horn jutting from the center of its forehead between two round mouse ears.
Kandra named it a rophibin. “You know,” she said to Fulsi. “Like rodent amphibian, but shortened.”
Fulsi sighed. “Adventurers rarely care about names, but with them this bad, they might start knocking points off. Try to consult with me before you name these things, dear.”
Kandra just ignored the comment. She liked the name. “I’ve done some work on decorating the dungeon.” It had been a couple of days since the meeting with the arbiter. During that time, she’d heard nothing from Calith, and said nothing to the other dungeon. Kandra still seethed over how rude Calith was. All Kandra had done was admire the abyssal avatar, and Calith had thought she was being judged.
“Show me,” Fulsi said.
Kandra moved the image inwards a bit, and Fulsi - for the first time - looked impressed. While excavating the dungeon, Kandra had found an interesting new stone called marble. It was denser and harder than limestone, and also a beautiful mixture of white and black. Kandra had decorated the first combat room with marble clouds, and made marble trees for her skyrrows to nest in. She had five in that room, the appropriate number per the Pact.
“Oh, that’s going to do well,” Fulsi said. “For a brand new dungeon, that’s some delicate work. What about the second room?”
“That’s where I’ll have the rophibins,” Kandra said, ignoring the way Fulsi tsked at the name. “So I decided to make it look more like where both frogs and mice would dwell.” She pulled her vision to that room. The marble clouds still hung from the ceiling, but she’d used wood for the other structures in this room, making hollow logs that were split in half and laying on their side. They were perfect places for the rophibins to hide. The floor of this room had shallow channels in it. “Once I get my mana out to the river, I’m going to flood those grooves.”
Fulsi nodded. “I was beginning to despair over your creativity, but you’ve outdone yourself. Well made. What about the boss room?”
“I was going to wait to see what my boss was and design it around that,” Kandra said. “Am I ready to make a boss?”
“I believe you are,” Fulsi said. “Have your slimes found a fresh pattern for you to use as a basis?”
Kandra nodded. “I found a fox,” she said. “Is that good?”
Fulsi literally clapped her hands. “Oh, that is more than good. That is delightful. I’m shocked you found one with a spark.” Her eyes grew distant for a moment. “I wonder if that’s because this valley has not had dungeons in so long. Perhaps sparks grow more common if the creatures with sparks aren’t being harvested by us.” She shook her head. “What kind of fox? It’s fennec, isn’t it? I’m sure it is, anything else would be too big for your slimes.”
“It is,” Kandra confirmed. “Would it work for a boss?”
“It will be perfect for a boss,” Fulsi said. “The process of making a boss is similar to that of making a normal mob - except when you create the template, you’ll want to form it like you would a slime. Then wait for your mana to fully replenish, and then fill the template. The template will become the mob - you won’t have it to reuse. But bosses don’t require manual summoning - you bind them to the boss room, and it’ll naturally reform there.”
That made sense to Kandra. “Will I be able to make more foxes? They’re cute.”
Fulsi giggled. “They are, aren’t they? And yes, you will - but save that for the second floor. You’ll advance quickly, and you don’t want to overload adventurers on foxes.”
“Will do,” Kandra said. “I’m ready to get started, but - how do I bind them to the room?”
“Just make the template and the mob inside your boss room,” Fulsi said. “It’ll automatically bind to the room where you made it. You can move that bond, but there’s no need when you have the room ready to go.”
That seemed easy enough. Kandra had made the boss room the largest one in her dungeon so far, which was apparently the norm. Her core remained tucked behind that room, accessible only by a tunnel small enough for a slime to squeeze through. Technically, the Pact meant she was protected from adventurers - they would never risk harming a dungeon’s core. In theory, Kandra could put her core on a pedestal right by the entrance and be as safe as this small room.
Kandra wasn’t risking her existence to theory.
She reached out with her mana to the boss room and formed the stone fox sculpture, but this time working the mana in her pool into the construction in addition to the free floating energy. It bubbled and roiled as it drained, and moments later she had a half empty mana pool and a fox sculpture that wanted to dissolve into an amorphous blob. Keeping it stable while she was waiting for her mana to refill was the hardest part. It kept wanting to move, wanting to revert into a slime. Kandra couldn’t build something around it. That wasn’t how it worked. It needed her power, her will, to hold it in place.
By the time she had a full pool of mana, Kandra felt exhausted. It was a relief to be free to finally pour the entire pool into the statue, then release her hold on it.
The statue took a couple hesitant steps, then shook itself like a wet dog. The stone she’d used in her initial construction went flying away from the creature as the mana took shape, using the lingering slime elements to form flesh and bone and blood. Firmament mana spiraled around the creature, looking for where it needed to go next to complete the creation.
Moments later, the fox boss solidified. Now the size of a small wolf, its fur had turned cloud white save for black fur around its eyes that lanced back in sharp lines, giving the look of wearing heavy makeup. The fox rolled its shoulders, and muscles rippled beneath the fur. Its tail was long and full, but the further away it got from the fox, the more insubstantial it became, until it was just wisps of cloud that followed the fox’s movement.
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It bared its teeth and then let out a yip. A white mist flew from its mouth, leaving trails of frost on the ground in front of it.
“The ancients believed the firmament to be a spider web of ice,” Fulsi said softly. “Frost and lightning are the most powerful assault elements of firmament until you get strong enough to make solid wind or channel solar light.”
Kandra noted the ‘just’ in that sentence.
Kandra muttered. The fox was looking a bit sickly. It needed a name to exist. If she didn’t work soon, she would have to start the process all over again. She looked at it again, hoping for inspiration - and noted a feature of the fox she’d missed before. The creature had sky blue fur around its feet, going up to its knees.
Socks reared back his head and let out a… not a howl. Foxes didn’t howl. But the sound was eerie. It was the sound of wind rushing past a small cave entrance, but far deeper.
Kandra moved to the Mesh, reclaiming her avatar and giving Fulsi a hard look. “I’m fine with socks being socks, but… do I have to name everything to the adventurers' liking? What about what I like? I’ll have these bosses for thousands of years. Am I supposed to be stuck with absurd names for that long?”
Fulsi, for a change, looked sympathetic. “Kandra, I hear you. I do. In the time before the Pact of Three, dungeons had a lot more freedom for creativity. Older dungeons have that luxury. Get strong enough, and you can too. You can even make smaller dungeons that use lower level mobs if you want to redo a low tier boss. But… it’s a tough world out here. You are not going to like the guild minimums. So you have to make bosses that will appeal to a broad group. You have to gussy up your dungeon all pretty, so people like it. You have to have minimal traps because adventurers hate those.”
Kandra ground her teeth. “Won’t they get tired of seeing the same things over and over again?”
“They claim they will, but they don’t. People don’t want novelty, Kandra. They want to feel safe, comfortable, and familiar.”
Kandra didn’t agree with that thesis on mortals, but Fulsi had known them longer than Kandra did. Which is to say, Fulsi had actually met them, Kandra hadn’t. But… it seemed, to Kandra, that a limited lifetime spent repeating the same things would be boring and dull. Yes, those meant the same thing, but it would probably be bad enough to warrant both terms as descriptions.
Maybe mortal minds worked differently. “How long until one of the guilds arrives?” she asked Fulsi, desperate for a topic change.
“Depends on the headwinds. There are two major guilds that will be on their way to establish a dungeon town - The Crimson Band, and An Ominous Sounding Name.”
Kandra stared at Fulsi, but there was no sign of a joke on Fulsi’s face. She really wanted Kandra to ask. “What’s the name?”
“An Ominous Sounding Name.”
“Right,” Kandra glared at her. “I’m asking what it is.”
Fulsi opened her mouth, then clamped it shut. “No. No, we are not doing this. The guild, when they named themselves, wrote down four words. Those words were An Ominous Sounding Name.”
Kandra threw her hands up in the air. “So now I know it’s four words, but what makes it ominous?”
“You cannot possibly be this… no. It’s just an ominous sounding name.”
“That’s a tautology. So it’s an ominous sounding name. Am I supposed to guess what the words are?”
Fulsi glared at Kandra, grinding her teeth together. “The words are, in order, An Ominous Sounding Name.”
“So the name sounds less ominous when you put them in a different order?” Kandra asked. The look on Fulsi’s face was priceless, and Kandra smirked.
“You were having a go at me,” Fulsi said, staring at Kandra.
“I knew what you meant the second time you said it,” Kandra said, her smirk turning into a genuine smile. “Let me guess, everyone calls them AOSN, and they named themselves that to provoke that exact conversation.”
“You are correct,” Fulsi said, the tension leaving now that she realized Kandra had been joking. “And given that you ran with it… I think you’re going to get along with them quite well.” She saw Kandra’s grin and raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t a compliment.”
“I’m choosing to believe it was regardless,” Kandra said, enjoying having her mentor on the verbal back foot for a change.
Fulsi sighed. “If we’re done with nonsense…”
“Never, but continue anyway,” Kandra said. So. She’d found one thing she enjoyed. Verbal sparring was going to be fun to learn.
Fulsi looked up to the sky above, as if beseeching the heavens for patience, then continued. “They’ll both travel by zeppelin to get here. Being the first guild to establish a Dungeon Town is valuable, and with two dungeons in the area, they’re going to be racing to arrive before the other, pushing the vessels as hard as they can. So, unless one of them has a zeppelin model that’s just better than the other, the headwind will determine who arrives first - and how long it takes. No more than a couple of days from now. You two are registered, so the guilds are aware of you.”
Two days. Kandra was surprised to feel her excitement. But after so long with only Fulsi to talk to, she was desperate for some fresh company. Just her luck. The only other being in range was Calith. Although… “Is there anything else I need to do to be ready?”
“Let’s go over your dungeon one last time,” Fulsi said. “But I think you’re ready. Why?”
“Because I want to learn how to search the Mesh,” Kandra said. “I’d like to meet some other dungeons at similar development levels to me.”
“I can teach you,” Fulsi said. “But… what’s your mana pool grade?”
Kandra The Novice Dungeon
Primary Mana Type: Firmament
Guild Membership: Verdant Circle
Mana Pool Grade: Quartz - A
Average 1st Floor Mob Strength: Quartz - C
1st Floor Boss Strength Grade: Quartz - AA
That got Kandra to pause. Fulsi had explained the rating system to her. Assessments the mortals handed out were just on a simple scale, going from F to A, then to a number of S’s for some reason. SSS+ was the highest any dungeon could earn. Adventurers just rated dungeons on a scale of one star to five stars. But for ones that were used to rank power, the ratings were Quartz, Amethyst, Topaz, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Onyx, Diamond, and the letters started at D before going up to AAA+. They were based on the quality and gem type of the being’s core.
That applied to mortals as well - the process of them learning to adventure involved cultivating mana until they could forge a core of their own. Although the mortal cores weren’t literally made of quartz, the gem still resonated with the same energy as a dungeon’s power, so it could be graded against that.
Bosses were graded based on their relative strength. Quartz-A was the minimum strength for a boss. “Do I need to worry that my boss is a double A quartz grade?” Kandra asked.
Fulsi shook her head. “It’s actually good. A boss that’s just Quartz-A will often get poor reviews because it’s bland. If you’d made an A grade boss, I’d say you needed to absorb it and make a new one. You could keep trying for triple A on your boss, but I wouldn’t bother. It might make the dungeon too hard. But what’s your mana grade?”
“I’m at Quartz-A,” Kandra said.
“Then I’m not going to teach you yet. Reach AAA. At least. If you’re ready then. But no sooner - If you’re going to explore the Mesh, you’re going to wait until you have the spiritual strength to protect yourself.”
That got Kandra’s attention. “Protect myself? From what?”
“There are diseases you can pick up there. You don’t want any of them - being sick is miserable for us. Most of them aren’t lethal, but they can be to weaker dungeons.”
Well. At least Fulsi had a good reason for telling her no. But something in Fulsi’s dismissal raised Kandra’s hackles. What wasn’t her mentor telling her?
More importantly, how could Kandra find out the truth?