While Lucifer thought of how to get a shaman into the dungeon if things became too complicated he returned to his core.

He could still feel a strong connection to it and no matter how hard he tried he could not force all of his consciousness into the new body, a small part remained stuck inside the core with an ever-present connection that scratched at the back of his mind.

Returning to the core room was taking too long for Lucifers liking so he started to manipulate the stone in front of him to create a walkway that closed behind him, moving stone like this was as simple as breather for him at this point, however, doing something like this on a large scale still involved using massive amounts of mana, something this small was easily covered by his passive mana regeneration.

Once he arrived at his core he laid down and with a force lesser than he used to get into his body he exited it and returned into the core, he found the feeling slightly strange again, but somewhat refreshing to be inside the core again.

Being inside the core gave him a sort of detachment from humanity and allowed him to escape all the negative emotions that came with it., bar the very limited repertoire of dungeon emotions that was usually limited to murderous rage and amusement at the end result of its murderous rage.

He wasn't sure if he liked being the cold emotionless core of a dungeon or being a human more, being a dungeon was easier, you didn't have to think past how to create a new devious trap or a different way to have intruders more interested in killing each other than him.

however, choosing to stay as a dungeon would mean he would be giving up to good along with the bad, he had many things he wished he could forget and not feel, but he also had things he wanted to remember and taking the emotion out of those memories takes the meaning out of them.

With a soft sigh he decided that for now, he would alternate between the two states until he is sure.

What he needed right now were better defenses, something that could stop an army of trained soldiers who have spent their entire lives preparing and training to become the best at bypassing said defenses.

The one advantage he had at the moment was the people attacking the dungeon were not his "customers", so he could kill them with whatever method he liked, however, the disadvantage was that he had limited time to set up because he had no idea when or even if they would attack.

If his defenses were going to be quick and dirty he had to think like people who used said tactics, he wanted every step the enemy advanced to cost them and every soldier to be too terrified to take that step.

He started by reconnecting the ant nest to the main dungeon, so now when the enemy advanced through "the door" they would go through all the traps, then pass through the entire ant nest and instead of coming to his core they will be spat out a tunnel above the first floor, This is bound hurt moral significantly and force the entire army to go through the entire dungeon which is sure to tire them out.

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After several dozen hours of working on dungeons defenses while trying to keep the mana usage to a minimum, Lucifer ran out of mana, even depleting his reserves.

WIth nothing left to do Lucifer reentered his body and walked aimlessly around the dungeon and perhaps see something he missed, or think of another way to kill the invaders.

Up ahead he heard voices so he walked over to investigate, once he was just a dozen or so meters away he could hear their conversation clearly with his absurd body, while he was thinking to himself 'enhancing this body was a good idea, although the smell are a bit hard to bear'. Then one of the men spoke, "I mean it, something fishy is going on here, look around there aren't any monsters around and we just found the same on the second floor too."

Another man replied "who cares, with no monsters around we can mine the ore crystals freely"

The first man said "who cares, I care, every time something fishy happens inside a dungeon something bad happens everybody knows that so we should leave while we still can"

Stolen story; please report.

A different man from the second spoke up "would you relax, if something was really happening we would hear the screams of the less skilled adventurers considering how densely packed the first three floors of this dungeon are. Besides this is a good opportunity for us, most of the miners are on holidays for their rock god or something so the crystals have been growing for nearly 2 days without being touched, and without the monsters to bother us we can gather more today than we would in a month or even a year"

Then the second man added "exactly, and I suggest we hide the or sacks inside the dungeon and go a general store to pick up a couple more"

Another person asked "why would we need more sacks, we can just sell the ore in these ones then come back"

The second man continued "yes we could, but who buys the ore, the same guys who are on holiday and once they find out that the monsters are on a holiday too they will flock here to take our score, those "miners" have to hire us at a high price to keep them safe and without the monsters they will gladly take all the ore in the dungeon...", he looked around to see that his point was made the resumed "that's why some of us should go outside and smuggle some sacks in so we can collect the ore in peace".

Now the first man asked "why do we need to smuggle in the sacks, there is nothing illegal about bringing sacks into a dungeon we do it all the time"

The man replied "Now who's knowledgeable about dungeons, most dungeons have guards watching them, and people who suddenly leave only to return quickly with more carrying equipment tend to end up dead"

"what do the guards watching the dungeon have to do with people dying in the dungeon," said the first man.

"Sometimes I question your intelligence Berkley, it's obviously because the "outlaws" get their information from corrupt guards for a cut of the profit, I would prefer to not be hunted by outlaws because you behaved suspiciously near some guards and they thought you had some treasure. This sort of thing is why people say that having a treasure in a dungeon or outside a city is a crime, you punished for it even if you're innocent"

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Lucifer who was listening behind a tree only a dozen meters away suddenly heard a twig snap above him, instinct kicked in and he jumps backward and rolled away, Lucifer stood up in a guarded stance only to see a masked man rush towards him with a dagger drawn.

Lucifer could feel the adrenaline pumping through his veins as he turned his body to the side narrowly avoiding the man's thrust, he grabbed the attackers forearm and slid the grip to the wrist while bringing down a knife hand attack on the mans inner elbow, this collapsed the outstretched arm and allowed Lucifer to control the knifes direction with leverage. A moment later the attacker found his own knife lodged in his jugular, the man gasped and tried to say something, but no sound came out.

Lucifer retrieved the knife as he was laying the body gently down and surveyed his surroundings, the curiosity of why the man suddenly attacked him was pushed to the back of his mind as he went through his mental checklist.

Area safe = haven't cleared

Snipers = haven't checked

escape route = unknown, best bet way I came

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After several seconds Lucifer finally came to and realized he had gone back into old habits and now stood over a corpse, he guessed that this man was probably this teams scout and had found him secretly eavesdropping on their treasure talk and decided to end the problem prematurely.

However, he did not expect the Lucifer to react so quickly, Lucifer found a small throwing knife where he was originally standing, so the scout must have thrown it on the way down just to make sure, but it seemed a little bit amateurish to Lucifer, 'if he wanted to kill me he should have just fallen down with the knife pointed downwards, if he didn't try being fancy he probably wouldn't have broken the branch that warned me'.

He sniffed the blade of the throwing knife just to check and found a rather foul odor on the blade, This gave Lucifer a higher opinion of the man.

The group was deciding who would go outside to fetch the sacks when one of them called "GRAY YOU COMING OR WHAT". One of the people in the group slapped the caller upside the head after he made so much noise causing the others to snigger, however, after several moments their expressions froze.

Normally after the scout was called he would appear out of shadows like he had been next to them the entire time, in fact, the man seemed to make a game of scaring the crap out of the party members by suddenly appearing right next to them unexpectedly.

People who had their weapons sheathed unsheathed them and those who already had their weapons in hand raised them.

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Lucifer thought to himself 'probably better to sneak away if possible, I only have 2 daggers and whatever I can find on the corpse before they find my position'. Just as he was about to make a tactical retreat he noticed his arm that was holding the dagger, it was far bigger than he remembered.

Then he realized once again where he was and reminded himself not to go on autopilot like that whenever a threat appears and his adrenaline is running. He figured that he needed to test his new body out and home invasion victims *cough burglars would be a good test. Besides, It's not like he would die even if this body was destroyed.

A vicious grin found its way onto Lucifer's face and a mad gleam entered his eyes.