> Dungeon Status:

>

> Level 1

>

> Heart 400/400

> Experience 65/100

> Workers 4/10

> Monsters 0/10-2

> Traps 8/10+2

> Rooms 7

> Food 102

> Timber 131

> Iron 24

> Mana 2

> Rock 172

> Gold 200

> Leather 68

> Leather Sludge 43

> Lava 7

>

> Quest: Make one of your monsters into a boss

With more gold mined and the worker limit upgrade purchased, Travis felt excited to be progressing up the tech tree. It was still baby steps, but they were needed to accelerate development. Stephan had dragged a bunch of trees in, and was working with Penelope on cutting them up into lengths when Travis felt the siblings getting close.

Thankfully, what with spiders loving to catch bugs at the entrance to his dungeon, Travis could see when they got within the terrible eyesight of one of the fat lizards that sunned themselves at the entrance and hunted bugs.

"They're back and they have a horse and cart." That got both Penelope and Stephan's attention. The former was about to start working on traps while the latter was working on cutting the wood up—which Travis had found out meant they got an extra bit of wood per tree.

First to reach the entrance was Penelope. With her eyesight there, Travis could see way more details. "Trav, that's not a horse. That's a donkey. The cart's full, too. Hey! What did you guys get?"

"Everything!" Robert bounced forward, the big cloak rolled up under his arm. "Some of the stuff is still on order, my glassware and some of Katelyn's books, but we found a smith in town who was happy to sell us as much iron as we could afford. We got paper, pens, ink, chalk, rope, a bag of grain that was overpriced, whetstones, and fire-makers."

It was an amazing haul by Travis' standard. Basically everything they wanted for ten minutes with a pickaxe. "What are we going to do with the donkey?"

"Make a room near the entrance, put torches in it, put some grain and grass in there." Stephan reached the entrance and helped them unload bars of iron. "We're going to need an easy way to get this into the dungeon itself."

Penelope shifted to make herself part of a chain to lift the iron from the cart and pass/toss it to the next kobold in a line until they got it inside. "It's easy enough to break the wall here, but we're going to have more traps soon. Maybe we could fill-in the pit trap for catching animals—since those direwolves killed most of the bigger game—we could hook it around and link to where the new warehouse is."

"We need more warehouses, too. A lot more. Maybe ten," Travis said. "Is it overkill? Maybe, but we can always tear them down later if it turns out we don't need them."

Stephan worked on the wall to bypass the sludge traps and they started stacking all the resources a little deeper in.

When it was all unloaded, Travis put up a build order just beside where the latest warehouse was. "Next time we could just drive the cart in. I've set up a dig order inside a bit. You can put the donkey and cart in there."

Robert reached into a bag hanging at his side and pulled out a light stick. Activating it, he urged the donkey inside. "You know, I've never had a pet before. You're kinda neat."

"Donkeys have an advantage over horses in that if you feed them well and keep them happy, they will literally march into death with you," Penelope said. "Get them angry or annoy them and there isn't a single hope you'd ever get them to do what you want."

"Sounds like Katelyn," Robert said, leading the donkey down the hall and into the warehouse. "I'll leave him in here until we have the room done."

"Unhitch him. Give him something to eat. I'll carve you a brush to take care of him properly later, for now just try running your fingers through his coat and if he twitches, stop." Stephan gave Robert a firm look, and seeing both sides of it made Travis feel a little weird.

With two kobolds digging and one melting, the room was quickly cleared and Travis was already planning the new entrance. He highlighted and set build orders without making a way for the kobolds to reach them. "Uh, you guys can't feel that, can you?"

Penelope looked vaguely in the direction of Travis' heart. "Feel what?"

"I was planning out some stuff and didn't open up a way to reach it. Since that doesn't bug you, I can plan things out way easier this way." Travis quickly drew his plans in, lining up tunnels and rooms and leaving strategic bits out so it would be easier to build section by section.

"Before we go any further with building, we can use up some of these resources and I'll make some more sludge traps," Penelope said.

"Got it. Here we go on the trap orders. Wait, I'm out of traps. Oh, we can break the one at the entrance."

Feeling the order to break the animal trap at the entrance, Penelope dodged around the slime traps and made her way up to fill-in the pit first. When she was done with that, she filled the room, too. "How is that?"

"Perfect, that gives us one more trap back. Okay, adding that one." Trav added the remaining build order.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

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Carrying the few books she'd managed to find in the town that would be of use, Katelyn left for the library. She skirted the traps, gave Travis' heart a distracted smile as she passed him, and then made her way to her new home.

"Wow, uh, what did you do?" Travis asked.

A puzzle to do with a dungeon heart? Katelyn's curiosity was piqued. "I put some new books in here. Did you feel it?"

"I know what's in them. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I know them. It's weird, like I just have this stuff memorized. Are they advanced books?"

Puzzle pieces slotted together. Katelyn grinned and nodded. "Yup, these are on master-level magic theory. I don't know why the bookstore had them, but I will order a lot more basic ones next time so you can catch up. First thing I want to do, though, is make some runes."

"Runes? What do they do?"

"Lots of things. There are runes you can feed mana into when you make them so they do a triggered effect. There are others that you can have use ambient mana. The last are ones that need you to channel mana into to use." Reaching behind her back and thinking rock, Katelyn felt a heavy hunk of stone in her claws and pulled it around. "That's a cool trick. I saw Penelope using it when she was building this place. Anyway, my first thought is that I make some explosive runes. Handy little things, hard to make and use a lot of mana, but when they break they release it."

"You have hand grenades? That is awesome!"

"'Hand grenades'? I guess they are hand-held grenade weapons. Okay, that will work as a name. More fun ones we could have, though, are ones that will explode when someone is nearby. They will detect someone's mana field and then set off with a charge. I never really thought of them as being useful for attacking a dungeon, but defending one…"

The rune she needed was readily memorized. The only limit to stop anyone making explosive runes was having enough mana to create the things. Smirking as she used her own clawtip to carve the pattern, Katelyn started doing just that—filling the pattern up with mana until, with a little pop to its magic, the rune was made. "That's one."

"How many can you make?"

"You're asking the wrong question, Trav."

It took him only a few moments to come back with, "How long does it take you to get enough mana back to make another?"

Katelyn hadn't expected a dungeon heart to be sapient. She'd hoped as much, but her heart was set up for failure when they'd first arrived. Finding out Travis was smart enough to solve a problem for the actual key element was exciting for her—he was smart. "Knew you could figure that out. With good meditation, about an hour. How many of these do you want me to make?"

"Let's just go with three per kobold, so twelve in all."

With a laugh, Katelyn reached behind her back and thought rock again. "I don't really need any, since I have my own mana to use for attacking, but I like the idea of being extra prepared. The last time I entered a dungeon, all the mana in the world didn't help me."

"Huh?" Travis sounded confused. "What do you mean?"

"Well, turns out there was a bunch of clever kobolds and a wicked-smart dungeon heart putting down sticky traps." She waited to hear Travis' laughter before starting her own. "I'll try to figure out what others I can make. Debuffs and snares are probably better for our style of dungeon, but I believe that in bad situations, extra fire is always a good idea. Also, you'll probably get a new level soon, which means we can start building a huge maze of traps."

"I don't know if I'll get lots of traps to place. I mean, it would be good, but—"

"Nah. We don't have to rely on the dungeon system for traps. We're kobolds; making traps is what we do! A trap can be a whole section of dungeon that's under water or things we can trigger ourselves. Our traps are limitless—but we might need more kobolds to pull this off." Settling down, Katelyn started to center her magic and focus on drawing-in more to fill her reserves. Talking didn't really slow that process down much, but if she had to think too hard she knew her recharge rate would suffer. "Pen said you have expanded the amount of us you can support. We're going to need food and bedding for more, and we need to attract some out here."

"I still feel bad about forcing this on people. You and your brother were—"

"Trav, we were here to take over control of you and probably screw everything up in the process. We had no idea there was so much for a dungeon to do. We figured it was all automatic. Would I have come out, knowing what was going to happen?" The question made Katelyn think, which slowed her meditation somewhat but was worth it in her opinion. "Possibly not. But part of me would still have been curious about it. Others coming out will be here to take advantage of you in other ways, don't feel bad about giving them a better lot in life than what any other dungeon would have done to them.

"The world might not be ready for a friendly dungeon that just wants to survive, but we can make sure that the world doesn't get anywhere near your core or your friends."

She wasn't sure if Travis was busy doing other things or if he was just thinking about what she'd said. She made two of the runes before he finally spoke to her again. "Thanks, Katelyn. It means a lot to hear that."

Opening one eye as she reached for more stone, Katelyn grinned. "It's not all sunshine and roses. I can feel being part of the dungeon in my head. It's mellowed me out a little toward you, even made me just accept being what I am—but the staff you gave me is the most powerful focus item I've ever seen. For that alone I'd have considered coming here a success, but I want to see what we can build."

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Penelope smiled at newly-built warehouse. "Okay, what's that give us, Trav?" She patted Robert on the back.

"That's our third. Want to try adding iron now?" Travis asked.

Walking out of the warehouse and down to where the wagon was, Penelope waved to Stephan. "We're going to try putting half the iron into storage now. Don't be surprised if something weird happens."

"Weird? In this dungeon?" Stephan laughed. "I get it. I'll just get this guy cozy and then I might go and get some more trees. With all those warehouses to build, we need lumber more than ever."

Walking up between the bars at the front of the wagon, Penelope braced herself and took a firm hold. "You get in here too. This is a bit much for just one of us." When Robert took up his place, she started to lift and, together, they rolled the wagon into the new warehouse.

From there it was simply a matter of picking two bars of iron at a time from the wagon—one from each end of the load, to keep it balanced—and they unloaded half of the stock.

"That got us two hundred iron. This was great!" Travis' voice was excited and eager. "Okay, that's half of what we need for the boss upgrade. If you build two more warehouses, we can then store enough gold to buy it."

"Why do we want that again?" Penelope asked.

"It's a quest," Travis replied, as if that was all the incentive he needed.

Shrugging her shoulders, Penelope patted Robert on the shoulder. "Come on, we have more digging to do!"

"Is it weird that I like digging so much?" Robert asked, pulling his pickaxe out from behind his back.

"Digging is what kobolds do best!"

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