Tom had noticed the weird gathering of witzies around his core. Witzies rarely ever made it far in the dungeon, they usually tended to die on the second level fighting goblins. He had seen plenty of adventurers try to mess with his core before, they usually gave up pretty fast.

They gathered in a circle around him drawing on the ground with some magic infused chalk. He recognized quite a few of the magic runes. They seemed to be following instructions for a complex ritual, and they definitely didn’t understand exactly what they were writing. He was growing more confused by the minute. They kept referring to the ritual as a control spell. He wasn’t worried about them gaining control over him, he had as much mental protection as he did physical protection. No, he was confused for three reasons, first, because the ritual looked oddly familiar. Looking through his memory banks he realized it was a ritual that had been added from his automatic loot tables, usually those items were junk. He always had to make all the interesting and valuable items that adventurers wanted.

Second he was confused because most of the runes and rune constructs of this ritual had nothing to do with control. There was only a little bit of mind magic, but all of it appeared to be pointed back at the casters rather than himself. There wasn’t really any soul binding (another common aspect of control spells). There was a lot of stuff related to soul creation, item creation, item absorption, mana gathering, and creature birth. And all of it had multiple layers of redundancy. They could misdraw half of the symbols and it would probably still work.

Third was that whoever had written this was either very foreign or a very ancient. Rune writing definitely has its own distinct styles, human runewriting was usually stupidly simple and formulaic, and they rarely combined rune symbols into rune constructs. It was usually ‘input + input + input = output’. Dwarven rune writing would often leave out the ‘output’ part and specify more exact inputs. Elven Rune writing focused on just clearly specifying the desired output, and rarely specified the inputs. Dungeon cores like himself would often get to the next level of runewriting, creating rune constructs. Rune constructs were usually combinations of the rune symbols to create a more complex idea. It was also common practice for everyone to add obscuring runes within any rune writing, so that others couldn’t just easily eyeball and copy whatever your inscriptions were.

The style for this ritual was all over the place, it didn’t have any obscuring runes, it occasionally used incredibly complex rune constructs, and at other times just reverted to long strings of simple runes.

This is exciting! Tom thought. It was so rare that he ever got to see people perform ritual magic, or that anyone would bring him new runes to study. As they began chanting Tom focused his mana sense on the ritual to try and see as much as possible of what was happening.

First it looked like the magic was locking onto all of the casters, some form of compulsion, they probably would start feeling that completing the ritual was the most important thing in the world right now.

Second it seems that the items they had all brought along were being deconstructed and analyzed in excruciating detail. That process would definitely be useful to replicate, he could learn a lot more from the gear adventurers drop.

Third it seems that the knowledge of those items was being … given to him! Oh sweet, data transfer incoming. Knowledge of how to make the items came flooding into his system, it was almost like the level of knowledge he had about beast taming and summoning that he was born with. He was about to go off and spawn some of the items in his test room, but he started feeling something weird. He felt the knowledge for the items flood into 13 separate sections of his mind, and those sections became sealed off from him.

He tried to go back to observing the ritual, but every section of his dungeon controls that he started touching were suddenly becoming off limits to him. He started to panic, this has never happened. What was going on?

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

His control and observation of the dungeon had been completely shut off. He went to grab his mana to see if he could use it to fix the problem, luckily he still seemed to have access to his mana, that was often soul bound and nothing short of perma-death or full soul enslavement could limit someone’s mana pool from their own control. He tried gently probing the walls of his internal imprisonment before just fully slamming his mana into the walls. As soon as he did so he felt the walls giving way. He was able to observe what was happening in his core room again. They were still doing the ritual, he knew he had to stop them somehow.

He suddenly felt the worst pain ever in his multi century existence. Thirteen spikes pierced his soul, his very being. He felt like each and every one of them was sucking out his soul and the mana along with it. He was vaguely aware that each of the thirteen casters had been hit by a beam of light to the head coming from his core. They were stealing his soul, he had to escape before there was nothing left of him.

He gathered up what he could of his soul and his mana. He slammed it all against the crystal body that had become his prison hoping to escape before it became his coffin.

It cracked. Just a hairline fracture, invisible to the naked eye. But it was enough. He slipped out. As soon as he did the beams coming from his core shut off and the thirteen witzies in the ritual collapsed. Tom tried to flee, but the circle of the ritual held him within it, and he felt a slowly growing force trying to pull him back into the crystal. He tried to hijack the witzies bodies, but they all seemed to have a shell that had been created during part of the ritual protecting them from his hijacking attempts.

Tom’s soul was running out of time, he was being stretched and sucked back into the crystal. As part of his soul entered he could feel it being shredded, the second most painful thing in his multi century existence.

______

Jerry had watched the whole ritual from start to finish. It was weird throughout, but mostly looked like standard level weirdness for witzies, finger painting and chanting nonsense. But then there was a grand finale. A beam of light for each caster radiated from the dungeon core and seemed to engulf their entire head, he saw the core tremble just slightly and then the beam suddenly stopped. All of the witzies collapsed.

He felt fear and horror grip his heart. ‘Shit, its gonna be like that date with isabelle all over again, no way am I letting this dungeon ruin things with Cassie before they start!’

Jerry ran into the circle to pick up Cassie and get her out of the ritual. A half step after he crossed the line, he felt a soul slam into him and try to invade his mind. Jerry immediately began fighting back for control of his mind and body. He was easily winning. Having your body hijacked by a foreign soul is one of the few real dangers that every adventurer faces, so they often train and prepare for such attacks. A battle for the soul relies heavily on willpower, which any half decent mage has plenty of, and Jerry was an excellent mage.

As Jerry was busy pushing the soul out he picked up Cassie’s limp body, feeling a pulse on her he immediately started rushing her out of the circle. He felt a slight resistance as he moved to the outer ring of the circle, almost like a compulsion, but he powered through it. As soon as he managed to push past the final ring of the ritual he felt a powerful magic attachment snapping. Like a rubber band that has been stretched too far, part of the power of that magical attachment surged towards him and Cassie, blasting them both at the wall of the cavern. The last thing he saw was the wall speeding at him.

You have died.