The storm Seahagan seemed to howl in rage, then determination.
"I will not fail the queen!" he snarled, slamming his staff into the ground. Torrents of water appeared from the nearby salt streams and sheared through Wyin's elongated arms. Wood cracked, and she dropped him with a hiss.
Delta watched as his seed pulsed, shifting between the kind of seeds she saw in Kemy and Estal's groups to something much closer to Deo or Quiss. She had never noticed there was a difference other than size, but seeing one flicker between both states, there were very obvious differences.
The larger seed form looked shaped, more chiseled as if some dark artist had turned an already creepy stone into a more horrifying piece. It looked like it was becoming a rage-filled child's face combined with a rotten fruit motif.
Vadellen's seed looked like a lump, pulsing and off-putting, but not outwardly aggressive.
Foodie's Mana was already picking apart both seeds, Vadellen would be easily purified, but the Seahagan's? It was resisting. It was too potent for the Mana concentration Foodie was putting out. He would have to be weakened, worn down, and exhausted.
Delta blinked just once.
The seed would be much easier to claim if the Seahagan had to traverse many dangerous areas, fight constantly, strain its mental capacity, and dive deeper into thicker Mana. Funny how she thought Dungeons had floors because… well, they were Dungeons.
It was the little things she learned when teaching others.
The Seahagan snarled and made a motion to come close, and then Jeb sat on him. There was a sort of noise like a grape being squeezed, and the ominous seed energy deflated like a balloon.
"Ingredients!" Jack howled and moved quickly, running over to scoop things up before Foodie could consume his fill.
Foodie groaned, and his Mana limit was overflowing, so Delta casually leaned over and formed a secondary storage for him, a sort of bubble around his core.
It wasn't any harder than making Hero or the Blackhole Piggle.
"Thank you."
Foodie sounded exhausted, and she couldn't blame the kid. For him, this insane battle and powerful foes must be a terrifying new experience.
For Delta, it was a Tuesday.
She sensed the Mana veins connecting her to this Dungeon were growing strained from supporting them like this. If they continue to remain, the lands between Foodie's Dungeon and her own would become dead zones. After that, up there would be oceans with no waves or fish, black dead trees, barren soil that would grow nothing, and generic superstores that drove others out of business would spring up.
"We need to go," she told Foodie as the corpses and damage from the battle was absorbed.
"No, you can stay," Foodie insisted. Delta smiled and appeared next to his core in a flash.
Dungeon Avatar benefit number four: lazy teleporting.
"I have to go back. If I stay, it'll hurt a lot of people and life," she explained gently, and the salty-gray core that was Foodie pulsed.
"I don't care about them. You stay!" it said, and Delta gently stroked the top of the orb, the entire thing embedded in an aluminum geode.
"I'll be back," she said solemnly.
"…Are you back now?" Foodie asked hopefully only two seconds later.
"Nice try, kid. This foxy teacher has got to get back to her own house before my partner burns the place down trying to install ceiling mounted flamethrowers or sawblades on door handles," she joked.
She knew Nu wouldn't do that, he was too classy.
"You be nice to Vadellen. He's going to be your friend until I get back," she insisted, and Foodie looked at the human child in the boss room.
"…Ew."
This was going to need a slightly different approach.
"Foodie, I need you to keep any Sandwalkers alive until I get back. The fishies that we just fought are fair game if they don't want to listen, but other fishies might be… useful, so be careful. Let Vadellen go home and others come back to explore your Dungeon. Consider it a quest!" she said with a slightly mystical tone.
"Qwest?"
"Close enough," Delta said and stood up.
As she turned, a new message appeared.
Foodie has accepted your quest.
Success: Kill no humans or landwalkers unless they attack first. Repel attacking Seahagans.
Optional: Befriend Vadellen.
Optional Optional: Learn what friendship is.
Reward: Delta's return.
"Nani?" Delta muttered.
Due to subjects
The box was a little glitchy, and Delta had a feeling this was never supposed to be a thing.
Established programs include Alpha and Gamma. A second program lists Delta and Beta. However, due to events, the system has created a new program for the unlikely pairing of Alpha and Delta.
The system box glitched once more and then vanished.
"Befriend… squishy child." Foodie mused, thinking on how to do it aloud.
Delta left him to it.
---
Vadellen rushed back to his village, jumping over large boulders onto the beach until sand turned to grass, and he ran uphill towards a towering bleached skeleton wrapped around a mountain spire. The Great Kerbob was a monstrous sea worm that grew so large that it could stretch from the ocean floor to the tallest mountains.
Supposedly, one man had devoured it all in a single night.
Vadellen both loved the story and feared it.
Its rib cage acted as a natural column that protected the village of Pictra nestled within. As he rushed in, people began shouting that he had returned, and his father emerged from the central house, hobbling on a crooked branch as he clutched Vadellen close.
"The seas began swarming with Mad Jaws; I feared the worst," his father said, speaking into the top of Vadellen's head as they embraced.
"Pa, I discovered something! Something to help save us and make the island healthy again!" Vadellen cried out, and he knew he had their attention. Vadellen was not a child to make ilde boasts.
He was considered… a quiet child.
"What's that, my boy?" his father asked, and Vadellen held out the fang of the Stormcaller Seahagan. The Salt Dungeon had given it to Vadellen as a show of power.
He swore he heard it call him 'Squishy.'
But it let him go. None of the monsters attacked him on the way out!
"Lad, you're covered in salt. Don't you know how expensive pure salt is to import? This is terrible," a nearby lady said as she dusted Vadellen off with a deep sigh.
Vadellen grinned and emptied out his pockets, raining the purest salt. It took barely any of Vadellen's Mana to make it stable after that amazing Kobold taught him how to 'make it his own.'
Inside his body, his seed shifted just a little bit, glowing blue and gaining a serene quality. Only a single, small, blue spot had appeared, but it was enough to give off an impression of a smiling woman and of changes to come.
---
"Nu, I'm home," Delta said as she materialized in her core room.
Nu… was in the map room, staring intently down at different locations.
"Whatchu doing?" Delta asked as she appeared at his side.
"Deciding if I want to conquer the left or right hand first," he mumbled, almost entirely humanoid with a young man's face, his hair still a dark blue along with what appeared to be an afternoon shadow on his face.
Nu was maturing.
"I want to own it all!" he said, spreading over the table with a sigh.
In his own way.
"Did Sis give you a chance to teach a Dungeon too? Did she give you the same speech as me?" Delta asked, suspicious. Letting Nu near a newborn Dungeon was asking for it to be turned into a burning heap of slag or a murderblender.
"Yes, she did. In fact, I'm going to choose my first dark minion right now," Nu announced with a smug tone. He wiggled his finger until he landed on the most southern island of the crown chain.
The island furthest from Foodie.
"I can only help those that need to be dangerous. Dungeons that have to defend themselves from cannibal tribes, insane wizards or door-to-door salesmen," Nu explained casually.
"What's on that island?" Delta asked, worried since Foodie was so near.
"Insane cannibal wizard fish people that deem being eaten by them as an honor," Nu said dryly. Delta stared at him blankly.
"Yea big, scaly, massive teeth, red mouths, hiss a lot and tend to throw water about while praising their queen?" Delta asked after a moment.
"That's the Seahagans, yes. Now I don't expect you to approve, but I may have to hurt them to prove a point," Nu said with a sniff.
Delta chuckled nervously.
"I have it on good authority that they may be weak to crushing forces, if that helps?" she said, voice strained with the effort not to gulp.
"How much force?" Nu asked, looking like he was taking notes.
"Um… I don't know. JEB! HOW MUCH DO YOU WEIGH?" she hollered down the tunnel.
"ONE WHOLE JEB!" he yelled back.
"One Jeb's worth of force," she reported, and Nu looked at her for a moment.
"Whatever it is, I don't want to know. I am off to show you how being a Dungeon really is. Be careful Delta, your place as 'hardest' Dungeon is now at risk of being surpassed by my minions of destruction!" Nu announced, glowing blue in excitement.
"Have fun!" Delta began to wave cheerfully.
"You… ruin everything," Nu grumbled and vanished.
Once Nu was gone, Delta went through her gains from her field trip. She didn't want to make Nu ask too many questions. If he found out Delta was willing to be a tough cookie when needed, he would make her be tough on everyone.
You have gained 'Pure Salt'! All of Fera's and Jeb's cooking has improved!
You have gained 'Seahagan giblets' and 'Aluminum scraps.' New Monster unlocked for the fourth floor! Rust Devils.
You have gained a 'Stormcaller' rod. New options for Devina and fourth floor.
Foodie has been added to a new Network. Once your Dungeons have developed a special room, communications and trading can be undertaken. Only cores that have accepted you or Nu as a friend can join the network.
Delta felt both tired and alive. This felt just like being a person again. Going out for hours on end, doing good deeds, coming home to her many wonderful friends and monstrous eldritch creatures.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
Just like how it used to be!
Well, sometimes there had to be pop quizzes, so 'good deeds' was stretching it.
She felt her entrance open, and Fairplay poured in, looking more determined than ever. She spotted a lot more badges with two fingers, instead of one. In the last group, a three fingered ranked man entered as well.
Behind them were two odd people out, a teen with a horribly angled nose and a hyperventilating woman with a slightly bugged out eyeball.
The numbers didn't advance down the hall but carefully guarded the woman as if she was more important than the others around her.
"Look! A welcome mat, but it's all squint," the woman told the boy as she fixed the welcome mat.
"Will you be alright in here?" the boy asked, and Delta moved closer because the woman…
"Oh, I'll be okay. I have this Mana charm that will stop me from getting too sick as we explore," she waved off the concern.
Someone or something had utterly melted a monstrous seed inside the woman to slag. Ashen remains of the seed showed Delta even now that the whole thing was about to 'hatch.'
It was a lot like Mharia, more like a parasite than a seed, but whatever life had been in it had been burned from the inside out, but to do that and not also kill the woman was impressive.
Terrifying, but impressive.
"Lim, look! Look at this beautiful offering table. Sturdy wood, simple bowls, and look, it's talking to us with signs! Quick, I have a silver coin that should cover us both," the woman chatted as the men and women in the armor all shot her either amused looks or disgusted ones.
"What's in there?" the boy, Lim, asked, and the woman gasped.
"The memorial room! Oh, I need to make sketches! I need to examine everything!" she told the boy.
Delta liked her.
She just wasn't sure about the other captain guy, the one gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly that the creaking of metal could be heard.
That one would need to be watched.
---
Nu hadn't gotten a squad of monsters, it wasn't really needed for his job. His task was to make a Dungeon stand on its own two feet as quickly as possible. Using monsters from Delta's Dungeon would only make it reliant on Nu.
But he was allowed to bring a vizier of sorts. A voice he could bounce ideas off.
"Ah, it seems we have arrived," Doctor the Guardgoyle announced as his long beak turned this way and that, his dark clothes rustling despite the fact he was as physical as a ghost.
Of all the creatures in the Dungeon that weren't three-five inches tall, Doctor had the closest mindset to Nu. Perhaps it was because he made the Guardgoyles that they were more in line with how Nu thought?
The Dungeon did not look too impressive at first glance. Nu was just outside the entrance. He looked up and shuddered at the bright blue sky and the sun.
So open. So bold.
Disgusting.
Nu hurried back into a cramped dark space to feel better.
The Dungeon's entrance was an overgrown stone archway covered in vines. The thick spreading greenery occasionally had white blossoms on its tips. It was inside a cave of sorts where a single shaft of sunlight illuminated the space to reveal a lush meadow just before the entrance.
"Needs more skeletons and warning signs," Nu reported, and Doctor wrote that down on a parchment with an extravagant black-feathered quill. Once inside, the first monster tried to surprise-tackle Nu with its head, only to fly through his immaterial form. Nu stared down at what he had to work with.
It was a fox. A pale green fox with swooping leaves for a tail and flowers on its head.
"Look, Sir Nu, it's a quadrupedal sentient salad dish!" Doctor remarked happily. He was sketching as he was talking, and Nu had to admit that the artwork was detailed.
"It's a salad fox," Nu grunted as he examined it for anything worthwhile. It bared its teeth and tried to nip at his neck.
Disappointed, Nu stood up and walked through a dangling vine, only for it to try and snap around his neck and hoist him to the ceiling.
"Yes! This is more how I like it," Nu grinned as he counted three of these strangler vines in one hallway.
"Are you a spirit?" asked a quiet voice. Judging by the use of Mana, Nu was speaking with the Dungeon Core.
"It's an intruder! We should bite, growl… howl!" the same voice said, talking to itself with a deeper tone.
Nu was intrigued. He teleported to the core room. Delta's Mana cut through any defenses like a knife through butter, and Nu was only too happy to use it for himself.
The Core room was nearly 19 floors down. Nu would have been envious, but a single glance told him how light on content they were.
Delta's floors were expansions.
This Dungeon's floors were patches.
The Core room was a natural cave with a flowing waterfall and lush meadows. Near the back, the core, a deep emerald one, was embedded deep into the skull of some creature.
The skeleton had four legs and a long tail, but age and materials taken by the core had rendered it mostly impossible to guess what it had been.
"It's powerful," the core mused.
"We die fighting. We die proud," she hissed at herself. A feminine voice…
"My name is Nu, and I am from a Dungeon across the sea," he said, making sure he sounded confident and at ease.
"…We are Trinity."
"You'll address us as Trinity."
"Intruder-Nu. I Trinity."
Now that Nu was close, he could hear the three voices clearly. They weren't separate Dungeon cores or split, but if he gazed closely. In the creature's mouth…Ah… it made sense now.
"Your first material was compounded. The carnivore was eating a herbivore who was digesting flora. You are the cycle of life," Nu said, and the Core was quiet for a moment.
"We did. I shall talk to you. The others are less inclined. I am the Trinity formed of the Herbivore. I am softer, the listener… the survivor," the soft voice said simply.
"You can be called, Herb. I'm not using Trinity for all three of you. There isn't enough black leather and philosophy rants for it," Nu said, and the Core was quiet again.
"I do not understand," Herb admitted.
"Stick with me, and you'll learn the important lesson," Nu said and leaned in close.
"There is no understanding," he said, releasing all his trauma and joy of being a partner of Delta.
"What do you want?" Herb wisely chose to move on in the conversation.
"I'm here to help you be a better Dungeon. Turn your pitfalls into spike holes. Your blow darts into a sword launcher, your level 4 goblin into a 60 orc who pays for the battle pass like the whale he is," Nu hissed, glowing blue.
"What's a whale? Does it bleed a lot?" the deeper voice said huskily. The Carnivore voice.
"It's a whale, so yes. Your name is now Carnage," Nu said simply.
"I accept this title of death," Carnage purred.
"It comes for me next! It will name me!" the skittish voice hissed. This had to be Flora… it had no real actual thoughts going on other than immediate stimulation.
"If Delta was here, she'd call you… Florida or some such," Nu decided.
"Rip and tear into juicy soil, take fishies heads, bloom beautifully!" Florida cried.
In the kingdom of Florida, Carnage and Herb ruled.
--
The Trinity sensed something when the NU mentioned 'Delta.' A tinge of respect, fear, and more.
This NU must be preyed upon by the Delta. The Delta was the superior lifeform.
They wanted to see this Delta now.
All three agreed.
---
Delta flushed and blushed as Yattina, the glass-eyed woman, gushed over her memorial room with big words Delta couldn't repeat accurately.
"The extended vaulted architecture is very reminiscent of the fantastic 3rd Verluan Era where the artist DeDevilo created similar styles inside dance halls. His works crop up in Dungeons sometimes because a lot of his work was subsumed in a great geoshake of the 5th era. Lim, see this brick? It had to be made by a Dungeon, its geometry is sublime-" she went on and on.
Delta had to excuse herself to put a finger in her shirt collar and breath quickly as she tried to induce cool air downwards.
Too many… nice words… Delta was overloading.
Where was Nu when she needed her ego popped?!
---
"This Clover Fox has upgrades for a poisonous bite!" Nu said, trying not to wave his arms.
"Next floor is only 20 Mana away," Herb said simply.
"It costs 10 Mana," Nu said, strangling a scream. The core glowed.
"We, the Trinity, have voted. Two against the bite and one for," the core said simply, and Nu glared at them.
Nu didn't know how long he had before the Seahagan returned to attack the Trinity once more, but he knew it wasn't a long time.
"Since I can crush you with sheer Mana alone, I overrule your demomacry and install a tyranny," Nu said, voice deadly quiet. The core was still as stone until it blinked once.
"We vote as a union against that."
"You can't unionize against me!" Nu complained, turning to Doctor who was conversing with a shapely boulder.
"Can they?" he asked the smart Guardgoyle.
"Indeed they can; Mistress Delta would even support their developing democracy," he reminded Nu.
No, what Delta would do is infect them until she had them all in her pocket or eating out of… her… hands.
"Can I be included?" Nu said innocently. "As a voter, I mean. Since I'm here to help," he pointed out. The Trinity hesitated.
"We… see no harm. The cycle includes all," Herb said finally.
"I vote for poisonous fangs for the Clover Fox," he said instantly, a window appeared, and he clicked the emerald green yes.
"Two for… two against. This is… a draw. A draw. A draw. A draw. A draw," Herb stuttered.
"Oh my, I didn't expect this!" Nu cried and quickly pointed to Doctor.
"Make him vote," he said quickly as a solution.
Doctor stared at Nu with a heavy sigh.
He clicked yes when the screen came up, the edges glitchy in panic.
"Order is restored! The purchase has been done and ended!" Herb announced.
Nu smiled to himself.
"Oh, no, little friends… the purchases are just beginning," he promised and opened the menu of the entire Dungeon.