The situation aboard my space station was very, very rapidly deteriorating. Very rarely was there a thirty second period in which another adventuring party didn't teleport aboard. With each such adventurer aboard the station, massive sections of the habitat cylinder became effectively unusable, preventing me from spawning any new minions in the sections they were fighting through.

As a direct result, I was very rapidly losing ground, for lack of a better term. The only saving grace was that none of the adventurers had yet appeared in the murder-maze surrounding my core, but that wasn't much comfort to my Gremlins, who were currently running for their lives to the designated evacuation bunkers. I needed to do something about this whole mess, and I needed to do it now.

Thus, I applied the brakes for my habitat cylinder, bringing it to a grinding halt and throwing everyone inside into microgravity. At the same time, I began churning out as many Clockwork Angels and Proton Tanks as I could from the murder-maze, and deployed them straight into the habitat cylinder, making use of those model's abilities for three-dimensional navigation.

The effect was almost immediate, as the lower-level adventuring parties either desperately hurried to teleport groundside, or found themselves helplessly floating in the air as they were picked off by heavy weapons fire. There were some notable exceptions of course, such as that first adventuring party who had teleported in. The angelic woman was gleefully darting around the hab and smashing Clockworks, the wizard had his own magic propulsion bullshit, and I still had no clue where the third guy was, so I presumed he was doing OK.

The group of special-forces troops were doing significantly less well, but still were holding their own. It seemed they had quickly figured out that they should use their guns to thrust back towards the 'ground'. Once out of the line of fire, they hid beneath a balcony for a few moments before teleporting away.

Turning my attention back to the environmental conditions inside the habitat cylinder, I very rapidly noted that all the heavy weapons fire taking place was quickly raising the ambient temperature to the point where it would swiftly become uninhabitable. Another double-check revealed that pretty much every Gremlin had made it to their assigned bunkers already, so I wasn't too worried about that being an issue. I personally pegged the point of uninhabitability to the first adventuring party, as all three of them grouped up again before teleporting out.

Gradually, over the next few minutes the number of adventuring parties warping in trickled off to zero, and I spun up the habitat cylinder again.

I was just about to start cooling down the environmental controls when one of my Clockwork Soldiers found a bottle full of a glowing orange substance beneath the balcony where the spec-ops team warped out. I immediately moved my 'dungeon view' over to the bottle in order to inspect it more closely, almost instantly recognizing that it was filled with a Protonium analogue, somehow kept in near-stasis by some form of enchantment on the bottle. I didn't have time to investigate the enchantment itself before it failed, and the Protonium in the bottle did as Protonium does, violently flying apart in a storm of nuclear fury.

The effect on the habitat cylinder was immediate and total; in a vacuum a nuclear blast is just a giant flashbulb ablating surfaces, but the inside of my station was not a vacuum environment. Instead, what I got was a superheated pressure wave rapidly propagating throughout the inside of my habitat cylinder, blasting it apart into thousands of fragments. Several of these fragments were rapidly embedded into the massive block that was my defensive maze, imparting nearly 120 meters per second of velocity in a fraction of a second. The framework I had constructed to hold my core was admirably built to hold me in place during this process, meaning that I wasn't smashed against the walls of my core chamber.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

That said, now I had several other problems to deal with. Namely, I was on an uncontrolled trajectory likely to re-enter the planet's atmosphere soon, all my maneuvering thrusters were down, my main reactor wing had snapped off from structural stresses, and I had about fifty hull breaches. It was quite clear to me now, that orbit was not the place of safety I had originally thought it would be.

Quietly, I built myself a small escape pod with my remaining mana reserves. I made absolutely sure to include all the essentials this time; a small fission fragment reactor, agile thrusters for trajectory control, and a sturdy heat shield to handle re-entry. As I ejected from the wreckage of my space station, I put myself on a re-entry trajectory that would land me in the ocean just off the coast of Regno. There, I could rebuild in relative secrecy.

----------------------------------------

(a few hours later)

Chief Reactor Technician Shart was not having a good day. Admittedly it was their so far only day, but Shart was fairly comfortable with declaring it as being bad regardless. First, the reactor wing of the station had broken off, and the rest of the station had either been obliterated or put on a collision course with the planet. Then, there was the matter that they couldn't hear the Dungeon anymore, leaving them wandering aimlessly without the guiding entity that had previously directed them to various tasks.

However, in the dim red of the emergency lighting, Shart could clearly see her fellow Gremlins mulling around looking to her for guidance; after all, they still existed, and none of them particularly wanted to die. After a few moments mentally adjusting to the idea of issuing orders without having an objective assigned by the Dungeon, she called out "Alright crew! If we're going to get out of this mess alive, we need power, maneuvering and astrogation online!

Gesturing at a rough third of the small crowd, Shart said "You are Team A! Your job is to get at least one reactor online; I don't care if you have to canibalize parts from literally every reactor just to piece together a working generator, get to it!"

"Team B is in charge of getting a fabber working! If we want to go anywhere we'll need thrusters, and we'll need to install those thrusters in vacuum! Both of these require ways to fabricate equipment, including EVA suits and maneuvering packs!"

Lastly, the Chief Gremlin put in "Team C! You're in charge of restoring communications with the rest of the intact sections of the station! The more Gremlins we get working on this the faster we can resolve this crisis!"

With one voice, the crowd of Gremlins called out "Aye Aye, Captain!" and immediately set about their assigned tasks.

In the meantime, the newly designated Captain Shart considered where they would go once they had working propulsion and astrogation. One thing was for certain, she didn't want to be on the surface where the nuclear doom-dragons lived, and staying in orbit was just a recipe for more adventurers teleporting aboard and killing everyone. After a brief consideration, Shart ultimately decided that the best place to land would probably be on the moon's far side; nothing lived there, and it wasn't easily visible from the planet's surface. It would be a perfect place for the newly free Gremlins to build up a power-base.