Two days prior to the events of chapter forty…

I had easily cleared the floor six boss, which was just a very big slime that I fired all my Gnasher Toads at until it had been entirely devoured, but I did not take a moment to rest on my laurels and thus quickly zoomed through the next five floors, which, lo and behold, were basically identical to the first five, apart from all the goblins having been replaced with hobgoblins and the mini-bosses being wereslime hobgoblins…

“You know,” Vagan started, “I think you’re on to something… this layout is really lazy. You would think that there’d be a bit more variation than just having the layout of the enemies altered slightly. But no… every floor is just four rooms in a line, with each room being square and having some braziers for lighting.”

“I know right!” I concurred.

“I lived in Lillebrünnr a lot, and, as I said, I’ve been to the bottom floors a few times in the past, but I honestly thought there’d be more to this Dungeon than this…”

“Let’s just keep going. The strategy may be to bore us to death, but I will not succumb to it!”

In the distance came an echoing voice that said, “Fuck you guys!”

The boss fight on floor twelve was comprised of two slimes like the one on floor six and, as I fired off a barrage of Gnasher Toads to devour the two blobs of slime, I couldn’t help but remark tiredly, “If the third boss on floor eighteen is three of these, then I swear I’ll tear down this whole mountain.”

“There’s no way the Dungeon will be that lazy,” Vagan remarked, though I could tell he didn’t fully believe himself.

Floor thirteen to seventeen were now comprised of Wereslime hobgoblins instead of normal hobgoblins, but the boss on floor thirteen had me momentarily-excited, when it turned out to be a fire-spewing drake. Granted, it still died in a single tongue-punch and the excitement died down when fourteen had two of them as the mini-boss, and fifteen had three. On floor sixteen, the mini-boss was a wereslime hobgoblin riding a drake, and the seventeenth-floor boss were two of them.

As usual, the layout of the rooms was unchanged, as though the Dungeon Core was literally incapable of coming up with something other than a perfectly square room with equilateral walls, floors, and ceilings. Neither in my life as a Toad nor as a Settlement Core had I met an individual with so little creativity. In a way, ridding the world of their presence was only a boon for all species.

I looked at the three enormous slimes that greeted us on floor eighteen.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Alright, once we get to the summit, I’m tearing this whole mountain down.”

“The King might be displeased with you,” Vagan replied. “But, I think it’s the right decision. This place is a den of unimaginative horrors and cookie-cutter aspirations. It deserves to be removed from existence.”

Then next five floors were, unsurprisingly, identical to all the ones below, with the wereslime hobgoblins being replaced by drakes. The mini-bosses for floor nineteen to twenty-one were wereslime drakes, which, as a concept, was pretty dumb, as the slimy nature of the wereslime was antithetical to the boiling and evaporating flames of the drake, resulting in a creature that was somehow more dangerous to itself than its surroundings.

The mini-bosses on floor twenty-two and twenty-three were wereslime hobgoblins riding wereslime drakes…

Alright, enough! I give up on narrating the rest of this…

Skipping ahead to floor thirty: the Summit!

Vagan and I emerged out into the vast open crater of floor thirty, exhausted and ground-down by the monotony and utter lack of creativity from the previous twenty-nine floors.

“I can’t believe we did it,” Vagan gasped, the new unfamiliar floor like a breath of fresh air.

The thirtieth floor was quite literally a crater, with the bottom a roundish platform thirty metres in radius and the surrounding walls all sloping up overhead to where a small aperture let the waning moonlight shine down on us. Granted, it was still the same tired aesthetic of bare exposed mountainous rock, but there were a few partially concealed veins of flowing lava, hinting at the potential that the slumbering volcano was perhaps not as asleep as first expected.

A maniacal laughter greeted us and we looked ahead to the final boss of the imagination-deprived Dungeon.

I let out a croaking sigh. “Seriously…”

“Yeah, that’s very lazy…”

The boss was an enormous slime, upon which rode a wereslime drake, with the Goblin Chief sitting at the top and whom the Dungeon Core, Blazing Blaine, was clearly possessing.

With Vagan staying at the stairwell landing, I hopped forward, while the giant slime slowly moved towards me as well. The wereslime drake let out a belch of fire, but, not only did it not reach me, it also set itself on fire as well as the giant slime it was riding. To help it die faster, I repeated my tried-and-true strategy of firing off a barrage of Gnasher Toads and they quickly got to work devouring the slime from underneath the self-immolating drake and panicking goblin chief.

No sooner had the giant slime been devoured whole than I leapt forward with a powerful kick of my toady legs and shot forward a tongue punch that sent both the half-melted wereslime drake and goblin chief flying off into the distance, where they collided with the wall and died in a spectacularly-bright flashfire.

As the light of the final boss’ death washed over the crater, a collection of mud huts became revealed, with a big crystal standing in the midst of them all. I hopped over towards the crystal, but then a bunch of goblin chiefs emerged from the huts and tried to fight me off. I was honestly too bored to fight back by then, so I let Vagan take over, as I continued towards the big crystal.

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It glowed with a warm red light and looked like a cluster of giant rubies that almost formed a crown of sorts.

Name: Blazing Blaine

Occupation: Dungeon Master

Species: Dungeon Core (Soul Core)

Level: 3/5

Alignment: Furious-and-frustratingly-stubborn

Faction: Papa Magma & Co.

As I observed the crystal, Blazing Blaine’s voice emerged from within:

“Alright! You beat me! I’ll give you all the rubies and gold and artefacts that I have! Just let me live!”

“You know I can’t do that, Blaine,” I said coldly. “Your Dungeon sucks. It’s an affront to all Dungeon Cores, not that I know any, but I’m sure they have more creative designs than yours!”

“What do you want from me!? My Guiding Fairy quit, so I had to figure this all out on my own!”

“That’s rough,” I told him, “But I don’t think it excuses your crimes against aesthetics and interior design! You must have been told over-and-over how boring your dungeon was!”

“So what, I don’t listen to haters!”

“Sometimes you have to embrace the hatred and let it flow through you,” I counselled wisely. “Not all critique is hate, and not all hate is entirely without reason.”

“Alright, I’ll change! Just don’t kill me!”

“How old are you, Blaine?”

“I don’t know, why would I keep track of that!?”

Vagan sidled up next to me, having gotten rid of the many goblin chiefs. He was carrying a sack full of all the loot he had gathered on our way to the summit. Once we got out of here, he’d be probably the richest individual on this part of the continent.

“This Core is at least three-hundred years old,” he said. “King Eskilder has been using his fortunes harvested from it to keep himself alive since he first laid claim to it.”

“See,” I told Blaine, “You’ve been around all that time and never once changed your ways.”

“You’re just a hater!” he yelled at me.

In response I tongue-punched his crystal Core and broke off a large portion that I promptly swallowed. It only seemed to make him yell more obscenities at me, so I did it again, and again, and again, until no pieces remain of Blazing Blaine’s Core.

Congratulations! For devouring a Soul Core like yourself, you have gained the [Cannibal Diet] perk!

[Cannibal Diet] – Devouring a Soul Core allows you to absorb the Core’s power and unique properties to use in your own settlement. Depending on the type of Core sub-category, you may also unlock unique buildings or minions! (Applies Retroactively)

Congratulations! For devouring the Dungeon Core known as Blazing Blaine, you unlocked the ability to craft the following structures:

Goblin Hut

Hobgoblin Hut

Slime Den

Drake Roost

Magical Species-Mixing Mirror

Magical Minion-Copying Mirror

I was about to remark sarcastically how silly it was that I’d gained a structure that allowed me to copy a minion, but then the ground underneath our feet began rumbling and quaking.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“This is just a theory,” Vagan started, “But it is quite possible that the Dungeon Core was keeping the volcano of this mountain dormant and, now that the Core is gone, it has begun to erupt, perhaps pent-up from many centuries of being forced to stay asleep.”

“Get on my back!” I told him hurriedly, immediately accepting his theory as fact, when the stairwell that had led us to the thirtieth floor exploded in a geyser of destructive lava. With a powerful kick of my toady legs, I shot up at a forty-five-degree angle and hit the sloping wall of the crater, before kicking off again and flying out through the small hole in the summit. As I landed on the roof of the thirtieth floor outside, I quickly hopped south towards the city of Lillebrünnr below, quickly beginning to slide down the slope and picking up tremendous speed.

As we were about halfway down the slope, the top of the mountain shot off in a trail of smoke and scalding magma and we got a perfect view as it landed on the castle below and turned it into a flattened ruin, chunks of the large stones it had been built from shooting out across the city beyond its walls.

I quickly leapt from the mountain as we neared the bottom, and sailed across the ruins of the castle, landing somewhere just outside its southernmost walls, but I did not take a moment to rest and continued onward through the city, heading straight for the Pacifists’ Guild, while fire and brimstone was raining down on the stone city, devastating houses with boulder-sized chunks of mountainous rock that was shot out of the volcano with the speed of a nosediving kingfisher plummeting into a pond to catch a fish.

Coincidentally, I found the Diplomat right as he was ushering his two new winged-bear-mascot friends into the hut atop the Jackicorn, Idad. The two bodyguard Cavalry looked eager to get out of the city as well, and when they saw me arrive, they quickly croaked orders to the Diplomat’s mount and they followed me as I hopped along the main thoroughfare.

Standing on a hill a few kilometres outside of Lillebrünnr with many displaced citizens, as well as my Diplomat and his two friends, not to mention Vagan who had held on to my vessel for dear life during our escape, I could not help but marvel at the cataclysmic powers of nature, which, now that I was so far away from the consequences of it, looked rather beautiful. An enormous pillar of black smoke rose from the remains of the mountain, which seemed to have cast off half its mass in the eruption. Bright spots of lava dotted the city at its feet and a river of magma ran down its blown-open front, engulfing the ruins of the castle, where the mountaintop had landed like a meteor.

“Do you think your city has room for all these people?” Vagan asked.

“They’re not my responsibility,” I replied.

“I highly disagree.”

“You know what happened last time my Toadkin mixed with lesser species.”

Vagan went silent for a moment, then proposed a solution, “Maybe we can build a place for them right here? That way they won’t be homeless, but also won’t mix with your citizens, since that seems to be a concern for you.”

I was about to decline, but then I remembered that one of the requirements for my next evolution was to build a Village, a Hamlet, and three Farmsteads beyond the reaches of my Castle Town.

The area on the hill was as good a place as any, so I quickly concentrated on a spot and out crawled a dozen minions, big-lipped and bug-eyed, but more similar to the displaced citizens of Lillebrünnr than my Toadkin.

The hundreds of citizens looked at my collection of minions as they began to gather materials and construct simple houses, workbenches, and other necessities to begin a simple community. Within ten minutes, most of the citizens had joined the minions in gathering wood and stone, and followed their lead as they started to build tools and buildings according to the blueprints I’d hastily placed.

When the sun started to stain the wilderness outside the walls of the ruined city of Lillebrünnr, there stood five new farmsteads a few kilometres removed from its still-smouldering ruins. Each of these farms were mostly inhabited by the displaced citizens of the ruined city, but a core of a dozen minions in each ensured that the new development of houses followed an orderly fashion.

When I returned my spirit to my temporarily-abandoned vessel in the first farmstead, I saw that Vagan had somehow reconnected with his mount, Skygge. The black-furred Jackicorn seemed to have made it out of Lillebrünnr unscathed, before finding its rider through unknown means.

“I think I’ll stay here for a bit,” he told me. “I feel partial responsibility for this tragedy, and, you know, Lillebrünnr was my city too once.”

“Very well, I told my minions in the farmsteads to listen to your commands, so feel free to order them to do whatever task you deem necessary.”

“Thank you… erm… I don’t think you ever told me your name. My Appraising Eye just set it as ‘Toad’, but that can’t be right.”

“No, it’s correct, you can call me Toad!”

“Alright… Toad. I’ll see you around I suppose.”

“Yes! I’ll be back!”

No sooner had the words left the mouth of my vessel than a poof of smoke that smelled of a whole bouquet of flowers mixed with sulphur emerged next to me. As the smoke cleared, I saw an irate Imu standing atop of Goldie, with a bikini-clad woman next to him that I immediately recognised as Judetta the Missionary of Light, and a strange-looking blue-skinned impish girl with sunglasses.

“TOAD! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?”

“Ohai Imu!” I replied cheerfully.