Dragonheart Core

It was, to put it shortly, pure agony to leave behind my beautiful burgeoning fourth floor and pop back up to the others. To look upon their graceless, un-algaed walls, to their primitive lights still clinging to stone. It would have been easy to grow my new variant on the walls, to fill this place with their sublime spores, but, well.

I wanted it to be a surprise.

And my first three floors were still excellent and lovely and I very much appreciated them, thank you. My subconscious retreated a bit.

I finished carving out the last little tunnel snaking its way through the limestone separating my floors; a last air tunnel, connecting to a nondescript den in the Drowned Forest, just to make sure it never ran dry. I had hundreds of the buggers for every floor, all small enough no invader would think twice about snaking their way through and with easily ten times the amount I needed just so I didn't have to worry about a burrowing rat covering the entrance in dug up silt. Back-ups upon back-ups, as it went. I was a fan of contingencies.

One such was the damn near thousand points of awareness I had aimed at my fourth floor.

The algae had kept growing, though admittedly not with the same flashy gusto it had when I originally moved in. It slithered over the walls with all the grace of something truly blind and immobile and dead, flicking its spores and roots with a very pressing awareness. I couldn't have been more proud.

No evolution yet, though. I could wait.

I had other plans.

The first of which was something I had been procrastinating on with all these tunnels.

See, I'd named the Drowned Forest, right? Given it a proper title and all the prestige that came with it. That likened to reason that the name was awfully important. As in something that stood as a marker.

As in, I probably shouldn't add any more creatures to the second floor lest I upset the balance.

But gods, the lichenridge turtles were right there.

Truly, I don't think you understand the agony.

…Rhoborh would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't he? The Drowned Forest certainly wasn't his but it had a kinship to him now, enough that any invaders would be able to feel his presence and let him bring it to all his latest pissing contests with the other gods. He had no reason to want to see it destroyed.

So he definitely wanted more defenders.

Mind thoroughly made up, I grabbed the near forty points of mana I'd generated and slapped them together into the rough shape of a turtle. The schema flowed through me and almost politely shifted what I'd snagged to the side, gathering a mere eleven to shape as scales and shell popped into existence.

Gods. I'd gotten too twitchy with the cloudskipping wisp. Not every large creature was a mana-sucking bloodhound.

The four turtles I wove together blinked, shaking their lumbering heads from side to side as they lazily drank in their new surroundings; a bit like the bears upstairs, really, although the bears tended to respond with more guttural bellows and clawing when they spotted their brethren instead of another slow blink. Almost embarrassing how long it had taken Rihsu to kill hers.

Although these didn't have the camouflage of their predecessor yet.

Turned out I was remarkably impatient when I didn't have the distraction of a new floor and the looming fear of new invaders; the two new species of moss and lichen hadn't died yet, slowly but steadily browning in the corner I'd shuffled them to, but I was sure that'd go soon. I wasn't willing to risk destabilizing the floor by trying to remove their carbon dioxide or squishing them with a stone—while it'd certainly work, these were two limp, bedraggled plants. Not exactly prime material. They could wait.

The turtles would just have to make do with my regular green algae and billowing moss for now. Plenty of time before the real shit started to take over.

At least I hoped so.

It hadn't escaped my notice it'd been a week since the merrow's invasion; certainly a time period I was very happy to have received and nothing to scoff at, but with the ever-present threat of my discovery I didn't know why more invaders hadn't come. Hells, I would have expected a whole Calarata army of drunken pirates to come charging in and start hunting for my core; that was why I had built the labyrinth of the fourth floor. Something to hopefully distract and separate them so my creatures could work overtime on saving me.

But no threats had come.

In the absence of war, the mind wanders, and mine was very far away from thinking about peace.

The only spy I had was Seros, with my ability to see through his eyes outside of my domain through his Name; and while he certainly was large enough to defend himself from a Bronze-ranked invader out in the wild, he wasn't exactly built for stealth. Fifteen foot long monitors tended to attract attention.

And while I had room to name another creature, I couldn't think of anyone who would let me learn what was going on with Calarata.

A rat, maybe—small and scurrying throughout houses with all the grace of an acrobat, alongside all the survivability of a dead one. Half a swipe and my precious spy and Otherworld mana would be a smear over the ground. Same for a spider, or a toad, or any of the small scuttling creatures of my floors. The opposite for a kobold or bear; large enough to survive, far too large to get anywhere.

And unlike with my lichenridge turtle conundrum, I didn't have an easy way to convince myself of what was right.

Hrm. Irritating.

I shifted half my attention to continue puzzling over that problem as I turned back to my turtles, the lumbering beasts glaring at their uncovered back like their nakedness was somehow causing world wars. Half a twist of an idle mana thread and a few spores landed between their scales, mostly billowing moss to match their predecessor, and with another twitch of my mana that gave root and started to grow. Something to appease the little buggers.

Because I had a plan in which I was hoping they would be very, very content.

In my efforts to make all my floors more difficult, I'd switched up the routes of several canals; now a handful blocked off access to rooms without wading through, or led invaders down the wrong path, or forced them to jump over in order to continue. It was that last one I was interested in striking.

See, I'd covered most of the ground on my second floor in moss, both to hide the mangroves' deadly thorns and to give the dirt something holding it in place. The end result was a constantly waving, shimmering field of green.

Something that the back of a lichenridge turtle looked almost worryingly like.

The turtles did their damnedest to ignore me but eventually listened to my prompts, shuffling to stand in the select spots I'd raised in the canals for them; just deep enough their heads could pop up for air, but shallow enough their backs rose from the water like the most inviting of stones. I kicked up a few eddies and rapids around their bodies with the help of other stones, just to disguise the scales and jaws beneath. A final little touch.

In the end, four flawless stepping stones were made to help guide my invaders to their next goal. In a way.

If their end goal was me, and they were fine with it only being their mana to make it there.

I certainly was.

-

Lluc sat and he twisted.

It was a new hat, purchased with all the grace that being the first mate of the Golden Ghost and second in command over the Dread Crew allowed him. A fine thing, really; not with the flashy old feather of a common sailor but the more distinguished scarlet strip of wolf fur around the underside, acting as a bandana. It would have cost a normal man a year to earn it.

He was also rapidly ruining it as he kept winding the canine's pelt around his fingers.

It wasn't his fault, really. No one could be expected to stay calm with the stench of agony and raw screams filtering under the crack in the door.

A pleasant enough room for it, he supposed—his time in this position had made him wait for far worse in far worse places. The old gaze-weed run in Leóro, ending in half the crew either dead or wishing they were; or the surprised head of the previous first mate, tumbling away from her equally surprised body after the pitch-shark had reminded her why it was best not to steal from the captain. On paper, they were both worse. This room had expansive couches and a glass-lined table, soothing quartz-lights in carved sockets on the wall and the borwood floor protected by a pelt as soft as silk.

Most places he waited, though, it was because he wasn't waiting—it was fleeing for his life, or dealing with his new and unexpected promotion, or whipping the rest of the crew into shape.

It wasn't waiting. He hated waiting. Bad things always came after a wait.

He twisted his hat more.

And of course, as with all things, it was the moment that he moved onto twisting the brim that the door, a fine polished borwood that looked to have gotten a new varnish of the scarlet hue, banged open and Varcís Bilaro walked out.

Grey trousers, cinched tight at the waist with a frock coat overtop with its sides tied behind him, gentle slippers and gloves over his extremities. His work uniform, then. He had a nasty habit of running through them.

Same for today, if all the blood meant anything.

Varcís stripped his gloves off, tossing them behind him without so much as a glance—there was no final cry for help, no grunt of surprise or panic as the door swung close.

"Clean it up before I get back," Varcís said, bracing his chin on his hands. There was some dark curiosity behind his eyes. "Brus broke like a fat merchant ship. Told me everything, matched what the merrow had said, they both filled in what parts each other didn't know."

Lluc winced. The merrow had taken forever to clean up. "And?"

"Some sort of dungeon. Neither knew whatever deity is sponsoring it, nor what it spawned from—ley line? Eclipse? Shouldn't be anything too powerful."

Two dead for half an answer. Gods if this wasn't why you couldn't know shit in a pirate's town.

Lluc frowned, setting his hat down. "Any chance it's something more alive? If what the merrow was saying about the new entrance is true."

Varcís smiled. It might have been nice if not for the splash of scarlet under his left eye. "Lluc. Do you know of any sentient-born dungeons?"

Ah. Suddenly his legs weren't fond of moving.

"...no?" His breath was tacky in his throat. It couldn't hurt to be polite. "Sir?"

"You're damn right." Varcís splayed his hands with all the serenity of a slit wrist. "That's because they don't survive. The gods don't like them, we certainly don't, and they get killed before they finish half a floor. So go scout it out to see how far along it is, and if it's developed enough to have opened its pathway to the Otherworld, I'll come and take it. Unless that's a problem?"

"No. No sir. Not a problem."