NOVEL WEB Chapter 16 - A Map
Dungeon Day 28 - Continues
“What the actual fuck!” Dan roared, annoyed, while looking at the notification. His monsters, who were back at the fort, looked in his direction. He quickly dismissed them, and they returned to relaxing or guarding.
For his part, Dan was just annoyed. He couldn’t do much of anything about the new challenge except build up his forces in response to whatever new threats were going to start appearing in the zone.
Dan already had a plan in mind, and he just needed more mana, something he figured the new monsters would provide. The annoying part was the fact that depending on the threats, he might lose more mana than he gained. However, Dan hoped the challenge was fair and that he wouldn’t encounter flying birds that could launch fireballs from hundreds of feet away.
Either way, it's not like he could do anything about it and to be fair, the World Crystal and its parent had been rather fair so far, so he should be fine. In fact, he actually began to appreciate the event after thinking about it for a while. It was true he would have otherwise needed to kill all the beasts in the forest for mana, and now this event gave him a way to avoid doing that. Not only that but if he played his cards right, he would be able to build his first dungeon floor before any adventurer ever stepped foot inside.
Dungeon Day 29
The night passed without incident, and Dan did not see any of the new monsters. That first part was the most annoying thing, as it meant that they passed as normal creatures instead of straight-up enemies. However, Dan wasn’t even sure if his dungeon area would mark creatures as enemies. He had a count of the number of people in his dungeon and the amount of monsters he had access to but not of anything else. That made him guess that the World Crystal probably had an accurate count of everything but was not sharing. Still, he tried to process the information in his mind and go through all the living creatures within his dungeon area until he found something new.
It took him a while to review all the information, but eventually, he found something on the outskirts of his claimed land and near the fog wall. He found some odd-looking wolves. They had dark green and brown fur and green glowing eyes. There were ten of them, and after watching them for a bit, he found that they were leaving most other creatures in his land alive. This meant that the fuckers were really just concerned with messing his stuff up, at least so far they were. Dan imagined that outside of his claimed area, they would attack whatever, but within it, they were just focused on him.
Now interested in these new monsters, Dan continued scanning his land and found some more monsters. They were much like the wolves but just different animals. He saw snakes, bears, stags, elks, and other smaller things like foxes and bunnies. Watching the new creatures, Dan didn’t think they were very strong, but he wouldn’t know until he actually engaged them in combat. As he continued watching the creatures, he wondered if he could mark them as enemies and found that he could!
Now, he could easily spot them within his claimed area, making finding and slaughtering them much more manageable.
After marking the ones he found, Dan tried to make a sort of filter to find and mark the new monsters automatically. It took him some time and finagling, but he eventually found a way to place some of his consciousness on finding and marking the creatures. The whole thing was rather nifty, but it wasn’t perfect, as if something looked like a regular beast. There was no way for Dan to know it wasn’t anything but a regular beast. He could only spot these beasts from the rest because they had green tinges of fur and scales or looked extremely different in appearance compared to the norm.
He thought about just marking everything that entered his territory, but that would take longer. Dan could make an enchantment that did so, but it wasn’t worth the mana cost right then and there. So, instead of attempting new security tricks, Dan did something simpler.
A miniature map of his land that would visually update targets via his dungeon magic. Basically, he spent a bit of mana to create an ever-changing illusion on the ground near his core. The illusion was a 20-foot wide by 20-foot-long thin layer above the ground that would act as a map. Dan then used his magical dungeon abilities to make the illusion into a still image of all the land he controlled. He had wanted to make a live map, but that would require even more mana.
After the illusion was projected, he had a miniature still picture map of his land. Dan did the next obvious thing and separated the illusion by adding a 20 by 20 grid of boxes over the large map. On top of the map, he placed 20 letters from A to T for columns while he had numbers 1 to 20 for the rows. This setup would let him easily track the monsters he marked.
Sadly, the monsters wouldn’t show up in real-time, at least not fully, because that would also take more mana. Instead, they would be updated around every couple of minutes. The whole thing would function due to his background dungeon brain constantly going through all the mark targets and updating their locations onto the illusion. The only thing that would be displayed live on the map would be the locations of his dungeon monsters, as he always knew where they were within his lands.
Speaking of his monsters, Dan updated his residents and told the normal beasts that it would be dangerous for them to leave the immediate area of the fort. The issue with them was that they were now part of him, and he was sure the new monsters wouldn’t leave them alone as they did with the other beasts in the forest. He told them they could ignore the warning but that they would more than likely die. Something that made many of them stay within the nearby forest. He did eventually plan to make the forest safe enough for them to travel, but he wasn't going to spend mana respawning them if they died.
After updating his residents Dan moved on to actually begin hunting these new monsters. He had five teams ready to go and was interested in testing the power of the new monsters.
The enemies were still rather far from Dan’s current location, and Dan wanted to be ready for any surprises, so he also sent Kinetic, Eagle the Hawk, and George to back up the three teams that would make contact. The other two teams and his other three bosses were told to hunt in the nearby area until after first contact was made.
Team 1 was approaching a pack of six wood boars and had Kinetic with them, who was running ahead. From what Dan could gather, the cheetah wanted to get a measure of the wood boars before he had his team engage. Something that Eagle was also looking to do as she flew ahead as well, though he imagined the hawk was just going to look and not harass. Eagle’s team, Team 3, just seemed to be taking things at a much-relaxed pace for whatever reason, and he assumed they were waiting to hear back from the hawk.
George and Team 2 had a completely different approach to the other two teams. George, like the great leader he was, was indeed moving ahead, but just by a few feet. His team was making their way across the forest at a decent pace, though Dan did notice their eagle was missing. Something Dan assumed was due to the bird going ahead and scouting. Dan had to respect George for that, as that was the smart move, unlike the other two mini-bosses who were approaching unknown enemies with unknown abilities.
The first to arrive at their target was Eagle, who didn't have to deal with the problems presented by land travel. Dan had sent her team to fight some half-wooden snakes about the size of the average human. Looking at them, Dan didn’t find the snakes to be particularly strong, but he could be completely wrong. The snakes had green scale skins mixed with a wooden leaf pattern, making them rather hard to spot for regular animals. There were around five snakes, and he felt that Eagle wanted to dive and smack one, but the hawk held herself back and returned to her team.
Next up was Kinetic, who was approaching six boars. The boars rushed through the forest's undergrowth as their half-bone, half-wooden tusks tore the shrubs apart. Each boar was also around the size of a human, though a bit bulkier. The boar's skin was a mangle of wooden roots that oddly intertwined and merged to make rather tough-looking skin. However, Dan saw that their bodies looked just as flexible as if they were made from ordinary flesh. So, Dan figured the outer shell was tough, but the stuff beneath it was still flesh and blood.
Finally, there were the wooden wolves, who looked like ordinary wolves but had greenish and dark brown fur with glowing green eyes. The wolves were the size of regular wolves, which meant they were slightly larger than most people. Unlike the snakes and boars, the wolves' glowing green eyes made Dan feel like they were capable of using magic. He was tempted to speak with George and let him know, but he didn’t. Dan wanted to see how the gorilla dealt with the enemy.