Dragonheart Core

It was not a good sign for my longevity as a dungeon that I was already sick of adventurers.

Three days, by my best guess; three godsdamn days after an attack before another party had meandered their way through my doors and decided to plant themselves amidst all the things I needed to be doing but was quickly deprived of the time to do so. Fantastic.

And to make matters all the better, they had figured out I was a dungeon just in time for one of them to escape.

Someone upstairs was conspiring against me, I just knew it.

Full of mana again, though. I let the three souls flow through me, rich and taut with knowledge—Collectors for certain, if what snippets I learned of foreign creatures pointed in the right direction. Half of their thoughts were flooded with stormtoothed jaguars and gemfruit maples and magma-core rock snails, giving me all the more delicious ideas to fill my lower floors with.

If I was able to get that far.

No Bronze-ranked mana, though, which was unfortunate. Their mana filled me pleasantly only up to twenty-three points; not enough to strain my core or make me lose the excess, which I appreciated. Gods know I needed every advantage I could get.

My creatures grumbled and hissed but slowly relaxed back to their previous levels of existence, the sudden increase in ambient mana from the three kills trickling through their system. The jeweled jumper merrily ignored the massive blast flooding through his, sucking Lália's body into a dessicated husk with nary a thought to how I might need to break down her corpse into additional mana. Ah well. He'd earned the kill.

The greater crab hissed and clicked but did allow me Nil's body. How generous.

For Brus, however?

He had run. Run out the cove entrance, ready to head right back to the lawless Calarata and bring the Dread Pirate back. At that moment, I hated him almost as much as the man that had killed me.

No sense in festering on that. I had work to do.

I dissolved all of their various knives, confirming what I'd guessed; the thin, narrow blade was for skewering soft-skinned creatures and also a scalpel for harvesting materials, and the wide, curved knife more as a general-purpose blade.

Nothing too interesting in their clothes. Lália had leather boots, but as much as I dissolved them and poked my way through what made them up, it just wasn't enough for me to learn the schema from whatever creature they were made of. Annoying. Looked like I couldn't use just leather or skin to make a schema—but maybe if they brought both leather and something else? Surely some adventurers had to build armour sets that focused on one specific creature, and then my Ressurector title could help me bring them all back.

Questions I had little doubt I would find an answer far too soon for my tastes.

I pushed my way around my first and second floor, healing up creatures with stray threads of mana for those that had been trampled or injured in Brus' panicked run. My jeweled jumper finally finished eating more than his fill and stepped back, practically vibrating under the pressure of all his new mana—he sprang back up the bark of the vampiric mangrove and scuttled deeper into the floor. The rest of my creatures finished settling back down.

Then I finally started poking through the messages skittering over my core.

Your creature, a Cave Spider, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Webweaver (Common): Spiders are a territorial species—but this beast has ignored that and created a communal web, the work of dozens all spanning together to create an inescapable trap. Not yet a hivemind but through releasing pheromones, they communicate across the miles their webs can span, and any foe that falls to them is split evenly between the lot.

Spurred Spider (Common): For defense in the open areas it frequents, this creature has grown armoured spikes of bone and chitin. Though this slows it down, its massively increased bulk and puncturing power of its newly-grown mandibles leaves it well-prepared for any approaching threat.

Jeweled Jumper (Common): Foregoing webs entirely, it spends its life constantly on the hunt, jumping between trees and stalagmites alike in their hunt for prey. As active predators, they ignore smaller insects and use their potent venom to take down larger prey, draining their insides and leaving the husks as a warning.

I paused. Glanced back at my core. Four more identical messages made themselves known.

Seemed like my creatures were slowly starting to reach the point where they had absorbed enough ambient mana that they didn't necessarily need a personal large kill to evolve; it had still taken the increase in the ambient stuff from the death of the two adventurers, but as I bounced between the five heads, none of them seemed to have done anything with the adventurer's death. Both originals from the first floor who had been brave enough to migrate down, strong in their own right but not yet enough to feel ready to take down a human.

With their evolutions, they might be.

Two options I already knew, and then the spurred spider; but however lovely a massive, spiky ball of armour sounded, I had just chosen the ironback toad. Wonderful timing. And however territorial the jeweled jumper was with other cave spiders, I didn't want to imagine how bad he would be with others of his own species.

Webweaver, then. I could see the group of them creating a massive web spreading the breadth of the second floor. Anything that could help them survive the now increased powers of jeweled jumper would be a boon.

I selected that for all five of them.

The various spiders, all completely separate from each other and really having spared very few thoughts to the invasion beyond the rage I'd incited into everyone, all slumped to the ground as the glow of evolution overtook them. I watched curiously as they all managed to fumble their way back up to a corner of their webs and curl up, clawed legs hooking them in place before they fully went unconscious as their bodies changed.

With any luck, they'd hurry the pace up a bit past the casual stroll their predecessor had evolved at.

I waited a heartbeat but no more messages joined theirs, no further evolutions or a new level for myself. Even though I deserved it.

Ah well. I had already confirmed I didn't exactly agree with whoever was running these messages.

I gathered my mana around me, dissolving the rest of the gear Lália and Nil had had—more scraps of unusable leather I stored the bits of in case something else from the creature stumbled my way, a few wooden coins, a handful of my own lacecaps and stone-backed toads–

And the corpse of a skewered silvertooth.

Something I didn't yet have the schema of.

Oh, at least something good had come from this absolute fuck-up of an invasion—I devoured my way through its metallic scales and jagged fangs, dining on the knowledge of its core like the finest of wines. Shaping it told me of all the muscles lining its bones, the strength of its jaws and fins; no wonder even a small school of them had been able to take down a Bronze-ranked adventurer. I couldn't wait to see what a proper swarm of them would be capable of. I gathered my mana around me, swiveling points of awareness near the other silvertooth school.

And paused. Glanced back.

Twenty-three points, plenty to try and make a silvertooth; but if the greater crab had taught me anything, it was that there wasn't a point in trying to make evolutions until I could find some strategy to keep the costs down or increased my regeneration and storage rates. Maybe I could try later, once I'd gotten more defenses up; but for now I could just wait for their eggs to hatch and more silverheads to evolve. With how many bloody adventurers I was getting, I doubted it would take long.

Later, my pretty, I murmured, and kept my mana to myself.

Seros raised his head as I prodded our awareness, coming to a rest on the bottom of the canal he was patrolling around. The sturgeon lurking near his tail quickly found other things to do.

You're in charge, I commanded, impressing on him a spark of extra mana to do what he saw fit. He nodded, flexing his claws into the sand. He hadn't made it to the adventurers in time to stop Brus from leaving, and I could feel the guilt from that hanging heavy over his thoughts—he wouldn't make the same mistake of being too passive the next time.

I trusted him. He would do whatever was necessary.

As for me, I made my way to the last room of my second floor—and instead of choosing the back of Seros' den, I chose a random outcropping of the canal, a little pocket only a few feet deep, and started tunneling down through the stone.

My third floor would be a massive expanse of water, endless and impossibly deadly; for too long adventurers had avoided my canals and the dangers present. No longer.

If what I really was got out, I would need all the protection I could muster.

-

She did not enjoy this.

Her scales protected her from bleeding but the thorns still tried to break past her palms as she skittered up the trunk, claws digging into the wood in turn; the great tree groaned and twisted as she crept over an extended branch. Her breath caught in her throat.

She stayed strong. As badly as it wanted to attack her, she wanted to attack something even more.

Those same big thoughts kept running through her head, far too big for a lowly kobold; the Dragon, core of the dungeon, had still never looked at her but she could feel His presence, a fire reawakening in her chest. She was so close.

Her chosen target poked its head into her room.

It was still so much larger than her, heavily armoured with its strange, shelled back—but it was slow. It was stupid. It didn't have the big thoughts.

She flicked her forked tongue, gripping tighter to the branch as it plodded closer; it didn't look up. Didn't notice her.

Her chest burned.

It crossed directly below her. She dropped onto its back.

There was a second before it reacted, her clawed feet smacking into its back as she scrabbled for a hold—it bellowed, swinging wildly, lashing its feet against the ground. She clung desperately to the tiny plants rooted against its scales, horns clattering against her skull.

It didn't attack back but instead hunkered down, legs popping into its… back? What? She lunged forward to try for its head but another second and it was gone, far away from her claws, safe within its scales.

She hissed, clawing furiously at its back; scraps of little green things flew off but they didn't seem to be attached to it. It didn't even flinch.

A failure. She hoped the Dragon wasn't watching.

Warily, she slithered off its back and scurried away, glaring at it from behind a tree; it stayed hidden away, its scales too thick for her to do anything. Her claws were dull, nothing like His; she couldn't rip past its defenses.

She leaned closer and accidentally brushed against the tree. Its hidden thorns stabbed at her muzzle, doing nothing but shocking her.

…but they were like claws, weren't they?

She paused, examining the wood; claws like hers, but not limited by her arms. Claws she could hold further away from her body, claws to attack the head of the beast before it could hide away.

Weapons.