When there was nothing left that could even remotely pose a threat to the rock, it made its way to deal with the hated existence at the core of the cave-system.
The closer it got the more connected it felt to the dungeon, but it dismissed the emotion as part of the dungeon's defence-system.
As the elemental drew close to its destination, it found something unexpected. A village of the strange arachnids. But instead of their usual behaviour, the rock was attacked by a delegation of 29 of these beings. Most of which actually wore clothes. Those who remained in the settlement hasty evacuated the village and fled further into the direction of the core.
The attacking force was divided into four divisions each consisting of six to seven individuals. The remaining three, who did not seem to belong to any division, were naked.
A thought formed in the rock’s mind. To test this hypothesis the elemental shot a beam of water at the naked opponent positioned in the centre of the army’s setup.
The water did not touch the arachnid’s body but dispersed shortly before doing so. Due to the pressure, the arachnid was pushed back several lengths of its own body before coming to a stop.
The division it was pushed into was almost completely annihilated. Legs and innards could be seen flying around everywhere.
And the rock’s hypothesis was proven right, these creatures had obtained a level of civilisation where they were able to train martials.
The remaining arachnids, two martials and three divisions, did not maintain inaction. As two divisions took defensive formations.
The last division attacked by cutting through the body of the elemental. Changing their formation slightly an invisible giant blade went through the elemental. Its body being neatly bisected. But as the attack did not hit the rock itself, the attack was ineffective.
The two martials rushed the invader and stabbed their limbs through the elemental’s muddy exterior.
When impaling the elemental with 16 limbs did not do much they even thrust their heads into the mud. The two were met with static electricity, frying their brains.
One of them managed to chip the core, prompting the elemental to retreat.
The boulders thrown at the three functioning divisions were blocked by the interference of the defensive ones. Two boulders bounced off of barriers while the third was rerouted back to the elemental.
When the boulder hit the muddy substance, the rock had long since abandoned the fight. It had launched itself out of its mud-body.
Before the rock even landed on the ground it used the dirt to further propel itself into finding a hiding hole.
The last surviving martial went to check on the corpse of mud.
The two survivors of the destroyed division reformed their ranks.
The three unhurt divisions got into defensive formations, while the destroyed one readied itself to attack at a moment’s notice.
The martial cut the boulder apart and jumped backwards, in anticipation of any kind of surprise. Not getting attacked or being otherwise surprised gave the martial enough courage to inspect the mud.
Finding nothing but dirty water was evidence that whoever, or whatever had previously been controlling this water had managed to escape.
“Yogli-division will go ahead and inform the civilians. For a few hours it should be save for them to come back and gather their belongings!” the arachnid martial began to give out orders. The language was rough and barely sophisticated “The rest will stay vigilant and cover this endeavour!”
Without saying anything the two-arachnid-squad scurried away.
No dangerous creature came along as the villagers collected everything of value. And retreated to the capital.
“Hey, we did not expect you back before the scouring!?” a confused guard greeted the returning villagers.
“The protectors prophesy has come true!” was all the answer the guard ever got from the traumatised refugees.
“I need to talk to the masters! Urgent!” was all the surviving martial would say.
The martial was quickly given audience with the masters of civilisation, at the centremost spot of the capital.
“Krekaran! Speak!” one of the two councillors demanded, shortly after the martial entered the room consisting of one desk, two occupied chairs and a pulsating, luminous wall.
“Dear creator this servant thanks you for giving birth to us all!” after giving a short prayer to the luminous wall, the martial arachnid explained the situation: “Yes, elder Franek! I believe we were attacked by the rogue relative of The Protector! After some of our hunters did not return, I instructed the other parties not to approach anything they were not sure they could take on. Some of them came back with reports of a strange mud-creature running amok within the tunnels. Our patrols paid extra vigilance, and so we noticed the approach of this thing quite early. As soon as we prepared all of our forces it was already in front of the outpost. We moved to intercept the thing. It proved to have control over the natural forces. It attacked with water, ground, and a third one. This third one was very strange. It killed Ririk and Krarr when they cut through the creature. I have no idea why it fled. There are three hypotheses I find to be plausible. It could be due to accumulated damages, which is unlikely because it left most of its body behind. It could be due to something Ririk and Krarr did. Or it was running low on energy.”
“Indeed, that is quite urgent!” the other councillor agreed.
“We shall pull some troops from all the various outposts! The scouring is still far! And we now know the direction the Living Disaster will appear from! So, we shall reinforce our ability to fend it off!” elder Franek suggested to their co-leader.
“I agree that we cannot count on the fact that the local military won the first battle, especially since we do not know how or why! Additionally, to reinforcing the capital’s defences we should seal off this corridor! And should elder Franek agree I suggest Krekaran oversee the construction.” the not at all fit councillor offered.
“I agree with professor Herkari!” with this the topic was settled.
“This servant of the creator will not disappoint!” Krekaran informed the two old leaders that the given orders were understood. Then turning to the pulsating wall “Your children pray that you will soon be able to order us yourself.”
The martial bowed to the luminescent wall and left.
A few days later the elemental came back to the battlefield. Having rebound from the pain, it found an abandoned village.
Upon closer inspection of said village, the rock noticed that the residents must have returned at least once and taken whatever they could with them.
Being unable to find out more about the civilisation of these arachnid creatures, the elemental was faced with a dilemma. Either push on and risk being obliterated. Or leave the dungeon altogether, risking the dungeon becoming a local powerhouse in wherever the two of them currently resided.
After multiple hours of pondering, the rock decided to sneak closer to the dungeon’s core.
Finding a hiding-hole close to the entrance to a massive cavern, the elemental ceded control of its muddy body mass. And spread its proverbial feelers to encompass the cavern. Finding tens of thousands of contacts, who did not seem hostile towards each other at all. The elemental decided to abort the idea of eliminating the dungeon collected a body and got the hell out of there.
Finding the exit was not as easy as finding the core. It took multiple years in fact. Years in which the elemental could train of its abilities.
Exiting the dungeon, the elemental was shocked at the surrounding landscape. It had never heard of a forest this crazy.
There were trees, yes, but mixed among the wooden ones there were trees seemingly made out of ice, fire, dirt, water, meat, bones or silicon. There were those who apparently were made out of various kinds of metal and stone. While the strangest of all the trees present were those which seemed to be made out of condensed gases.
The few animals it could perceive, were most certainly crazy in the same way. The least crazy thing about this forest was that all the animals in it seemed to be mammals.
Now that it thought about it aside from the strangely civilised arachnids all the creatures within the dungeon were mammals as well. None of the crazy variants, but still.
Thinking further on the topic, the very fact that this dungeon had a civilisation was strange. From the dungeon's scope, it was obvious that the dungeon was not even one century old. And for civilisation to form in that short amount of time was very suspicious.
The other strange thing about the dungeon was that its civilisation was so different from its wildlife. Normally a dungeon only produces one kind of creature. From what the rock knew, most commonly dungeons were limited even further. For example, some dungeons may have a variety of mammals, but more commonly they only have canines or only felines or only bovines.
And then there was the incongruency about the dungeon’s interior and exterior. Dungeons normally recreate the exact creatures found in the vicinity.
In conclusion, the arachnids were out of place, no matter how the elemental thought about it.
Continuing to stand around while thinking, the elemental just mentally pinged every creature coming close. Being thus pinged most immediately lost their footing and fell over. Others just stumbled a bit before trying to continue their charge.
Neither the falling nor the stumbling ones survived for long as they were shot and killed by elemental bolts of different makeup.
The elemental extracted all the energies it could, while being extremely irritated that the dungeon still took its share.
The elemental’s thoughts came to a halt as the first non-fleshy animal made its way to attack the elemental. The fiery bull, or rather oxen, charged as any other oxen would, by moving its legs. So, the first hypothesis about these elemental animals could be ruled out. They were definitely not elementals.
Finding the bull's soul where its heart should have been, the elemental mentally pinged that location, to no effect. As it would still be a while till the bull arrived, the elemental experimented further. It tried to manipulate the fire, making up the bull’s body and failed.
The elemental threw a few different elemental bolts at the bull to slow it down. Then it invaded the oxen’s soul finding it barely defended and easy to navigate.
The fire’s soul was organised in a way to operate an oxen’s body, meaning it did not have any capabilities of creating offspring, aside from asexual ones. It was so vastly different from any normal animal’s soul that the elemental almost forgot why it was there.
After reminding itself of its purpose the elemental quickly searched for the mind of the creature and took over the creature’s body. Or at least that's what was supposed to happen.
Opposite to expectations, when the elemental returned to its own senses, the oxen made of fire was gone. In its place, not far from the elemental’s rock-self, lay a very condensed very small fire with an ever-morphing form.
As the elemental started to extract the energies from the fire, the fire started to shrink even further while simultaneously growing less dense. When the elemental was finished with its meal, nothing remained of the oxen. This was another major difference to the other creatures, whose bodies could still be seen lying around, mostly intact.
Without any means to find out what these creatures were and without efficient ways to deal with them in any other way, the elemental just ate them whenever it came across one.
Having lost all sense of time, the elemental came across a field of stones, each of them full of elemental energy and containing a little bit of that energy commonly found in animals.
During the whole time the rock required to consume this energy, it could feel pain and sorrow from the rocks. This did not make any sense to the rock thus it paid this circumstance no mind.
After having found a field of energy-filled rocks and consuming all the energy within, the elemental left a field of energy-less rocks behind.
From that day forth, the rock-turned-gem also found the occasional elemental and added them to its menu.
All their cores were boring old rocks. None had a beautiful rainbow-gem like itself. None was even remotely as powerful as the one its previous iteration had fought until it died. And none had the ability to reason. Not that it would have listened to any of them, even if they did.
