It was an incredible relief to know her parents were still fine. Very little dampened Shayma’s spirit but her worry over them definitely had, the last time we discussed it. It was good to know that, at last sighting, they were perfectly okay and still traveling and adventuring together. Plus it gave Shayma something to talk about with her new party members.

I was particularly proud of that bit of thinking. The reaction to the primal Source gem had been a lot more dramatic than I was expecting, and I could hardly let them have it for free, but it wasn’t like they were exactly rich. Most importantly, from what I’d seen, the two of them were good people.

But I was only half-listening to their conversation, because I was hearing another one, and not one from the refugees living in their habitats. It actually took me a little bit to figure out what was going on, because it was the first time the perk had activated. Someone who wasn’t already inside [Genius Loci] was using my name.

It was Thul Monat, [Grandmaster of the Fist].

He was sitting on the porch of his cabin, reclining in his hand-carved chair and facing a small gathering of other people who all looked quite impressive. The perspective I had was like a tiny mote of [Genius Loci], hanging in the middle of all of them, but it didn’t come with the attendant overlay bonuses of being able to appraise people. I still got names and classes, which was good, because it’d be pretty useless to know some random person somewhere was saying something, but no stats and no view outside of the speck of presence.

“And according to the Queen, this dungeon is a Power that goes by ‘Blue.’ Which is disturbing in a number of ways, but according to her it’s fulfilled all the agreements they’ve made without issue.”

“If it’s not a Great Dungeon, it’s one of the mage-king pet cores,” said Yamal Gen, a grey-bearded man with a huge sword slung over his back. He bore the impressive-sounding Class of [Sovereign of the Thousand-Blessed Blade]. “That means that someone’s controlling it. If not Queen Iniri, who?”

“If it’s actually a Power it may not be constrained by those rules,” the [Theurge Of Purifying Flame] cautioned. He had a robe that seemed to be actually on fire, tiny flames licking along it and threatening a neatly-trimmed goatee, and the overlay told me his name was, improbably, Liril Lirilson.

“Yeah but I doubt it is.” Yamal scowled. “We should find out.”

“It is a significant claim, I agree,” Monat said. “But the girl that claimed to be its Emissary was neither monster nor demihuman. She was something else, which makes me think we ought to be careful.”

Yamal still looked pretty set on finding me out and since they were all fourth-tiers, that meant he was north of level seventy. Not that the numbers alone described the power of a fourth-tier class. It was the third class evolution, and people at the fourth tier had earned the Skills and stats to refine their lifetime of experience into incredible power. I had heard one of the Classers in the inn say that Monat had leveled a mountain with his bare fists. And he wasn’t joking.

I was glad I’d already started improving my defenses after that incident with the idiot adventures trying to get ahold of my core. They had been relatively low-level, second-tier types, and I’d still had to fiddle with things to get rid of them. A group of high level people? I probably wouldn’t stand a chance without something more robust.

Which is why while Shayma chatted and the fourth-tiers debated, I was expanding and improving the tunnels that led through and around my interior. I didn’t have many, since they were mostly there for the inhabitants, Shayma, and Ansae, but even now I didn’t have enough resource generation to turn them all into stonesteel right away, especially since a number of them were being graced with Spatial Control fields. Earth mages still worried me, given how the [Earth Invoker] had managed to shortcut through my walls.

That had been pretty uncomfortable, though not actually painful, and it seemed to take more effort to breach the walls than the stone between. Judging by his mana he couldn’t have done it too many times, but a fourth tier could probably just dig straight to my Core if they wanted.

So I was taking steps there, too. Since I could just teleport Shayma to my core room, I created a shell around it. I had to run threads of my own dungeon-stone through it, since I couldn’t disconnect myself from the rest of the dungeon, but that was fine. I could make hundreds, thousands of thin stonesteel strands and it was a better use of the material than hallways, because I filled the shell with layers of magma and ice to keep the elementalists out.

I wished I could run myself through strands of metal, but I still hadn’t managed to unlock the use of metals for my own structure. The stuff was just sitting in my inventory in raw form, interesting but useless. I could spit it out like stone or biomass, into loose stuff lying on the floor, but it wasn’t part of me and I couldn’t manipulate it. I couldn’t even manage to finagle it with mana flows the way I had with the flower bouquet. Clearly I was missing something, but I had no idea what. Maybe I’d have to see if I could use [Assimilation] on some sort of metallic structure.

Since I was stuck with them, for the moment at least, I just kept the stone threads thin and Spatially Controlled the shell from a respectable ten-meter gap to a massive hundred meters. Then for the heck of it used that same control to compress the angular direction, which actually resulted in a confusing distortion that I was pretty sure meant the core room was effectively smaller from the outside, but it wasn’t quite clear. But if I was hazy on how it worked, so would everyone else, and under that logic I kept it.

Then I started filling up the shell. Layer of magma, twenty meters thick. Inner shell of stone, coated with glass. Ten meter air gap, filled with the [Darkness] field. Another shell, this one of ice, encased by stone and glass and likewise filled with [Darkness]. Then more magma, air, ice, [Darkness]. The resulting layer-cake took its own tithe of my mana income, but it would, I hoped, be a difficult and painstaking process to penetrate.

New defense created! Calculating rewards…

16,000 experience granted.

After a moment of reflection, I saturated the whole thing with [Warding]. I didn’t generally keep the Skill active over my whole volume, because that took far too much mana and anyway I seemed to have a slight natural defense against divination. Mostly I kept it to a thin layer on the surface, so my guests could hunt in peace. But divination definitely could work under some conditions, given that twice people had used scrying crystals to track things down.

It seemed that no matter how much mana income I managed to create, it got eaten up again pretty rapidly.

Ansae made a few comments as I constructed my shield layers, mentioning poison and acid and making me wonder why I didn't have either of those things. I had kind of assumed that the boring tendrils used acid, but a closer look revealed that they used brute force and a touch of mana to break down and intake stone.

I had magma, and I knew volcanoes were usually a source of all kinds of nasty chemicals, but mine just seemed to generate heat. But then, it was just heating up my stone...which as far as I could tell was the blandest, most inoffensive feldspar to exist so I didn’t have any nifty impurities like sulfur or chlorine that would offgas from it. No luck with the surrounding stone, either, since it seemed to be mostly granite – which made finding iron ore in it maybe a little weird but nevermind.

I’d have to find some other source of rock or mineral to melt before I could kill people that way, it seemed.

I wasn’t just working on defending my core. I couldn’t really obfuscate the tunnel between the habitat and the surface, but I could and did layer in my various trap ideas. Not the useless sticky and spear traps, but things with lava and steam and water under tremendous hydraulic pressure. Even if that one guy had blunted it with his swords, the however many billion pascal water stream was one of the few home-grown traps that didn’t rely on heat.

Honestly, I had way too many weaknesses when I thought about it. Or rather, I didn’t have enough approaches. I seemed to be mostly stuck in earth-magma-water, and given that I had access to mana and a pretty reasonable knowledge of technology I really ought to be doing better.

Speaking of mana, I was running into an impasse there, too. I understood how the shower worked, but it needed something I didn’t yet know how to do. Which was twist mana into actual Affinities. The dynamo only sort-of had Affinities - now that I was actually trying to work with it I could tell it was subtly different than the mana people used, like it wasn’t quite fully realized. So trying to turn the flow from the ice flowers into an air conditioner...didn’t work.

I was hoping that once I talked with Ansae directly I could figure it out. It had to be a simple thing. Given that Ansae seemed to actually be able to see my weird mana, surely she had some idea of how to apply it. Actually, I was frustratingly limited despite being terribly busy.

The discussion between fourth-tiers wrapped up without anyone actually agreeing they should try and get rid of me, which was nice, but Yamal did say he’d go join Iniri, which was less nice. Well, good for her, but I didn’t want the guy around.

My awareness of the meeting faded when they dropped me as a topic of conversation, moving onto matters of Wildwood administration that I was just as happy to not have to listen to. It was a pretty spectacular ability though, to just hear and see whatever, and made me feel like a bit of a bogeyman. Speak of my name and I shall appear! Virtually appear, anyway.

It was something to keep secret, though. From everyone but Shayma, at least. Even Iniri couldn’t really be trusted with the knowledge. She had her own loyalties and a whole kingdom to worry about. When she took it back, anyway.

“Looks like Monat is going to track you down in a little bit here,” I warned Shayma. “He’s going to start sending people over.”

“Great!” She said, confusing Keri for a moment. Those two seemed to get along pretty well. Keri was pretty adorable, actually, being so ridiculously cheerful, and the fact that for some reason she had a mouth full of shark teeth made her either more or less adorable, depending on the circumstances. Annit was somewhat more reserved, which I understood, since in her position I wouldn’t have trusted me either.

“Blue says that some people are ready to go join Iniri,” she explained, and Keri glanced around as if expecting them to burst through the door.

“Is...is he spying on the whole city?” She asked, eyes wide.

“Not the whole city,” Shayma said, a little bit impishly. “Anyway, they’ll probably need me to set up the teleporter in a little bit. When we’re wrapped up here...Blue, do you think you could make them their own cottage or something?”

“Since you’re asking, of course. I could even set up a training room if they tell you what they want in it. I don’t have monsters, but I can make a parkour course?”

“Parkour?”

“Oh, ah, obstacle course type of thing. I could also make open areas for sparring. That kind of thing.”

“He says that won’t be any problem and he can set up training areas if you have anything in mind.” Shayma relayed back to them.

“Well, it’s always best to start with low-level monsters,” Annit said with a frown.

“Blue doesn’t do monsters. We’ll have to use the borderlands until we teleport back? Then I suppose we’ll have to find something near him.”

“What sort of dungeon doesn’t have monsters?” Keri asked, fingers playing idly with the primal Source. She hadn’t let go of it since it had changed color, her mana flowing through it and back into her body even without using any Skills.

“The Blue kind,” Shayma grinned. “He’s in a nearly mana-dead area but I’m sure there will be somewhere closer than Wildwood you can train me. Not to mention Vok Nal’s lesser forces.”

Annit and Keri exchanged glances at that. “We’ve been out on the borderlands here since before the invasion,” Annit said. “How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad,” Shayma admitted. “Tor Kot has Taere, Invin, Duenn, and Laeer.” She listed off four of the five major cities, holding up her fingers. “And Vok Nal took over Meil about six months ago. They aren’t expanding anymore, just raiding the countryside for slaves and such, but that’s bad enough. I passed a number of ruined villages on the way here.”

“That’s why I wanted to stay out here,” Annit sighed. “Give me monsters any day over wars.”

“But we can help there too, and adventure!” Keri was not at all daunted. “I bet we can level up faster there, too. You’ve always said you get more experience from being outnumbered or endangered.”

“That doesn’t mean that you should be endangered. You’re a [Healer]!”

“I can’t stay inside the city walls forever, Annie.” Keri’s narrowed her eyes at Annit. “You promised we’d go adventuring when I evolved my Class and we could actually get a party together. You promised. And this is definitely an adventure!”

Annit sighed. “You’re right. I suppose we can’t start out in Wildwood anyway. We’ll come by the Flowering Branch tomorrow probably? How are you giving out these teleports, anyway?”

“Blue does it. He’ll have to take over some part of the street temporarily, probably.”

“I’m not sure the Grandmaster will like that,” Annit said doubtfully.

“It’s the Queen who’s asking, and anyway I’m pretty sure nobody else can teleport inside me now.”

“We should still warn him ahead of time. I know you like being dramatic and all, but that might not go over so well here.”

“Aw, but that’s the best part.”

“Hey, I thought I was the best part.”

“Um. Well, yes. But not in public...usually.”

Shayma giggled, while Keri and Annit stared. “Wait.” Keri said after a moment. “Are...are you flirting with Blue?”

“Um. A little bit?” This time it was my turn to laugh as Shayma answered, a touch flustered to be called on it.

“Oh my gods.” Keri turned to Annit. “Why can’t we do that?”

Annit was speechless.

The pair were going to be really fun when they actually did go adventuring, I could tell. I had no regrets about roping them in to help Shayma. It didn’t even matter if they weren’t as high level as they could be, since it wasn’t like Shayma was some powerhouse either. Yet. It didn’t matter that apparently Annit’s [Wind Hunter] was a pretty lackluster Class, either. Once I figured out how to make a wind Source I could give her something to buff her up, and probably give her a huge boost for her next Class evolution.

“Well, I’ll leave you two so you can figure out what you’re going to do. I’m probably going to have work soon and then...probably going to see if I can track down mom and dad, if they’re still here!”

“It was good to meet you Shayma!” Keri waved vigorously, seizing the hand of a still-poleaxed Annit. “We’ll catch up with you later!”

Shayma was barely holding back laughter as she escaped the room, emerging back into the clean-swept streets of Wildwood Reserve. No sooner had she exited the clinic than the rainbow-ribbon form of Lockert dove from the sky. “Oi,” he called. “Grandmaster wants to speak with you!”

“Yes, I imagine he does. Let’s go.” She adopted her more official mein, slightly cool and aloof, as Lockert flew a circle around her and lifted her into the sky. Looking out at the city spread below, I had a sudden thought.

“Hey, Shayma? If your parents are still in Wildwood...uh, how are you going to introduce me to them?”

“Um.”