As we returned Argent took a sudden detour. Curious, I allowed it. She lead us to a dark corner of the sewers were the walls were split open, a crumbling alcove dug into the soft dirt behind the broken stone. A pair of bright yellow eyes fixed on us from the shadows.

Argent’s froze in terror and then slowly began to edge back. From the shadows padded an enormous creature - at least compared to us. It had the white, wise face of an owl, and the shaggy body of a raccoon, its fur matted with dried blood. Wings sprouted from its back. Some kind of mutant chimera.

With a sudden burst of defiance, Argent rose on to her hindlegs.

I realized suddenly.

She thought I was a god. This must be the creature that wounded her before, and she wanted revenge now. She thought I could simply smite it with wrathful fire.

I did the mental equivalent of an uncomfortable cough.

I hated to reveal myself as less than omnipotent, but as the owlcoon spread its wings and reared up, I frantically signalled to retreat. The beast lunged forward and it was like an avalanche of flesh falling upon us. I screamed sheer panic into Argent’s brain and she responded on instinct-

There was a flash of light and then we were elsewhere.

We had passed through the beast, appearing on its other side, within its den. I saw a wealth of gold sparkling in the dark, grimy trinkets salvaged from the sewer’s flow. Argent seized the battered silver lid of a tobacco tin in her jaws, and turned just as the owlcoon did.

Two mortal enemies faced off.

The owlcoon moved slowly, using its full bulk to block off the entrance. All light was swiftly blotted out behind brown-and-black fur.

Argent jumped again, slipping through space and coming out on the other side of the beast.

But this time it was ready.

One of its hind talons kicked out, striking Argent in the side. The lid went skittering across the floor as she opened her mouth to let out a pitiful squeal, sent rolling by the force of the blow, blood dotting the pale fur of her haunches. We came up on our feet and ran.

A split second later the owlcoon smashed against the ground where we had been, turning faster than I thought possible for something so big. Another burst of speed and it was upon us.

We leaped. Space bent and split like a kaleidoscope, and then collapsed back into normal, only with us a few feet away now. The owlcoon’s jaws snapped at empty air.

We kept that pace, limping away, teleporting whenever the beast was upon us, until we turned a corner. A barred grating stood before us. We ran for the safety it represented.

And in the moment before we reached it, the owlcoon reached us. Argent tried to leap. There was always a brief moment of resistance when the fabric of reality tried to prevent us from punching through. This time, we failed to push past it, and went…

Nowhere. No escape from the descending claws. The owlcoon had taken flight, its wings scraping the top of the sewer tunnel, its talons stretched out and reached for us as it swooped down.

We reached the grate and struggled to squeeze through, Argent’s ribs actually bending to let her scrape between the bars. Too slow. Too little. As we wriggled halfway through the owlcoon caught us. Pain lanced through us - the first pain I had ever felt - as sharp claws dug into our hindquarters. There was a sudden wrenching pull and that pain exploded into something unbearable.

The rat’s back left leg was gone. We fell through the grate, smearing blood behind us. Argent let out a defeated squeal and limped the last few inches to safety as the owlcoon’s claws thrust through the bars and raked the ground.

She collapsed. Unconscious.

 

 

I was suddenly deprived of my link to her, of her senses and sight. I was alone again.

I frantically sent mental prods to Aurum, causing him to raise his sleepy head. I beamed images of Argent to him, tried to communicate the desperate flight from the owlcoon, the dire situation I’d left her in. To my vast relief he seemed to understand.

Uncurling from around the egg, he slithered away and out of my sight.

I waited. For once I was unhappy to be a Dungeon Core, to be utterly unable to move or fight on my own. I could only wait and waiting felt like a prison.

All this had happened because Argent had naively believed I was a god. No, all this had happened because I wasn’t.

It felt like years before Aurum returned, my rat clutched in his coils. He lifted her into the heights of the Sanctum and laid her down next to me.

Already I was pouring Mana into her wounds, trying to fix her. The leg was gone. There was no helping that. But I could stop the bleeding.

Aurum turned and departed again.

I stopped him, sending negatory thoughts. No. It wasn’t time yet. I would kill that damn chimera. I would kill it with a fire and a fury.

But right now, I couldn’t have both my right and left hand wounded. I couldn’t afford to risk Aurum.

I had to handle this like a Dungeon Core. I would wait and serve vengeance cold.

So wait I did. I let the hours trickle by, watching over Argent, letting my Mana replenish as Soul fragments slowly floated up to me from my gardens. Finally, the hundredth ember of Soul energy was dragged into my core.

A long, harmonious chime filled the entire Dungeon.

I had leveled.

My territory swelled out, a sudden rush of Mana billowing out of my core and expanding the ethereal cloud. The tiny corner of the world that was mine swelled to include a t-shaped fork in the tunnel on one side, and on the other, my ethereal feelers reached out and found an outflow grate; sunlight poured through from the far side.

But - and I had been thinking about this - I wasn’t satisfied. Narrow tunnels were good for channeling intruders, but they were very poor for maximizing my zone of control. Presently, if we calculated my territory as a sphere, most of it was taken up with solid rock.

Thankfully, I was a Dungeon.

Over the course of the next few hours I did nothing but devour rock and dirt, slowly eroding away the wall opposite the door to my Sanctum. After hours of work I suddenly burst through, finding exactly what I had expected - a tunnel opposite the one I’d taken over. My cloud of influence expanded through the channel I’d dug and I rapidly widened the gap.

Unfortunately, the tunnel I’d burst into was in use. Detritus and worse was sluicing through, and I gagged a little, mentally. With a godlike command I simply collapsed the upriver end of the tunnel, wearing away the ceiling until the loose dirt behind the brickwork poured through and sealed us off.

I continued to widen the connected between the two tunnels for most of the day, until finally, I had made a wide open clearing of mud and muck. Perfect ground for expanding my fungus garden. What I now controlled looked like a fat-bellied ‘H’ with one of its legs amputated.

I considered closing off my other connection to the human world, but that seemed unwise. I still wanted so many things I could only get by infiltrating their city. Instead, I merely weakened the walls and ceiling until I could collapse it on short notice.

All this time I had been steadily stockpiling Mana, and now it was time to spend it. About five points went directly to expanding the garden, spreading Nematocelia, Bloody Cups, common button mushrooms and slimy algae across the newly cleared ground. Here, instead of digging their roots into a shallow layer of dirt over a stone bed, they could lay down proper foundations. I even used a gentler form of my ‘eating’ to loosen up the soil, making it easy for them to intwine their complex networks of fungal tendrils through the earth.

With the, ahem, leavings from the blocked sewer tunnel serving as manure, my new garden was well positioned to thrive. I dug several pits into the ground with channels between them, thinking they’d fill the next time it rained hard enough to fill my flood tunnel.

Finally, I seeded rats, toads, and other small vermin throughout, burning another five Mana, which was most of what I’d earned from the Nematocelia’s catches that day. It was worth it however. Common creatures like these were prodigious breeders and I’d be reaping Mana with every new generation born and, in time, buried. I had formed an ecosystem in a bottle.

And to keep outside intruders from intervening, I had just the thing. When my territory expanded I had discovered an unusual fungus hiding in a crack in the walls. A shy creature, it would release spores whenever it detected movement, spores that carried a sleeping poison. I absorbed it and, after a moment’s hesitation, took it as one of my Schema.

The image in my head suddenly clarified. I understood every cell of that simple lichen, the crude building blocks and complex working whole.

And because of that understanding, I could replicate it for barely any Mana.

My creation barely resembled the lowly original. Huge stalks sprouted from the floor of my dungeon, towering up to the ceiling. Spiraling patterns of tiny paper-thin feelers sprouted along their lengths, a translucent white but tinged at their tips with a colorful splash of electric blue. Even a slight pressure on those feelers would cause the stalk to spray soporific poisons into the air.

They looked like a pale corkscrew flower, strange and beautiful. I made a veil of them, covering the entrance to the dungeon, but purposefully left gaps that smaller creatures would slip through. A filter. Letting my prey in and keeping my predators out. A little like the combs of baleen whales.

There it was again.

How on earth did I know what a baleen whale is?

I hesitate to point out the obvious, but a baleen whale can’t even fit into a sewer. Of all the knowledge in the world to be taking up space in my mind I couldn’t think of anything that would be more unlikely or useless.

And just when I started to ask myself questions, a notification burst into my mind and scattered those thoughts.