Seeing this the much more expensive assassin vine starts to make ever more sense. Not that he plans to use them on this floor. That can come later. For now, he decides on a small wolf pack. Ten dungeon wolves for 500 points, five stone wolves to act as mounts for Her companions for 375, and five wind wolves priced at another 375 for a total of 1250 points.

At this point, though, Doyle really doesn’t feel the need to add more monsters. Though he does chuckle to himself when he realizes with the points left he could summon in another 461 goats. Still, it doesn’t feel right to not spend the points.

Since he doesn’t want to add more, that leaves an increase in quality. The stone wolves are up first, getting two additional levels each, spending another 750 points. This leaves a bit more than a thousand points, and that is when it hits him.

Before the people from up-river had come around he had unlocked a new feature, the farm zone. A handy little thing that simplifies stocking his dungeon. If he remembers it correctly, monsters in the farm zone only count as a tenth of their point total for the floor. Of course he can’t just call them out, they need an actual vacancy on the floor proper.

Upside is that from how it sounded, they are treated as almost a sub-floor. While it does prevent him from flooding a floor with monsters, it also removes the chance of others finding the farm and getting some easy kills.

But the key thing right now is he has a little more than a tenth of the floor’s point cap. That means he can make a farm with all the animals with room for a pool of breeding stock, so he never has to summon the animals again. This is of course possible because even with delvers on the floor, anything in the farm zone will still be advancing at an accelerated pace.

Now Doyle just has to figure out where the farm zone should go. Except it doesn’t take much for him to come up with the perfect place. With a swipe of mental power, Doyle hollows out the hill and makes the inner section into the farm zone.

Extra points squared away, all that is left is to outfit the kobolds. Of course, those that came from the first floor are already equipped. Though now that Doyle looks over them again he realizes the equipment needs an update. This isn’t the first floor, so he doesn’t have to be too light on the equipment. At least not for the five companions.

So with that in mind he equips the four melee fighters with full armor consisting of gauntlets, greaves, boots, a tunic, helmet, shield, and cloak. For weapons he gives each of them a different one. An axe, bow, mace, and spear. Then the healer kobold also gets dressed to the nines, even if instead of bronze, everything ends up as leather. And of course to top it off, Doyle makes it all loot and drops five silver coins on each of them as well as a random healing potion, including the special ones.

For the rest of the kobolds, Doyle first pulls away one from each group to be the herders. Since the five would be in charge of the animals, they get a full set of leather armor with a shillelagh. Though only the weapons are loot this time and a single silver coin each. That leaves the five groups of 15 to take care of.

The simple way would be to set them up like the kobold in charge of them. However, Doyle has this feeling that 15 casters in a single group is just asking for trouble. Instead, he decides on each of the five groups being composed of the same breakdown of gear.

A healer with tunic, cloak, and wand. Two casters of random elements wearing the same. A trio of kobolds dual wielding daggers with helmets, cloaks, and boots for sneaky nonsense. Four spear users are set up with helmets, tunics, greaves, boots, and gauntlets. And finally, five kobolds wielding maces and shields who are decked out in a full set of gear minus the cloaks. Then instead of specifically assigning what would be loot, Doyle makes a random piece on each them be the loot like he has been doing with the potions.

Satisfied with the results, Doyle pulls back to watch them construct their town. Of course, in normal circumstances this would take a significant amount of time. Luckily not only are the inhabitants sped up when no one is delving, the dungeon material practically falls apart how they need it. Not because it is weak, but because this is what Doyle intended to happen. Even the rocks are smashed up right quick.

Once the town is done, wall and all, Doyle has one more thing for them to do. Right now there is a bunch of extra space along the sides and especially in the corners. To make use of it, Doyle gets the kobolds to dig out large tunnels through the free area. And once the tunnels have been made Doyle moves the entrance portal to a random corner, along with scooping out a medium sized room.

Tunnels finished Doyle made sure that the kobolds would send out patrols to keep the area safe. Or more likely to give adventurers a chance. Anyone capable of fighting through so many kobolds would be too strong for it to matter. Having two or three of the groups off checking the tunnels will turn the impossible into the possible. Though it also means that even if a group has seen a tunnel is empty, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

Doyle pulls back and looks at the floor as a whole before laughing. The only thing on the floor that is predetermined is the hill and the farm. He hadn’t meant to do it this way, but the boss floor is the most random floor yet. Even the maze floor was just a bunch of set pieces. While randomly placed, Doyle is certain the delvers will realize what is going on, eventually.

Here? The floor is built anew by the kobolds whenever Doyle wants. Sure, he hasn’t set it up to do that. But having the options means he will probably use it. Though with that thought Doyle realizes he will probably forget about it given enough time. Sure, with time his first floor boss won’t exactly be the hot new thing. That doesn’t mean he wants the floor to become formulaic.

Given time, Doyle is certain that delivers will figure out the best ways to clear the floor and pull off the various groups. If video games had taught him anything, it is that people will try the craziest things to cheese a dungeon. At least he is mostly certain there won’t be any problems with people finding untargetable areas and beating everything without any danger. While the most monsters aren’t sapient, they are a good deal better than the AI of any video game he had ever played.

Now the question is how often he wants to reset the floor? The once a day thing with the maze has more to do with having to respawn the ores than any actual desire to make it shuffle so much. Still, he doesn’t want it to take too long. From how he understands it, the boss will be like a checkpoint to the lower floors, so Doyle doesn’t want anyone getting through too easily.

Though in the future Doyle admits there will be places, he wants to randomize, more or less. Once a day is a decent starting point, but it doesn’t leave a lot of lower options. Sure, splitting it up by half a day, six hours, an hour, and so on could work, but it just seems too fiddly.

Doyle shakes his core, ‘Once a day should be the lower limit for the moment. From there, I guess it would follow the natural cycle of things. A week, a month, a year, and so on. Depending and given how long people can live I might even end up with once in a hundred year randomizations or even longer.’

‘Also, there is technically one step that could technically end up quicker than once a day that I want to try. But it would be more in line with special conditions like having a maze floor that randomizes right after someone solves it. But yeah, randomizing an entire floor for every new group would be hilarious on the first floor with how often people are kicking about there.’

He goes on for a while longer thinking of other special conditions for randomizing things. While many of the options were quite interesting, they really went down hill in practicality until his attention came back to the fifth floor. He didn’t even need to consider it at this point and pegged it to be randomized once a week. Once a month is too much time and he didn’t want to mess around with counting days. This of course ignores the fact that a week isn’t exactly some universal constant, not that he would care. After all, if he ever did end up on a planet where they didn’t have weeks or they lasted for ten days he could just change it up.

For now, he had one final thing to do on the floor. Despite Her ability to command the kobolds and mold the floor, she isn’t a boss yet. In fact, without Doyle noticing it he was the one creating the scene that played out. Like puppets on strings, they danced to his will, his human mind beginning to warp even further from what it had been to deal with keeping track of everything at once.

Not from some force corrupting him. Rather, this is just an inevitable side effect of no longer having his mind and soul within a human body. What is strange isn’t that it is happening, but that more hasn’t happened. Most flesh based beings that turn into a dungeon core will end up radically altered with core beliefs shattered and central goals forgotten. The goat incident alone would have altered a common mind beyond recognition. Yet here Doyle is, slowly stretching his mind to multitask without the system’s help for the first time.

In her room Ally notices the change. Before now she would have ignored the change or not even detect it because it came from the soul bond. Not that she understands what it means, but even through the corrupted muck that had built up on the connection she can feel the bond hum in two different rhythms, as if two minds were on the other end.

Not feeling like proving Doyle right and going back to people watching she is tempted to turn her gaze towards what he is doing. Then she twinges, remembering a past reaction from him. She had revealed that she would watch him without his notice and how that had unsettled him. With a grimace, this one memory dredges up time after time that similar events had happened, and she curls up on her bed again.

Ally cradles her head, ‘This isn’t what I wanted! Why did it turn out this way? I thought I had pulled the lucky straw when I found out he was so developed, a real person already! Now all I can do is lay here sick to my stomach at the corrupted bond. How did that even happen! I need to examine it closer, I need to know why! There has to be a reason.’

She settles in to feel out the corruption and cross check with the universal net. Not that she will find much help there. Soul bonds are not something people share, and definitely not something that you can get help from someone on. They are too personal, a mix of all the souls involved.

Plus, the answer is so simple that most people would miss it. The Fae are more of the soul than they are of the body and mind. Part of this connection of the soul is expressed through bonds. Like the Devil’s and their contracts, the Fae are intertwined with their bonds. Simply put, Ally has failed her bond and so her core, the soul, has started to darken. The corruption on the bond is just one of the more visible results. At least for now, though, the change has been halted. Hopefully this kick to the butt she received is enough to truly change her for the better.

Akhier

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