A Lonely Dungeon

The hex bombs of Soutso are a terror to all, to their own almost as much as to us. Casting the spell drains the life force of all near by, at minimum killing the mage who channels the spell. The greater the drained life force, the greater the resulting destruction. Cast alone the spell can breach a town wall from a distance of hundreds of kilometres. Fed the lives of a few hundred, the same spell can erase a large city and all in it from existence. Where the spell strikes its effects linger, and nothing green will grow there again. The spell unmakes any mana constructs it encounters, rendering magical defences useless. It would be possible to disrupt the spell in flight by launching a physical object at it, but for larger castings the required mass would be impractical. The only feasible defence we can suggest is to fully cover likely targets in a dome constructed several hundred meters away from anything it needs to protect. Soutso does not use its regular army mages for these castings. The first wave was cast by coerced prisoners, but after the resulting destruction of several of their own targets by traitors they changed their tactics. They now conscript magically talented but uneducated people from their own farming villages, who are given three months of training to learn how to channel the spell before being used. Villages who refuse the conscription, where the conscript refuses to cast, casts at something other than the specified target or deserts are used as sacrifices for larger castings. The threat of the deaths of their family and village has thus far been effective at keeping their casters in line.

- Intelligence report on hex bombs from the kingdom of Jetosu

New material unlocked: Reinforced dungeon stone

Unlike the earlier town, no barrier protected this settlement. The walls were easily consumed, and turned out to be made of a higher tier of dungeon stone than Erryn had available. Erryn knew from experience that dungeon stone that was detached from a dungeon leaked mana, reverting to non-magical regular stone. Either the higher tiers didn't have that problem, or these walls had been treated in some way to prevent a mana leak. Or they were still attached to a dungeon... Erryn couldn't see any mana flows that would suggest that and there had been no reaction or counterattack to its assimilation of the walls, so an active dungeon seemed unlikely. Erryn generated some of all three types of available dungeon stone in an otherwise plain patch of surface, before deliberately detaching them and trying to remember to check up on them every few days. Although since Erryn could immediately see that the compressed dungeon stone was leaking mana at a slower rate than the basic dungeon stone, and the reinforced stone not leaking anything visible at all, the results could be guessed already.

The settlement itself was far smaller than the previous town. Despite that, the walls were thicker and higher. They were stronger too, given the material. The structures inside were all stone, but none remained standing. There were no normal residences but rather some buildings containing rows of bunk beds, forty to a room and still recognisable despite the rot. Another room held long crumbled tables and benches. Erryn's excessive fiction consumption allowed it to identify them as barracks and a mess hall. There were none of the usual trappings of a town, such as shops and restaurants. Erryn deduced that this was once a fortress, occupied by soldiers and not regular citizens. Given the terrain it commanded a wide view of the surrounding plains, but didn't block off a choke point or guard anything specific that Erryn could see. Without knowledge of human warfare, Erryn couldn't comment on the strategic importance of the location, but it did know that it was implausible that the walls simply fell over by themselves. The fortress had been attacked.

One chunk of the wall was simply... gone. No rubble or debris showed where it had once stood, but Erryn doubted that anyone would build a wall like this with a big hole in it. The buildings and remainder of the walls had fallen in a direction away from this point, with closer structures noticeably more badly damaged. It appeared that this castle had been struck by a single explosion, large enough to demolish it in its entirety. Whatever had done it, Erryn wanted nothing like it anywhere near the dungeon; anything that could just remove dungeon stone like that needed to be kept well away. Even worse was an uncomfortable feeling of wrongness that Erryn felt from this area. The mana flowed strangely and didn't quite do what Erryn wished. Whatever weapon caused all this destruction apparently had lingering effects that had lasted all this time.

Erryn was used to seeing skeletal remains in positions of day to day life; eating at tables, walking in the street, manning shop counters and the hundred other things happening daily in a town. There was none of that here. Some skeletons were well buried under rubble, but there were none in the barracks or mess halls. There were however a row of over a hundred bodies buried shallowly inside the courtyard, decayed debris above each body suggesting each one had marked with something that had since rotted to nothing. The destruction of this fortress had happened before the end; people were left alive here to bury their comrades. Given the utter destruction, Erryn was uncertain if that was an improvement for the people involved.

The presence of survivors also meant that the facility had been stripped of valuables. Under the central keep Erryn located what appeared to be another barrier generator, with runes laid out in the same pattern as the first town, but the central pedestal stood empty. If a dungeon core had been present there it had been taken. Armouries and storehouses similarly lay empty. Only large items whose value didn't outstrip the effort to move them remained, and even they were all broken in the explosion or decayed by time. A furnace sat in a smithy, coated in dust, the chimney snapped off half way up. Broken workbenches littered some other workshops of unknown purpose. There were no useful resources for Erryn to be found here.

Still, the level of decay of wooden items around here was not noticeably worse than in the towns and villages Erryn had previously seen, so the destruction couldn't have taken place too long before the wider ranged snuffing out of life. Erryn's best theory was that Jetosu and Soutso had been at war again, and that Soutso had deployed some sort of super weapon that had wiped out Jetosu in its entirety. Erryn had no idea what sort of weapon could snuff out all life, scorch the sky and seal away the sun, and had no desire to find out. Such a weapon should not have been permitted to exist in the first place.

Erryn built up some new markers out of stone for the graves. There was no reason for it; it just found itself feeling sentimental. Another inappropriate emotion with no logical basis. It wasn't as if Erryn knew these people, or was in any way responsible for them, or was even born before they died. It was like the time it discovered its monsters were starving to death. But Erryn had never desired to be cold and ruthless, driven only by hard logic, so it didn't resist the emotion. Yes, dungeons killed people, but it wasn't the same. Dungeons always offered a chance, a promise of risks and rewards, and before that a choice to accept that risk. These people never had a choice, or a chance. One spell, and they were gone. It was... saddening.

With the fortress taken, Erryn had very nearly reached the limits of its expansion. How many kilometres of land had it travelled now, without finding so much as a blade of grass still living? But its earlier assessment that the fortress was the last remaining point of interest within range turned out to be incorrect. Hidden in a crag in a cliff face, far from any settlement, was a door of stone. It was well camouflaged, practically invisible to sight, but not protected from Erryn's assimilation. Behind it was a tunnel, leading deep under ground, with more doors interspersed regularly. Someone had built something here, and hidden it and protected it well. There was no barrier, and Erryn swiftly moved in.

Writing greeted it, carved into a wall in large and heavy strokes, obviously designed to last. It proclaimed this structure a vault. Built away from any targets likely to draw attention in the war, built without mana to try and keep its construction and continued existence invisible. It was to be a store, containing what was needed to rebuild should Jetosu be consumed by war, and the stories of the kingdom so that something may remain to remember it.

Erryn found sacks of seeds, stored with preservation magic. All were dead. Whatever terror had ended Jetosu had reached even down here, the preservation magic simply preventing the dead seeds from rotting away. There was equipment for farming, smithing, tailoring and more. All well preserved, but with no hands left to wield them. There were books, thick tomes of the history of the kingdom. Maps of the kingdom. Maps of the world, albeit in less detail. Erryn learnt for the first time the name of the first town: Berju. There were crates of clothes and blankets, and food enough to provide for a hundred people for a year or more. There were no valuables here, aside from the preservation magic itself. This vault simply contained what was required to survive, and not to live in luxury. It was equipment to start a new village from scratch, under the assumption that the village had no-one to trade with and needed to be completely self sufficient.

Letters described the circumstances at the time the vault was built. Jetosu had been attacked. Soutso had deployed a horrible new weapon, and Jetosu had no defences. The capital had fallen before anyone had even realised what was happening, defensive barriers offering no resistance to this new magic. Fortresses destroyed, cities wiped off the map. The war could have been over before anyone had realised it had begun, but Soutso's new weapon was not infallible. Many of Soutso's own targets had somehow fallen in the first barrage, including the facility from which the attacks were launched. The emperor himself and many military aides had been present there to witness the destruction of Jetosu. The chain of command of both sides had thus been crippled, but the highly authoritarian Soutso was slower to recover as selfish nobles vied for power. Jetosu was able to regroup, and strike back. But Soutso still had the weapon, and Jetosu were preparing for the worst.

Other notes had been added in later, keeping a high level record of the progress of the war safe in this vault. Details of Soutso's new weapon were uncovered, named the hex bomb. It was by no means a perfect weapon, and after the initial wave they weren't able to rely on it to carry the war. Jetosu had pushed deep into Soutso territory. Soutso had largely been abandoned by their smaller vassal states, which were ruled through fear rather than respect, fear that was swiftly departing as Jetosu pushed further. The same largely held true for their own citizens, villages and towns happily defecting as soldiers of Jetosu approached. The early pessimism had given way to belief that Jetosu would win the war.

And after that note, nothing. Apparently at the point the morale of Jetosu was highest, at the point they were poised to claim victory, the end had come. If Soutso had such a method of immediately ending the war, why had they waited until such a point to deploy it? Given the attacks on cities, they obviously had no qualms killing civilians. The notes reported on the downsides of the hex bombs, the life force that needed to be absorbed to channel the spell. Perhaps this super weapon had a similar drawback. Perhaps it had not, in fact, targetted Jetosu. A hex bomb so large that it did not need targetting at all. A hex bomb that was deliberately fed all life on the planet, without differentiating between enemy and ally. A weapon of last resort, to ensure that even if Soutso lost the war, at least Jetosu wouldn't win. That the citizens and vassals that had deserted Soutso were punished accordingly. That would explain why not a single blade of grass had survived the devastation. It also meant that even growing as far as the Jetosu borders would not help Erryn in finding life.

The thought was completely and utterly horrifying. Erryn just... stopped. In the face of that what was it supposed to think? To do? What sort of world had it been born to? It had felt sentimental over those hastily constructed graves, but this? For the first time in the history of the world, a dungeon cried.