A Lonely Dungeon

Our mission is a success. The outside world is gone, utterly destroyed by the last war between the races. Here, in our ark, in our unity, we live on still. The combination of the magic of the elves, technology of the dwarfs, ingenuity of the humans and the perseverance of the demons has given rise to something far greater than any of its individual parts. We have survived the world's end. Next comes the hard part; the world's beginning. We will create a united world, one without division, whose inhabitants will live on freely without the threat of war.

- From the diary of a member of the ark project

"Umm... System? Show me my status?"

There was no response. System assisted summoning was down and Skills were unusable. That was... a problem for another day, frankly. Erryn had just spent a week fighting for its life and was not about to go diving straight into another predicament. The links between cores seemed stable despite the... loss? Temporary misplacement? Whatever of [Mana Mastery]. Erryn could afford to take a break. So Erryn rested.

The smog cover broke apart, exposing the surface to the sun for the first time in decades. It made very little difference. There was still no life on the surface, so the sunlight simply lit up the brown and greys more brightly. However, it also shone down on the seas and lakes. Clouds formed. Wind blew. It rained, the patter of raindrops adding some sound to the previously silent surface.

Erryn stirred, and surveyed the damage. Vines and plants were growing uncontrolled in the dungeon, but at normal biologically sensible speeds. They would need to be left unattended for a long time before causing damage. Mana vision and mana control still worked, Erryn having mastered them properly and not simply relied on the Skill. Complex summoning or relocations were off the table for now, and [Inventory] could not be accessed, the status of everything stored within unknown. Neither did [Analysis] work. Enchanting was still fine, Erryn having never relied on that Skill to begin with.

More interestingly, the mountain void was a void no longer. The System crash had removed the interference that had blocked Erryn from entering or even perceiving that section of mountain. Erryn moved in, interested in what had been hidden there so well. There was a well disguised entrance hidden in the rock, leading to a tunnel whose walls shifted from stone to steel only a few metres in. That led deeper into the mountain, to solid and heavy doors that nevertheless posed no obstacle to Erryn. The interior seemed somewhat like a military barracks, but the design was something Erryn had never seen before. There were rooms that were obviously used for residence, but never more than four beds to a room unlike soldier barracks that slept dozens. The bedrooms came in different varieties too, with vastly different decorations and even bed sizes. There were mess halls, kitchens and store rooms, but no weapons, and no visible defences. Although quite obviously that did not mean that there were no defences at all.

The store rooms contained not only seeds, but also eggs and young animals in time suspending preservation enchantments. Tellingly, there were no runes involved. They were also of a higher quality than the preservation enchantment made available by [Rune Crafting], which would have torn apart something as complex as an animal. Furthermore, they were all still living, apparently protected from the life eating hex bomb. There was enough here to repopulate the world with plant and animal life.

Erryn found documents and books. They couldn't be read with [Analysis] or [Inventory] but that no longer mattered. Erryn smiled inwardly at the difficulty it had reading its first book, as it conjured up a tiny and perfectly controlled speck of air affinity, blowing pages over one by one. Even without the fingers and thumbs of the golems, reading was now a simple task. Erryn learnt that the war between Jetosu and Soutso was not the first time the surface of the world had been destroyed, that there was an earlier world where multiple sentient races had walked. After they had destroyed themselves this ark project had rebuilt the world. They used samples of the original plants and animals, but not of the sentient races. Having watched the races war among themselves for centuries, they decided that the only path to peace was to have only a single sentient race. They had combined traits from elves, dwarfs, humans and demons to create something new, and set them loose upon the world. They'd even gone so far as to ensure no difference in the colour of skin, hair or eyes.

They had created the System. A magi-technological marvel that could monitor and manipulate the entire world. Much of Erryn's assumption was correct; the purpose of the System was to stymie progress, to prevent the new population of the world from building weapons of sufficient scale to threaten the world's existence. This new population was released onto the surface with no understanding of science or of mana, or even the truth of where they had come from, and the System offered easy access to abilities and personal power. What reason would they have to begin research from scratch? Dungeons were effectively a part of the system, artificial constructs that crammed in sentient souls, existing to provide a common enemy for the new humanity to unite against and to provide a controlled supply of resources that were deemed too dangerous to permit humanity to manufacture on their own.

After setting up the foundation of the new world, the ark project members had simply died off of old age, largely remaining within this facility. They were after all of the old races, and had no part in this new world. They built it to replace themselves, not to be a part of it. All they had done outside was to restock the supplies of seeds and animals, in case something went wrong and they needed to restart. Erryn commended their foresight. The fatal mistake they had made in their assumptions was obvious, in Erryn's opinion: They thought that just because everyone looked alike that there would be no division. They seriously overestimated their creation.

Likewise, Erryn was of the opinion that they had also made a mistake in their execution. This little secret society had obviously held free will in a high regard. They structured the System to discourage external progress, but did nothing to physically prevent it. As such, the animosity between empires led to them devoting vast budgets to searching for ways to rise above their enemy, eventually culminating in development of the hex bomb. The System obviously had the capability of perception manipulation, and Erryn itself had used mind manipulation so it should be capable of that too. Giving complete free will to their creations was too much of a risk, and one that they hadn't needed to take.

Erryn looked upon the rooms full of machinery, enchantments embedded into tiny flakes of orichalcum with a fidelity well beyond anything Erryn was capable of. This was the physical form of the System, and Erryn held the instruction manual. And the reset button. Erryn smiled to itself again. It would do better; it would create a world that truly knew peace. A world in which war was not only not an option, but was not even a word in their language.

The previously created humanity was a failure, and was not needed for what Erryn had planned. It would restore the original races of this world. Or perhaps they were the races that a previous ark project had created after yet another older world ending event. Who knew? But Erryn could only work with what it had available. This was actually more than just the elves, dwarfs, humans and demons that survived till the end; there was material here from all of the old races. Fairies, beastkin and more had been eradicated before the final war. The last four survived largely because at that point should an alliance form between any two against one other, the fourth would join in to protect the target, lest the alliance finish them off next. It had been stability of a sort, up until the final four-way war.

Erryn marched in a few golems, who began poking at buttons on the machinery.

System commencing hard reset.

System boot in progress...

Entity 'Erryn' registered as administrator.

Blades of grass pushed up through the soil. More plant life followed them. Soon animals would be released to breed. It would be a long time yet before the world was ready to support sentient races once more, but at least it was now a question of when and not if.

Erryn thought back to the dungeon rules it was born with. Even there, nothing physically stopped it from breaking them. It simply knew when one was broken, and had a strong instinct to fix it. In this new world, it would not be instinct. It would be Law, written into the very souls of the people and impossible for them to disobey. Impossible to even consider disobeying. They would be Erryn's people. And Erryn would be... Not a god. A protector, there to protect these self-destructive children from themselves. A mother then. Erryn would be the mother of these people.

It... no, she smiled to herself as she began reconfiguring the System. An intelligence completely alien to the humans, an artificially created predator born to lure and kill, had decided to serve as their protector instead. But Erryn had never met one of the races she had decided to recreate. She had never met anyone. An intelligence that was alien to start with had spent its whole life alone, trapped in a world devastated by war and forced to deal with the aftermath. And as she set up new rules within the System to strip her children of their free will, and even to hide from them the fact that their freedom had been taken, she thought only of what a nice and loving thing she was doing for them.

No longer just a dungeon, but in Erryn's eyes the mother and protector of all intelligent life. To the eyes of those of the ark project, were they still here, the ultimate authoritarian dictator. And thus the world began its next cycle. How long this one would last until it reached the inevitable next period of destruction, only time would tell.