The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 23/100

Heart 1,904,400/1,904,400

Experience 332,421/476,100

Workers 27/139

Monsters 9/141

Traps 118/339

Food 6,349

Timber 7,322

Iron 2,292

Steel 905

Mithril 922

Mithril Ore 0

Adamantine 917

Adamantine Ore 0

Charcoal 3,658

Mana 4,950

Rock 1,293

Gold 6,057

Leather 216

Leather Sludge 215

Lava 501

Ice 10

Glass 483

Explosive Runes 30

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Long Guns 30

Bullets 400

Black Powder 400

Poison, Greater 500

Deadly Scorpion Venom 76

Sulfur 708

Quest: Kill the boss of another dungeon.

Quest: Half populate your dungeon: Workers 27/66 | Monsters 9/67 | Traps 118/162

Quest: Delve to the bottom of a dungeon with at least 20 floors.

From the top of the wizard tower Katelyn could see for miles outside the city walls, which was good for Travis because it meant he could see that far too. XP was rolling in and all Katelyn could tell him was that she saw lots of dust on the horizon.

Quest Complete: Kill the boss of another dungeon.

New Quest: Kill 100 city dwellers.

Travis said a good few swear words. Normally he would have kept them to himself, but Fife had asked nicely if he could share any such with her, and he'd found that doing so put a huge grin on her face every time. "I just got a quest to kill a hundred people from Northridge."

Leaning back on her chair, Fife nodded to Huntress and said, "I gotta talk to Trav—my dungeon—for a second. Okay, Trav, so just pay them and have one of us make it quick and painless."

"Rupert might not like that. Would he be okay, do you think, if we paid him extra?"

"We have the weirdest conversations, but I appreciate the new swearing. Okay, I'll go and ask him." Fife stood up and stretched.

"There is literally no rush on it. We— Pen's back. Wow, she's got a lot of XP. Maxed out her mage class!" The moment Penelope was back over the city's walls, even flying, Travis asked her, "What happened?"

"Lots of stuff. We need to talk about possibly getting some refugees. Hilda was not having a good day." She didn't elaborate further, focusing on losing altitude to land.

With her circling lower and lower over the city, Travis was surprised to see that far from the guards threatening to shoot Penelope, they were cheering her on. "I have to figure out how to get these lizards so they can hear." While she was in the process of landing, Travis made a note in his heart room to ask Rupert about the use of resurrections for things other than violent or accidental situations.

"I'll talk in my boss room. Let everyone know there'll be a meeting there, can you, Trav?"

As Penelope pressed forward, toward Travis' dungeon entrance, there was a weird sensation as her definitely-bigger-than-the-entrance bulk easily compacted down so that she was able to walk in the tunnels.

She knew she was smaller inside, but she still felt her mass and power. Sparing a nod for a few townsfolk who were waiting to head into the kitchen area, she thanked them for having lunch in the dungeon, and kept moving.

Taking the long stairs directly to the bottom floor, she disregarded the stone and pushed her way through to her boss room. Inside what should have been a ten-by-ten room like the others, it looked like she had closer to forty-by-forty. She relaxed and stepped further in and decompressed into her full size. "Ohhh. I like this," she said, seeking out a big stone bed in one corner, right beside the angry-looking acid that bordered the room.

Fife was the first to arrive. She'd left Huntress behind with an apology and a promise of more lessons. "Oh wow. Look at this place! I didn't come down here to check it out since you got your new powers, but damn! Trav told us you'd become a dragon now. Hey, try biting me!" Looking around the huge, vaulted boss room, Fife was perfectly aware that this was far too big to fit where it was on the map. "What happens if we tunnel in from another direction? How much acid is that? Where did your swords go?"

"Fife, take a deep breath and wait for the others. Trav, how many are coming?" Penelope had to lift one foreleg to shove Fife back from trying to grab at her. "What are you doing?"

Fife glared at Penelope. "Let me hug you—just once."

"Once?"

"Definitely once." Fife waited until Penelope nodded and then rushed up to her and hugged against her friend's neck. "Oooh, you're so soft!"

"If you make this awkward, Fife, I'll…" What Penelope didn't want to tell Fife was that it felt nice to be hugged. Since becoming a kobold and finding herself in love with Travis, she hadn't gotten much close contact. "A little more's okay."

Travis watched Penelope relax, and though he felt a touch of jealousy of Fife, he could see that the woman he loved got something she needed. "Katelyn and Luddy are almost there. Wild will get the Cliff notes from Luddy, he said. Felna and Astrid are coming down too. The rest said they'd catch up on news later."

"Astrid? Huh, yeah, good idea. I should have probably said to get her down here." Penelope eventually pushed Fife away when she could hear more people arriving. "Okay, enough."

Fife surrendered Penelope and let herself be pushed backward. She wondered, for a moment, who would win in a shoving match, but then Ludmiller, Brayden, Katelyn, Felna, Astrid, and Robert arrived. Blake walked in a moment later. "Is this all, Trav?"

"All that's coming. I'm relaying it to a few others, but otherwise we might as well start. Pen, what happened?" Travis asked.

"Okay, let me get it in order. First thing, flying is exactly as amazing as you can imagine, and then some. When I flew out, I saw the northerners coming back toward the city with an army of goblins behind them." As she began talking, though, Penelope could see the confusion on Astrid's face. She repeated her beginning, in the language that she'd picked up from Travis, and saw surprise register now instead. "After waking from my upgrade, I found I'd shared some stuff from Trav. It was very useful."

So, with a little repeating herself every so often (to fill Astrid in), Penelope told her tale. She embraced her memories and recalled every emotion as she'd strafed the goblins. When she got to the part where she'd told Hilda to leave, Astrid barked a laugh.

"You let a wolf more dangerous even than me go, then. Now her army are hungry for victory and don't care for their own lives." Astrid liked the story, though. She hoped that Hilda would see sanity and leave this place.

"That's not the end of it," Penelope said, then repeated for Astrid. She explained the attack of the elite goblins and their bosses. Of the magical spores that had almost taken her down (or so she assumed). When she explained that to Astrid, she nodded.

"Fungus magics from a rot dungeon are the foulest of all. It would have been a slow death, gasping for air and only drowning as its rot grows inside you. If you're lucky, and die away from your friends, they might not catch it too."

"She saved me, then. Hilda stuffed some kind of rag over my nose and it killed the fungus," Penelope said in the northerner language.

Leaning back and looking up at the cave-like ceiling of the room far above, Astrid worked over the meaning behind it in her mind. "She respects you—probably more than she did me. Be careful, though. Respect doesn't mean she doesn't want to kill you herself."

The language was still a little thick to wade through, but Penelope was sure she got the gist of it. Hilda probably wanted to fight her to the death. It seemed such an important thing, yet Penelope broke into a laugh. "That's perfect. I'll bribe her with that."

Astrid felt her demeanor slip a moment. "Bribe?"

"A day of downtime, when things are more peaceful, is perfectly fine by me. If she wants a fight to the death, she can have one, but she'll have to pay for it." As she described her rough plan, Penelope watched as Astrid's more open expression showed first shock and then actual laughter spilled from the huge woman. "You think that would work?"

"Work? Are you joking? If you offered her such a fight, she would actually take over this city, raise a new army, and take over the whole lowlands kingdom for you. Promise her a fight like that, and deliver on it, and you will get her to do anything." Struggling to recover, Astrid finally gave up and let her laughter roll for a while. Every time the idea surfaced again, she lost herself in the mirth it brought.

"And if she loses? Do we offer her resurrection?" Penelope asked.

Astrid shrugged, but was still surprised at how easy it was to talk to a dungeon monster. "Sure. Let her fight as many times as she wants. Thousands of battles in which she gets to experience the rush of battling something stronger than her. She'll be in love with you, if you're not careful."

"What about a wolf?"

That question pulled Astrid up short. "You mean a fight to the death against me in my wolf form?" Thinking on it, Astrid didn't know if she could complete the transformation without the drugs. "Old stories tell of wolves who would control their forms and slip from human to beast form in the blink of an eye. Now, we always use the brew from the wise women. They prepare it from herbs and feed it to us."

Intrigued, Penelope asked, "Do you need it?"

"I don't know. This is the moment where you tell me to try." Flashing a smile, Astrid gestured around the room where most of the dungeon's bosses were arrayed. "This is the perfect spot and the perfect company."

Hearing Travis' translation, Fife's eyes started to dance at the thought of it. "I want in on this. How do I tell her I want to fight?"

Looking over at the juggernaut that was Fife, Astrid knew exactly what she'd said without understanding the words. "I guess this is the part where I try to become my wolf. Give me a moment, it takes—concentration."

"Rules," Travis said, interrupting Fife's excitement. "No weapons, no armor. You can have your inbuilt armor, Fife, but she's definitely going to rip you apart."

While Penelope translated that for Astrid, Fife groaned and set down her sword and shield. "It's probably a good thing I've been practicing with other weapons, then." Bunching her legs, Fife bounced in place a few times, flexing the big sickle-claw on each foot as she landed.

Closing her eyes, Astrid blotted out the dungeon and its monsters from her mind. She was just herself, a single individual. A lone wolf. Drawing on the latter thought, she tried to feel for the first times she'd changed and her inner self had spilled out.

She'd been thirteen and was frustrated from her sword practice. The arms-master of her house was trying to teach her a disarm maneuver that she didn't think she was strong enough for. With frustration rising within, she'd gotten angry—angry enough to want to kill.

The second time she'd spontaneously become a wolf, well after the huge party to celebrate her first change, had been when she'd been spurned by her first love. She was fourteen, and he was nineteen. In her own eyes, it had been the perfect match and she had no clue why he wasn't interested in her.

That, in her life, had been the sum total of times she'd become a wolf without the aid of a wise woman's brew. They weren't even the only times she'd gotten angry, but the truth was she'd been angry and wanted blood. She wanted to make someone pay and, she hoped, that was the key to it.

Focusing on Fife, she remembered the battle she'd led against the gates of the city. It had been Fife that had dropped the poison outside that had killed most of her wolves. It had been Fife that had held the gate's controls, seemingly single-handed. It was now Fife that stood before her, itching for a fight, and for that Astrid got more than angry, she wanted to kill Fife.

All eyes were on Astrid when she stood up, but Fife was more in tune with watching the woman's body than her furious expression. She was already built on a scale that defied what Fife knew about muscle development, but now Astrid's muscles seemed to pulse and flex with a new life behind them. Fur started to sprout, and Fife clenched her hands so tightly that her claws drew blood from her palms. "She's doing it."

Astrid's vision narrowed and she could only see the one kobold standing before her. The way Fife's body moved told Astrid how to fight, how to bring her down, and how to kill Fife. Adamantine seemed built into nearly every part of the kobold; scales, claws, and even small horns betrayed the dull metallic glint of the dense metal. When Fife grinned, Astrid saw adamantine impregnating her teeth.

It was going to hurt, biting and clawing at Fife, but that just made Astrid want to kill her more. To test herself and learn how to bring down such a foe. Feeling her blood burning, she found herself looking down even more than normal at Fife as she grew taller. When the wealth of scents of those around her intensified, she knew there was no going back. She tried to remove the restrictive shirt and pants she'd been given, but her claws sliced through them without any resistance.

"You know, I forgot how bloody big she was. This is awesome!" Waiting for the moment when Astrid stopped growing, Fife charged her. Ten feet away, she planted both feet on the ground, coiled her muscles, and shot into a forward jump.

Instead of dodging the leap, as any normal fighter would, Astrid instead swung one long arm around and forward to try battering the kobold out of the air. It partially worked. Fife's mass was the biggest part of her momentum, and while she did deflect a head-on attack, she felt an adamantine claw dig into her side and slash her from front to back in a deep gash.

Dodging back after landing, Fife avoided a backhand from Astrid that would have sent her flying. She knew Astrid had the strength to toss her around, and the first failure to do so was more surprise than lack of ability. "How's the thinking? You still you, or just blood-crazy?"

Astrid had to pause a moment and step back. She looked at Penelope, who translated for her. "Still me." It was hard to talk. Her mouth certainly wasn't made for it and yelling always worked better. This was a test, though, so Astrid did what she could. "You're heavy and fast. Never seen something be both before."

"I'm full of surprises. How's the cut?"

Twisting a little, Astrid was surprised at how deep the slice was. Her body, though, was perfectly happy to ignore the pain as she parted the clean edges. "Deep. You might have hit something important." Letting go, Astrid focused her attention back on Fife. "Ready for more?" The feral, hungry look in Fife's eyes made Astrid realize the woman was practically a kindred spirit. She barely waited for Fife to nod before rushing at her.

Bracing against the first swing, Fife dug her talons into the ground and pushed into Astrid's second. She fought back the impact and grabbed the arm and pulled.

Tipping forward, Astrid fell onto Fife and their melee turned to a grapple. She thought her overwhelming strength would win her the fight easily, but Fife proved as stubborn as ever and somehow pinned one of Astrid's arms to the ground by kneeling on her wrist.

Fife was quickly giving up on thinking about it as a fight between equals. They were both so asymmetric in various ways that general humanoid tactics were out the window. She winced as Astrid bit down on her left arm, and knew that while her scales would give, the crushing force of Astrid's jaws would probably shatter her bones soon enough. Returning the favor, she clamped her own mouth around the wolf's free arm just below her shoulder. Unlike Astrid's bite, Fife's was far more focused on working her teeth into the soft flesh and severing tendons.

When the fight had degenerated to a savage contest of wills and jaw muscles, Penelope decided it was well and truly over. Rising up from her cozy spot, she walked toward the pair and filled her lungs. "Stop!"

The bellow stunned Astrid and, from the look of surprise in Fife's eyes, it had a similar effect there too. Carefully, following the command of the dragon looming over her, Astrid opened her jaws and released Fife. It shouldn't have been possible that, in such a rage as she'd been in, that one shout could stop her in her tracks—but it was.

Fife too followed the order. Wincing a little as she drew back from Astrid's ruined arm, she realized she'd have to be the one to fully disengage thanks to her grip on the other shoulder.

Satisfied that the fight and the test was done, Penelope turned to look at Brayden. "Would Brogdar be averse to you healing these lunatics?"

"And reward one friend for learning new tactics she can use in combat while the other manages to exert some control over her destiny? I don't think Brogdar would punish those that try to better themselves. I certainly wouldn't." Directing his magic first to Astrid, Brayden let himself become a channel for his god's power.

When it was her turn, Fife closed her eyes and let the divine magic do its work, though apart from some bruises and the broken bones, she was fine. Looking at the looming wolf that towered over her, Fife stuck her hand out. "Good fight!"

The sentiment was obvious to Astrid, and although magic still felt a little itchy to her sensibility, it was mostly a redundancy from many years fearing and hating it. She thrust out her hand and grasped Fife's forearm. "I hope I'm not stuck like this."

When Travis repeated Astrid's words for Fife, she tilted her head. "Why wouldn't she want that? She's stronger, faster, and has a hell of a right-hook."

Penelope did the work of translating for Astrid, and hearing the question, she immediately said, "Because I'm not—" and there she stopped. Looking around the room, she was acutely aware that there was only one being present who would be considered normal in the city, and Felna was just as fuzzy as Astrid was. Looking at her huge hands, she wondered what it would be like to practice and train with a sword, like she was, rather than to simply release her feral side and attack.

Sitting down, Astrid tried to focus in on herself. She still felt hungry and wanted to attack, but her will could keep it at bay. What worried her was if she lost that control. In her time spent talking to Travis, she'd learned about the hard mental control he could exert on every kobold in the dungeon—but he didn't. She wished there was an option like that for herself; a way to give someone she trusted a safety switch.

Travis, having mostly been listening and translating, was surprised to see a question box appear before him.

The werewolf, Astrid, wishes to join the dungeon. Agree?

The popup surprised Travis. "Uh, Pen, I just got a thing that is asking me if I want to make Astrid part of the dungeon. Can you figure out what she did?"

Hearing the question passed on, Astrid looked up at Penelope. A mixture of fear and interest rolled through her. Travis had done a lot for her, including giving her her life back, but this was putting herself back in his hands—mental hands, at least. "I was meditating on what Fife had said. Why wouldn't I let go and become human again?" She took a slow breath and reached around for the words she needed to explain without straying too far from simple language. "I thought that I could, but only if I had someone who could stop me from going wild. I remembered what Travis was saying about how he can control all of you."

"Well, all them," Penelope said. "He cannot control me. It's a perk of being the dungeon's boss. I guess you wanted this a lot, huh?" She gestured at Astrid.

"Being a wolf? I feel more comfortable like this with every second that passes." Balling her huge hands up into fists, she closed her eyes. "If he doesn't want me, I am not surprised. As much as I want to live like this, I know it would be too dangerous."

"Stop being so"—Penelope fished for a word good enough to fit her intent, but didn't know one and picked the next best—"stupid. Travis trusts you. He let you sit in his core room without any guards. If you want to be part of this crazy hole in the ground, tell him."

Taking a deep breath, Astrid searched herself. "Can it ever be undone?"

"We don't know."

"So if I'm in, I'm in for life."

"Yeah. Seems that way. It was a good deal for me since my life was only going to be a few more seconds." Penelope watched over Astrid, not needing to defend against the hulking wolf, but at the same time curious as to her thoughts. "You don't have to answer now."

Taking a deep, slow breath, Astrid looked at Penelope and nodded. "I know that, but this is what I am and it feels— It feels right. Travis, if you have room for me, please accept me into—"

The rush of feeling knocked Astrid over. She stumbled, fell, and climbed back to all fours before lifting her head to look around. Her vision was sharper than ever, but even if it weren't she'd know that something had changed. For a start, she could understand Fife as she retold the fight from her own point of view. Looking back to Penelope, she asked, "He did it?"

"I did it."

"He did it."

The second was clearly Penelope speaking, but the other voice was one she'd heard before only under the effects of a powerful spell. "Travis?"

"Yeah. I guess this throws your contract out the window, but I'm fine if you want to keep it up anyway. Welcome to your new home."

Pack Den unlocked!

Travis shoved aside his shock and checked the stats. Again, it was a room that looked suspiciously like a boss room. If nothing else, he figured, it would be a nice place for Astrid to call home.

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This story is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If you are paying money to see this or the original creator, Damaged, is not credited, you are viewing a plagiarized copy of the story.