The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 4/10

Heart 25600/ 25600

Experience 2500/6400

Workers 8/23

Monsters 0/24+1

Traps 26/45+4

Rooms 45

Food 382

Timber 1383

Iron 1004

Steel 80

Charcoal 0

Mana 18

Rock 2437

Gold 1300

Leather 455

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 51

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 10

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 6

Quest: Have 10 minions in your dungeon

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

The better part of a week of work can see a lot done within a dungeon. Travis had cast the spell to create mana shrines twice, and was sketching out a plan to find them. The time-wasting tunnels in both floors had been completed and some other minor works had been done to correct a few errors they'd found during the invasion by the undead.

Travis, though, had something important he had to do. "Wild? I have the resources and we have the time to do this now."

Turning his head from the rockface of the new tunnel he'd been digging, Wild stood up as straight as a kobold could. "Where is the best place?"

"Definitely your bed. When I made Pen into the dungeon boss, she was out for hours." Travis double and triple checked his resources. It was going to put him a little low on gold. He turned his focus to Katelyn, who'd been burning through her mana making runes. "I need to top up my gold in a bit. Would you be free to melt some down?"

Lifting her head from the tight focus she held, Katelyn smiled at the sound of Travis' voice in her head. "I'll be done with the next repeating rune in an hour. Is that okay?"

"Perfect. Thanks." Turning his attention back to the upgrade, Travis realized something that could be bad. "Uh, Wild, we might want to move to the floor you're meant to be the boss of. Sorry, but I don't know if that affects things, and I don't want to find out after that I screwed it up."

Stopping before he dug his way into the central part of the dungeon, Wild shrugged and turned around. "Not screwing up is good. First time being a dungeon?"

The question shocked Travis with how succinctly it got to the crux of the matter. He actually laughed at how well it typified the problems he had encountered. "Yeah. Yeah it is."

"And you not make many mistakes. Good." Heading back up the stairs, Wild made his way through the secret door in the maze and along the back entrance. "There space here. Build room?" His hand rested against the stone.

Travis had to admit that Wild somehow just knew the dungeon layout, despite the twists and literal mazes. "Yeah, let me set something up for you." So he gave a quick plan for a 5x5 room with an entry, then added a simple door to it. Twenty-six more rock gained, fifteen timber lost.

"Well, here we go." Travis opened up the menu and selected the upgrade.

Floor Boss requires 10x10 room.

"Okay, apparently we need a bigger room for this. Here." Travis laid out a bigger room for Wild. He kept his focus close, knowing that this was an important obligation for him. When Wild had finished digging the room, Travis let out a sigh. "Ready?"

Walking to the middle of the room, Wild sat down and nodded. "I am ready."

The moment Travis selected the upgrade, Wild fell sideways and slumped on the floor of the room. And it was a room now, Travis realized. A quick check revealed a new room upgrade that only applied to the room that'd just appeared. "Enhanced Equipment," Travis read to himself, "boosts the equipment a boss has. A hundred steel and a thousand gold. I need to get steel production going."

A gold vein has depleted!

Travis felt his non-existent blood run cold. Rushing his focus to the vein, he saw a cooling puddle of gold fading as it emptied into his storage. "What happened?"

Katelyn stared at the spot. "I just started melting it down and it vanished!"

"I got a message saying it was depleted. I guess they have a limit on how much gold they have." Considering his options, Travis checked his mana. It had ticked up again while Wild had done his digging. "We need more gold quickly, but if I place a node on this floor it could be one of several things. So, since the first floor has only two outcomes, I'll cast it there."

Travis hadn't meant to actually cast the spell, after all, he thought he didn't have enough mana to do so. But, when he idly prodded the activator—the spell was cast for 5 mana. "What the hell?! Five?!"

"Calm down, Trav, what happened?" Katelyn put her hand on the wall as if to sooth her panicked dungeon.

"I was just thinking about casting it at the first floor, but it should have needed fifty mana. It only used five!" Thinking about game mechanics, Travis realized what might have happened. "It's scaling. I think it's scaling the cost depending on what floor I cast it on, but it only shows the maximum. That would make sense with the mana shrines too. Five mana to cast one, but it only puts out one extra mana a tick. If its costs scale like that too, it's actually more efficient to dump all your mana shrines on the first floor!"

"Wait!" Katelyn's shout echoed through the library. "Travis, don't do this yet. We know the gold vein depleted, what if the shrines do too?"

That was the balance, Travis realized. Whenever something in a game looked too good to be true, particularly at so simple a mechanic, it was. "Right. Of course you're right. But it's still a good idea for gold. We need gold. Iron would be nice too, but I think I can just dump all our mana on lodes for the first floor and not be concerned about it. We need to find the shrines on the second floor because then we could be dropping a LOT of first floor lodes."

"But, we don't want to go searching for them until we need them, okay? The more you can place, the less work we have to do to find each one, as long as we don't go looking for them." Katelyn snapped her claws, causing all the rocks around her to start trembling as she walked back along the tunnel toward their storage area. The tunnel collapsed in dramatic fashion.

Penelope, having spent the afternoon resting after digging out the various winding paths, sat up on her bed and stretched. There was no shouting in the dungeon, for which she was thankful, but increasingly she was learning that almost ten kobolds in a dungeon made for a certain amount of chaos—and that chaos was at its greatest when they were noisy and when they were very quiet. "Trav, what's going on?"

Travis turned some of his attention to Penelope, reading a mental catch-up for her. "Wild is becoming the first floor boss. It comes with a room—"

"Why didn't I get a room?"

"No clue. Maybe you get it as an upgrade? Anyway, I had Katelyn melt some more gold off the vein to top up again—and the vein ran out. I figured I'd place some new ones on the first floor, since that gives a greater chance of getting one, and found out they only cost five mana to place there. So I put down five lodes in total. Hopefully we get a mix of gold and iron." Travis moved his attention with her, following Penelope as she walked out and took a shortcut through to the stairs and up to the first floor.

"Anyway," Travis said, continuing, "Katelyn is still working on more repeating runes, since those are just so amazingly good. Robert and Steph are outside, Robert's keeping watch while Steph goes through his trapline. I promised Blake he could help look for the lodes up here. Ludmiller is in the bar talking with Fife and Jack."

"Where's Brayden?"

"He went to town to deliver the two-hundred gold to the priest. He's also going to check that Tannyr's okay." When Penelope passed the new door, Travis added, "That's where Wild's room is. The upgrade said he needed a ten-by-ten room."

"Floor bosses are pretty tough. It'll be good to see him more his old self—combat wise." Penelope kept walking and passed through the donkey area, the warehouse drop off, and finally through the doors leading to the bar.

Fife and Jack were sitting by the big fireplace, roaring flames chasing back any amount of chill and leaving them both looking quite cozy.

Spotting Penelope walking in, Fife grinned up at her. "Hey, Pen, how're things?"

"Oh, doing great. Wild is on his way to being the first floor boss—he even gets a boss room. Our gold vein ran out, and I have this weird feeling we're going to have some kind of encounter with monsters." Walking through the bar into the kitchen, Penelope asked, "You two hungry?"

"I just ate. Whatever that stew is in there, it's pretty amazing." Jack wasn't exaggerating. Having spent years on the road eating rough, with short relief periods in taverns eating some truly delicious food, he could now say dungeon food was the best he'd eaten. "Do I want to know what goes into it?"

"Tell him it's a mix of game, oats, and probably water. I don't know how it comes out like stew, but who cares if it does the trick?" Travis told Penelope.

Repeating the message, Penelope shrugged. "If it tastes good, who cares. Better than living off pemmican and salted pig fat." As she walked to the back of the room to grab one of the loaves of bread that were just always, mysteriously, there—she felt something strange on the other side of the wall. "Trav, Wild's room is on the other side of this, right?"

"No. Kinda. He's off to your left. There's nothing in front." As soon as he'd said it, Travis watched as Penelope pulled out her pickaxe and, with not a word, dug a hole through the wall to reveal a small three-by-three room with a big pillar of reddish rock in the middle. "Ha! That's an iron vein!"

"What're you yelling about?" Fife poked her head into the kitchen and spotted the hole in the wall and the small room beyond. "Is that just there? What is it?"

"Iron. Well, that's one of five, but the best bit about it was I could feel it through the wall. Trav, you don't need to make the tunnels as close together if I can do that, right?" Penelope hefted up her pick and dug at the vein with a solid swing.

"Right. But that means the first thing I want you to do is just walk all the outer walls of this floor and the second one. You might find another like this." Travis was relieved that something had gone right for them. Just as he was starting to set out a search pattern for the first floor that would take advantage of Penelope's newly realized skill, he noticed his mana tick up. "Got more mana, adding another lode."

Jerking her head around toward the direction of the stairs, Penelope shouted, "Wait! Keep some mana in reserve in case we get more enemies attacking."

"These one-sided conversations are going to bug me until you make me a kobold." Grabbing a loaf of bread on her way past, Fife walked back to the barroom and settled back at the fire.

Brolly Windchime had been confused at first. He had a few hundred talismans in the bag Brother Rupert had given him, and he'd been told to hand them out to everyone. "Everyone? What do you mean?"

"Everyone." Raising his finger, he poked Brolly in the chest. "Everyone gets a talisman. Everyone who isn't a complete idiot gets resurrected if they die. The only exception being if they attack the kobold dungeon or break the city's laws."

"That's specific." Grabbing the first talisman out of the bag for himself, Brolly stuck it into a pocket on his coat. "Who pays for all this?"

Rupert glared at Brolly, keenly aware that everyone needed a little privacy, and had decided that he would keep the deal with the dungeon quiet. After all, if the town knew he was collecting gold from them, they would want him to charge the special rates and fees. Economics should have nothing to do with the balance of justice. "Howard knows. You should ask him."

Striding toward the pair, Brayden Smith still wasn't sure how to handle Rupert. The priest's god was more neutral than Brayden's, but the same sense of justice radiated from him. It meant that day to day, Rupert's alignment could swing based on the acts of those he'd dealt with—Brayden preferred knowing where a priest stood. "Brother Rupert, I have—"

"Wait!" Looking between the two, Brolly finished up staring at Brayden. "You mean the dungeon is paying for this? To what end?"

Taken aback by the string of curse words Rupert let loose with, Brayden shrugged his shoulders. "I think the idea is that people can't get rich and pay the dungeon if they're dead. Knowing that there were others, not as hardy as Tannyr, who didn't make it was a wake-up call. So, undead, huh? Any clue on their theme?"

"They sent out two attack forces at the same time. Three if you count the milling undead that they put down at the verdant dungeon. I think that implies it's a horde dungeon." The thought, even now, sent a shiver up Brolly's spine. Undead were annoying at the best of times. "Our best bet will be to get a lot of something flammable and pour it in."

Brayden shook his head at that, passing the bag of gold to Rupert. "While I like the idea, it would be better if we could get enough adventurers to just keep farming it. Better to get experts in to deal with the undead than to cripple another source of income." He gave the priest a nod. "Anyway, I need to get back. I'm sure Katelyn is trying to set fire to the rock or something. Who knows, maybe there'll be more undead at our door already?"

"Our?" Brolly asked.

Shrugging his shoulders, Brayden gave a good-natured laugh. "It's an agreeable faction to be aligned with right now, and doesn't compete with my vows. Plus I get some good dust-ups out of it—against evil no less. Don't spend all the gold in one place."

Watching his friend walking away, Brolly sighed. "None of this has gone according to plan."

"You have new soldiers coming?" Rupert asked.

"Yes. They'll be here in the next week. Plus the adventurers' guild is sending some delving parties. I just hope our walls will stand."

"I'll make sure of it. I have been working on a ritual of reinforcing."

Turning his head to Rupert, Brolly was surprised at the normally cantankerous priest being so forward. "Those that died—"

"Will be marked down on the walls of my temple. They will be the last to have fallen here." His conviction flaring, Rupert felt the full might of his ideal burning within him.

Available at: https://www.royalroad.com/profile/220350/fictions

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.