The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 4/10

Heart 25600/ 25600

Experience 2500/6400

Workers 8/23

Monsters 0/24+1

Traps 27/45+4

Rooms 46

Food 378

Timber 1168

Iron 404

Steel 30

Charcoal 0

Mana 10

Rock 2515

Gold 450

Leather 492

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 51

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 10

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 7

Quest: Have 10 minions in your dungeon

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

If nothing else, Travis was secure in iron for a while. Penelope had wandered back and through the tunnels to the living area that Fife, Jack, and Brayden used, and found another iron lode. It hadn't taken her long, but she couldn't exactly run along the tunnel.

Wild still slept in his new room. Travis was content to let him take his time, given all the help Wild had been so far. He hadn't seen him fight except for the end of the undead struggle and when Fife had tried to stop him from going crazy, but when Fife had sat in the bar and told him what had happened, in all its detail, it had made Travis even happier to have agreed to make him a floor boss.

When he checked in on Katelyn, Robert, and Blake, the three had all fallen asleep in the library. Katelyn had been regenerating her mana to make yet more of the repeating runes, while Robert and Blake had been working on research. When he checked Reaper, the research had 8/15 days filled.

"Trav! I've found something else. Maybe." Penelope's shout got Travis' attention. He found her quickly enough (for some reason there were always a few lizards hanging around her, but also her own vision narrowed her spacial location down. She was in the first floor twisting hallway and holding her claws against a wall. "It's weaker than the others. Maybe I can feel two deep?"

"Dig it out. The worst that could happen is we have more spiders or something." Travis didn't waste any time, quickly adding a few blocks of planning for her to follow.

Penelope was fast at digging. Almost as quick as she drew her pickaxe, she dug the first square of rock away. The second came a moment later and she was staring at a pillar of gold. "Damn I'm good."

"Yeah you are. Okay, so, new plan here. We don't bother doing the whole searching tunnels thing on the first floor. We just keep making lodes until we make some close enough for you to find them. By the time the others start to get in the way, we can get Katelyn up here to just melt them down into warehouse-filler."

"I love how you think, you know that? Okay, but don't spend mana on anything here now. We have gold, we have iron. We need to find those shrines down on the second floor, make more shrines, and find them, and—We need to start getting steel, too." Penelope turned as Travis set out more planning. "Don't want it like this?"

"Let's conceal it to an offshoot of the wood processing tunnel. It's not far… twenty squares." Travis felt excitement, it was like when they'd just started but now they had all the safety measures they needed. "Oh, and if you want, it would probably be a good idea to place some of those repeating runes in our twisting tunnels, particularly the one just after the sludge traps."

It was a nice and relaxing evening for Penelope. She worked while most of the dungeon slept. Even the three adventurers had retired to their quarters while she dug out the new tunnel for the gold vein's safety. She went back after the tunnel part was done and filled-in the hole she'd made initially finding it.

"What about the iron one that connects directly onto the main entrance?" she asked Travis.

"That one's in the way of everything. I am pretty sure that Wild's boss room needs to be part of the way for enemies to go down into the dungeon, but that iron vein is right in the way of everything. Maybe we can just link it into Wild's room when we figure out how it all works." Following her focus (and her lizard fan-club), Travis watched her brush her claws over the door to Wild's room. "If it's anything like your upgrade, he'll be out for a few more hours."

Penelope just sighed and nodded. "I wanted to test a few things with him. Typically, a floor boss gets bonuses only when fighting on their assigned floor, but I am fairly sure they get it when fighting in the presence of the dungeon boss."

"More reason to allow Fife to join the dungeon and make her a floor boss," Travis said.

"Exactly. We might not have many that will be front-liners, but we'll have some seriously great people." Taking the stairs down, she reached behind her back and thought of the delightful little explosives. "Alright. I think three of these here would be a good start."

"Wait, here?!"

"No. I mean in the twisting tunnel after the traps." Walking down the hall a little, Penelope swung her pickaxe and broke into the inner dungeon on the first switch-back of the new hall. "The trick with catching people who remove traps for a living is to put them in a place where they can't touch the trap without blowing their face off. No one likes that, by the way."

Watching as she worked, Travis noted how she dug her claws into the wall to embed the rune firmly into the rock. "They won't set each other off, will they?"

"My senses are telling me no. I've dealt with these things before, and the hard-edged dungeon walls help a bunch. I'll save three for the twists here and let Blake use the last one in the twists upstairs." She made her way to the short length of tunnel Robert had dug and hefted her pickaxe again. When she got up to the face of the rock, she lifted the pick and swung.

The rock collapsed unnaturally fast, crumbling away to reveal what looked like an empty cave with a blue glow to the left. Taking a step forward, it was only that blue glow shimmering in the air that gave Penelope any warning at all that there was something huge and almost invisible right in front of her. Jumping backwards just as her pickaxe was jerked from her hands, Penelope screamed.

"What's going on? What is—Oh shit." Travis didn't hesitate, he threw up a Fire Wall between Penelope and the huge cube thing that was trying to grab at her. "Get up and run!"

The massive slime didn't care about the wall one bit. Its kind barely knew about the dangers of fire, let alone pain, though it did take on a darker hue as its outer layer got slightly carbonized.

Turning and running for the intersection, Penelope spared a moment to grab the lizards that'd been following her around and made a quick decision and turned left. "If anyone's awake, Trav, can you get them to dig me a way through to the middle? These damn slimes are fast and I don't think I can make my pickaxe again."

Travis turned his attention to the kobolds in the library. "Wake up! I need help!" After a moment of nothing, Robert stirred. "Robert! Wake up!"

"Trav, what's going on? Why are you yelling?" Robert lifted one talon up to rub at his face (carefully).

"There's a huge slime thing chasing Pen! Go to Katelyn's spell-testing hallway and dig a tunnel where I show you." Travis tossed a plan for a single square that would create an opening. "Pen, I managed to wake Robert and he's going to open a hole for you back near the core. You didn't skip leg day, did you?"

"Leg what? Forget it. I'll make that, no problems, just get the tunnel dug now!" Practice and training at moving with a big kobold's body stood Penelope in good stead. She took the tunnel at break-neck speed, rounding the corners by digging her claws into the stone to swing her body around faster. There was no greater sight for her than Robert at the tunnel he'd dug, waving her toward it. "Coming through! Don't ask my permission to fill it in!"

The problem for Travis was that the slime had scoured the floors clean in its movement down the tunnels, leaving him blind thanks to it devouring any lizards that got in its way. Then he saw it, at the stairs, starting to head into the twisting tunnel.

"It's in the twisting tunnel now, uh, it looks odd though."

Shivering, Penelope shook her head. "No way it made it back that fast. Did the one you saw have the burns around it?"

"What's going on?" Katelyn asked. "Why's everyone in my library?"

Penelope set her lizards down, giving each a reassuring rub on the head. "I started working on the tunnel to find the mana shrines and opened up another cave. This one was full of huge slimes. There's at least two out there, and I know for a fact the sludge pits are not going to bother them at all."

"Ugh. And the explosives are going to be useless too. Well, not completely useless, but slimes are strong against concussive forces. We should go and grab all the ones out of the pit trap now before the slimes get to them." Seeing everyone's incredulous look, Katelyn shrugged. "We might be screwed."

Fife yawned. She hadn't had such good sleeps as when they'd moved into the dungeon. It went against everything she figured was true, but knowing the dungeon and knowing it would protect her made her feel actually safe.

The room around her was always a constant temperature, if a little on the cool side of comfortable. She climbed from her bed and started pulling on her clothes, starting with her shirt, shorts, pants, and then chainmail.

The buckles were all well-oiled and worked perfectly. She didn't feel dressed until she at least had her chain on. A set of greaves slotted over the top of her boots and up her shins, she buckled those down, then reached for her breastplate and started buckling it over her chest.

With the last few straps tightened, she let out a happy sigh. Finally, there was her sword, her pistol, and her shield. She felt complete. Well, she could grab her helmet too, but she hated the thing. "Never sits right." She set the helmet back on her arming dummy and headed for the door.

Through the living room, she made her way down the hallway and paused before continuing to the bar. She liked the bar, she'd conquered the bar, but she wanted to go and talk to Travis—as much as she could talk to him.

She had to break out a light stick, of course, but it was a new one that Robert had made for her. Not a recharged one. Not a second-hand one. She grinned at the fact she now had better equipment than she'd ever owned in her life.

Knowing where all the secrets were on the doors helped. She reached the end of the tunnel and opened the door to take the stairs down, and it was only the fact that her light stick was so bright and new that she saw the slime twenty feet away.

"Fuck." Fife backed up through the door again and slowly pulled it closed, hoping the slime hadn't sensed her. The loud thud against the door just as she pulled it closed set that hope to rest. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

Running for all she was worth, which was pretty quick even in armor, Fife rushed back to the living room she'd left only moments earlier to find Jack and Brayden there. "Not sure what happened, but there was a huge slime at the top of the stairs, and it didn't look friendly!"

Brayden, who didn't have his full armor on yet, cursed and rushed back to his room.

Jack, however, was wearing his cloak and was ready to deal with anything. "It could be worse, Fife."

"How could it be worse?!"

"We could have undead coming in too."

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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.