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 9

Rock 2539

Gold 450

Leather 492

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 41

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 10

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 4

Quest: Have 10 minions in your dungeon

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

Travis spotted Fife with one of his lizards as she, with Brayden and Jack behind her, advanced down the back tunnel and to the center of the maze. He wanted to scream a warning at first, but when they found the first slime in the tunnels they squared up on it and started dealing with them.

He stared at the silent battle they waged, Fife bashing at the slime with her shield again and again, then quickly pulling it back before the creature could absorb it. Jack was the powerhouse here. He froze and chilled the slime, causing parts of it to solidify so that Fife could hack them off, so they took their time cutting through the slime until it was only so many pieces of inert gunk.

While he watched the party take apart a slime, Penelope, Ludmiller, and Katelyn rushed down the hall to the pit trap, removing all the runes on the way.

Robert, meanwhile, retreated to his lab and started mixing up his strongest solvent.

"The worst part is not knowing how many of them there are. Wait, no, the worst-worst part is not being able to tell Fife where the ones I do know about are. Actually, just mix both of those problems together and you have—"

"Trav, I get you're having a bit of a nightmare situation here, but we need you to keep it together." Penelope passed two runes to Katelyn. "We need to know where Fife's group is so we can meet up with them."

"Or better," Ludmiller said, "get them down here so they can guard this hallway."

"You know Fife is going to scream if we make her march through that time-wasting tunnel system we built, right?" Penelope asked, dropping into the pit to start gathering up the runes at the bottom.

Travis couldn't help but laugh, the distraction being just the right thing to break his panic. "Yeah, but we can offer her boredom pay."

"It's a joke," Penelope said.

"Sorry, Pen, but if Trav said he'd pay us boredom pay, and he's going to make us do something boring, I'm going to take that." Fife had been relieved when she'd seen a wall collapse and Penelope stick her head out. So much so that she'd led their group deeper into the dungeon without a thought. "How many of these holes did you have to open until you found us?"

"Five. What were you doing this far along the side passage?"

"We were making sure there were none down there. Don't get me wrong, it would be kinda cool to live in a dungeon full of slimes, but we'd be less inclined to hang around." Brayden was checking over his gear, making sure he hadn't misplaced anything important—like the talisman he carried. "Okay. How are we going to do this?"

"Well, we have one game piece that can sweep them up but several dead-end tunnels leading to one point. So, we clear up the tunnels and do a little creative digging to cordon them off when cleared. First, I need you to sweep the tunnels clear, leading to the stairs." When Travis was done explaining it, Penelope repeated it for the adventurers.

Fife rolled her shoulders to free them up a little, hefted her shield, and then looked at the sludge traps. "Uh, Trav, not that I don't love the idea of you having this nightmare set of traps here, but how are we meant to get past it?"

"Yeah, I can help there. Trav's setting things up to isolate the twisting tunnels and shortcut from the stairs to here, then we'll go back around and do the back tunnel to the stairs. That will leave the lower part—cleared."

Nodding to Penelope, Fife smiled. "Also, this is a good bit of work. We used to run with two shields, but in a tunnel like this I can keep any advancing threat on lockdown for Jack to deal with." She held out her mailed fist to Jack and got a light, though not reluctant, fist-bump back. "Okay. Point us in a direction and we'll start doing our thing."

And she did. Weaving through the tunnels while Penelope sealed things up according to Travis' plan behind her, Fife stalked two of the big slimes, keeping their attention while Jack worked them over. The tunnels were, otherwise, just as boring as she'd been promised.

Having been waiting at the stairs, Penelope smiled at the group as they came around the corner. "Okay, now, with that clear I can seal this up and we can move to the back tunnel. Shame these things didn't make life easy and just come right for Trav. Would have been simpler."

"Aren't you worried about them coming through the sludge traps?" Jack asked.

"Robert has worked on something that should burn them pretty badly. It's now mixed into two of the sludge traps, and he's making more of it as we speak. This way." Digging into the central dungeon, Penelope led the way through to the kobold bedrooms and opened another tunnel that broached to the back tunnel.

There turned out to be no slimes in the back tunnels, but Fife found something exciting just as they neared the stairs up again. "Pen! Pen!"

Looking around the corner, from where she was waiting, Penelope spotted Fife. "What's up?"

"Okay, seal this off first, or whatever you need to do, and then come and look in here." Fife stood at the intersection that led to where the slimes' cave was.

Relaying the timing through Travis, Penelope collapsed the tunnel as Ludmiller opened it up to the inner dungeon. "Right, now, what do you want me to look at?" She walked toward the group and, when she saw what Fife was gesturing at, she felt confusion. "How'd it get so big?"

There was a truly immense slime in the mana shrine that was revealed in the slime cave. It was so big, in fact, that it couldn't get out of that shrine room.

Jack walked forward, his senses sharp and ready to lead him back to safety. "I think it's feeding off the shrine. Look, it grew so big it can't leave the square room."

"Pen, I have a great idea with that. We could build the winding tunnel to loop through that mana shrine and then come back out. If the slime is feeding off the mana, it'll be hard to kill, right?" Travis asked.

Breaking into a gale of laughter, Penelope nodded and almost fell to her knees. "Trav says he—he's going to use it to stop invaders. He wants us to leave it alone for now."

Brayden got the idea first. He chuckled. "With that mana shrine, it'll be near unkillable. The only downside is you can't get to the shrine yourself."

"We'll see about that. Maybe it will become usable when we build a tunnel up to it or maybe it won't, because of the slime." Penelope just shrugged. "Ready to head upstairs?"

"If one of those things has messed up my bar…" Fife started up the stairs, anger rising at the idea of needing to clean up her favorite watering hole.

"Wait!" Running up the stairs, Penelope stood at the entrance to the maze. "Uh, remember, we have explosives in there that go off whenever something that isn't a dungeon monster goes near them?" At Fife's surprised look, Penelope rolled her eyes. "I know where they are, let me lead and if one isn't exploded, that means nothing came that way or any slimes are in side tunnels."

When Penelope reached the outer radius of the first explosive, however, she could already see it had gone off recently. After the undead had triggered their toys, she had assessed everything with Katelyn to make sure they would recharge and trigger again. They had. "One has been this way."

Jack put his hand on Fife's shoulder. "That doesn't mean they have triggered the rest of them."

Fife was thankful he'd said it, not that she'd admit that. She just gave him a nod and walked forward behind Penelope. "Are you likely to dig into these things often?"

"I'm working on a better way of finding resources and stuff, but we're always looking at expanding—and when you dig anywhere you haven't dug before, there's a chance of finding these." Walking on, Penelope slowed her pace and paused. "Hold here, checking the next one."

Each one had exploded—until the last. The moment Penelope found it, she shouted, "This is intact!"

At the shout, Fife's senses sharpened and she spun about. "Behind us!"

Brayden barely heard the warning before he felt something soft and wet flow around his arm. Screaming in agony, he tried to pull back from the slime—only the slime was much heavier and was well-anchored to him besides.

The scream of her friend had Fife moving faster than she ever had in her life. Shield up, she rushed past Jack and slammed the wall of steel into the slime. "Get off him you bastard!"

The impact loosened the slime's grip on Brayden's arm, but not enough to get him free. The ripple through the huge cube jerked him off balance first one way and then the other. Before he realized what was happening he was off balance and falling toward the slime.

"Jack! Kill it!"

"I've got you!"

The shouts were all muddled in Brayden's head. He looked down his trapped arm and saw that his armor's bindings were melting and pulling apart to reveal his fingers and hand were no more than bones by now, while there was more flesh the closer to him he looked. Something pulled hard on him—trying to get him out of the slime before it got any further.

Penelope might have only been a kobold, but she had the strength of a boss monster. She tried her best to ignore the way Brayden's arm became easier to pull free—mostly because she could see the cleaned white bones floating in the slime and dissolving already.

Only when Brayden was free of the slime could Jack unload. He let loose with so much magic that rime formed on the walls of the tunnel as water condensed out of the very air and froze. He didn't stop until the slime was completely solid—and then he fell over.

Travis, staring at the screaming priest as Penelope unbuckled his armor, could do nothing else as each plate she removed revealed the slime had spread under it. There were holes in him. There were green-lipped gaps in Brayden where the slime kept eating.

Feeling one of his lungs collapse, Brayden reached his one good arm up to grab Penelope by the shoulder. "Get me to the heart!"

"Fife! Carry him!" Penelope swung her pick in two big arcs, ripping away a hunk of rock to reveal the secret tunnel back entrance to the stairs. "Move!"

Behind them, as the slime crumbled and cracked, a half-melted talisman covered in green slime hit the floor of the tunnel.

Carrying her friend on her back, Fife didn't question Penelope nor did she slow. The kobold ahead of her sliced through any rock that got in their way and forged the fastest route to her friend's safety that she could.

"Someone seal up this hole!" Penelope considered just slicing her way through the last door that opened into Travis' heart room, but it was actually faster to just open it. In the pink glow of the giant crystal, she bared her palm and sliced across it with her knife.

As pain blossomed in Fife's back, she set Brayden down beside the heart and held his remaining hand up to touch Travis. "Go! Take him before this shit eats him away!"

Travis didn't hesitate. He'd heard Brayden's words through Penelope and knew the man's wish. When the query came up, he instantly approved it. The drain on him wasn't as bad as when he'd fought for Tannyr, but he knew that missing organs and limbs cost him a lot more to restore than a fully intact body.

"You'd better make it two," Jack said. "Fife has slime all over her back and I think it's under her chain mail."

"Fife?" Penelope asked, reaching out to her friend.

Trying to answer, Fife coughed and bubbles of green slime stained her lips. She reached up to wipe it away, then wished she hadn't. When she saw Penelope bring her knife up to her palm a second time, Fife grabbed her wrist.

"What—?" Penelope saw that in one fist Fife held an intact talisman and, before she could finish asking what Fife intended, her friend pulled the dagger into her own throat.

Sitting up on the altar, Fife reached her hand up to her neck.

"It's going to be one hell of a scar." Brother Rupert offered Fife a hand to help her move. "A problem at the dungeon?"

Barking a laugh, Fife shook her head. "No, well, yes. We dealt with it. I'm a bloody idiot. That was my chance."

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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.