The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 5/10

Heart 40000/40000

Experience 1400/10000

Workers 9/27

Monsters 1/29

Traps 27/59

Rooms 49

Food 585

Timber 1342

Iron 2404

Steel 30

Charcoal 0

Mana 30

Rock 2416

Gold 4000

Leather 492

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 50

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Quest: Have 10 minions in your dungeon

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

"Where'd they go?" Travis was confused. He'd gotten a string of xp events after a few explosions in the lower twisting tunnels, but then it had all stopped and settled down and no undead had come out. "Was it the slime?"

He'd been putting off checking all his stats while his group of hunters tried to solve the problem, but eventually he glanced at them and immediately saw some weirdness. "Uh, I now have a monster."

"Is it the slime?" Penelope asked, following along behind Jack to provide eyes for Travis. "Sorry, Travis is just freaking out because he now has a monster and I bet it's the slime."

"Makes sense," Fife said as she reached the corner that led right toward the slime in question. "Feeding it, giving it a home—Trav, you totally have a pet monster now."

There was an odd sense Travis got as Penelope approached the slime. He could see the slime—and the mass of bones floating inside it—with Penelope's senses. And, he could feel her presence too in a weird way.

There was a smell, a sense of heat, and little more. Travis had heard, in his previous life, that some bugs could smell your breath and sense the warmth of it in the air. "This is weird, but I can feel you're there. Like, the slime knows you are—WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Extending her hand, Penelope pressed her palm against the slime's surface and felt resistance. "Just making sure it's friendly. A normal slime would have let me push inward."

Travis wished for a hand to face-palm with, but then he realized he'd need a face, too. "Brayden, can you make sure to tell Fife not to do this? The slime might be friendly to kobolds, but I don't know if Fife would count. Yet."

"Fife," Brayden said, leaning down and using one of his claws to scratch a long line across the tunnel several sections before the entrance to the slime's chamber, "you are not allowed closer to the slime than this."

"But it's a friendly slime! When would I ever get the chance to—?"

"Fife!" Penelope turned around and glared at her. "The slime is still hungry after gorging on mana constantly and then devouring… how many zombies was that again?"

"Ten, and don't forget the dogs too," Travis said.

"Thanks, Trav. Ten zombies and a pile of dogs. Hell, it's even eating all the skeletons and I can still feel its hunger." Penelope smiled at the slime and turned to look at Fife. "So maybe don't offer yourself up as its next meal, okay?"

"Ugh. Okay! I get it!" Fife glared at the line and then looked up at the slime. "One day I'm going to be a kobold, though, and then I'm gonna pat you so much you'll fit in the tunnels again."

The group formed up again, Penelope cut through the barrier between the entrance and exit to the slime room, and then sealed it up behind them as they pressed on.

Travis watched their progress, checking his new stats and menus as they checked each of the explosive runes to ensure they were expended. "So, Pen, I'm level five now. We have more traps to lay—wait, I'll tell Ludmiller that. It's her job to see to the traps on the first floor. Your upgrade appeared. Five thousand gold, a thousand steel, two hundred leather, and five hundred food."

"Can we hold that much gold, Trav?"

"Yeah, if we get rid of some timber and stuff first. I think building some of the new buildings will help with that. Also, I want my lizards!" The last came out in a laugh of frustration that Travis felt to his very core. "I'm going to plan out a room right now for lizards." First, though, there was a pair of dungeon upgrades he had to purchase. They were expensive in food cost, but that wasn't a huge issue if he could get more supplies of grain from Northridge.

It didn't take Travis long to see the ideal spot to add it. It would require no worrying digging outside their existing perimeter. He set down a planning mark right beside the glass smithy. "Is there anyone who can help me with digging out a room?" he asked the rest of the kobolds.

Blake was first to speak up. "I can, Trav. Where do you need me?"

Giving directions, Travis felt mounting glee. "Thanks. It's just over near Robert's glass smithy. I—I just found a new building. Lizard village! It's huge, too. Well, we can build that later."

"A village for lizards?" Blake smiled broadly. "This dungeon really is the oddest—and most wonderful—I have ever heard of."

Reaching the spot Travis had indicated, Blake felt the pull to dig out the marked section. Rolling his shoulders in preparation, he began digging. "Trav? It feels more rewarding to dig in planned out areas. I wonder if this is to encourage kobolds?"

Travis was jerked back from his excitement by that. "Yeah. Yeah, it probably is. Would you rather I didn't do the planning thing?"

"Hell no. This feels great. Just musing on it. Pen told me about there being mental changes, and I figured I'd try to document them all." As he spoke, Blake dug out along the path Travis had laid out. "Two forward, turn right, dig, dig, dig—Travis!"

"What? Something's wr—Oh! Well, that throws a spanner in the works for this project, but I wondered where that new mana shrine would turn up." Right before Blake's nose was the newest mana shrine. "Okay, moving this along a bit more. We won't run into more mana shrines now."

"Aren't we getting close to the back tunnels?" Hefting his pickaxe, Blake walked back out to the tunnel and started digging the next section.

"You're going to be butting right into it, actually. Don't worry, when you get down there, you can go and fill-in to block the section off from the stairs." Travis watched as Blake worked, digging out the area and filling-in the required bits to make it a nice, uniform room. "Okay, now let's make it a lizard farm."

The happiness in Travis' voice actually lifted Blake's spirits. He remembered how the others had shown him to work and started assembling the building. The inside of the building was myriad little holes and tunnels in the rock, with little feeding stations here and there made out of wood. The moment it was done, lizards seemed to scoot out of everywhere and mill around Blake's legs.

When he crouched down, one of the lizards ran up Blake's tail and up to his shoulders. "These little guys are pretty cute, you know?"

"I saw Pen with a pair that seemed to follow her around. I wonder if that's another mental change?" Travis asked, investigating his menus now and finding room upgrades. "Oh! Quick, add this upgrade to the room!" It cost him five hundred iron, but Travis was beyond caring about that now.

It took Blake barely a moment to complete the upgrade, but all the lizards now seemed to have dull, reddish scales. Looking at the one on his shoulder, he ran a claw carefully along them. "What is this?"

"Iron! Their scales are now made from iron and they are much tougher." Travis wanted so much to be able to pick one up, but he had to settle for the lizards being doted on by others. "Oh, that reminds me. Blake, I want you and Ludmiller to get together and plan out some traps on the first floor. There's no point being stingy with them, since I can have so many."

"Isn't there a trap factory someone mentioned?" Blake asked. "Maybe we should build that first?"

"You know, that's a good idea. Uh, let's not build it on the inner side of the traps, though. We can merge it there when it's dug out."

"Got it, Trav. Wait, back in the shrine?" Shrugging as he walked out of the lizard farm, Blake got back to digging. The process was similar to the farm, only the room was far bigger. He opened up the tunnel, then rushed to the back of it and sealed it away from the tunnel leading to the stairs. At last Travis gave him all the work to build the trap factory.

"You know what I really love about this?" Travis asked while Blake built the room. "Using up rock. This room cost two hundred of the stuff!"

"Any idea what it does, exactly?"

"It says traps and their upgrades only cost half as much." The prospect of that was good, but there was something Travis suspected that excited him more. "And I'm pretty sure it will unlock more traps."

"Then let's find out together." There was a lot more to build in the much bigger room, but taking it bit by bit he worked his way around, building examples of traps and scale models and things, as well as the tools that would be needed to make them. In the end he was building a little model of a rolling boulder trap and the room just clicked as being completed. "That got it?"

"Whoo hoo! Giant boulder traps, pendulums, deadfalls, a prison, explosives!" Travis was in heaven at the new unlocks. "Okay, we're going to need a meeting of everyone involved with trap designs to go over these new toys."

The meeting was a big success. New plans were formed, mostly with Ludmiller's input, and she was actually feeling sorry for any adventurers who might be stupid enough to try to take-on the dungeon. "All I did was think of the worst-case-scenarios for what I would have faced. This is just nasty."

"It's mostly going to be undead hitting it, you realize?" Penelope asked, though she too was smiling. This was the kind of trap setup she would have built if she was told she had nearly unlimited resources. "And it leaves room for some spectacular upgrades to make things worse."

Travis giggled. "You all know what I think already."

Wild bowed his head. "It uses up rock. Rock equals dead attackers."

"Exactly! Now, we need to organize some trips back to Northridge to get steel, timber, and food. Any volunteers?" Travis asked.

Straightening up, Penelope tapped her chest with one claw. "I can go. With the slime being such a good boy, I feel we are reasonably safe from the level of undead they've been throwing at us lately. Necromancers will always be annoying, but the winding paths might even result in them having to come into the dungeon lest their buffs fall off the others." She didn't exactly regret stealing Travis' lingo for herself, it was faster at explaining some mechanics of undead combat, but it also felt like there was a loss of dramatic power when their necromancy was described away as a "buff".

"Take Katelyn. She can see about getting me more books about magic. Maybe take Steph, too." Travis pondered others. "I think Brayden should go and speak to Rupert. Take him a thousand gold to cover any expenses. The rest, about five thousand gold, is for you to buy as much stuff as you can and get them to haul it back here for us. Tell them to hire guards if they need to." Quickly changing his focus, Travis asked Katelyn to grab enough gold to make up the difference.

"I want to use some of the trap slots to add some things into the second floor twists. Could also use some actual traps in the maze, too. Just to keep things on their toes." Having two rogues in the dungeon was a new delight for Travis, and he wouldn't have it any other way. "Okay, that's probably all we can do now. Build the bypass tunnel and one of the main ones at the same time here, so there's a quick way to escape, then we can look at working on the maze and adding the traps."

Turning his attention to the library, Travis saw Katelyn, Robert, Stephan, and Brayden reading over books—all of them working on the reaper unlock. "Thanks for getting this. More levels seems to be paying off, and with all the undead coming in this will double the reward."

Lifting her head, Katelyn turned to face the direction of Travis' heart. "How are the mana reserves coming?"

"Good. That extra shrine is helping. The shrine the slime is in now counts as mine, but the slime has a five mana upkeep." When his words got a confused look from Katelyn, Travis clarified, "It costs me five mana to keep the guy around."

"Worth it. He ate a whole undead raiding party. What's up, anyway?" The greatest thing, at least on a personal level, that Katelyn had found about becoming a kobold was that her back never got stiff from reading too long. It was pure joy.

"Trip to Northridge. I'd like you to go with them as support and to get me as many books on magic as you can find. Fill the shelves in here if you can. Also, take Steph and Brayden. Steph, Brayden, we're organizing a trip to Northridge. I'd like you both to go too."

"Me?" Stephan asked. He put the book he'd been reading down. "Why me?"

"We're buying a lot of timber and I'd like to know how useful it is."

"Oh! I can do that. We can test things out with different grades of timber, too." His mind racing, Stephan reached for the tablet he'd gotten and started writing down notes on it.

"I'll go and let Fife and Jack know we've got work." Brayden was glad he'd been picked to go—he really wanted to talk to Rupert about the amplification of his powers.

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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.