The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 7/10

Heart 78400/78400

Experience 4000/19600

Workers 9/35

Monsters 1/37

Traps 36/79

Rooms 55

Food 2565

Timber 2325

Iron 1288

Steel 1005

Charcoal 0

Mana 71

Rock 2910

Gold 300

Leather 402

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 10

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Quest: Reach Tier 2

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

Having such a huge amount of resources poured into him was an astounding feeling. Travis could see most of his warehouses now filled with timber, grain, or steel. It was a relief to get a surplus of the very resources that were annoying to gather.

What had been a surprise was when Tannyr had stepped into the dungeon and his quest had completed. Four new points of dungeon appeared to him, all of them on the second floor. They were three-by-three, and he had a brief glimpse in each to reveal gold, iron, coal, and sulfur.

He waited until she was settled and the resources all stowed before making a more focused greeting. "I just want you to know, I appreciate you coming back. You're not a hostage here. If the town needs—"

"Travis, I appreciate it. I really do. But my promise is only one reason I'm coming back. The town hates having me there. I mean, it's toned down from hate, probably because it recognizes that I was helping, but the town's spirit was actively trying to push me away." Tannyr set down her pack and carefully lifted her tools down and set them beside her bed. "You've been doing a lot of work in the dungeon. Do you have a building for working with stone?"

Biting back his own need to apologize further, Travis focused on the need at hand. "I figured you'd want to have a hand in it. Do you have a preference as to what floor to have it on?"

Seemingly deep in thought, Tannyr spent a few moments in silence before shaking her head. "No. Wouldn't it need to be near the storage where all the rock goes?"

"You know, I think I have the perfect spot on the first floor. There is plenty of room around Wild's boss room." Travis quickly marked out the place. "It's up to you if you want to do that now or just relax. Today is technically a day off."

"A day off? I haven't even done a day of work yet. Nonsense." Grabbing her tools, Tannyr left her room and cut a hole through the wall to reach the tunnel that headed upstairs. Dropping the ceiling down behind her, like she'd seen others do, she started to head up. "I suspect it might just be a lack of knowledge, but you construct this place very efficiently for a dungeon."

"You wouldn't say that if you saw some of the compromises we've had to make. There are some messes on the first floor where a lode of iron or gold just turned up in the worst possible place. That said, I like to think I was pretty good at games like this."

"Games?"

Travis hadn't realized the little secret of his hadn't spread beyond the initial few kobolds. "The cat's out of the bag on that one. Yeah, games. I guess something happened to me, like I died or something. Anyway, I woke up in a dungeon, right? Only, where I come from dungeons don't exist, but there are games where you manage one."

Nodding, Tannyr didn't seem at all surprised. "Sounds like a complicated game. Dwarves play such games, though the rules are such that it could take years to learn them fully."

Travis' first reaction was to boast how easy the games were on computers, but he dug his heels in on that. Playing a dungeon game, as a board game, would need a lot of rules he realized. "Well, we had ways to make running the game easier, but it still took some dedication to master. I guess since I'm still here, it means it paid off."

Tannyr climbed up the stairs and turned to the secret door. Robert had shown her the way to activate it when he'd led her down, and now it was a simple case of finding the right piece of broken stone to press and it opened. "Could I have my bedroom up here too?"

"Sure can. I'll let Steph know to make you an extra bed, if you like?"

"I can manage that myself. A big part of masonry is boxing things up with wood and ensuring it's all square." She stopped when Travis connected the planned room to the tunnel right beside her. "Is this how you tell people what to do?"

"If you'd rather not, I can leave you to it yourself. You need a square in that direction, then start a ten-by-five room."

"So you don't just order us around?" Tannyr set down her tools and glared at the wall. "How did they"—she reached behind her back and lifted forward a pickaxe—"ah, right. This is a weird place."

"You get used to it." Travis split his attention over to Katelyn and asked her, "I know it's your day off, but I could really use some gold."

"No problems, Trav." Katelyn was in the bar chatting with Tom and Stratus—the two fire wizard adventurers Travis had hired. "Sorry, gentlemen, but I just have to take care of a job really quick."

Figuring she'd been in the library, Travis mentally winced at breaking up her conversation. "Oh, I didn't mean to interrupt—"

"You're fine, Trav. We'll have plenty of time to talk about the finer points of fire-based offensive magic." Walking out of the tavern and down the tunnel to the gold lode nearest the entrance, Katelyn tapped her staff on the stone floor and sent out her will and mana to melt the gold free.

"That's enough, Katelyn, thanks." Travis noticed that he didn't have more than a corner of one storage room free.

"It's a shame your spell doesn't count hired people as minions to buff their mana or we wouldn't need all these traps—you could just put me, Stratus, Tom, and Jack in the hall here and nothing would get in."

"I'd still rather let them die in the traps. For a start, if they do have something too big for y'all to bring down, that'd be an issue. Besides, Squishy is always hungry." Travis listened to Katelyn's laughter all the way back to the bar.

Tannyr was surprised how easily she moved when mining out sections. Her pickaxe practically flew through its arcs and carved out huge sections of the rock. For a stonemason, to find such ease in her digging was fantastic. She had half of the room excavated by the time Travis exclaimed wordlessly in shock. Pausing, she asked, "What's wrong?"

Travis was dumbfounded. "Did Pen come and help you? How did you excavate so much so fast?"

Shrugging her shoulders, Tannyr smirked. "You mean the others aren't as fast as this?"

"Pen isn't as fast as this. I guess this is what it means to be a stonemason?"

"No," Tannyr hefted her pickaxe, "it's what it means to be dwarven." Walking back to the rockface, she started working again. The tool sang in her hands, its voice triumphant every time she connected it with the rock again and again. She cleared the room out in what felt to her like an hour at most.

"At this rate you'd be able to do eight times that in a good shift—"

"Are you daft? Make it ten."

"Okay!" Travis actually laughed. "So ten times fifty leaves you five times faster than Pen."

"Maybe I could show her a few tips? See what she's doing wrong. Hey, where can my quarters go?" Tannyr looked around the room and reached a hand to the wall. "I think you have iron behind here. Let me just…"

Her pickaxe demolished the wall and revealed she'd been right. "See? Iron."

"Ugh. More iron. Well, I guess we need to get to making our own steel too now." Travis was ready to start planning a small room, then paused. "What do you want with this? Want me to plan it, or do you want me to tell you how much room you have?"

"I figure a few rooms will do me. I want somewhere I can plan things out, a bedroom, and somewhere to store my plans." Tannyr was already pondering how she wanted it to be. "If you don't care about this iron, can I use this as part of my rooms?"

Travis checked himself before he commented on a dwarf wanting an iron seam as decoration. "Sure can. So long as you don't go further to the left than the room here already is, you have as much space as you want. Go nuts, but if any monsters appear, lead them to the maze door, got it? Oh, and I'll set up here to have a door, and the room here to be made into the stoneworks."

Waiting for Tannyr's grunt of acknowledgment, Travis reached out to Wild, carefully, and found him sitting with Ludmiller in one of the lizard farms.

"Trav?" Wild asked.

"Yeah, just checking before I interrupt something. I have the resources for your—" Before Travis got to finish, both Wild and Ludmiller were on their feet (though the latter still had a lizard balanced on her shoulders).

Walking out into the open and plain area of his boss room, Wild looked around. "Let's start."

Fifteen hundred gold, five hundred timber, and a hundred steel later and the materials were on the floor of the soon-to-be-arena. As Wild and Ludmiller worked to build it, the room's ceiling seemed to stretch upward, and lava flowed around the edges of the room. In the middle, a huge sand-covered circle denoted where fights would take place.

The entrance became a simple set of doors, but the exit that led to the maze got a huge, steel door that looked impossible to open. The door that led to the back tunnel, likewise, looked a lot more sturdy—but still retained its camouflage.

A popup grabbed Travis' attention. "I purchased the cohort upgrade there, and it's asking me to select two minions. Ludmiller?"

"Of course." Ludmiller's focus was all on Wild as she spoke. Something about him seemed different, though it was hard for her to pin it down to anything in particular. "Who else?"

Clearing his non-existent throat, Travis asked everyone, "Wild's arena is built and he gets to pick two to be his cohort in there. He picked Ludmiller, but does anyone else want to be part of the guard?"

"Yeah. You know what, I'll take him up on that. A rogue, a wizard, and a melee fighter—should be a good combo." Katelyn didn't care that the two wizards she'd been talking with looked at her strangely. Well, she did, so she said, "I'm talking to Trav. Just signed on as the first floor boss' cohort. Want to come see our room?" When they stood up with her, she led the way.

"Katelyn has volunteered," Travis said after he noticed no one else seemed interested.

Wild had closed his eyes to feel the new strength burning in his body. Upgrading the room to an arena had imbued him with more strength on top of his boss bonus. A glance at Ludmiller revealed she too looked a little different—but it wasn't strength.

Ludmiller noticed right away she seemed to blur around the edges a little. Focusing on herself, she sensed a new ability in her repertoire and activated it. A chill stillness surrounded her, and when she held her hand up, it was almost invisible.

"Luddy? What happened? Where are you? Trav! Where—" Wild froze mid-panic when he felt Ludmiller's touch on his shoulder. "Shadow walk?"

"If going invisible is shadow walking, then I guess so," Ludmiller said—barely a whisper to Wild's hearing. "This is going to be useful."

When Katelyn opened the back door into Wild's arena, she saw a small stone bridge rise out of the lava she'd almost walked into. "Neat. Hey, Wild, you want someone else for your cohort?" After she stepped into the room, Katelyn felt Travis' attention on her for a moment, and then her breath caught in her throat.

Travis stared through Wild and Ludmiller's eyes (as well as various lizards that braved the room) as Katelyn's staff shattered into a red pillar of pyroclastic rock that caused heat ripples in the air around it. Her hand didn't burn, far from it, Katelyn gripped her new staff as her eyes glowed into yellow embers and a hot shimmer of air left her mouth. "Are you okay, Katelyn?"

"I am far better than okay." Katelyn had never felt so firmly in control of her new element. Power burned through her and she realized she could control the lava in the room too. "Hey, Tom, Stratus, check this out!"

Stratus laughed. His world had turned insane. He'd only seen a draconic pyroclast once in his life, and the party he'd been with had gotten away from it so fast they hadn't stopped running until they were two towns away. "I don't believe I should step into an active arena alone, all things considered."

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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.