The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 7/10

Heart 78400/78400

Experience 4000/19600

Workers 9/35

Monsters 1/37

Traps 58/79

Rooms 63

Food 2557

Timber 804

Iron 1134

Steel 605

Charcoal 0

Mana 62

Rock 2222

Gold 305

Leather 402

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 10

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 5

Quest: Reach Tier 2

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

With everyone getting another day off, most had spent it actually doing hobbies or celebrating the recent acquisitions. Travis was perfectly okay with all of this. Katelyn had been one exception, making more runes. Wild and Ludmiller had spent a day getting their bedroom constructed, and so too had Tannyr in her own quarters.

The following day had seen a flurry of digging, trap building, and creating new mana shrines. Three new shrines had been created, and the one found early had left Travis annoyed that it ruined the symmetry of his new warehouse building.

"I can't believe I'm saying we have too many gold mines, but Trav, we have too many gold mines." Blake looked at the second maze-based gold mine and shook his head. "How many more of these things are around here?"

"I don't actually know. It's not like I have a notepad to keep track of these things. There might be a few." Travis wasn't concerned with the gold mines. They were perfectly fine where they were. "Luddy, this is a masterpiece," Travis said, splitting his attention off to examine her work. She was checking over what Travis would now call the bowling alley.

The other major upgrade that he'd purchased was from the stoneworks for the first floor, upgrading all the floors and walls to a worked stone finish. The final thing for that day had been to seal off the new warehouses from the stairs and integrate them into the central area of the dungeon.

"So, more digging?" Tannyr sounded, at least to Travis, as eager.

"If you want. I mean, I can set you up to dig all day long, but I won't."

Frowning, Tannyr glared at the mirror behind the bar. "Why not?"

It was weird for Travis to see the face of one of the kobolds, but he was glad Tannyr took the initiative to do that. "Because you aren't a slave. Even Luddy, who according to the town is an indentured worker, isn't a slave. I don't want to push you to do things you don't—"

"How old are you, Travis?" Tannyr asked.

The conversation was monopolizing Travis' attention, but he felt he owed it to Tannyr. "Including before I became a dungeon?" At her nod, he sighed. "Twenty."

Tannyr sucked in a sharp breath. "You speak like someone ten times your age. And, even if you were, I would still have thirty years on you." She let it sink in for a bit. "What I'm getting at is if I want to dig, give me something to dig. Don't tell me you don't want a slave, because I am not one."

It was a proverbial gut-blow. Travis had to reorient his concepts of responsibility. "Alright, but I know that mining out planned areas is sort of like training, giving you mental rewards for doing work, so I'm going to stop you every hundred sections and see if you want to keep going."

"I already noticed that. I'd judge it's no worse than drinking. But you let us have as much time in the bar as we want." Raising her eyebrow, Tannyr smirked at her reflection over the top of her ale mug.

"You want me to close down the bar?" Travis hoped his joke would be taken well, and when Tannyr started laughing he knew it had been. He used the eyes of everyone present to build a weird three-dimensional view of the room, with several lizards around filling in most of the gaps that the kobolds left. The room was almost packed, to the point where he considered the idea of building a second one beside it and linking them up. "Don't worry, that's definitely not a plan in any way. If you have any ideas for things you'd enjoy, let me know and I'll try to make it happen."

Lifting her mug up, Tannyr saluted herself in the mirror. "That's a better deal than most places. Thanks." She took a long pull of the ale and let out a very relieved chirp-like burp. "This is good stuff. Better than the ale in town."

"Yeah I—Undead!" Travis shouted the last word for all kobolds to hear—probably even Squishy. "There are dozens of skeletons coming in. There's a lord with them again, necromancers and other magic users, there's some kind of—It just came through the door like it wasn't there!"

At the table across the room where three wizards and a sorcerer had been discussing magic with stacks of books scattered around them, Katelyn stood up. "Sounds like a raid. Wraith coming, I think. Everyone to the back of the room."

Getting up and scurrying away from the door, Tannyr turned to see the indistinct ghost pass through the door and turn to look into the tavern. Her time spent dying of necromantic energy made her not at all pleased to see the thing. "Can someone here kill that?"

Here, where she was a cohort of the floor, Katelyn was constantly holding back her power. It was like a constant clenching of her mental fist to keep it from spilling over. Releasing that grip, she let her fire out and met the gaze of the undead wraith advancing into the room. Gesturing with a finger, she extended a single coherent beam of light/heat out and speared it.

Wraiths, being immune to physical attacks, could only be harmed by magic. As the beam of light pierced it, it screamed silently and rushed forward faster—only for the other magic users to send their own power out to lash at it, freeze it, and incinerate it further. Its hate fizzled out before it managed to reach the magic users.

More were pouring into the bar. Katelyn started spitting out a flurry of fireballs at the wraiths just as an enriching blue light boiled around her. Feeling her mana become denser, she started to bark with laughter—doubling the output of her spells.

"Uh—" Stratus looked between Tom and Jack, seeing them both having stopped casting. "Is she doing this all on her own?"

"Seems to be—Oops, there's a lot." Tom, along with Jack, both lashed out at the last of a rush of wraiths that had slipped in.

The shout had woken Brayden up. Rushing out into the hall, he saw several wraiths floating down the tunnel, their barely substantial claws held out and reaching for him. "By Brogdar, I will not stand to have you here!" The wrath boiling within him, Brayden knew, was only partly his own. His god detested undead, and with a flood of magic that felt as vast as the ocean, he pushed out to them and burned them with holy fire.

"What the fuck is going on?" Fife stomped out of her bedroom, half dressed, and glared at Brayden. When she saw that he was wrapped in holy flames himself, she asked, "There's fighting?" with a new eagerness in her voice.

"Undead again. Looks like the other dungeon has unlocked wraiths and other things. The incorporeal stuff ghosted through the doors, but the rest are marching down the tunnels." Brayden left his party member behind to get ready, opening all the doors to check that no wraiths had gotten past. "Trav, can you see anything in the back tunnel?"

"No, I think it's clear. There are more wraiths coming!" Travis considered just dropping rock to block the wraiths' path to the tavern area, but he felt confident that between Katelyn and Brayden, nothing was going to get through.

Buzzing with all the mana she was being fed, Katelyn was excited to see more wraiths pass through the door outside, but before she could raise her magic to lash out at them, they imploded with boiling, white light. "What was that?"

"Holy flames. Brayden must have gotten annoyed by the new visitors." Jack grinned to see his friend accounting well for himself. "Are we going to head out to tackle the necromancers?"

"The necromancers aren't outside. They're going down after that swarm of skeletons! They changed tactics." Travis couldn't help but sound nervous, but at the same time he was excited that all the monsters seemed to be filing into the tunnels, not stopping to notice the boulder traps.

Making his way out of the nearest lizard farm, Wild set his little friends back down on the ground. "Travis, don't kill all of them. I wish to test myself, Luddy, and Katelyn. Can you ask them to come down here?"

Travis passed along word and focused his attention on catching the necromancers as best he could. The problem was that there were zombies in front of them and thirty skeletons behind. He sent boulder after boulder at them, but when they withstood all that a particular tunnel could dish out, they would then just resurrect the fallen skeletons.

The tunnels were packed solid, but Travis waited for the necromancers to bunch up around a corner before unleashing two boulders right into the midst of them. A rush of experience hit his coffers and he let out a laugh as he finally got the last of the resurrecting annoyances. What was left—after a careful use of additional boulders—was the lord, a zombie, and three of the other magic users. "Wild, I have whittled them down to just five. Letting them come through to you."

Wild, welcoming his female cohort to the arena, beamed in excitement. "Are you ready?"

Ludmiller winked at Katelyn and kissed Wild before she vanished into thin air. The room might be illuminated by the lava around, but Ludmiller still was wreathed in shadow. She slipped across the room quieter than a breath and waited by the door.

With the door closed behind her, Katelyn took a breath in and let it out again. Red specks of light sizzled on her exhalation—burning cinders scattered to the air. "Keep them away from me, Wild, and I will make them regret their choices in death."

The intense heat of the lava was nothing, Wild realized, compared to Katelyn's presence. She was like the heart of a volcano, pressure and inescapable heat both, and she was searching for a target to release her will on.

Stomping into the arena, the undead lord stepped past Ludmiller and moved decisively for Wild. She let it pass. Next a zombie shambled in and ran toward Wild too. She let that pass. The three magic users who piled in next were a problem for their group, though. One in particular she recognized as not being undead. Moving around behind the offending humanoid, she brought out her knives and lined herself up on it.

Just as Katelyn started incinerating the zombie, she spotted one of the magic users reach out and extend a wave of sickening green magic toward her target. Flesh grew back, bones were pulled back into place, and the searing of her flames was undone. She was just setting up a huge fire detonation among the casters when Ludmiller appeared from the shadows behind the cleric, already extracting her blades from the two deep wounds she'd made. With a cackle, Katelyn incinerated the zombie to end it.

Wild still didn't have the reach of his old form, but his new strength made his strikes far more effective. He deflected the lord's strikes while hacking off the limbs of the zombie that got too close. He fought on, taking several hits from the lord that got through his guard, but unlike his recent brush with death, now he felt far more durable. "Kill the zombie!"

Turning her attention from where Ludmiller was dealing with the two mages to the tower of meat and bone that still menaced Wild just with its size alone. "My—pleasure. Trav, a mana field please?" The resulting flood of mana hit both her and Wild, but the influx of power boosted her damage potential to new heights. Gesturing at the zombie, she started plowing fireball after fireball into it like a swarm, but rather than small ones she used the full-sized version.

The heat washing over Wild's scales, along with the lack of any attacks from the zombie, told Wild that he had one problem left to deal with. When the lord swung his next attack, Wild brought one axe up to slow the blade and the other across at an angle—a hammer and anvil of an attack that led to a high-pitched cracking sound echoing around the arena.

The undead lord's sword was broken just past the hilt.

Wild jumped up and brought both his axes around at the lord's neck. Each blade passed within a hair's breadth of the other and bit into and through the hard, old bones holding its head to its body. As he came down from the jump, he dug his feet-talons into its ribcage and twisted his body to the side, shoving the thing behind him across the floor and only jumping free of it a moment before it landed in the lava.

Panting with excitement, seeing the world only in shades of hot and cold, Katelyn slowly reined back her combat thrill—there were only two other things moving in the room: Ludmiller and Wild. "That was fun."

"Hey, uh, I think I leveled twice in all that," Travis said.

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.