The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 10/10

Heart 160000/160000

Experience 40000/40000

Workers 9/47

Monsters 1/45

Traps 62/109

Rooms 111

Food 7438

Timber 7980

Iron 539

Steel 605

Charcoal 500

Mana 84

Rock 3450

Gold 84

Leather 377

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 90

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 20

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Quest: Reach Tier 2

Quest: Destroy another dungeon

The last thing that Travis asked for the day was for Penelope to go and designate five hundred timber to start processing in the charcoal burner. Several lizards had wandered into the little room and spent the night there while everyone slept.

The fire of the charcoal burner was comforting, as was seeing through the eyes of all the lizards in the village. They seemed, to Travis, to have roles. Some would march out and track down bugs (mostly by going outside) while others built little lean-to buildings for them to rest in.

Queuing up six more warehouse upgrades brought the amount of timber he had down to a far more manageable level, though it did use up all his steel. "It was about time we started making our own, anyway."

The quiet of his dungeon was somewhat peaceful. Not being able to hear through lizards had an advantage because although he had mastered the art of tuning out a kobold's senses, the lizards seemed hard-wired to him—almost like his heart was.

A few lizards marched out the front entrance of his dungeon and started sunning themselves on the stone there. He could see enough through them to watch the sunrise through the trees and it was nice to experience.

No sooner did the first rays of dawn shine over the horizon than Travis noticed his mana and food tick upward. It was a reminder that a new day had come and with it all the challenges that had become familiar to him in this strange world. Two more gold mines purchased for the second floor brought his mana back down from over a hundred.

"Mmm. Morning, Trav."

Penelope's voice drew Travis' attention to her room. She was huge, now, compared even to what Wild had been. She had a pair of wings that she often kept clung tight to her back, and she stretched as she got to her feet. He was watching her from multiple angles thanks to several lizards who seemed to follow her everywhere.

"You look amazing," Travis said with full honesty.

Jerking in surprise, Penelope smiled after a few moments. "Not beautiful, not hot, and not sexy?"

"The first, definitely. The second—your breath is acid, not fire." Travis liked seeing her laugh. "And the third…" He took his time finding the right words. "We can't exactly do anything about it, but yeah."

"Yeah?"

Travis laughed and replied, "Yeah. There are more warehouses to upgrade, too."

"Of course there are. Did the charcoal finish?" Picking up her sword belt, Penelope strapped her weapons on. "Also, will this give us enough space to go to the next tier? I feel like it would be a good time to."

"I don't know, this whole thing doesn't tell me about my free space, but let's give it a try. If you get the warehouses done, I'll get Kate to melt as much gold as she can before I explode."

Penelope didn't mind upgrading rooms. It was work, and kobolds liked work, but she was having a lot of trouble keeping her excitement in check. A new tier to the dungeon would mean a lot more expansive growth and she could remember that from last time.

When she'd gotten the sixth (and last) of the warehouses upgraded, she walked down to the blacksmith. "How late was it before Kate went to sleep?"

Travis laughed at the assumption. "About two hours after you. She just won't stop reading—unless Steph asks her."

"Is it wrong to be so happy that people are finding ways to make relationships work in here?" Pulling out some iron, Penelope set it in the furnace and added what felt like the right amount of charcoal. She wasn't sure what she expected, but the shiny steel ingots falling out wasn't it. "Trav! This is ridiculous!"

"Oh? You'd rather actually do all the work? Hey, can you just dump two hundred iron in and do that again?" Travis dutifully absconded with the ten bars Penelope had produced.

"Two hundred? How much do you have right now?" Penelope tried to think of the amount, reaching behind her back to pull out ten at a time. "Ugh. You should get Robert to do this. He's way better at pulling resources out than I am."

"Robert's been working on making the sludge traps so corrosive that I worry it will eat through the rock and we'll just end up with really deep pit traps." Travis briefly looked in on Robert and found him in his lab, watching a chemical bubble away in some glassware.

Katelyn caught Travis' attention, though. She was sitting at a table in the tavern with Stephan across from her. "What's up?" Travis asked.

"Me, now. You want me to get you some gold today, right?" Katelyn sipped at a glass of water.

"Yeah, I think we'll have enough storage now. Pen just upgraded a few more warehouses. Pick a seam on the top floor that's in the way and go nuts with it. I'll tell you when I start overflowing," Travis said.

"You are talking to the dungeon?" Felna asked, interrupting Katelyn's conversation.

Nodding, Katelyn looked at Felna and her eyes traced the stripes and feline lines of her body. There was more muscle there than most cat-kin wore—which reminded Katelyn a little of Wild. "You're the priest who has the heart communion spell?"

"Yes." Felna brightened at being recognized, and more so at the woman probably guessing her intent. "I would like to try casting it on your dungeon before this next advancement, if that would be alright with him?"

"Yeah, I'm okay with that. Steph, would you mind leading her down?" Travis asked.

"Follow me. Do you have a light source?" Standing up, Stephan looked at Felna. For an adventurer, it was a strange sight to see them without a weapon and without their armor. "You aren't armed?"

"A matter of trust," Felna said and followed after Stephan. "Sorry, you know my name, may I have yours?"

"Stephan. Call me Steph." He tried not to bat an eye at the way she summoned a ghostly green flame with one hand, but Steph was impressed by the ease with which she navigated the dark. "You're not scared of this place?"

"I've been in many dungeons, but all the others have hated that I was there. Always, they have this malevolence directed at my mere presence. It probably comes part and parcel with being an outsider. Your dungeon—Travis—does not harbor ill-will toward me. I would not be able to sleep in here if he did." Being paid a regular amount of gold every day for just being ready to work purchased a lot of honesty in Felna's mind.

"I don't know if Trav could actually hate anyone, though I have heard from Pen that her ex party members are two such that he'd happily feed to Squishy." Grim as it was to think such, Stephan had heard the story from Penelope's lips, and it hurt him to know that humans were capable of such things. "He'd probably even make friends with the undead dungeon if it gave him a chance, though that would be up to Tannyr."

"Tannyr was the dwarven stone mason who died defending the town, wasn't she?"

"You've heard that Trav can turn people into kobolds, right?" Stephan looked back over his shoulder and up, waited for a nod, then continued. "She'd been poisoned by the undead dungeon. It had laid claim to her and was killing her. Trav intervened and fought back to protect Tannyr. That made her into a kobold."

"I can see why it would require appeasing her, yes. Your dungeon seems unique in its understanding of not just human, but also dwarven behavior."

Thinking about it, Stephan couldn't help but shake his head and grin to himself; out of sight from Felna. "Trav listens to people. He asks questions that sometimes make him seem vulnerable and weak, but it's always to find out what we want and what would help us. He could order us to do anything. I helped him test that it works. Outside of that, you want to know how many times he has ordered someone to do something?"

The path seemed very long, with Felna sensing an almost complete loop at one point before they took stairs down to the second level. "I would assume, by the loyalty you all show, that the answer is none?"

"None. I didn't enjoy the idea of going to negotiate the purchase contracts in Northridge, and I can't say digging out a dungeon was high on my list of things to waste a slow afternoon with, but I will do them without him ordering me because I know they need to be done. We have someone better at digging now, but I still like to spend a little time with a pickaxe. It's a kobold thing."

When Stephan stopped at the bottom of the stairs, Felna expected him to turn right and follow the tunnel. Instead, he turned left and pulled out his pickaxe. "Where are—?" She stopped, watching as he cut a section of stone away to reveal another tunnel. He stepped through and started digging at the wall opposite. "Don't get a lot of visitors down here?"

"Not really, and those who do are welcome to—Don't go down there!" Stephan stopped Felna in her tracks by grabbing her arm and pulling her back. "That's where Squishy is, and no one knows how he'll react to a non-hostile."

"'Squishy'?" Felna asked.

"A slime that's about twelve feet cubed. He's huge and the only thing you'll notice about him is the few undead bones still dissolving inside." With his charge duly warned, Stephan got to work on the next wall and opened a path to the inner area of the dungeon.

"Right. You have a giant slime called Squishy." Shaking her head and smiling, Felna could feel the dungeon heart was significantly closer. It seemed strange to her, but then she realized the original path must have a long way to travel before it reached here. "What are—Oh, sealing me in."

"You're safer in the inner parts of the dungeon than you are upstairs. There are no traps between us and the heart, now." Stephan finished closing the two gaps he'd made up by dropping rock from the ceiling and led the way further in.

Each step she took, Felna could sense herself getting closer to the heart. The mana in the air thickened more and more, and she felt almost intoxicated by it. A long tunnel brought them to a T intersection, but rather than left or (following Stephan) right, she stopped and looked at the rock before her. "Camouflaged door?"

"Our library is in there. Trav's heart is down here." Stephan waited until Felna was following him before turning again and walking to the hidden door that protected Travis' heart. "We try to hide things at the intersections leading to them. The library, in particular, we wanted to keep hidden from invaders." He used his body to block the mechanism from sight as Stephan unlocked and opened the door.

Felna took a step backward at the intensity of the mana in the room ahead. It rushed out and swirled around her, then seemed to suck back in. The motion was almost like the waves of an ocean, and it took her a few moments to get used to it. "That's quite intense. The mana density here is many times the strongest dungeon I've encountered."

Travis watched as she stepped forward, an adventurer he wasn't as close to as Fife or Jack, but she froze at the sight of Penelope standing beside his heart. The awe mixed with fear on Felna's face didn't surprise him, to be honest, not after he'd seen what Penelope could do against the weaker undead lord. "Pen, relax. Tell her to relax, too."

Penelope hadn't realized she'd been tense. Forcing her muscles to relax, she stepped a bit closer to Travis' heart and reached one hand out to it. "Hey. This is Trav, he says you need to relax. If you don't do anything stupid, we can all be friends."

"Y-Yeah." Felna found herself stumbling over her words like a kitten. "Sorry, but as I said, this is the most intense mana field I've ever encountered. It's—" Stopping and lowering herself to one knee, Felna reached for a little flask at her throat and muttered a soft prayer to her god.

Strength filled her, but not strength to fight. The Sandwalker, like all felines, was a curious god, and practically sat on her shoulder as it fed her the strength to move and think in the intense magic. "Sorry, I needed some help."

"Trav says he can feel your mana and the mana of something else. That's your god?" Penelope asked.

Felna nodded. "By the holy dunes, yes. You may not feel it, but the mana here—if I wasn't protected right now—would have me in a comatose heap, drugged out of my mind. Can we do this spell and figure out the effects afterward?"

"He wants to know what it does."

"The spell links me to a heart—to a dungeon—in what I suspect is a similar manner as you. I retain my autonomy, but I can feel the dungeon's will and its emotions. I can also perceive a little of what it can. You're still willing to do this?" Almost wanting to shield her eyes, Felna managed to look at Travis' heart as she asked. "It's not permanent, either. It should wear off within a day or two—unless I put more energy into it than usual."

Penelope laughed and gently rubbed at the spot where her palm was on the heart. "You're both as bad as each other. Yes, he's okay with it. If you are, cast the spell."

Felna drew her mana out and struggled not to lose track of it in the greater flow of the dungeon's mana. She built her spell and cast it as one breath, pressing her magic to it and sending it into the heart.

The spell completed and Travis felt the connection form with Felna. She became—She wasn't of the dungeon, but she was definitely linked to it. "Hey, uh, can you hear me?"

Eyes widening, Felna nodded in surprise. "I can."

"Well, that's neat. Hey, can I try something else that only works on dungeon minions?" Travis thought it best to ask Felna before just doing something, particularly when he could still feel her god's magic hovering about her.

"O-Okay." No dungeon had ever actually spoken before. Felna liked the young, deep voice that sounded in her head whenever he spoke. She was just about to ask what he was planning when all her mana exploded and swelled.

The world around Felna turned from the pink glow of the heart into a bright blue, and she felt like she was ten sizes too big for her body. She dropped to her knees as her own mana seemed to have swollen and grown in sympathy with the dungeon's spell. "What is—Hey, what're you doing?" It was hard to get her words in order, it felt like she was so full of mana that even her thoughts were crowded out.

"Well, that proves it. You definitely count as part of the dungeon with that spell cast. I wonder if the spell was adapted from the magic dungeons used themselves?" Travis was mulling over the thought when he noticed Penelope step forward and catch Felna before she hit the ground. "Uh…"

"Trav, I'll take her upstairs and explain why their cleric looks like she's spent too long imbibing mellow wart." Picking up Felna, Penelope started to make her way out of the heart room.

"Mellow what? Stephan, why are you laughing? What happened to her?" Travis asked.

Since it seemed harmless, Stephan felt confident in treating the situation with the mirth it deserved. "Trav, she's addled out of her mind on your mana."

"Oh."

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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.