The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 10/100

Heart 159996/160000

Experience 24150/90000

Workers 9/67

Monsters 1/69

Traps 62/159

Food 2470

Timber 1780

Iron 124

Steel 420

Charcoal 458

Mana 220

Rock 3450

Gold 255

Leather 377

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 90

Glass 744

Explosive Runes 20

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Quest: Destroy another dungeon.

Quest: Capture an adventurer and put them in your jail.

Quest: Lay siege to the nearby town.

"Okay, so I have new quests. I still have one to destroy another dungeon, but there's two more that are even more terrifying to think about. I need to capture an adventurer and put them in a jail. I also need to siege the town." Travis was surprised by how little Penelope reacted to his news. "I'm going to have those two slots unable to be completed forever!"

Walking around the heart room, Penelope was reading over the lists they'd made on the walls. "No you won't. Firstly, we have a bunch of adventurers we can stuff into a jail any time we want. Just give them ten gold and they'd be fine with a day or whatever's required. You could even build things all sneaky and actually surround one of their living areas with jail. That might not work, though."

It surprised Travis how she'd come up with that. So far, it had mostly been him exploiting how the various systems of the dungeon worked. "Let's go with the first idea. I don't want to spring a surprise jail on people."

"Right. So about sieging the town. What would we have to do for that? Actually attack people, maybe reach the wall, or do we have to encircle the town?"

"We can try two of those things easy enough by visiting the town. Also, we have the okay from Christine to try building an entrance closer to the town, so we should probably do that. There are a few things I need your input on with it." Travis looked around at the scratching notes on his wall. "Can you make a map there?"

"What of?" Penelope asked, already working her claw over the stone to smooth it out.

"Northridge, us, the undead dungeon—The whole area. We have enough resources, we need to figure out where it will go."

After mining out around twenty thousand gold, Katelyn had made her way down through the dungeon to the heart room. When she opened the inner door, she heard Travis and Penelope arguing—though the former had been keeping himself from being heard by the dungeon at large. "Hey, I have the gold. What's up?"

"Trav thinks it's safe to open our entrance into these grass flats. We should be on a hill at least. You want your defensive positions to be high ground." Waving her hand at the map, Penelope indicated the spot where an X sat.

Travis railed at not being able to manipulate the map directly, but he was working on the problem at hand. "But we don't. The town said, Christine and Brolly, that they would defend us with an outpost. So, we build that around that entrance. The important bit is that we can get rails and have flat ground between us and the town. We can have the new entrance connected directly up to Wild's arena."

"There are two problems, Trav," Katelyn said. "The first is what happens if the undead swarm in, get past the Bowling Alley, kill Wild, Luddy, and me, and then charge up through that tunnel to attack the outpost from within? The second is that even if we try a better method, that tunnel needs to have living quarters for the garrison, storage areas and dropoffs, and—like Trav said—it needs to be flat and lead to the town directly."

"Pen, can you flatten me some rock, I've got an idea." Travis focused his mana to a point and swirled it around in front of Katelyn. "Kate, can you see that?"

"You're going to need to be—Oh! Your mana?" Reaching out a talon, Katelyn poked at where Travis had made a little swirl of mana weave around itself over and over.

"Right. I want you to move your claw and follow the mana on the wall, okay?" Travis asked. When Katelyn approached the wall, he started to draw. "This is the first floor. There will be three sections to this. One will be the main entrance going straight down to the stairs. Eventually, at the next tier, the top floor will be wall to wall traps and not much else.

"Right, so here. There will be two entrances on the current first floor. One will be the entrance we have now, the other will be the shortcut to town. The shortcut will have sleeping quarters, a tavern setup, all the good stuff we need. Then there will be the monster of all switchbacking tunnels, like the Twists down near Squishy." As he described it, he had Katelyn do a rough design. "Something it would take them days of marching to get through. Whatever it is, it needs to give us enough time to block off the ends as needed. We don't even want traps in there.

"The last thing on that level will be a set of stairs leading down here. That's because we'll make the rest of that floor specifically for living quarters for kobolds and adventurers we're allied with. The bulk of that floor, in fact, will be mined out for rock, too, I think. It will be a reasonably safe place to mine and build where anything we find there shouldn't be too nasty to fight, and we can lead it to the tunnels going to our traps."

"Okay, that is a good idea. Maybe have the tunnel split off to the twists here or another tunnel that has the tavern and stuff, so if things get bad there, they can withdraw in there, link them up to the inner section, and block it off completely here." The idea would take kobolds to implement, but Penelope wanted to get everything done right the first time. "Let's get Brolly to give some input on this. Those guards should also have several talismans each."

"So, how does this entrance thing work?" Katelyn asked.

"I have no idea. I figure I'd need to target something with it, but since I can't see outside, how would that work?" Travis checked his resources, then double-checked them. "Ah well, here goes nothing."

With the two costs displayed, Travis opted for the one that cost more gold and less other resources—it made sense to use gold as much as he could since it was so easy to acquire. Selecting it brought up a question for him—Select first minion to define endpoint.

"Whoa. Okay, I think the way this works is I select two of you, one to act as each end, then you get to pick the spots it connects. You two up for it?" Travis asked.

"Yeah!" Penelope and Katelyn said at the same time.

Having left the dungeon with every single mage they had to defend Katelyn, Penelope ran as fast as she could along through the forest. She felt big and dangerous, and when she got to the edge of the treeline she spread her wings—and completely failed to fly.

"No flying? What are the point of these things?" Regaining her running pace, she folded her wings to her back and kept moving.

All the energy of an upgraded boss monster made her feel impossibly powerful, though she had no delusions that she couldn't be beaten in a fight. The foothills smoothed out into wide grassy plains. In the far distance she could see farms with wooden palisades around them. She aimed for the big wall of the city in the distance.

Brolly had been on patrol with his newly formed squad of riflemen when he spotted the dragon boss in the distance. "Hold! Do not fire at them!" To reinforce his order, he rode his horse around and in front of the squad and did his best to keep his mount steady as Penelope approached.

"Brolly! Good to see you again. How are the guns?" Penelope slowed considerably, fully aware of how dangerous those weapons would be if they decided to aim them at her.

"The guns are working very well. We had an undead attack here several days ago and the weapons meant we could pick off their necromancers at a distance. Their lord did a good number at the base of our wall, but a few well-placed shots took him down." Much as Brolly would have loved to chat about his new pride and joy, he figured that Penelope running at the city meant something odd was up. "Anything we can help you with?"

"Actually, yes. Christine Sellswell told you we plan to open a new dungeon entrance closer to the city?" Waiting for the nod from Brolly, Penelope continued, "I'm here to do that. Would this be a good place for it?"

Brolly had never raised one eyebrow quite as much as he did. "You can really open one here? We could get a fort built around it quickly. Faster still if you could provide some stone from your stores."

"Exactly my thought. Kate is back in the dungeon marking one end position, apparently all I have to do is stand here and focus on this as being where—" No sooner did Penelope actually think that than the ground started to shake.

Even Penelope jumped aside and made room as the ground swelled up, building into a small hill about twenty feet high—and then a hole opened in the front. The moment that entrance opened, Penelope could feel the dungeonness coming from it. "Guess it works like that, huh? Okay, so we were thinking that we would have most of the stuff inside the entrance—sleeping quarters for the guards, trading area for merchants, another tavern, and kitchen. We also have a plan to make it as secure as possible against invaders from the forest entrance and to protect the guards should the fort you build be overrun."

"That is a lot of foresight. When I heard you were planning to place a dungeon entrance closer, I expected it would be on the edge of the forest—not on our doorstep. This is a good spot for it and I'm sure Christine will be salivating to move goods and gold rapidly in and out." Looking at the mound, Brolly knew he was about to become busy. "It will take some days to get our builders working on it. You can protect this entrance from being flooded by undead—from your side—until then?"

"We'll have our best digger on the job." Penelope stepped back into the dungeon but turned to nod toward Brolly. "We've got our own gunsmith built. All we need now is to make a few dozen weapons and I'll have a rifle in the hands of every guard and militia in Northridge."

He couldn't help it. Brolly was grinning like a maniac as Penelope reentered the dungeon. Wheeling his horse around, he looked at the faces of what would no doubt be the first of the rifle squads of Northridge. "Come on. Let's finish this patrol and get the good news back to town."

It was strange how easy it was to produce them. Tannyr would beat the steel into a long rod, she'd load it onto a turning device and bore a hole down the middle of it, then she'd machine the fiddly little trigger system and priming mechanism. Shaving down a piece of timber for the stock, she'd put it all together and somehow have a rifle in her hands.

Not being a mage or a fighter, she left the latest project of Travis' to those that were and continued on with her work—soon making nine more. She was about to grab the steel to make another when she felt Travis' attention upon her. "We got ripped off, Trav."

"I nee—Huh?" Travis felt confused, what with being ambushed by words he hadn't expected. "What do you mean? Also, can you come up to the first floor?"

"Digging? And I mean those rifles we paid the town to get. I made ten of them for fifty steel and ten timber." Setting the rifles aside on a bench, Tannyr watched them disappear. "Those appear in your inventory?"

"Yeah, they did! We have a shortcut to Northridge set up, and it's time to start securing that from the tunnel leading down—and do some really tricky stuff with stairs." Travis felt new excitement build. Not only was he getting better situated, but Tannyr had shown that they could provide assets that could be traded to the town for even more protection.

"You know the deal, Travis. Map it out for me and I'll dig it up faster than all the others put together." Unsure whether it was dwarven or kobold pride that made her so excited to do the work, Tannyr didn't exactly sweat the difference. The fact was she had been saved from death to complete her life's work, a true magnum opus. She would build a dungeon that would never fall.

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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.