The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 10/100

Heart 160000/160000

Experience 29700/90000

Workers 11/67

Monsters 1/69

Traps 63/159

Food 2471

Timber 550

Iron 111

Steel 1370

Charcoal 358

Mana 355

Rock 3429

Gold 314

Leather 377

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 300

Glass 650

Explosive Runes 20

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 9

Long Guns 9

Bullets 500

Black Powder 500

Quest: Destroy another dungeon.

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

Quest: Lay siege to the nearby town.

It had been a heck of a day. Travis had gotten Tannyr to focus on the safety built into the second entrance area while Blake had started digging the tunnel on the bottom floor looking for mana shrines. What he'd found had been a huge one. If Travis could have danced, he would have. His mana had shot up for the rest of the day and he was content to leave the digging at that for the moment.

Katelyn, Fife, Kelvin, Stephan, and Brayden had spent the day talking about being kobolds and researching the newest passive experience income from quest completion, and the rest had been free to do their own thing.

Robert, though, had revealed his latest work. "This stuff should terrify even the undead. Look." Having spent time changing the old sludge out and adding his own in, without any caltrops, Robert drew out a potion vial from a pocket. "Standard issue flashfire."

When he tossed the vial at the wall beside a sludge trap, the air itself ignited the mixture within and a gout of flame poured down onto the sludge.

… and sputtered out.

"Is the glass melting?" Travis asked.

"The glass is melting. Look, even the stopper I'd sealed on has started to dissolve in the acid. And, you know the best bit?" Robert asked as he crouched down and put his hand in the highly acidic muck. "It doesn't harm kobold scales, though I would not suggest anyone get it on their face."

That surprised Travis more than the efficacy of the sludge. "Uh, make sure to warn everyone about that. Walking through the stuff might seem great if there are no other solutions, but if you trip and go face-first into it…"

Pulling his hand out, Robert used the stone wall to wipe the sludge off as best he could. "And you don't want to drop anything in it."

"Okay, now, I have a lot of spare trap slots. Want to make the maze more exciting?" For Travis, nothing seemed like as good an idea as filling the second floor maze full of the new and improved sludge traps. "Because I like the idea of undead going into that and never coming out the other side."

"Uh, there's a problem with that." Robert gestured to the trap before him. "It took me a day to make enough of this for that one trap."

Travis swore without focusing on anyone—the words only there for his benefit. "Well, would buying anything help speed it up? Maybe get someone to help you?"

Thinking on it, Robert nodded. "I'll make a list of things to get from town, and I'll ask Pen and Luddy to help. They've both had experience dealing with alchemical traps and items."

"I don't make them nervous?" Penelope asked.

"What makes them nervous is undead. The rifles have been helping with that. Besides, these are all established workers; they know the help you've provided in the past." Brolly Windchime gestured at the squad of guards with rifles, then patted the pistol at his own side. "I didn't like the idea of you trying to take that dungeon out, you know, but I'm starting to see upsides to it."

"Right, did you want some more guns?" Jerking her thumb back to the dungeon entrance behind her, Penelope added, "I can grab you another five right now." Something was itching in the back of her mind and she couldn't remember what it was. Going back to the dungeon would mean she could ask Travis.

"I would never say no to an offer like that. I trust there will be more coming to outfit this outpost?" Following along, Brolly couldn't help but feel excited at the idea of Northridge becoming a manufacturing hub for guns. The moment Penelope had stepped inside, she started producing guns out of thin air—though he'd talked to Christine Sellswell and knew this was how dungeon creatures could retrieve items from the dungeon's stores. "We got a new smith in town. Perhaps I should send her out to sign up?"

"Her great grandfather already has. He made it clear she wasn't to become a kobold for a good hundred years at least." Passing Brolly the guns one by one, she quickly asked Travis, "Hey, Trav, what was that thing you wanted me to try out here?"

"Can you try punching or scratching the city wall? I want to see if that registers as laying siege to the nearby town for this quest."

Penelope asked, "Are you sure you want to do that now and not wait until you have that new research done?"

"There will be more quests. I want to know how much we can cheese them."

Laughing, Penelope shook her head. "Sometimes, Trav, I think I have all your language figured out—then you say something like cheese them and I have no clue what you mean. Oh, I'd meant to ask too, how much steel and wood do we need per gun?"

Brolly found hearing half a conversation, somehow, more interesting than hearing the whole thing. The last bit, though, he was particularly curious in knowing the answer to.

"A rifle uses five steel, a pistol three, and both need one timber."

Seeing Brolly's interest, Penelope smiled. "Five steel for a rifle, three for a pistol, and we need a little wood for both. Would you be amenable to me testing some things on your city wall?"

Brolly knew how the dungeon counted weights and measures for various things was different from their own system. Ingots and bars counted for two and five dungeon steel. "If I get you a thousand steel and some trees, and you make these weapons for us, you can pull down a section of wall on your own for all I care." He turned, rifles in his arms, and nodded toward the city. "We can do whatever you want with the wall now."

Stretching and walking along beside Brolly, Penelope felt huge compared to him. It was an odd feeling to contemplate that she would only get bigger until she was a huge dragon. "Any problems with the goblin rot dungeon?"

"They keep probing our defenses. We're holding solid and took your advice to hire some fire mages to burn the corpses. I've talked with the masons, and they're making a long-term project out of extending the wall out to a second ring that would encompass your entrance there." Approaching the wall, Brolly nodded to the workers (these ones looking a little nervous at seeing a half-dragon so close) who were disassembling the wall to build a gatehouse. "Feel free to test out anything you wish on this section here. It's being torn down as we speak."

"Thanks. Trav gets these quests that—We don't know how or why, but they are magic and give us stuff for doing things. The latest ones are to capture an adventurer in a jail and lay siege to the nearby town." Waiting for Brolly's raised eyebrow to reach its peak, Penelope continued. "We don't plan to build siege engines, unless we have to, and even then we don't want to actually do anything harmful. We're starting with the obvious to see if it works—I'm going to scratch your wall."

Passing the rifles to one of the guards who came out to check on them, Brolly shook his head in disbelief. "This is the craziest stuff. Here I thought dungeons were all mechanical and well-understood, then you lot upend all that with—with this. Go ahead, lay siege to us."

The moment the dungeon boss laid its claws on the wall, the city knew it. The feel was, to it, a harbinger of pain and agony to come. Turning its attention to the spot, it felt the sensation stop. It wasn't easy to narrow its attention to what one of its officers could perceive, but Brolly Windchime didn't offer any resistance, either.

Everything seemed different with how beings perceived things. One direction, one set of eyes, a single point of focus. The dragon was big—taller than Northridge's current point of view. It wasn't fighting and didn't seem hostile, though, which confirmed to Northridge that its inhabitants had formed some sort of treaty with the dungeon. When the two turned from the wall and started back toward the new entrance to the dungeon, Northridge was able to see what was going on there.

Walls were being built. Guards stood around the low hill. Northridge had finally beaten past its fear, panic, and hate of this dungeon toward curiosity. The dungeon wasn't harming Northridge, which meant Northridge could turn its attention to actual threats—the undead and the goblins. With better targets than an apparently peaceful dungeon to turn its anger on, it left dealing with the dragons to its officer.

"That did it! Hell, I can't believe scratching the wall counted as siege. The new quest is to fill out all the possible boss positions." Travis was super happy with himself. With the level of flexibility the dungeon system had given him on quests, he would have to spend a lot less effort completing them.

"Trav said it worked. Thanks for that." Penelope winced as she saw Brolly gulp in the face of her smile, remembering that such an expression betrayed a terrifying array of teeth that, combined with her size now, could look like she was thinking of eating someone.

The smile did worry Brolly for a moment, in that brief this is a big predator way, but when Penelope's expression sobered he felt like an ass nonetheless. "Hey, no problems. I think there are some more people in town who want to sign-on. Should I bring them out in the next day or two?"

"Yeah. At this point we'll take anyone, but if they have any skills—"

"When you're recruiting old-timers, they're bound to have some skill that will be useful, right?" Brolly asked.

Penelope laughed. "We've been pretty lucky so far. That old elf we had sign up? One of the finest weapon masters I've ever seen. He's downstairs figuring out how to use his new body."

That was news to Brolly. "We're still trying to get an update about sanctioning that undead dungeon. Christine said the main angle her representative is using is that being a dungeon means its in your nature to want to destroy other dungeons."

"How's that working out?" At Brolly's shrug, Penelope sighed. "We'll start besieging them, then, and wait for news. In the meantime, I'll keep watch up here. Short of attacking me with everything they have, I don't think their boss can take me down as I am."

"Boasting, or have you tested that?"

"The latter." This time, when she smiled, Penelope got an answering smile that looked almost as predatory as she knew hers was.

As was always the case after finishing a quest, Travis was left at a loss as to what he'd gained. No stats had changed, so he started looking around for any physical changes—but again he came up blank. Looking through buildings and upgrades gave nothing, and neither did research this time. Finally, he started checking each individual room's upgrades and, when that didn't work, each inhabitant. That's when he spotted it.

His first target, Fife, gave a selection of classes he could pick from that each said zero gold as the cost. Dungeon Soldier, Barbarian, Tank, and Ranger were the first four, but there was also Dungeon Kobold, Trapper, Crafter, and Digger.

A check of the others showed the same thing, including Wild and Penelope. "Okay, so I found the reward for 'sieging Northridge—I can assign a class to you. Probably only one, but it's something new." When he checked Brayden, he found a different set of combat options (Dungeon Order, Cleric, Paladin, and Inquisitor). Katelyn had Dungeon Mage, Wizard, Sorcerer, and Arch-Mage. Travis read out all the options.

"Interesting," Penelope said from inside the Northridge entrance. "Is this some kind of specialization on top of whatever adventuring skills we have? Are there any descriptions for these?"

After repeating the question for the others, Travis tended to agree. "I think so. Also, as usual, no descriptions. Who wants to be—?"

"I heard you call me a tank before," Fife said. "You said it was something about being unmovable and keeping attention, so, lay it on me." She felt the moment he'd accepted her challenge. Fife felt more solid and like her old self. Her muscles, small as they'd been since she'd become a kobold, swelled and she felt far more strength in them than before. "Wow, that's a rush! Anything new on your end?"

"You have skill progression!" Travis stared at the simple list. There was one skill currently unlocked, Resistance. It read like a standard damage absorption plus constitution bonus would in games Travis had played. "Okay, you currently have a single skill, Resistance."

"Resistance?" The moment she said it, Fife felt a new level of solidness to her. Drawing her sword, she pressed the sharp blade to her scaled arm and drew it slowly along her toughened flesh. Then she pressed harder, and harder, and let out a whoop of laughter. "Hey, Brayden, punch me!"

Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, and not having had a chance lately to give his friend a thumping for the fun of it, Brayden stood and did as Fife asked, delivering a blow to her gut that should have doubled her over—instead he just about hurt his fist. "That's—Fife, that was like punching a rock!" He couldn't help but smile at how happy she looked.

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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.