The Heart Grows

Spoiler

"Hey, Trav, I'm back! Bigger and better than before!" Fife was moving around her room, getting the hang of walking again, or so Travis figured. "So, are we ready to do my room and get me all juiced up?"

"Nope. I don't have enough timber. We're waiting on a delivery from Northridge." Travis was appreciative of the fact that the dungeon was reasonably quiet—apart from Fife, who was jumping up and down and moving around a lot like she was dodging things. "What're you doing?"

"This is such an improvement! I'm still as fast as a regular kobold—probably a bit faster—but now I feel like I could just crash through walls and not notice."

"Please don't. I like my walls where they are, thank you." Travis froze at a familiar sight and sensation. "Undead coming in. Looks like the lord and a whole mess of skeletons."

"I want to test myself against that boss. Trav, let me go in and block it in the tunnel just before Wild's arena." Grabbing her chain armor, Fife pulled it on and scooped up her weapon belt and shield before running out of the room.

"Fife's going to try tackling them before they reach Wild's arena. She wants to test herself and I'm inclined to let her. No guns, anyone. I don't want that dungeon getting access to ranged weapons like those." All the combat sorts were scrambling to get to their positions. Travis tingled at the idea he had so many of his friends to protect him as he protected them. When Fife reached his arena, Wild nodded to her.

Katelyn and Ludmiller reached the arena after Fife and both poked their heads out the door to see she was checking over her equipment.

"Good luck, Fife." Ludmiller, already slightly indistinct thanks to her stealth effect, still managed to give a ghostly thumbs-up.

"How many undead will Trav let through to you?" Katelyn asked. "Because he said they have a lot of skeletons."

"However many come down this hall, I won't let them pass." Fife wasn't the boss of the second floor, though, and while she'd woken up with a lot more energy, Travis could tell she was a little diminished from that. She was still, of course, a floor boss.

On cue, the first group of skeletons rounded the corner and started marching toward Fife.

Calmness. That's what Fife was striving for. The undead approached, and she felt big and solid enough to fill the entire tunnel. Bracing her feet and using her tail for balance. Her practice with Kelvin had been paying dividends and her awareness of her body and how it moved was increasing with each day. "Come on, you have a fight on your bony hands here!"

Banging her sword against the edge of her shield, hoping to incite the undead to come at her, Fife felt her arms surge with power. The first group of skeletons tried to rush her. That resulted in several getting in the way of the others while she crushed two against the wall with her shield.

Parrying two attempted hits by more skeletons aside, Fife started getting down to business and crushing the undead. Not willing to let them advance on her, she started pushing forward. "Trav! If they wind up back in the alley, start giving them incentives to keep coming at me, okay?"

"Fife, you want to see something even cooler?"

The offer from Trav had Fife's excitement rise to new levels. "Don't ask, just do it!" Every step she took cost more than one skeleton its unlife. Slamming her shield into them or punching them with her mailed fist, she was about to the corner that led right when she felt a rush of heat coming down the tunnel.

As she got to the corner, the blast reached it and flung high temperature bones against the wall to her left as hapless skeletons were caught in some kind of inferno. "What was that?!"

"A new fire spell I got. Like it?" It had cost him a hundred and twenty-five mana and a hundred lava, but the explosion had been worth every point of both. As per its description, it had sent out four jets in each of the four directions, seemingly with unlimited distance. It didn't turn corners but as he watched Fife round the bend, there was not a single skeletal minion left standing—except the other dungeon's boss. "Also, you leveled up. Something called regeneration. I figure that's something to keep you standing."

"Regeneration?" When she said it, Fife felt a new rush of physical strength flood her as her wounds starting to heal. "This is amazing! Is there anything left? You did leave something for me, right?" Fife spotted the undead lord as she finished speaking. Blood pumping in her veins, she charged down the tunnel at it—shield up and using it as a powerful wall she intended to crush the boss with.

The crunch when Fife connected with the boss was a salve for her soul. She didn't simply hear bones break, she felt them, but despite the damage the boss didn't give an inch.

Baring her teeth, Fife took the first swing of the boss on her shield and tried to slip inside the big skeleton boss' guard—only to catch its own shield in her face. "That barely hurts! Was that all you got?"

It wasn't, or so Fife discovered. Trading blows back and forth with the boss, she started bleeding from several wounds but after a few moments they started to close. Its blade marked her flesh with a stinging line of cold each time, but it was like they were scratches rather than real cuts.

"Hey, uh, Fife?"

"Kinda busy, Trav!"

"It's that you're not actually beating him. He's just kinda wailing on you and you're blocking him."

"That's my job! I get in the way and—oh." Fife took a step back from the boss and the pair eyed one another up and down. "You could go back to your dungeon. I won't let you go a step—" The sound of fingers snapping behind her was a prelude to seeing the undead lord explode into flames. Fire engulfed it, but a particular little white-blue streamer of flame wove and danced around before it started to carve holes through the huge undead.

"Trav said you might want a little help, Fife." The flames Katelyn wove—here on the second floor—were the hottest of any she'd ever produced. She roasted the undead lord and, with Fife between them, it had no chance of reaching her.

The undead's intent was clear. Fife braced herself against its charge, blocking its momentum and shoving it back and away from her. It burned while it tried twice more to get past, and twice more she bodily checked it and kept her friend safe. With its glowing eye-sockets fixed on her, Fife gave the monster her best toothy grin. "Just die already."

Trying two more times to rush past Fife, the undead lord eventually started coming apart. First its sword arm burned up and the weapon clanged to the floor of the dungeon, then one of its legs was consumed by flames to leave nothing behind, and finally the fires Katelyn had summoned burned through its skull and reduced all the rest of the undead to ash and the odd thicker bone here and there.

"Okay, so I can get in his way and stop him, but I can't kill him. While that kinda sucks, I think I did pretty good. Did I get a third level, Trav?" Checking herself over, Fife finally found a cut she remembered getting—close up and leaving pristine flesh behind.

"No, but your bar is full. I got a good bit of XP from that too, but not enough to upgrade the mushroom farm—it needs all its cost in XP from undead. Thanks for the help, Kate." Travis tried to ignore Fife's swearing. He'd noticed he was losing food which meant the new farm was not enough to give him a net positive. He wanted the upgrade to double its output.

Stopping her cursing, Fife let out a sigh and leaned against the wall. "Well, I'm happy."

"You are?" Katelyn walked up to the still-smoldering pile and kicked the largest remaining piece—the spine. With the bone turning to ash and collapsing, she seemed happier.

"Yeah! This isn't even my floor, and I managed to fight that big bastard to a standstill! He couldn't kill me!" Slinging her shield to her back, Fife puffed out her chest. "Also, that's the undead beaten back for a few days. Weird how they sent all those skeletons."

Travis found it odd too, but was more worried about future probing by the other dungeon. "If they were trying out new tactics, they failed utterly."

"See, that's the thing with horde dungeons," Fife said, "they can make a lot of monsters really easy, but they seem to have difficulty making more powerful ones. With spells like that one you used—we should have no problems dealing with them."

"You won't have access to spells like that when you're invading the other dungeon." Travis saw the smile on Fife's face grow wider and wider.

"No, but we have some efficient fire mages. Are you forgetting we have Stratus, Tom, and Jack?" Katelyn asked. "Or me?"

Travis thought about that and (unseen and theoretically) nodded. "That's where we're going to have an advantage. With all the firepower you four can bring, undead like those skeletons will be less than yard trash—they will be that dungeon wasting resources. Which is exactly what we want. If the dungeon is wasting resources and you are slowly pushing deeper, we are winning and will win. But this all comes down to weariness too. The undead won't get tired, but Jack, Stratus, and Tom will."

Everyone stood still and looked on in shock for several moments before Katelyn managed to respond. "You're right. Also, Trav, sorry if I thought you didn't already have plans for this. You do. We need to formulate them and discuss it all. In particular, I'd like to ask Kelvin about besieging a dungeon. Of us all, he's got the most experience."

When the wood delivery arrived, it was paid for with rifles, but not before they built a timber mill, upgraded it as much as they could, and ran all the logs through it. The final upgrade was twelve hundred gold and nine hundred steel, but even that Travis was happy to pay. In all, it turned the five thousand timber in logs into fifteen thousand.

"Trav, why did we bother getting so much timber only to wind up stuffed full of it, then?" Kelvin asked. The others were talking about what they would use it for, but he was still mystified as to why they needed so much.

"Because we have the space and timber is one of the hardest-to-get resources," Stephan said. "And it is required for most rooms we need. Like Fife's arena. But, the most important one, Trav has an upgrade for the lizard village that lets them find resources he's summoned. This alone will save us a lot of headaches on that floor."

Rubbing his chin, Kelvin thought about it. Then he thought about it some more. "It all seems rather arbitrary. The costs involved are astronomical compared to what the rooms seem to need. Why do they need gold at all?"

"Because it is arbitrary." Travis felt a rant starting. "It's horribly arbitrary. Where I'm from, we have games that let you play like a dungeon, and they use gold for everything—like this. Oh, Kelvin, have you ever besieged a dungeon?"

"I was involved in one once. A town was trying to establish itself and had neglected work on their wall. A dragon horde dungeon needed to be locked down until they could mount a proper defense, so the group I was in, along with two others, were hired to blockade them. Nasty fighting, that. Nothing is so dangerous as a cornered monster—and we had the whole dungeon cornered." As he spoke, Kelvin dredged up the less than pleasant memories of that time. "What did you want to know?"

"How many shift rotations were needed to maintain the siege, what should we expect inside the dungeon, and—if you know it—what happens when a dungeon's core is destroyed?"

Kelvin whistled at that and took a slow breath. "You sure know how to show an old man he hasn't seen everything."

Spoiler

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.