The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 18/100

Heart 1166400/1166400

Experience 261025/291600

Workers 11/115

Monsters 9/117

Traps 63/279

Food 2459

Timber 7322

Iron 2292

Steel 905

Charcoal 5058

Mana 715

Rock 2753

Gold 1057

Leather 17

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 0

Glass 635

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 15

Long Guns 10

Bullets 1000

Black Powder 1000

Quest: Kill 142 invaders.

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

Quest: Mine some mithril.

"What are they doing?" Travis asked.

"That much powder isn't going to do anything." Penelope sounded worried. "Why does it have such a long fuse?"

"Explain," Robert said, "what they're doing, Trav."

"They put a big barrel inside the forest entrance. Pen said they put a small keg of gunpowder beside it, but it isn't enough to damage the dungeon walls. Now they're sealing the entrance wi—" Travis cut off as Robert dropped the vial he'd been working on and started running. "What's wrong?"

"Get everyone out to the city side, Trav!"

The urgency and panic in Robert's voice made Travis act without needing to know why. "Get everyone out right now! Tannyr, can you make sure Jacob and his family get out?"

Robert continued his sprint. He passed by everyone organizing to leave via the back stairs to the city, he shouldered his way through doors and walls where he had to, until he got to the top floor and rounded the corner to see the fizzing fuse on the small powder keg. "I've heard of this. It's an old way of clearing out dungeons. The kingdom doesn't use it anymore, but I guess these invaders do."

Travis remembered something from his high school history class about a particular poison gas used in trench warfare—and if he'd had a gut, it would have twisted in a knot. "It's poison that's heavier than air, right? So it flows down into the dungeon and—" He couldn't finish the description.

"Yeah." Robert plucked the fuse out of the little powder keg and tossed it away down the tunnel. Picking up the little open-topped keg of powder, he lifted it behind his back. "There, the immediate danger is dealt with. If this breaks, it will still be annoying, and I don't know if I can lift it."

"What do we do with it then?" Travis asked.

"Get it into storage if possible. It should be fine there. Or, better, seal it up in rock and never ever open it. Any poison that you can explode and still have it be dangerous is stuff I don't want to be around." Robert stared between the barrel and the sealed entrance beside him. "But more importantly, I want to get it away from the entrance and set off that explosive here. That way they will think they have killed us all."

Watching through countless eyes, Travis contented himself with unlimited speculation of all his bosses while Robert crouched beside the barrel of nightmares. Eventually he said, "Okay, the only living soul left in here is you and me and a bunch of lizards. Don't die and don't kill the lizards or I am told that Luddy will not forgive you."

"She'll have to get Brayden to bring me back from the dead, then." Robert spat on his hands and started rolling the barrel along on one edge, carefully getting it further and further from the entrance. When he was two thirds of the way to the first corner, he set it down and pulled out his pickaxe. "This gets me to the storage dropoff, right?"

It surprised Travis, but in a good way. "Of course! If you can get the barrel in there, the storage system will process it. Yeah, anywhere along here and you will reach the tunnel leading to the dropoff."

Robert broke down the wall and was facing the Northridge exit, complete with Brayden looking in. "You might want to back away from there. If this breaks, the wind should get rid of it, but I wouldn't want to get any of this stuff in you."

"I was going to say the same thing, but if you want to do this alone, there's a good idea right here." Stepping into the dungeon, Brayden approached Robert with a long length of rope. "Tie this around your waist. If you have an accident, I can drag you out with the rope."

Robert opened his mouth to argue, then snapped it closed. "Thanks," he said as he tied the rope around himself.

Waiting for Brayden to leave the dungeon again, Robert steeled himself. "I've dealt with things more deadly than this probably is," he told himself. "I've just never dealt with so much before. It'd be nice to have Kate here to cast a breathing bubble around me." He paused for a moment and smirked. "Hopefully you don't respawn in the middle of a toxic cloud."

With that said, and glad that he couldn't hear his sister, Robert started working on getting the barrel further along. Short, careful sweeps of the top were manageable, then he'd reposition and shift the angle he was starting at.

It was slow going, but he got the horrid mess a short distance down the tunnel and to the entrance of the dropoff. "We got this, Trav. Okay, just…"

Swinging himself to the side, Robert got the barrel barely inside the specially upgraded warehouse and it disappeared. "Ha! Perfect! Now, where was that keg?" Reaching behind his back, he pulled out the keg of black powder.

He filled in the hole he'd made, untied the rope, and pushed his way through to the other side. "Does it tell you what that stuff is?"

"Poison, greater. Says I have twelve-hundred units of it. Much as I wish there was a way to destroy stuff, I kinda don't want to if it wants to happily sit there." Travis watched as Robert set up the keg of black powder with a long path of powder trailing along the ground away from it.

Pulling his little alchemical lighter from a pocket of his loose jacket, Robert tipped it so that it spilled a little of the pyrophoric liquid onto the rock at the end of the path of powder. A blistering white flicker of light made him screw his eyes closed as he turned and ran. Laughing as only someone who has lit a fuse can, Robert rounded one, two, and then a third corner and pushed his way through the rock to the top of the stairs leading deep into the dungeon.

Gunhild had been getting worried. She'd seen the fuse lit herself and had ordered the entrance sealed, then waited as the rocks were piled up. A minute passed. Then another. Finally, there was a deep rumble and the rocks at the entrance settled. "Okay, seal it now. You heard the captain!"

Ever since the order had been given, the sappers had begun mixing the mortar. Once the rocks had stopped moving and everyone cheered at the revenge upon the dungeon, they started pouring the mixture over the rocks.

More and more they applied. "Bury it good. Make sure it works into the cracks of the surrounding rock face. There you go. That damned pit will starve and die for what it did!" The commander of the sappers, Sergeant Knud, continued giving orders while more of his squad mixed up greater quantities of mortar for the task. There was still more work ahead of them, of course—there was another dungeon to try to control, and this one had a defensive position atop it. "Keep at it! Make the captain proud!"

When Christine Sellswell approached the dungeon entrance again, she was awed by how the city had wrapped its wall around the entrance. There was a group of kobolds starting to walk into the entrance even as she advanced, as well as a family that looked a little out of sorts. "Excuse me?"

Stephan paused as he heard the voice. He turned and looked back to see Christine. "Can I help you?"

Relieved to find someone willing to talk, given the situation that seemed to have engulfed the region, Christine approached Stephan. "Yes. I need to discuss things with the dungeon. We have a quest, you see, and it involves digging."

"Digging is what kobolds do. How much digging?" A weary smile was the best Stephan could manage under the circumstances.

"It's probably best if I go over it once so we don't have to repeat anything. What I'd ultimately like is if you could build another entrance for us, and let us use it." Walking beside Stephan, Christine was at ease around the kobolds as much as she was around anyone. Particularly Stephan, since she had discovered he was a skilled negotiator.

Shaking his head as they crossed the threshold of the dungeon, Stephan said, "I don't think Travis can open another entrance until he reaches his next tier."

Hearing the tail-end of the conversation, Travis clarified. "Yeah. That's a hard limit right now. The stairs to the bottom floor cost me a—Oh wow, I got a new notification warning me that one of my entrances has been sealed. It, uh, is a quest to unseal it. Nope, don't want to do that."

Stephan nodded and passed on the information, "Travis confirmed for me that he can't open another entrance. Come on down and we can discuss this in a more suitable location."

"Lead on." Christine followed as Stephan led the way, even when he dug out one of the walls and led her through it, only to seal it up again behind. The familiar bar required another bout of digging to open, but given the siege she could understand the need for security.

Pulling out a chair for Christine, Stephan waited for her to sit at the table before he parked himself opposite her. "So, you want some digging done?"

"Northridge, that is, the genius loci, has issued us with a quest to establish a tunnel to our outpost around the verdant dungeon to the southeast. Our detachment there could well use reinforcing and relieving, I'm sure Brolly will tell us, sooner rather than later." Christine brought out some paperwork and a spare tablet to write on. "Can you help?"

Travis' swearing almost caused Stephan to blush. He instead smiled to Christine. "Excuse us a moment, Travis is formulating a plan."

"Plan? PLAN?! That's miles of digging! And it would be real rock and dirt and all the problems a real hole would have! Tannyr, can you come and talk sense into them?" The situation was untenable. If Travis wasn't reasonably sure he was safe from outside attack now, he wouldn't have even given it a second thought. "Tannyr?"

"Yeah, yeah. On my way, Travis. What's going on?" Tannyr had been getting back to making rifles, a job that now could only be done with Mixie perched on her shoulders watching the process carefully. Now she turned for the exit of the room.

"Where are we going?" Mixie asked.

"They want us to dig a tunnel from the city to another dungeon! I don't even know where it is, but none of you have seen it." More lizards, Travis decided, would be needed. He would flood the city with the little guys to remind Northridge that… He lost track of his thoughts.

Laughing, Tannyr stalked down the tunnel, through the darkness. "He wants me to do some digging. That dungeon is about ten leagues away from the current city wall, Travis, and I have seen it."

"Leagues?" Travis tried to make sense of the thing, and saying it made him think thirty miles. The number had popped into his head. "Right. Okay, so that's a long way. What are our options?"

"Getting it done this year? Not a lot. I can dig through rock like butter, but this won't be in a dungeon and—Wait, that's it!" Moving a bit quicker, Tannyr let out a laugh.

On her shoulders, Mixie laughed too. "What's funny?"

Tannyr rounded a few corners before answering. "We need to sneak into another dungeon and ask it to open a new entrance, then sneak one of its minions out!"

When Tannyr entered the room with a goblin on her shoulders, Christine froze. She had heard there was a goblin-cursed family living in Northridge, but she hadn't met them. Breaking her focus from Mixie, she spared her most understanding smile for Tannyr.

"We need to send a diplomat to the verdant dungeon," Tannyr said, "probably two. One from Northridge and one from us."

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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.