The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 20/100

Heart 1440000/1440000

Experience 75747/360000

Workers 27/121

Monsters 9/123

Traps 71/294

Food 3093

Timber 7322

Iron 2292

Steel 905

Charcoal 4758

Mana 1143

Rock 6243

Gold 1057

Leather 17

Leather Sludge 15

Lava 500

Glass 483

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Long Guns 12

Bullets 1700

Black Powder 300

Poison, Greater 1200

Sulfur 700

Quest: Kill 5 invaders.

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

Quest: Mine some mithril.

It had been a busy half a week for not only Travis, but the whole dungeon, city, and his new friend dungeon. Kobolds like to dig, so he'd set a mammoth digging task to hollow out a huge room to fill with mushrooms. The only thing that Travis hated about it was that he wouldn't get any more undead XP to buff the room.

Ludmiller was out each day, "delivering packages". It had brought him a lot of XP from the destroyed siege machines, but with everyone busy it meant he didn't get much more research done.

After Travis had paid the cost for riding saddles on the wyvern den, Fife had found them and had wasted no time riding one out to the city. Getting it used to the townsfolk had been the more difficult task, since the beast (Fife Junior) was quite bitey.

With around two hundred food being generated in the dungeon every day, and that value effectively doubling through the kitchens, he was feeding half a thousand of the town's inhabitants. The next task was to get everyone building out the residences.

"I want a better rifle," Fife said. She was leading Fife Junior down through the dungeon to their wyvern pen on the second floor. "And, you said we have a mithril node, we just have to dig through to it, right? Well, I'll do the digging for that."

Travis pondered this. He'd not seen Fife do any real digging at all, so he knew she wasn't keen on it. Which is why he knew he had to get the most out of her while she was negotiating. "And you can dig out some more rooms down there while you're at it. All that, and I'll prioritize the first mithril gun for you. And you'll have to get the first one hundred mithril."

Scooping a handful of meat from a trough that seemed to never empty, Fife offered it to Fife Junior—who almost bit her hand off trying to eat it "gently". When her new best friend was content, Fife started walking down to the bottom floor. "Okay, but if I'm going to be digging, you might want to get Pen to back me up."

"Pen is busy upstairs. If you find anything, get to safety and then head up to help her there." Travis started highlighting places for Fife to dig. First on the menu was a new large gold mine, then smaller versions of the mana shrines that the lizards had uncovered.

With those done, he had a long path for her to dig to reach the mithril node. She got exactly sixteen squares along when she opened up a cave. Gazing through Fife's eyes, Travis couldn't see anything in the cave. "What's going on? Where are the monsters?"

"Are you really going to look a gift cave in the mouth?" Fife asked. She strode forward a bit and pulled out her pickaxe again. "How much further?"

A weird itching sensation reached Travis, but he ignored it as nerves and pushed on. "Eight more sections, then you can turn right."

Digging as instructed, and following Travis' plan, Fife dug out the last section to see a dull grayish crystal before her. "Crap, Trav, that's a lot of mithril! How does it work, though? I've seen pictures of it in guide books, and seen the armor it makes, but—"

"Can you mine some so we can find out? I figure it'll be like steel, we stuff it in a furnace with something else and out comes what we need to make stuff." Travis didn't exactly want to push her, but he felt that if he tried to make sense of how things worked in the dungeon, he'd go crazy.

"Spoilsport." Fife approached the fortune in ore before her and sighed. "Travis, have I told you how much I love you? But only for your cool stuff. Also, no one ever bought me a gun before. Well, technically Pen did, but it was your gold."

"Fife?"

"What is it Trav?"

"Thanks for being you. For putting yourself between all the bad things and our friends. It means a lot." Travis knew he sounded a bit mushy, but he didn't care. Fife, to him, was amazing. "I don't know how you can do it."

"Oh, that's easy." Between swings, Fife answered, "You see, it's when you realize you can't run away as fast as everyone else. If you don't get good at not dying, slow people kinda die. Then I started wearing heavier armor, got thinner, and next thing I know I have friends who don't care what I looked like. All so long as I can run the slowest."

"I'm going to tell Squishy to hug you next time you go to your boss room."

"Oh, sure." Fife picked up each chunk of mithril and a moment later they disappeared. "Pick the one creature in the dungeon I can outrun." She smirked for a moment. "Not that I would outrun the big guy. He gives great hugs!"

Quest Complete: Mine some mithril.

New Quest: Give classes to 10 of your creatures.

It didn't take much looking to find where his reward was. "You know how I had a quest to get mithril?" He waited for Fife to nod—she was still mining the stuff. "Well, the quest gave me a hundred ready-to-use mithril."

Fife groaned and tossed her pickaxe away to the side, where it vanished. "Perfect. Now I never have to dig again!"

Quest Complete: Kill 200 invaders.

New Quest: Send a spy into the nearby city.

Quest Complete: Send a spy into the nearby city.

New Quest: Delve to the bottom of a dungeon with at least 20 floors.

Travis felt overwhelmed. Ludmiller had been out doing her "package deliveries" again. He reminded himself to get her whatever class he could before things went further with her adventures. Now the problem was to find what he'd gotten from his stupid quest system.

"This quest thing is so broken. Luddy just completed the kill two hundred invaders quest, then it gave me a quest to send a spy into the city. That completed and gave me a quest to delve another dungeon with at least twenty floors. That means that the goblin dungeon has twenty or more floors. I can't figure out what they gave as rewards, either." Glancing around his interface, he spotted one quickly. "Right, I got two hundred thousand experience. That's nice. Uh…"

"Maybe you should write down what you have so you can tell easier?" Fife asked, heading out of the mithril mine and heading back up the tunnel.

"That would never work. These values are constantly changing, anyway. Also, some are really hard to fi— Ah, I found the reward for the other. A lizard village has appeared on the first floor and it already has Exploration Focus."

Fife laughed at that before picking up her pace. "I want to see what adventure lizards look like. I hope the city likes lizards."

Sitting in the dining room immediately inside the dungeon's city entrance, Christine cleared her throat and looked around for any kobolds. One would come running out of one of the connected kitchens every few minutes with a huge pot full of stew, only for people to collect it and carry it out of the dungeon and to the city. It would be a bewildering process if only she hadn't organized most of it. "Travis, can I have a word?"

Two kobolds froze and nodded toward her, one said, "He's sending someone to chat now."

It didn't take long before a familiar kobold walked up to where she was sitting. Smiling at her visitor, she reached to her side and picked up a lizard to put on the table. "Sorry to bother you, Stephan, but what are these all about?"

"There is a lizard village that we got, unfortunately, for free. It also came with the exploration upgrade. It was part of a quest reward that Travis' system gives him for, in this case, spying on the city." Stephan reached a hand out and scratched the little lizard that was now wearing a cloak. "I like their waterskins."

"I can appreciate that most of them are spreading out over the wall and heading out into the enemy lines, but a large number of them are also making their way deeper into the city." Despite how much she liked the kobolds for their hard work and seemingly limitless supply of gold, Christine had to bring the issue up. "I'd like you to stop sending them out if you can."

"We can't and that's the problem. There is an advantage." As he spoke, Stephan listened to what Travis was telling him. "Travis can see through them. He can't direct them, but the lizards have already helped us find three new sets of siege engines that we didn't know they were building."

"Oh."

"Ludmiller will go out a little later to deal with those. We are in the process of establishing a mithril production system, and we're going to make some better guns. Travis wishes to give a pistol to each member of the council, as well as Brolly a rifle." It was a bribe and Stephan knew it. It would be a small price in resources for settling a big problem. "All we ask is that you don't sell them."

It was enough to make Christine drool. Mithril guns were unheard of. Normally, such items were reserved for the most wealthy adventurers, high-born army commanders, and kings. "I don't know of anyone who could pay me enough to satisfy the merchant in me."

Stephan laughed and tilted his head to the side as Travis asked him to bring up another idea. "We're going to try some actual tunneling to open an entrance outside the city. Some of our adventurers want to try goading the goblins into attacking the army."

"Why don't you sneak Ludmiller out into the forest somewhere and open a new dungeon entrance? Like what we did with the verdant dungeon."

"Because we can— Oh. We might be able to try, I guess. It depends if the forest entrance now counts as fully sealed or not. Travis, can we try?" Stephan asked.

"Wait," Christine said. "If we could get an entrance past the enemy, we could send riders to raise the alarm."

Travis had been set to argue about spending almost a thousand of his precious rock on something frivolous, but with such a goal as lifting the siege early, it would be worth the risk. "Tell her we'll try." While the conversation was going on, the last of the day's food was being shipped out of the dungeon.

Ramping up his food delivery, Travis had dispatched two thousand food worth of meals to the kitchens, though they had turned it into enough to feed double that. From his new ability to see outside, he was trying to track the distribution—and watched as about two-thirds of the city was fed from his coffers.

When Ludmiller stepped back in his entrance, Travis decided it was time to try this trick again. "Luddy, do you want a break or are you ready for a special one?"

Her nose still full of the smell of black powder post deflagration, Ludmiller said, "Give me an hour to cuddle Wild, bury myself in lizards, and get some food." The only thing about the list was she'd have to consider what order to do the things. Passing the kitchen complex that'd been built near the entrance, she detoured there to fetch something to eat. When she was done with her food and started heading to the second floor—lizards started running at her from all directions. "Thank you, Trav!" she managed to say before being buried in the rambunctious reptiles.

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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.