The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 2

Level 21/100

Heart 1587600/1587600

Experience 300371/396900

Workers 27/133

Monsters 9/135

Traps 98/324

Food 3613

Timber 7322

Iron 2292

Steel 905

Mithril 53

Mithril Ore 100

Charcoal 4558

Mana 963

Rock 1147

Gold 1057

Leather 217

Leather Sludge 215

Lava 501

Glass 483

Explosive Runes 2

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 0

Long Guns 15

Bullets 300

Black Powder 1050

Poison, Greater 1000

Sulfur 600

Adamantine 24

Adamantine Ore 0

Quest: Give classes to 10 of your creatures.

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

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

Eighteen new Residences, expanding the mushroom farm, and finishing the Jail generated a lot of rock, but the residences ate it all up and then some. Also, using a full day of mana generation, he placed another mana shrine and an ore lode. He'd also gotten someone to dig the single square that gave him a revealed mana shrine, and added a simple metal door there and a heavy steel door on the jail.

Another small mana shrine disappeared, but he wasn't panicking about that. What he liked the look of was the adamantine lode his lizards found. "If there was something I could hug apart from you, Pen, it's all those lizards on the bottom floor. How much longer do you think Luddy will be?"

"She'll take as much time as she needs to, Trav. You know she's always careful." Penelope was on her way to deal with their prisoner-outside-of-jail problem. "Has she talked since yesterday?"

"Spell wore off not long after she told me not to talk to her. I want to help her, but I won't make decisions for her." Travis wasn't exactly a historian in his old life, but he knew enough that making choices for others wasn't the best way to do things. He might not have always been in a position where he could allow such, but now he could. "Put her in the jail until I get credit, then we'll let her go and see what she does."

Nearing Fife's boss room, Penelope rolled her shoulders. "Okay, time for you to come and take a load off."

Following along, Astrid seemed reasonably passive, at least as far as Travis could tell. He was about to comment on that when he got an indication of a building project that had finished. There was only one that would trigger like that. Sure enough, Ludmiller walked in from a newly opened dungeon entrance. "Luddy! You did it?"

"Yeah, Trav. Get someone else to fix this up as we'd planned, move the door, and tell Brolly that we have a way to smuggle riders outside the patrols." Looking completely wiped out, Ludmiller got a few steps and stumbled, looking wobbly enough that she leaned on the wall for help.

The first to arrive was Wild. He didn't speak, simply plucked up Ludmiller from where she'd stopped moving and turned to walk off with her again.

Blake arrived next, having been helping the builders work on their new residences. "This is going to end things early, isn't it?"

It felt nice to see a light at the end of the tunnel. "Yup. Once Brolly gets some horses and troops through, they'll ride like hell for the next city. If they don't know we're under siege, they will inside of a week."

Axel brought his hammer up and down, again and again, breathing the same air as the intense furnace. The spell the cat kin had cast on him hadn't changed him much at first (apart from hearing the voice of the dungeon directly), but when he'd stepped into the blacksmithy, he'd felt like he'd come home.

His first task had been to make himself better lighting, not that the forge fires weren't already bright, but he wanted to see the metal glint and for that he'd made four large braziers out of iron. His hammer felt weightless as he pounded out the metal. The sound echoed up and down the tunnels of the dungeon like sweet music.

"Hey, Trav said you were down here and I should talk to you about armor and a shield."

Lifting the metal piece from his anvil, Axel lowered his hammer and looked at the woman who'd walked in. Well, not exactly a woman—a kobold. He'd learned her name after meeting her. She was the loudest individual he'd ever seen (or heard), but Travis had told him to expect her. "The adamantine, right?"

Dungeon-wrought metal. There was no other way to get the stuff. Usually a carefully cultivated verdant dungeon could, over the course of decades, be coaxed to produce a seam of mithril or adamantine, but it only went to mastercrafters. She wanted it, Travis wanted her to have it, and Axel was buzzing with excitement that he was going to be able to work with it.

Fife closed her eyes at the sound of obvious excitement to match her own. "Yeah! I want to see if I can absorb it like this mithril stuff, and if so, do we get the mithril back, and also if I can wear adamantine armor over adamantine-absorbed armor!"

The mechanics of that boggled Axel's mind. That she'd absorbed the mithril half plate she'd been wearing and now bore it on her hardened body was interesting enough to try. "You got the leather shirts, boots, and pants?"

"Two leather shirts, two pairs of leather pants, two sets of leather gloves, and two pair of—they are like leather boots." As she rattled them off, Fife set the garments on the workbench beside her. "Do you want any help with this?"

"Start pumping the bellows there until I tell you to stop." Axel's blood sang as the room grew hotter. Fife pumping the bellows was relentless and indefatigable. "Okay, get me a piece of adamantine."

It took Fife a moment to realize what he meant and then a moment more to work out why. "Right. Here you go." She reached behind her back and thought of adamantine. The heavy weight in her hand was a shock. Fife had seen the metal before, but she'd never held it.

The reverence that Fife displayed, staring at the metal like it was the most precious thing in the world, echoed in Axel's heart. He took the adamantine from her, feeling her claws try to hold it a little longer before she let go. "We're going to make something amazing."

Together they worked. Fife kept the forge blindingly hot to work the adamantine while Axel would put the metal in, take it out, and beat it into shape. The dungeon system accounted for much of the expertise, and soon enough he'd beaten out two breastplates, two sets of greaves and thigh guards, a helmet, sleeves, and boots.

The rivets for attaching the leather garments and straps took more work, more precision than the bulk work of the large plate pieces. He stepped back from the armor. As each piece had been finished, he'd set it to harden by bringing it slowly back up to high temperature, then quenched it. "Well?"

"It's done?" Fife asked.

"Yeah. I still need to do a sword and a shield." Axel looked at the rest of the leather. "And a whole other set. The dungeon has given me the instinct to know what to do— One day I'll make the dive and become a kobold too, but I want to try having a family of my own first."

"I tried that. It didn't work out." Fife started with the boots and greaves, buckling each on and testing the weight of them. Compared to mithril, which was hard and light, the adamantine would be almost unbreakable and as heavy as if she weighed three times as much. Still, the more she put on, the bigger her smile got. Last of all was the helmet, and fitting it over her head made her let out an excited barking laughter. "Alright. Ready to test this?"

At Axel's nod, Fife closed her eyes and said, "Reinforced Armor." A surge of magic rushed over her. The adamantine drew tighter and tighter against her until it felt suffocating. Then, however, there was a sigh of relief as it pulled tighter still and became part of her.

A loud clank drew Axel's attention to a pile of mithril armor appearing on the floor beside Fife. Picking it up and setting the old armor on the bench, Axel watched it fade away and become part of the dungeon's stores. "Fife?"

Solidness was such a small word for what Fife felt. Her body was no longer covered in a suit of the heaviest armor she'd ever worn—she was now one with it. Drawing her sword, she studied her face in the reflection on the naked blade. Her teeth were now a dull gray, and when she tapped them with her mithril blade, she felt the weapon tremble. "If I wasn't a kobold, Axel, I'd marry you!" Spinning around, Fife leapt at the human and hugged him.

Catching Fife was impossible, as was hoping to arrest her momentum. She instead tackled Axel to the workbench and pinned him there in the hug. She stood a foot shorter than him, not that it mattered. "Hey, you want to start on the suit you'll be wearing, then?"

It took another six hours to make the second suit. Axel was aware that his muscles were screaming and he needed rest—but Fife's energy was contagious and this was the greatest moment of his life. After twelve hours of work, he had Fife put on her actual armor. His eyes studied every line, everywhere there could be a gap. There were gaps, of course. Armor couldn't be made without them. "How is it? Take a few steps."

Each time Fife's booted foot landed on the stone she felt the ground give a little. There was a solidness to her now that defied even what she knew magic could do. "If I could be killed now, I would be surprised. I'm going to sleep in this."

Laughing, Axel said, "Then you'll want me to make you an adamantine bed, because even stone won't take the weight of all that repeatedly."

Even after the spell and becoming a peripheral part of the dungeon, Axel hadn't felt as at home here as he did now. With his own hands he'd improved the dungeon and made its defense stronger. "Travis, I know you said there would always be a place for us here if we wanted it, but I didn't like that. It feels wrong to be— It feels wrong to owe you without giving back."

Travis had left the two alone to their manic metalwork, but now he focused his attention on Fife and Axel. "I meant every word. But, by doing this for me, you and your children are extra welcome. There wasn't a debt and I wasn't holding anything back, but if you need gold, food, or more space—just ask."

"I'll have to see." The fact was Axel did want to do things in the city, but the siege was putting a damper on his chances of spending time with a woman he'd met. "Maybe after all this mess is dealt with."

"Wait!" Fife's new mass took an extra moment to settle before she could ask, "You have someone topside, don't you?" His blush told her enough. "What's her deal?"

"Huh?" Axel asked.

Fife started walking again. The dim glow of Axel's alchemical light was a nice ambiance in her opinion, especially with the way it played off her armor. "What's she like? You've figured out what she likes to do and stuff, right?"

"She's a blacksmith too. She's too old, though. People would—"

"Screw 'em. She appreciates metalwork? We'll go up together. When she asks where I got a suit of adamantine armor, I'll tell her you made it for me. If I was a blacksmith, that'd totally get my attention. Not many blacksmiths get to work this stuff, you know?"

Detecting a horribly comedic sense of bad timing on the horizon, Axel nonetheless realized he had no way out of this. "Alright. We'll head up and—"

"It's dark outside. Has been for three hours," Travis told them. "Go and sleep—if you want."

Recognizing Travis' signature asking if they want to follow every order, Fife laughed. "He's got a point. It's been a long day. Tomorrow, though, we're tracking down this girl and showing her how amazing you are!"

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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.