I heard Jeff groan, guessing his mother had just elbowed him in the gut. Violence seemed to be the universal troll motivator, and I wondered how well they liked it when it was more on the lethal side. I figured I’d find out soon enough.
“Yeah,” he said. “That be right.”
It was time to negotiate again and get control of the conversation. For all that Ma was saying, she didn’t know everything. I had so much more up my sleeve and an army of nonspecific—and hopefully ravenous—creatures on the way to redesign the wallpaper with troll intestines.
“Keep me here until you can sell me to the guilds, is that your plan?” I asked her.
“How about I let you rest on my mantelpiece? There you go. That’s a good core. Jeff, go tell Bertha we be entertaining. Then send a message to Gavin.”
Ma whispered her next words, but I couldn’t quite catch them with my irritatingly limited sense of hearing. I had no idea who Gavin was, if he was involved with the trolls, or the guilds they’d mentioned. I just didn’t know enough.
Retreating from Ma’s consciousness, I nestled my mind comfortably inside my small, blood-red fractals. I stretched my consciousness out again, past Jeff and Ma, but the white noise of voices was a roaring ocean an eternity away. I heard no sign of that familiar, grating, subservient voice. Where was the creature who’d promised to rescue me? Had I been conned?
Frustration bubbled beneath my jewel’s surface. I couldn’t move at all, nor did I think I’d be able to convince Ma to let me go. I spent some time settling down, examining the sensations flowing through my clean, sharp, reflective faces.
My existence as a dungeon core was a peculiar experience. I didn’t have nostrils but could still sense the aroma of stewed meat drifting from beneath me. My senses were different from being a human or an elf. I somehow bypassed the actual process of perception and moved straight to a kind of understanding of substance. The vibrations moving through surfaces, the particles of the air, the hum of sound.
I could feel the heat from a fire below me, and I let my senses—rather than my consciousness—flow outward. Conducting my investigation with caution, I was wary of alerting the trolls to my actions. The exact type of meat stewing on the fire wasn’t one I recognized from Earth; this was thick, chunky, and beefy with a lot of thick proteins but also carried a large amount of fructose.
If I reached out a little further, I could feel the fireplace’s roughly-hewn volcanic stone. With a little more attention, I almost laughed. Weird. I could feel the connections, the tiny, microscopic fractures in the dark, volcanic stone, similar to the edges of my own being.
A thought struck me. If I could absorb the essence of Von Dominus, could I do it to inorganic material? I stretched out my consciousness to the obsidian, rather than the hushed, garbled whispers of thought in the distance, and pulled at the stone. I felt a soft crack, then, in a moment, essence began flowing into my jewel, just the same as it had done with my avatar.
“Hey!” Ma cried out. “No eating my grotto! Just you wait there. Not long now, and you be seeing troll hospitality.”
I cursed Ma and her higher-than-usual troll IQ. She knew even that much, and was going to keep me here? She was too much of a threat. If I became a bother, nothing was stopping her from speeding up her plans to sell me to the guild or toss me off the mountaintop.
Mentally grimacing, I let my grip on the obsidian’s essence slip. Guess I was stuck here, unmoving until my timer reset, and my avatar could be summoned.
Or perhaps I was stuck until the tribe got here. But that was starting to feel like a lost cause. I couldn’t count on them to rescue me. I had to handle the situation myself.
First, I needed to gather more intel on these trolls, their home, and their capabilities. I turned my attention to my more traditional senses. At first, it was difficult to see even a few inches beyond my jewel, and the process caused significant stress on my form. I had to rest a few times before I could try and practice my sight again, but after a few hours, I could see the room in its entirety.
Moonlight filtered in through wooden window panes, so this cave wasn’t actually very deep inside the mountain. Fur rugs lined the floor, and the preserved heads of hideous beasts jutted from the walls. An elderly female troll sat in a rocking chair by the fire, her rolls of fat tumbling over its arms. The floral nightgown she wore made her look almost comical, except the rest of her was both terrifying and disgusting.
Ma’s bare scalp was covered in growths that resembled parasites, and the only things identifying her as a woman were the mountains of flesh I took for breasts sagging down to her waistline. Her skin was a brown-green color, like the kind of projectile spew that might have graced The Exorcist’s set.
I doubted Ma was even capable of heaving herself from her seat, but I was proven wrong when she exerted considerable effort to stand and waddled toward a bench on the far side of the room. She started carving a carcass with a cleaver, the sheer strength of her chops suggesting strong muscles lay hidden beneath her layers and layers of fat.
All right, note to self: don’t try and take her head-on.
The rest of the chamber was sparse of belongings, but it had two exits. One looked like it led outside whereas the other led to a passageway. I hadn’t seen anything of the troll Ma had referred to as Bertha, but I figured she was either outside or in a room off the passageway.
That made three trolls I’d have to deal with. Ma had sent Jeff to deliver a
