Chapter Sixteen
My first order of business was learning the capabilities of my new spawnable minions: Hellbats. I poured Infernal Essence into the soul forge and watched them come to life. They were like bats from Earth, but their fags were much larger, and their black skin was marked with hexagonal shapes that almost looked like scales. Black fur clumped together on their chests, and three talons protruded from the tops of their wings. Each Hellbat had a wingspan the size of my elf’s arm, and twin crimson eyes glowed within sunken eye sockets. Bone-white claws jutted from their feet while fangs curved from their mouths.
The minions were simple creatures—their consciousness wasn’t anything at all like Puck’s, for instance. Undisturbed, they hung from the ceiling, shrouded in shadow, utterly uninterested in anything. If I’d been a scientist about this, I’d have said the imps had evolved from bats - there were plenty of similarities, at least biologically - but they were perfect low-level mobs for Zagorath. I channeled emotion into the Hellbats, and they acted accordingly. With a prod of my dungeon’s mind, I could whip them into a frenzy.
Beneath the cloud of bats, Bertha and Puck prepared to strike. My champions dealt with the minions in single killing blows, the half-troll cleaving them in two with her new halberd while Puck’s shadow-spheres ensnared them with black tendrils. It didn’t take long to realize the Hellbats weren’t exactly the tankiest of minions, but their claws and fangs could tear slash armor and tear through flesh.
Channeling my essence into the black machine gave me a rush, and whenever a Hellbat was killed, I sucked the essence back into my jewel. I discovered that spawning a single bat required inserting 15 Infernal Essence into the soul forge, but an individual creature generated 16 when killed. The gains were minimal, but it was a sure way to acquire additional essence while remaining in my dungeon. Puck and Bertha weren’t afflicted with critical injuries, so I was able to wait a few hours before I needed to spend any resources on healing them.
The low-risk farming provided a perfect method. All I needed to do was reach out to the deceased bats, consume the delicious darkness within their corpses, and then siphon it back through the forge again. It felt so natural, so organic; I figured it had to be how any other dungeon core would do it. Whenever I delivered a bat to its death by Puck or Bertha, I felt no flicker of fear from the spawned monsters. Rather, they almost gratefully flapped free of their corporeal forms and returned to my gem in a rush of essence.
After almost sixteen hours of farming, my champions had averaged fifty kills per hour with only a few breaks to heal their wounds at a cost of 50 Infernal Essence. I concentrated on the center of my jewel, and a text box flashed before me.
Zagorath
Type: Infernal Core
Essences
Physical - 350/10,000
Infernal - 850
Soul - 500
Spawnable Minions
Hellbat
Champions
Bertha the Hell Troll/Human (Black Sands)
Puck the Infernal Imp
Traps
Spring Trap (Physical)
Materials
Obsidian
Bread-rock
Honeywood
Troll Iron
Leather Scraps
Blueprints
Cleaver (Magic)
Poleaxe (Common)
Savage Halberd (Magic)
Savage Mace (Magic)
Seals
Swiftness
My dungeon had made quite the progression, but I wasn’t finished for the day. Puck and Bertha were spent, so I allowed them to rest while focusing on renovations.
All of my gaming experience involved raiding dungeons, not constructing them. Consuming walls, burrowing into the mountain, and decorating my very own den of death and destruction was a thrill. Every inch of stone or obsidian I brought into my core gave me more power, more length, and more size.
Rather than have the soul forge vulnerable to any overzealous Adventurers, I sealed the alcove behind a wall of obsidian, three feet thick. Now that I was starting to divide the spaces, I decided the alcove would be better served by a specific name: the Forge Chamber. Satisfied with my decision, I covered the stone wall separating the Forge Chamber from the main antechamber with jutting spikes similar to those I’d fashioned over the entrance archway. It didn’t look like an entrance, however, but some kind of area for barbaric torture. The modification suited my dungeon’s theme while also keeping the most valuable items away from prying hands. I wasn’t quite satisfied with it yet; it needed more style. I took my time morphing the obsidian wall and used my Physical Essence judiciously until I’d produced a mural resembling a huge bat with an open maw and dripping fangs.
Summoning more Hellbats while adventurers were diving my depths required some kind of shaft from the antechamber to the alcove, so I fashioned a vent directly above the ceiling. It was large enough for my flying minions to travel in single file, but I imagined even the smallest of adventurers would have trouble squeezing through it. If they tried, they’d be greeted by a Hellbat’s fangs. The vent also functioned as an area for my bats to sleep undisturbed until an unsuspecting adventurer was greeted by a surprise dive-bomb attack.
When this task was complete, I considered where to place Spring Traps. The center of my new and improved antechamber floor was too obvious. I had to think like an adventurer—where would they expect the traps? Right in the middle, of course, next to easy loot. Gavin wasn’t exactly the brightest of bulbs, but I wasn’t about to use a troll as the epitome of tactics and planning when it came to my prey. Better to sneakily place traps in less obvious places.
Part of me suspected that Gavin had somehow seen my first trap on his way in, despite the low visibility. With this in mind, I carved simple etchings into the glassy black obsidian, making sure to keep the same thematic consistency. I intermingled the spring traps with the same throned properties of my entrance to hide the exit points of the stone spikes.
I placed spikes above the antechamber, too, on either side of the bat
