“What in Ciryli’s name was that?” her musical voice washed through my mind.
“That,” I replied, “was Puck. My other champion.”
“He’s loud,” Abby grumbled, and I couldn’t help but grin.
“Ralph might have cut and run, but I don’t think the kid was a dumbass. He’ll be back sooner or later, and he’ll bring more adventurers with him. We also have the Sand Pirates to worry about. Bertha, you still think they’re coming?”
“I’m certain,” the half-troll replied. “Ma and Jeff sent them a message. As soon as they heard of a dungeon core, they would have dropped everything and made for Shadow Crag.”
“How many days travel are they?”
“Three from their base in the Black Sands.”
“How did Jeff get them a message?” I asked from my gem. “He couldn’t have been gone more than a few hours.”
“There are traveling stones throughout the realm. Most have deteriorated so much that they don’t allow for actual travel, but it is possible to send messages through them. Jeff would have used one of those.”
“Hmmm . . . then the Sand Pirates could be here any moment. I need Zagorath at fighting strength, and I need it upgraded.
Abby had been strangely silent, and I followed her mind. Her senses moved over the First Floor, exploring it. She seemed frustrated but resigned. Something was going on here, something I couldn’t quite decipher.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.
She sighed. “I can’t excavate here.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not all like you, Dom. These are Lilith’s realms. Even the Physical Essence is drenched in enough of her energy to stop a Storm core from claiming the earth of her realm.”
Damn. I’d been banking on her being able to help me excavate. The Sand Pirates were coming at some point, and Ralph would likely bring back his own group of adventurers. We were racing against time now. I needed to shift my dungeon, give it new twists, turns, traps, minions.
My stairs and passages grew longer while the vents expanded until even Von Dominus would be able move through, hunched over. The Pretzel hollowed itself out, and I sucked in the essence, widening the altars. I continued mining the delicious essence until my total reached 7,000.
I didn’t want to carve out new rooms before I’d perfected the existing ones, so I went to work on renovations. Pillars erupted from the ground of the First Floor, stretched to the ceiling, and carved themselves with the same demonic patterns as the rest of Zagorath. I modified the entrance by refashioning the archway with sculptures of skulls. The detailing was simple to create after seeing so many corpses inside my dungeon, and I used a mixture of human and half-orc bones while modifying the thorns so they were even larger than the entrance’s previous iteration.
The antechamber’s structure didn’t require any modification, but I adjusted the Bladed-Fan so that the blades were bigger and heavier. Then I reinforced the trap itself so it had enough force to hurl the cleavers into unwitting adventurers and cut through multiple enemies at a time. I moved to the final corridor separating the Pretzel from the First Floor’s chamber. The Ceiling and Floor spikes had been my most effective traps to date, but Ralph—and anyone he’d spoken to—would be expecting the spikes in their current locations.
I adjusted the insertion points of the traps, and a modified blueprint appeared in my mind. I chose to construct them with Troll Iron rather than Obsidian Alloy to preserve my essence, and then placed them in the walls so the spikes would blast out horizontally, turning the entire corridor into a new kind of deathtrap.
Zagorath built Wall Spike x4 (Troll Iron)
Cost: 3,200 Physical Essence
My mind then turned to the new trap I’d learned through my Vampiric Expertise. The Paralysis Ring. The blueprint was there—maddeningly close—but it needed Storm Essence to activate it, not merely Physical like my simple traps. I could feel the pathways throughout my gem, giving me access to it, but the crackling lines where the electric essence should’ve been was empty, calling out to be filled.
Could I siphon any of Abby’s Essence? Could two dungeon cores share essence and channel in tandem?
“Abby,” I said, “do you have any Storm Essence to spare?”
“I thought you absorbed all of it on the peak,” she said coyly.
“I’m serious. I can’t absorb it from anything else except you.”
She grew thoughtful. “I don’t know; I haven’t ever tried.”
Her consciousness drifted toward mine and entwined with it. Suddenly, a flood of crackling, blue-tinged essence blasted into my jewel.
Zagorath Absorbed Essence
+1,420 Storm Essence
Laughing with delight, I instantly re-routed it. I built a Paralysis Ring in the antechamber as a perfect way to immobilize any adventurers and force them to catch my Bladed-Fan with their face. Then, I constructed two in the corridor. The twin traps overlapped slightly, ready to freeze some hapless idiot in place, right in time for my halberd spikes to leap out, impale them, and crush them into jelly when they were dragged back into the wall. Perfect.
Zagorath Built Paralysis Rings x3
Cost: 1,200 Storm Essence
The width of a Paralysis Ring’s circumference dictated the power of the shock and the requirements for triggering the trap. I’d learned this from the knowledge I’d absorbed from Abby, and the largest one located in my antechamber required three adventures inside its ring before it would trigger. Then it would blast them with a live current and force their muscles to spasm. The other two, situated in the corridor, were smaller, and only needed one invader to step into their circumferences to trigger the effect. The smaller traps delivered a more powerful effect because of the greater concentration of power in the narrower rings. The Fan-Blade and Wall Spikes worked in tandem with the Storm traps, and the thought of the slaughter they would cause made my jewel flicker.
I really was breaking all the rules in the Sinarius Realms.
An idea blasted through my consciousness - the missing piece to the puzzle. Previously, my soul forge wouldn’t
