But there was something I could do. Something that really excited me. After all, though I enjoyed my own company, I didn’t like being down there all alone all the time. I’d feel better if I had a friend.
Some people, if they were here watching me, might have felt a little apprehensive that my whole deal here is to entice, entrap, and then disembowel heroes. Perhaps they would think it’s better that I’m all alone.
I wouldn’t blame them for feeling that way. It would just mean they’re a well-adjusted person with empathy for others. When I first became a core and still had a glimmer of my old self inside me, I felt the same way.
I remember sitting in Overseer Tocky-Turnbull’s Introduction to Being a Core class, and he explained what we were and what we’d have to do. He accompanied this by casting a light spell on the wall that showed a bunch of paintings. Ones of heroes going into dungeons. Bear traps slamming over their feet. Giant boulders crashing into them. Then we saw the cores siphoning lifeforce from the heroes so that they could grow stronger.
Seeing it for the first time, I felt queasy. I was a gem core, so it was impossible for me to vomit, of course. It was a phantom feeling, like when someone loses an arm or a leg and they think they can still feel it. I’ve mostly gotten rid of this, but I still get the occasional phantom emotion from time to time.
Anyway, I felt sick when I first learned about what my new life would consist of. Then, Overseer Tocky-Turnbull changed my thinking.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to imagine a lion,” the overseer told us all. “A big warrior lion out in the sandy plains of Jansanze. No, wait a second. If we’re imagining things, let’s go big. So, picture a…dragon. Shiny scales, a giant head with big horns coming off it. He’s flying over the plains with his wings flapping so loud they sound like cannons firing, and then he spots a sheep way below him.
This dragon is hungry. His nestlings are hungry. A sheep would feed them for a little while. Would you call him evil when he scoops the sheep up in his mouth and carries it back to his nest? Maybe some people would. If they do, I respect that.
You cores can’t have that same opinion. For our dragon friend, it is his nature. He doesn’t have a choice in it. So it is with you cores. You can’t nourish yourselves in any other way. You exist to entrap heroes and drain their souls.”
It isn’t exactly like the sheep story, either. The sheep is defenseless. Whereas heroes come down here armed to the teeth, and their sole intention is to defeat me and take my loot. They’re not even motivated by survival; humans don’t have an inner need to kill stuff for treasure. Glittering gems and mountains of gold don’t inherently keep a person alive. Not directly, anyway.
So, it works on both sides. They want to kill me, and I need to kill them. What I’m saying is, heroes aren’t innocent in all of this.
If I told someone this and they didn’t change their mind about me, that would be okay. I’d just want them to understand that I don’t do any of this because I’m evil, and I’d hope that we could remain friends.
With that said, I had work to do there in the third room in my dungeon.
As a level one core without much essence, the only categories available in my crafting list were fixtures and monsters. As I selected the monsters list, my excitement grew inside me. I was close to getting a friend!
Monsters:
Spider [Cost 15]
Leech [Cost 15]
Fire beetle [Cost 20]
Kobold [Cost 35]
Hmm. Not a fearsome list at all. In fact, it looked like the lunchtime menu at an orc restaurant. Plus, even with my discounted essence rates, they were still expensive. 15 essence points to create one leech? Yeah, right.
There was another thing to be wary of, too. If I wanted to, I could have used up all my essence creating fire beetles. At my current total of 49 essence points, I could create 2 at a time.
Then I could keep creating beetles, regenerating my essence, creating more beetles, and so on until my dungeon was crawling with the buggers. All it would take is being patient while my essence regenerated.
Fire beetles might not be so fearsome on their own, but 5000 of them would have been a match for anyone!
But…
Yes, there’s always a but when it comes to dungeons…
As a level one core, I had limits to the number of rooms I could build and the number of monsters I could have in my dungeon at any one time.
I checked them now.
Level 1 Limits:
Rooms: 4
Monsters: 4
Traps: 6
Puzzles: 2
Leveling up wasn’t just a way of increasing essence, it also gave me access to other crafting categories, and it increased how much of the lovely stuff I could place in my dungeon.
As a devout academy student, I was very interested in dungeon core history, and I’d learned that it hadn’t always been this way.
There used to be no limits whatsoever on the number of monsters a level one core could create. All he needed to do was be patient when he waited for his essence to regenerate.
So, a dungeon core named Alibub created rats in his dungeon. Not just one rat. Not two. Not three. Not four.
Alibub painstakingly created
