As beneficial as it was to stretch myself into new territories, it wasn’t entirely without its drawbacks.

Despite everything, I still only had a single mind even if I had enough eyes and ears to match a small city in number. While it was simple enough to keep myself focused on the area around my core, doing so left my more distant reaches feeling muted and distant. Likewise, shifting my attention to be around the outpost Ephilia was currently sleeping in felt as if I’d uprooted my consciousness and shifted it all the way over there, only maintaining full consciousness over the immediate surroundings of my core while the greenhouse and the other rooms faded to background noise.

It wasn’t a big issue yet, since I could flick between the two with ease. Still, with all of the ground I was covering I now found it hard to maintain my attention on a single thing at once. The cry of an animal I couldn’t recognize down near the river would make me snap over there, only for suspicious rustling of plants to make me have to examine another area. It wasn’t automatic, more like the reflex to snap my head back to glance over my shoulder while walking down a dark path.

There wasn’t much to report, though. A deer guiding its fawn through the thicket or the bellowing of seals resting down on broad rocks near the seat—no goblins, no adventurers, nothing at all of interest.

Ephi’s rest didn’t seem particularly restful, though I chalked this up to her being in an unfamiliar place. Even if I tried to make it seem like home, this was still probably the first time she’d ever slept outside of the pit we called home.

The night was a productive one for me, as I set about discovering and cataloging the various pockets of ores scattered through the earth. There was an iron node in our valley that was large enough that the bottom of it vanished beyond what I could sense with [Mining I], as well as a copper node of a far smaller size below the long hall I’d just built.

Curious, I began to excavate towards the iron, forming a rough hall toward the mineral pocket and rather quickly finding the stone I was carving through changing in texture and composition.

❖ Hematite ❖

Category: Mineral Stone containing large quantities of elemental iron. Often takes on a dark color.

Thick bands of glossy gray and dark red striped through the porous rock surrounding it. Breaking through this took slightly longer for my manamites, not quite as easy to chew through as everything else I’d dealt with. Still, with the horde it currently was, I was able to amass a small amount to begin to play with.

Right off the bat, metal was fun. Stone was brittle, wood was soft like working a potter’s wheel, but metal felt right. Focusing my senses, I guided the manamites to try and form some simple geometric shapes from the iron, glossy metal forming piece by piece into a cube, a sphere, a rod. Some small imperfections marred these forms, but otherwise they were workable, and I spent most of the remainder of the night consuming and creating with this new material.

It never took long to get the hang of a new substrate to work with.

Before long, I was starting to experiment further with it; raw iron on its own would have limited use unless I wanted to perform constant maintenance on corroding iron. We were already near the ocean, but the inside of my structure was significantly more humid than outside as a result of the aqueduct system’s residual steam. Anything I built out of plain iron wouldn’t last long at all—not without some kind of coating or galvanization, and [Core Metallurgy] didn’t seem too eager to spill any secrets on how to approach those and make my life easier.

At the very least, I knew that copper would fare decently in its basic state, and if I could locate tin I could alloy it into bronze to make something comparable, if a bit weaker than iron.

Mining to the copper and collecting a decent chunk of it took the remainder of the night, and I had only just replaced the piping in the boiler room with copper when Ephi finally shoved herself out of bed.

“Heading out now, Boss,” she chimed, already making her way down through one of the exits to the road below.

The trip back to where she had left off yesterday was fairly uneventful, dreary clouds clogging up the sky overhead and drenching the area in a constant but slight drizzle. Few animals were out, aside from the occasional raven overhead or insect skittering across the forest floor. She found her way to the mile marker without difficulty and continued on past it, trotting along the winding road into unknown territory.

Which was, for the most part, largely identical to everywhere else we’d been so far. Tall conifers cast thorny shadows over the lichen-covered earth below, like sundials beneath a dreary, sunless sky. There were few signs of travel, if any—the stone road left little in the way of tracks to follow, and it was several more miles before Ephi finally found a split in the road.

Branching to the east was a well-trodden trail that cut through the forest, a path of muddy soil that snaked deeper inland, gradually ascending the hills. In the distance, I could just make out a pillar of smoke twirling upwards into the heavens, obscured by the towering pines.

It had been raining for hours now, though. How was there a fire, and who was keeping it going?

No words or orders needed to be exchanged—she knew exactly what to do. She stayed deeper into the forest as she followed this trail, taking further precautions given that this road seemed to be a more recent creation. Winding up through the hills, I almost found myself wishing we had a map to follow instead; it certainly would have been quicker than sticking to the paths that the humans had constructed. Ephi was nimble and travelled light, so heading offroad wouldn’t really carry the same weight as it would for a more conventional traveler.

Snaking further uphill, it took a while before we found our first legitimate signs of habitation: a guard tower, along with an armored figure standing watch at the top of it, obscured by shadow.

HUMAN TOWER SENTRY LVL: 4 NAME: "Orin"

Skills:

[Enhanced Vitality II]

[Enhanced Strength I]

[Enhanced Dexterity I]

[Crossbow Maintenance I]

[Precision I]

HP: 22 / 22 CATEGORY: Humanoid MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Human SP: 15 / 19 SIZE: Medium XP: ?? GENDER: ♂ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 9 8 7 7 6 6

A human hailing from the city of Boltha. Once a poacher, he has since paid for his crimes and now puts his skill to use for the good of his lord.

Nothing we needed to worry about with skills and stats like that. Spotting a single mouse skulking through the underbrush—however large this mouse might have been—would be a stretch, to say the least. Continuing past, she deftly squeezed through a hollow log and hurried past the tower, continuing forward to finally see what we’d come here to see.

The area surrounding the camp was heavily deforested, with a number of stumps still remaining in the areas closest to the forest’s edge. Within this artificial clearing, a wooden palisade encircled a number of tents and hastily-constructed buildings, though seeing any details beyond the tops of their rooves was impossible without getting to higher ground or actually venturing inside. Entrance seemed to be controlled via a gate, though this threshold was guarded by a duo of chainmail-wearing guards. With how barren the area around the gate was, there wasn’t any chance she’d be able to sneak through there unseen.

Thankfully, the palisade seemed to be constructed mostly with keeping out bigger threats than an overly curious mouse and her helicopter boss. If we really wanted to, we’d be able to gain entry fairly easily.

“Let’s take a look at it from above before we just charge in blindly. Sound good to you, bird-bait?”, I suggested.

“They’ve cut down most of the close trees, so I’ll have to watch from a bit of a distance,” she explained, skittering over to one of the nearest pines she could find and beginning her ascent, “Are we looking for anything in particular, or just taking a peek?”

I wasn’t really quite sure myself—the entire point of being here was to gather intelligence on a danger that we knew almost nothing about.

“I’m thinking we’ll look around, maybe eavesdrop a bit. I want to figure out if they know about me or not, and see if we can find out where that other core is so we can stay as far away from there as possible. Besides that, maybe pick up some ideas on how to establish some form of trade. If we can get a rough idea for what these people need most, we might be able to coerce them into a working relationship with us. Pretty slim chance I figure, but worth investigating.”

She reached a decent perch near the top of the tree a few moments later, turning her head towards the camp to act as a security camera for me—she didn’t really know exactly what she was looking at, given how little she’d been around civilization.

The enclosed area was fairly-large, all things considered. Calling it a town wouldn’t be quite right, but it wasn’t entirely a war camp either. There was a fair amount of movement as people milled about, some performing menial tasks like construction, shoeing horses or tending to the bonfire at the center of the camp. The largest building was near the southern wall, built from stone bricks—a surprising choice, given how recently-developed the rest of the camp seemed—standing two stories tall and with a gabled roof.

As for the rest of the settlement, most of the more permanent structures were built from wood harvested from the surrounding area, barely processed at all before being slapped together into a building. The rest of the camp was tents made of sewn-together hides or thick canvas. Almost everyone that I saw moving around camp was armed in some way or another, and a quick glance at their tooltips was a stark reminder to not get caught.

These were fighters—though it didn’t seem like a military camp to me with how disorganized it was. Rather, these people were freelancers of some sort with only the most base levels of organization, mercenaries or adventurers or something along those lines. With that in mind, I began to try to reason out the purposes of the various structures.

The largest building, the sturdy one made of stone with the brass sigil shaped like a spear hanging above its front door, that had to be a headquarters of some kind, their command center. There was a blacksmith, a shop of some kind, a stable, as well as a few buildings that I believed were just lodgings.

The bonfire at the center of the ramshackle town was one of the more intriguing things to me. There was no one tending it—it simply continued to burn in defiance of the downpour. Magic, probably.

Perhaps it was intellectually lazy, but it was a hard temptation to resist in a world like this where the answer to any question might actually just be a halfhearted shrug and a grumble of ‘magic’.

We remained there for a while, observing the comings and goings. It wasn’t just humans, I’d discovered. Though the majority of them seemed to be human, there were a number of other species mixed in as well: dwarves, elves, lizardfolk, even a few demihumans like Cheshire was.

So they weren’t just a dungeon thing, then.

There were a few other species that showed up in small numbers too, but once I’d done some mental math and adjusted for the buildings in the area, I guessed that the population of this place was somewhere between two and three hundred.

Though I couldn’t really figure out how they were filling that many bellies, given that there didn’t seem to be any form of farm present. Maybe shipped in from Boltha? It was only a short way to the south, according to the signs.

Once we’d gotten a feel for the place and memorized the layout, Ephilia made her way down and squeezed through a gap between two of the palisade logs, slipping into the interior of the camp proper. Slinking along through the sparse grass, she ducked down in between a cluster of barrels sitting out in the rain, the din of the village’s residents going about their day far more audible from here.

We spent the better part of an hour listening in, staying out of sight—but overall, I’d call our gains minimal. Hell, we learned more from watching which direction the patrols went: further inland and to the north, toward the looming snow-capped peaks at the heart of the land.

If that was where they were focusing their efforts, it stood to reason that it was where the threat was: the other core.

Aside from that, the occasional bit of gossip reached our ears, but nothing groundbreaking.

Remarkably, no one was out there gabbing about long-term plans or anything like that. No, it was almost more like casual office-talk.

I’d interned for a place once—only for about a week before I’d decided it wasn’t for me, but one of my most memorable moments there was when the vending machine company swapped out the sour cream and onion chips for jalapeno cheddar ones. It was the only thing anyone had talked about for that entire day.

Nearly lost my damned mind in the space of eight hours that day.

This felt similar.

“So what’s this fancy berry-mead I’ve been hearing about?”

I heard about fifteen variations of this over the time we were listening. Apparently the general store had gotten a few barrels in and it was the talk of the town.

“…So what is mogoberry mead, anyways?”, Ephilia had asked after I translated it over for her.

“Gotta start with explaining mead first, which requires I explain alcohol. Humans like to drink this stuff called alcohol—it’s pretty simple to make, but making it good takes a lot more effort. It makes you… feel nice, usually, so people will pay a good bit of money for it. Mead is a type of alcohol made from honey, so raspberry mead—”

“…is made with mogo berries too, got it,” she butted in.

“Yep. Not exactly the information we came for, but it’s something. Some say brewing alcohol is mankind’s oldest profession, part of the reason they developed agriculture at all, at least where I came from. It’s a pretty profitable gig, though it takes time. If they’re this worked up over something like that, we might be able to turn that into money in our pockets.”

“…You want to make mead, now?”, she questioned.

“Probably not mead, since we’d need honey for that and I don’t see myself as much of a beekeeper. But we might be able to make some kind of wine with what we’re already growing, or branch out to a new crop—a grain, for example. We’d be able to make whiskey if we did that. Really though, there’s a lot of possibilities, but not much point sticking around here anymore. Start heading on back whenever you feel safe to do so, yeah?”

“Are you sure? We might be able to nab some money off of them before I leave,” Ephilia suggested, motioning towards a group standing near the bonfire.

“We can try that another time when it’s dark out. Too much activity now, it’s better that we take what we learned and head on home—one or two more coins isn’t going to make or break us at this point. I’d rather us play it a bit safer and keep our heads down.”

The rest of my afternoon was spent on further experiments with metal, determining uses for the iron and copper I had available. While the nodes seemed to be fairly expansive, the amount that I actually got out of them was deceptively small so I had to play things smart with how I used this material. The good news was that the manamites were perfectly capable of breaking down the processed metal right back into my hoard, which meant that I could use and reuse it as much as needed without worrying about waste from scrapped projects.

Copper wasn’t quite as sturdy as iron was physically, but it was much safer to use for long-term structure at the moment. Iron would oxidize if I left it out, so it was better-served as structural supports inside the walls for now. Spikes made of copper weren’t as effective as I would have liked, but iron ones were capable of piercing through quite a few materials with each. If I ever had to mount an icicle defense again or give a crushing trap some more ‘oomph’ in a dire situation, iron would be the one to go with.

On the other hand, copper would last far longer out here and carried temperature well, meaning that it would work well for heating and cooling purposes—at least better than anything else I had.

Ephi continued to make her way home while I experimented with everything from metal-reinforced doors to trying to create a primitive radiator using some of the hot water piped from the boiler room. Hell, we’d even be able to use it for tools and armor, if we ever needed it—though I wasn’t quite sure how I’d design rat-armor. Maybe I could take inspiration from horse barding and start there.

“Hey, Boss? S-something’s going on, can you take a look?”, Ephi shot over our link, apprehension in her tone.

I peered over and found myself looking upon pure chaos.

Travelling back home alongside the road, Ephi had stumbled onto—or into, more appropriately, what seemed to be some kind of armed standoff between some diminutive, green-skinned humanoids and a small number of adventurers, shouting back and forth to each other from a short distance away.

One of the humans seemed to be trying to act as an interpreter, speaking in some guttural tongue that I assumed was some kind of goblin-speak, while nearly a dozen goblins squabbled back, all trying to talk over one another.

CORE-TOUCHED GOBLIN BRAWLER LVL: 5 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Core Egocide I]

[Enhanced Vitality II]

[Enhanced Strength II]

[Blocking I]

[Group Tactics I]

HP: 27 / 27 CATEGORY: Monster MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Goblin SP: 23 / 24 SIZE: Medium XP: ?? GENDER: ♂ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 9 11 7 4 3 3

A goblin under the auric influence of a dungeon's core. Possesses decent martial prowess in numbers, but lacks courage on its own.

The adventurers had better skills and higher stats, but far fewer numbers to their side of this conflict, assuming it heated up into an actual fight.

“Do not do anything to get seen by either side. Get off the road, vanish into the forest and cut around, got it?”, I urged, watching from a distance as one of the goblins started to bash its buckler with the flat side of its sword, others following suit a moment later.

Among them, I could see one goblin standing slightly above the rest, its hair tied up into a tall ponytail and its face covered in scars that it made no attempt to hide. It waved a wooden staff decorated with a mess of black feathers around in the air above its head as if drawing circles up into the sky itself, and I nearly missed it when I saw a tooltip pop up.

CORE-TOUCHED CROW LORD LVL: 2 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Monster Lord]

(2 unspent skill points)

HP: 6 / 11 CATEGORY: Monster

Assistant Manager

MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Crow SP: 3 / 7 SIZE: Small XP: ?? GENDER: ♂ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 3 4 4 4 3 5

A crow under the auric influence of a dungeon's core. Infused with the great potential of a monster lord. Currently employed as a decoration.

It wasn’t just a mess of feathers. It was the crow, tied up wings spread to the head of the shaman’s staff.

My crow—my monster lord? This was where it ended up?

Err, sorry. My assistant manager, apparently.

"Ephi, that's him. That's the crow. I guess that explains the lack of eggs, too...", I muttered over our link, trailing off.

"You didn't check?", she shot back, darting off into the woods.

"He was already gone by the time I was actually starting to think about that kind of stuff! Either way, I guess he's beyond our help now. No way we can take on that many of those freakshows," I added.

"...Yeah, I'm goin' home. See you in a few."

I didn't tell her, but I almost considered spending the crow's skill points on [Core Link II] to use it for espionage, only to remember what Cheshire had been able to do with my link to Ephilia that one time. Begrudingly, I left him be, not wanting to risk everything if this other dungeon noticed what I'd done.