Mark watched the Kobolds leave.

“Alverost, don’t the Kobolds need somewhere to sleep?”

“They have the whole ground.” Alverost replied. Mark could feel that Alverost was reaching out to another Kobold with his mana, slowly untwisting it.

“Can’t be very comfortable though, can it?”

“Have you ever slept on the ground?”

“I’ll make them beds.”

“Waste of mana.”

“Oh. We should make them rooms too. Walls. We should make lots of walls. Do you feel like we’re exposed to the elements here? Its like an itch.”

Alverost ignored him.

The heavy mana in the cavern was like a whirlpool. It would slide towards them, be recycled, and fresh mana would be released, raining over the caverns many mushrooms. The mushrooms would absorb the mana, like breathing in oxygen, and release heavy mana like co2, continuing the cycle.

By now the breathing had become automatic, though the dungeons domain expansion slowed to a crawl.

Mark directed stone to rise around their core, starting with a small, circular room. Creating physical materials consumed much more mana than simply changing something.

Mark wondered how much mana it would take to create a living creature from nothing.

The process of creating and moving stone was slow. First, the seemingly incorporeal roots of the dungeon had to move to where he wanted to build. The dungeon core itself seemed to be only a small part of his new anatomy— though, was it larger now, that he was looking? A question for later. Most of his anatomy stretched out like tentacles under the ground in huge, glowing, rainbow “roots”. They could be seen through the earth when they were near the wall, and, as best as Mark could tell, they were made of pure, ethereal mana.

He rose the roots to the circle around him where he intended to make the wall. They moved slowly, like a great beast underwater, waving through the solids before two tips of the roots nearly touched the surface. First, the rot and dirt disappeared, dispersing into an intense amount of mana. The dirt nearest it actually caught on fire for a moment before running out of dry burnable material. Then he began to push, to create, a mix of sedimentary and metaphoric rock. It was a featureless gray color as it rose from the earth, like it was poured of concrete. It drained his mana at an incredible speed, but he persevered, ever so slowly pushing a wall to the surface. When it had reached a few feet tall, enough to house a Kobold, he began to close the roof over it.

As the hole that connected him to the outside world shrunk, a dark malaise encroached on Mark. It was as if hands were descending and suffocating him, as if they grabbed his throat and—

“What are you doing?” Alverost asked. “We need the room to be open to allow mana to move through the air.” As Alverost spoke, he reached out with two other roots of mana, though these ones fluctuated with much darker colors, burning open the wall. Noticeably, the mana produced by reclaiming material in this way was not heavy mana— the dungeon couldn’t reabsorb it until the sea of mushrooms processed it, consuming it as they grew. Alverost left a door way open, then shifted his attention back to the Kobolds.

“Well, that would have been a good thing to know before-hand.”

Alverost didn’t reply.

Mark finished building the roof.

The only sounds in the cavern were distant and echoing. Silver thought he could hear the chitters, the footsteps, the occasional mulching of earth or something falling from the tunnels above. But he couldn’t be sure any of it was real. The silence in this place was oppressive, but it was one he had known all of his life. The loud things died quickly.

Things were different now. Silver was different now. For one— he was Silver! He had a name. A concept he couldn’t even wrap his mind around before. His thoughts were faster, more complete. Before they were animalistic. Hunger. Pain. Sleep. Now he could think. It was if an unimaginable weight had been lifted from him, where before the world was covered in oil, now he swam through thoughts like water. He was lucid.

Memories stretched back before him. A tapestry of a long, dark period— now in his past. He was stronger now. But though he was stronger, he still remembered: long nights sat still as stone, listening to the sound, that chittering sound, like the clicking of a hundred legs tearing through the dark, until a fatal death cry could be heard. Waiting until the screaming stopped, until the monstrosities lurking in the dark carried their meal away. As a Kobold disappeared forever.

But those days were over. Their gods had granted them sight to see, and built a world free of hunger. Silver had to look no further than the myriad twisted shapes stretching out as far as he could see. He had eaten more mushrooms in the past few days than in the rest of his life combined. Even as the Gods slept, the mushrooms continued to grow. And the tastes— the black mushrooms were rich and earthy, the white ones sweet. New colors would pop up as well, mutating and changing with each generation. There were hot, red ones, and minty blue. Silver had never known mushrooms that didn’t taste of dirt and rot before.

Silver was reborn, and with purpose. The Gods had given him a mission. It flashed through their minds in images and words, visions of shining metal, of silver coins and runes. Images, concepts, and language— memories not his own— all flitted through his mind. Of strange places, and stranger creatures still— Like him, standing tall on two legs. But devoid of scale or horn, instead pink and soft.

Silver had learned enough to know that he should be weary, even with Axel leading the way in front of him. Mala brought up the rear behind him. Oh, to have a name! To know was a special gift the Gods had given him. Mala’s eyes and head snapped around, staring at the shadows that shifted as they crawled through a sea of glowing fungi, like waves of darkness crawling about the walls and the veritable forest around them.

They moved on still, occasionally seeing the distant forms of their former kin crawling among the fungi, chewing what they could, and scurrying away at their footsteps.

They would march until they found the wall of this place. The farther they got from the Gods, the lower the ceiling fell, closer and closer, like the world was closing them in. Pillars rose from the earth, holding the ceiling back and potentially concealing any number of crawling horrors in dark.

The farther they left from the Gods, the more the mushrooms mutated, shifting into dizzying shapes and swirls and patterns, some twisting and spiraling, others like long tentacles stretched out over the open ground. Some even seemed to move on their own; Silver stepped far around them.

“Wait,” Mala said, his voice a raspy hiss, having never been used for more than screeching before. “Ahead.” He ragged out, gasping between breaths as if the act of speaking pained him, and in all likelihood, it did. Mala stopped, climbing a mushroom and peering out ahead over it.

Silver waited, straining to hear what Mala heard, to see what he saw. When he did, he almost flinched. There it was again— that awful, chittering noise. Hard chitin legs clicked against each-other as that awful thing uncoiled, rising up three times as high as Silver and nearly twice as wide.

Silver turned to Mala, evaluating if he Mala could safely escape while Silver was getting ready to run—

Axel screeched, charging the centipede. Silver stared in a momentary daze. Then Axel and the monster were a mess of black shapes dancing in the shifting shadows, one a tide of shining, glossy legs that reflected the glimmering light of the mushroom forest, the other a matte black shadow with flashing claws, trying hard to cut into chitin. Trying hard and failing.

A blur of legs, a whip of gloss black, and Axel was in the air, hefted by insectoid legs tearing into his scales, screaming as he slammed into the ground. Silver looked to his left. Mala was paralyzed, staring at the gigantic bug. Axel was pinned beneath it.

Silver dug his hands into the dirt, looking for a rock, for something, anything to fight with. He was more now than he was before. He wouldn’t, couldn’t simply run away. They had come unarmed, and Axel wouldn’t stop screaming now, the sound of his claws sliding off chitin repeating in the air.

Something cut into his scales, and he flinched, before pulling it out of the dirt. It was a rusted, iron blade, its handle gone, most of it missing.

Silver charged, stabbing at the great insect. The blade cut into his palm every time he swung, and blood was dripping onto the metal now. The blade was slippery in his hand. Worse yet, Silver couldn’t find purchase in the insects chitin carapace; it refused to be split open by the chipped blade. The insect finally dropped Axel, though, as small a victory as it was; it now turned its attention fully to Silver. A mistake by any wager, as Silver immediately found a spot where the blade found purchase: in its eye.

The insect screamed, pulled itself to its full height, and slammed its head into the ground, trying to dislodge the blade. It turned, thrashed, tearing apart the mushrooms in its path as it headed to the wall, slamming its head into it to dislodge the metal sliver.

Instead it lodged it further, slamming it back into its eye and then into its brain.

The monster collapsed dead.

Silver stepped to Axel, who was breathing heavy and ragged, only having half left the ground. He was covered in a fresh layer of muck and blood. Axel reached out a hand to lift him up.

Axel slapped it away, crawling and slowly lifting himself from the ground. Mala approached with trepidation, still staring at the now silent and still insect corpse.

Axel approached it first, kicking it.

Silver turned away, looking instead for where he had found the blade: the crux of their mission. The dirt had been distrubed by the mycelium of the mushrooms; he found a human skull rising from it, white mycelium like groping tendrils crawling over it.

Behind him, he could hear Axel huffing and working at something.

Axel squinted at the skull, as if he was trying to eek out its secrets with a glare. Then something thumped behind him, nearly causing him to jump. Axel dug his claws into the skulls empty eye sockets, pulling it out of the ground.

He stared at it suspiciously.

Silver tore apart more of the dirt, digging out the area around it. Mala joined him quickly, sending flitting glances at the corpse Silver knew was behind him.

Silver filled his arms with as much rusted metal as he could carry.

“You… help.” Axel hissed at Mala, who looked between Axel and the centipede he was half carrying.

Mala took one cautious step forward. Then another. He poked and prodded at the centipede cautiously before finally hefting it under his shoulder, helping Axel drag it home. Home, the idea had a strange feeling to it after Silver had spent so long alone in the dark.

With great reluctance, Mala stepped up and lifted the other side of the beast’s still bleeding head.

He joined them in retracing their steps through the forest. Now, under the scent of churned dirt and earthy mushrooms, there a sharp, iron tang of blood. It was a long, slow crawl back to the dungeoncore.