Alverost admired his handiwork. It had been several days since the project to reach the next floor of the dungeon had begun.

Only after sweeping the four corners of the mushroom strata did they begin to plan for the journey upwards. In the mean while, they had collected bits and pieces of scrap metal left behind on human— and sometimes inhuman— corpses in the ground. Every exit to their stratum was upwards above them, great holes that opened in the ceiling, though the dungeons domain didn’t reach towards them at all, almost entirely being projected directly upwards to make way towards the ceiling. The holes were off in the distant edges of the Pit.

Mark and Alverost’s towering spire bore through it now, and within a day their little fortress would reach up into the surface of the next floor. Alverost double checked his work. He had deployed defense in depth, building stone grates to seal the exits of the tower. It spiraled upwards in a staircase, the central pillar interrupted here and there with a hole that light shone out of, luminescent mushrooms pouring light from inside. The walls shone black, intricate patterns of black waves carved into them and smoothed to shining.

“Everything ready?” Mark interrupted my reverie.

“If you are. We should gather the expedition force soon. Its time to begin our first conquest.”

“Conquest? I thought we were going to negotiate for silver? You know… diplomatically?”

“Battle is a form of diplomacy, Mark. Conquest is the first topic of diplomacy classes.”

“What kind of fucked up diplomacy classes… okay, thats besides the point. We’ll probably be able to negotiate with just like, clean clothes, if Valleria’s reaction to wood is any indicator.”

“If you really believed that you wouldn’t have made all of the Kobold’s weapons.”

“Good to have a back up plan. Plus that way they can all defend themselves.” Mark said.

“Massive waste of mana. Its probably cheaper to make new Kobold’s. You did get that first batch growing, didn’t you?”

Mark mentally sighed. “Yes, I did get the first clutch of Kobold eggs. No idea how long they will take to hatch though. Have you ever seen scaly eggs before? And so brightly colored? This is messed up, but they made me think about omelets. Man, I miss eating sometimes.”

“You’ll probably get to experience it again soon.”

“What!?”

“Our dungeon core should soon reach a stage where it is developed enough to synchronize our senses and meld minds with our creatures when in our domain. And none too soon for laying out my contact ritual.”

“What do you think our mushroom soup tastes like? We need to create spices. And salt.”

Alverost mentally sighed.

Silver and Valleria marched at the head of a band of a dozen Kobold’s climbing the staircase to the next floor. All of them were armed with spears, saved Axel and Valleria, one of which was barehanded and the other wielded a terrifying black sickle.

Almost all of them cast nervous glances, the building they were walking through shaking as they ascended the spiral staircase that made the middle of it. The building was shaking because it was still rising from the ground, and as they reached the top of the building, they came to a courtyard in the top.

Around them was a wall as if a castle, turreted battlements with stairs rising to them standing proud as the ceiling burned away into mana and the building continued to rise.

The stairs opened up into an open ceiling, though the ground was covered in a layer of dirt, rubble and debris. The ceiling above crumbled away into mana, bits and pieces freed from it falling onto the castle floor below.

“Damn thats loud!” Valleria yelled over the rumble of the melting ceiling, seemingly undisturbed. Her voice had made all of the other Kobold’s jump, though they continued staring at the ceiling that was melting away before them as the building continued to rise.

Two spirals of nothingness bored upwards, the tingle of intense mana making its way down the Kobold’s scaly skin as they stared upwards.

Valleria stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Then she climbed the walls at the side of the courtyard, the turrets rising from the stone edifice like the teeth of a worm burrowing through the ground.

The dirt and detritus on the ground that fell from the ceiling had slowly become more and more wet, and mushroom spores had made their way through the little fortresses air and into the new soil. The new growth mushrooms had only just begun to sprout here and there at her feet.

She reached out and touched the wall of the tunnel, which sat only inches away from the wall of the rising building. “Ew. Its all wet.” Valleria laughed, but it slowly died in her throat as she turned and looked back at the other Kobolds, who stared up in a mix of terror and wonder.

Then, with a roar and a rush of air and earth, the remaining portion of the ceiling collapsed on her, half burying her in dirt and loose stone. That earned half a chuckle from Axel, who pretended to be looking away very seriously while he brushed off the much thinner portion of dirt that fell on him.

Dirt, debris and slush water poured down the side of the hole above them, a flurry of material falling to the dungeon below as the building continued to rise.

“Oohhhh, shit!” Mark said.

Silver felt the tingle of mana that had shrouded him this whole time disappear. He stared up into the angry, black mouth of the cavern above, which swallowed up every bit of light.

No fires burned, though a hundred quiet echoing sounds reached them, of moving cloth and chafing fabric, hushed speaking and barking laughter, and footsteps plodding through dirty mud and on broken wood, and a hundred private conversations in hissing whispers.

“The amount of heavy mana is unbelievable.” Mark said. “I feel like I’m choking on it.”

“Our domain rips at the air… all of this will belong to us.” Alverost replied.

“All… all what?” Axel asked, having scrambled up the staircase to peer over the little castles edge into the yawning darkness.

“Theres a city out there.” Valleria pointed. “Hundreds of Kobolds.” As if on queue, there was a flash of light from an indeterminate point in the ceiling like sparks popping off a broken machine. A slow moving river of rainbow color flowed in the ceiling, gradually intensifying in brightness in shuttering waves, flickering before coming to life in a gush of light.

The ceiling above them undulated like waves of stone, rising up in a dome before falling low again, obscuring the horizon around them as their building continued to rise.

“Mornlight! Thats convenient. Oh! There is the Longtail Dredgehouse. That used to be clan Bighorn territory before the war.” Valleria pointed helpfully. “If its on the other side of the river… that means we’re in Tiny-Finger territory.”

Two tall Kobolds stared down from the buildings roof. They were too far away to see their faces from here, but they seemed tense, pressed close to each other. Most people probably would be at the sight of a building slowly rising out of the ground.

“Lets see… that way is clan Longtail… then to the right is clan Blighteye…”

“Which one will be easiest to manipulate?”

Valleria paused.

“Probably clan Tinyfingers. There are rumors that they lack food and resources, especially since the last time territory was redrawn they lost access to the river to dredge. Their farms are also in a terrible state.”

Mana swirled and coalesced in front of Valleria, rising from the earth in the form of sleek, black fungiwood planks that were edged with gleaming purple lines. Then a weaved basket of white and green seemed to grow from thin air beside it, before filling with glowing, white mushrooms.

“That’s great. Everyone in the rot city can only collect wood from the dredge, right? That means we can offer them light, food, and wood in exchange for silver. They should be in need of all three.” Mark spoke next.

The entire structure that had been boring upwards suddenly lurched to a stop, causing the Kobolds on it to wobble on their feet. It had risen as high as they would raise it today, stopping with the entrance level to the ground, after much of the mud slush had fallen away.

“We wont be able to see you while you’re on your mission. Axel and Silver, guard Valleria well. She is our only form of communication with the clans. Take three more of the Kobolds with you just in case. The rest of you, guard the castle.” Alverost instructed, receiving a mix of understanding grunts and nods.

Beside Splotch, two other Kobold’s greedily observed him harvesting the mushroom crop, sickles in hand, as he pruned the mushroom’s meat free, before spreading its spore on the ground in its place.

“Spread spores. See? More grow.” Splotch instructed, his voice a raspy hiss. He looked back to his two Kobold students to see if they were listening, but one was staring into the distance. “What?” Splotch hissed.

“Chittering.”

Splotch’s head spun to attention, and he crawled towards the edge of the farm’s fences, ever slowly. Sure enough, he could hear it now; just beyond the range of the wooden fence was a soft clicking sound of chitin against chitin. Splotch scanned the line of the mushroom forest outside, looking for shapes moving in the darkness.

He turned, beginning to talk. “Nothing—“

A Centipede, fully grown, slammed against the fungiwood fence’s outside. Splotch staggered, wheeling over with his sickle in hand.

The centipede reeled back.

“Stupid bug.” Splotch hissed, the other Kobolds cowering behind him. The centipede charged again, slamming its body sideways— and getting its head stuck in the fence. Splotch approached it as it bucked wildly, stuck between the two poles it had forced apart for only an instant.

Splotch hacked at it with the thinly coated sickle. Bug juice sprayed out of its head and onto Splotch’s face as he worked, hacking until the squeaking noises ended. Then he worked to free the body so that it fell.

“Follow me. Drag inside. Then I show you how to skin a centipede.”

After several minutes of trepidation and sweat inducing labor, they managed to pull the centipede into the farm. Splotch and two other Kobolds began hacking it to pieces, breaking down each section into an individual chunk.

Splotch brought one of the individual pieces of it to his mouth, tearing into the flesh of one of the bisected segments. He leaned back, smiling. Purple juice covered rows of sharp teeth as he sighed in appreciation before offering the chunk of bug to one of the other Kobold’s in the farm.

“How do they keep breaking these?” Mark asked, pouring over the pile of metal tools from the farm that were chipped and damaged. Even as he asked, he already got to work repairing and reinforcing them.

The purple Kobold shrugged, dragging the sled away and through the little fortress, over patterned stone bricks and towards a room near the kitchen.

He had to walk down a long, low light, slanted ramp. The walls were all white and swirled with green here, and it got progressively cooler the lower he got, the air temperature dropping with the depth.

Eventually, he fell below even the depth the dungeon core was kept at, coming to a stone room covered in shelves, filled with fungiwood barrels. He was panting with exertion from pulling the, and finally lifted the chunks of mushroom that they had harvested from the farms, placing them into a barrel.

He admired the room around him. Cool and compact, the walls and floor both were textured, and it was only dimly lit by mushrooms, the same eerily soft light that filled the rest of their world, the only light they had ever known. The stone seemed to suck the heat away from him as he took in a blissful moment to close his eyes and recover, hot from the work of a long day of harvesting and hauling food from the farm. Their little colony was ever hungry, and they stripped the forest of mushrooms around them.