Cara

The work she had to do was brutal sometimes, but there was really nothing to be done. Though Cara found her soul now contained within a dungeon core, she’d retained most of her human memories and sensibilities upon the transition. Hell, she even remembered how it’d happen, not that she’d ever confess to that.

It wasn’t until the first group of people attempted to steal her dungeon core that the situation really set in for her, along with some base dungeon instincts that made themselves heard over her own thoughts. She was a dungeon for now, and for the foreseeable future. Though she’d told Manning she knew magic when they were both people, the truth was she knew only the fundamentals and had yet to begin her proper training with her family due to… complications.

Still, although she now accepted and even leaned into the fact that she was currently a dungeon, she couldn’t help but find the work distasteful. The whole process of creating monsters to defend herself was one thing, but when they then had to fight and kill humans, elves, and gnomes in the process, she couldn’t help but feel guilty. Sure, they’d been raiding her dungeon and some had even attempted to strike out at her, but everything in her now functioning instincts screamed she had to kill them.

Which, of course, made sense to her. From the first time she got memories and skills injected into her memories after slaying a sapient creature, she knew that the only way dungeon cores truly grew in intelligence and capability was through the consumption of their invaders. Even that was hard for her to accept, let alone what she had to do to improve her followers.

She turned her gaze away from where Gil’thuk was dissecting another one of the invaders, trying to learn how its physiology worked, a word she only gathered when they’d accidentally killed one of their medics during the invasion. The first step, as far as Cara was concerned, to improving the bodies of her troglodytes was to figure out where and how the species had diverged so greatly from other tool-wielding sapient races. Still, the fact that Gil’thuk insisted that the invaders still be alive during their investigation made things all the more difficult for Cara’s human discernment.

Of course, there were other ways to try and get the species on track. This, of course, referred to the way the troglodytes had initially falled so far from the beaten path, through the systematic impregnation of sapient races. Not only was this a little too far gone for Cara, but it would take several generations to even see results, as far as she could tell. The troglodytes did not lose their abilities to birth females overnight, and neither would they regain it overnight without some sort of magical backing. Still, they’d prioritised capturing the female invaders alive. There was no avoiding spilling blood to accomplish their goals, and that was the female biology was the one the troglodytes were most lacking in.

Besides, if someone was going to suffer, why not make it the murders, rapists, and pillagers that made up the band of invaders? It was a thought she kept coming back to. Why not let her troglodytes do what they needed to, even if it sat wrong with her? It always boiled down to resource management. The fact that there was no guarantee that the troglodytes would be able to repair their species through reproduction with the number of captives they had. Cara shuddered as she caught herself falling down the dungeon core mindset once again, only a very loud and visceral scream from the current vivisectee awaking her from her thought process.

After applying enough mental and magical pressure to the human’s brain, they once again fell unconscious so that Gil’thuk could continue his work. Currently, they were going through and categorising the human’s organs and comparing them to one of the genderless troglodytes that Cara beieved to be the leftovers from what were once their females. So far, it wasn’t going too great. Although there were similarities, there were too many differences as well. Organs one had that the other didn’t and vice versa, with functions that neither Gil’thuk nor Cara knew. Even the medical knowledge consisted of ‘this one is needed to live, not this one’ rather than explaining what they actually did. If only Cara had gone through her family's specialized training, or they’d allowed themselves to learn the more mundane medical knowledge, this would have been much easier.

Allowing herself to get distracted, Cara put her mind back to the dungeon reorganization she was undergoing. Although none of the villagers had known that she sent her troglodytes to the surface to help against the invaders, she could tell that several of them had theories. It wouldn’t be long until someone came to investigate her core again. All she could do was make it as difficult and cost inefficient as possible to find her core, which mostly consisted of creating several new dungeon floors, sub- and side-floors, and traps.

There was nothing she could do to keep out the truly powerful, but all she could hope was that they’d be too busy to come investigate a brand new dungeon in the corner of the kingdom. As it was, she felt that human contact with herself and Manning had been far too quick and they’d not been given the time to grow as dungeons beforehand that they otherwise would have had. The damnable king and his royal edicts were to blame, but there wasn’t much they could do besides struggle to get to where they should have been. Luckily, they both kept their higher intelligence and, whereas she was somewhat lacking, Manning got a near-full dose of dungeon instincts.

While he worked to refine his spacial manipulation skills, Cara was trying to figure out how to make their dungeon functions more mana efficient and how to improve the quality, quantity, and regeneration of the same. It was something she was better tasked to do as most dungeons did not have a strict control of magic in the first place. With her human knowledge and the dungeon core’s ability to reach out and touch mana in a way she’d never been able to do before, it was easier for her.

Already she’d already discovered a way to arrange her floors in a way that allowed the mana to thicken and increase in volume the lower they went. It was a compounding process built off a few theories she didn’t have the name for, but was essentially the reason dungeons ended up so deep. Well, apart from the obvious benefits of hiding the core and deep as possible.

Changing the shape of certain rooms, hallways, and, for lack of a better word, furniture, allowed for the mana to flow more smoothly. It looked a bit like streams, crashing around rocks and cutting through ravines as they collect together to become an even stronger river. If a pile of rocks was there, the rivers either crashed against it and fizzled out a bit as energy teetered out of pattern or absorbed the energy and became even stronger for it.

She even found that the sub- and side-floors could increase the quantity and quality of the ambient mana in her dungeon even when they did not reconnect to lower floors. Like this, it not only became a strategy for hiding her core, but dead-end floors even benefited the overall quality of her flora and fauna. She also found herself experimenting more with her beasts and plants. Manning’s many adaptive species had made a large impression on her in the wake of the invaders. She realized she’d been relying too hard on her troglodytes and hadn’t done enough experimenting. Even the boar-variants of them were an accidental result of her trying to increase their population.

Working through the memories and skills of the various sapient races that had fallen to herself, along with those she’d traded with Manning, she began practicing the refinement of other mana attributes and experimenting on her base creatures. Thanks to Manning, she also had access to some of the more mundane livestock that the villagers had tried to bring along with themselves when they evacuated. He’d managed to lead a few astray during the villager’s panicked retreat from the sudden foray of their aggressors.

Like this, she’d been spending her weeks very busily with her attention split between changing their overall layout, creation of new species, mana experimentation, and training of her troglodytes in fighting styles. It was a lot of work by herself, but she really wouldn’t have it any other way. This sort of power was something she’d never even dreamed of having as a rank and file magician, though she was very annoyed by lack of guidance or research to build off of.

As always, Brick, her dungeon companion, proved to be a worthless layabout. As time had gone by, he’d contributed less and less to their expansion and just left her to her own devices. In his own words, he’d come expecting for a brand new and lesser lifeform to be inhabiting her core. Beyond basic skills, language, and common sense, he had little else he could contribute apart from companionship. Something he also said she didn’t need as a core who’d been born with a twin soul and its own sapient race to converse with.

She found herself wondering how far she could have gotten with Ash, Manning’s dryad companion, as her own assistant. At least she’d been born and raised in a dungeon, had had some semblance of ideas and guidance to offer her. But no, it wasn’t to be due to this damnable dark affinity she had.

As she sat there lamenting her back luck, Cara got her first proper visitors in weeks. A group of four stepped through the muted threshold of her and Manning’s estuarie, into the lobby of her dungeon-proper. She’d finally get to see how others interacted with her dungeon and if the changes she’d made had done what she needed them to.