“Are they going to be alright Manning? I’d hate for the elf girl to have survived that grievous would just to die on the way out of the forest.” Ash, ever the bleeding heart, watched the victorious party limp their way down his forest paths in the way only she could. With her eyes closed and hand against one of the larger trees in his forest, she was able to track their movements as they grumbled and grunted at every turn in the path or root underfoot.

“Why won’t you just shorten the path for them? You’ve done it before and I know its not because you like to see them in pain.”

“We’ve had this conversation, Ash. I can’t help them out here, they almost died down there. If they think that I’m supporting them, they will take dumber and dumber risks until they eventually die. And that's just the normal adventurers, imagine what the cultists would start doing if they thought I was backing them behind dungeon diving?” She knew the answer, just as he’d known that she would ask anyways. If they were going to die, he’d probably let them out but as it was, they’d survive stumbling home even if they hated every second of it.

“I’m not really sure why, but I am still jealous of Cara’s troglodytes. I don’t even want to kill people to get stronger, and if people saw them in the forest they’d probably know I’m a dungeon too, but man if I don’t want my own sapient race. It’s probably a good thing that their sun sensitivity issues seem to stick with them no matter what races they breed with.” With every permeation of the troglodytes, Cara always sent a couple above ground in the day time. Every time, without fail, their skin burned away and killed them within hours.

Neither Manning nor Cara saw the point in having troglodytes that could only move during the night. It certainly didn’t help that they were always obviously troglodytes. It would do his cover as an ‘enchanted forest’ that's holding the dungeon at bay if they saw dungeon denizens running around.

“It’s probably your dungeon instincts. Every old dungeon always ends up with at least one sapient race, usually humanoid too. Even the ones without outside influence, the ones so far underground that they never get discovered or in the middle of the ocean. They can go their entire existence without meeting a human and have a near clone of one, though often more physically deadly, by the time they are discovered.”

Once again, Manning found that his thoughts weren’t really his own. Cara often ranted, when she found the time to speak to him at least, about how lucky he was to have a nearly intact set of instincts as a dungeon core. She thought him the luckiest man in the world just because dungeon stuff came easier to him, but he knew she was the luckier of the two. She didn’t have to rail against the screaming in her mind to kill the humans at all times. Didn’t feel the need to cover every creature in her domain with chitin and claws. Didn’t have to fear discovery and subsequent purging at any moment every day.

“Yeah I guess. I suppose I’ll just concentrate on focusing my creatures’ evolutions whenever they get close. It helps to know what I’m working towards I think, so we don’t have to accidentally reach sapiency for them.” Even as he spoke, Manning’s attention was drawn to one of the new biomes he was building within the forest. For the time being, nobody should be able to accidentally stumble upon it.

The massive Fungoar, as he’d taken to calling them, had just finished defending its territory from a group of intruding Razor Rats. Strewn across the area were felled saplings and the corpses of the mushroom boar’s enemies, a race of hedgehogs that Manning went full dungeon on during a period of boredom. Their quills were replaced with thin copper blades, sharp enough to slice through the boot and foot of anyone who stepped on it by accident. They were, also, about three times the size of his other hedgehogs. Really, they were little monsters compared to the cute creatures they started out as.

The Fungoar, the fairly large boar that had a field of various mushrooms and mosses coating its coat, had been able to slay them by poisoning them over time and, from the look of the meat puddles, stomping on several of them with its reinforced hooves. It trotted away on bleeding and near shredded legs, limping back to its home in the glowing forest. Massive stalks of stipe with branches of red and blue glowing caps reached out across the canopy, both blocking the sun and creating an environment of light at the same time.

From the battle, which hadn’t been that specific Fungoar’s first, the creature managed to harness enough energy from its slain enemies that it was very close to evolving. His dungeon instincts told him to harden its legs and improve the potency of the poison upon its back. Left alone, it would like to increase its own size and perhaps lengthen its tusks. Of course, Manning didn’t let either of those happen.

As it reached its cave, ready to sleep off its injuries and digest the few Razor Rats it managed to consume from under their coat of swords, Manning began to put his plan into action. Within the hollow tree truck of the wood-based-forest of the past, the boar laid down upon its bed of mosses and mushrooms. They drank away at the blood, both his and his enemies, and released bits of mana that then sank back into their mobile colonies upon the boar’s back. Manning, seeing it falling to sleep, pushed for it to sleep even deeper than it naturally would.

As his consciousness sank into the boar’s unconscious, he felt its every need, desire, and thought. That portion of the forest belonged to it and he would slay every one of the furry intruders. His feet felt soar and, not for the first time, he regretted that his hooves were not hard enough. If only his feet were made of the same material that those rats’ backs had been, they would not slit so easily. Even as he envisioned it, he was prepared to make it happen.

But, no. What if, instead, its front hooves were more flexible. Instead of having to stomp straight down, it would be able to move them at angles and swipe, catching them on their unarmored sides. He would be able to reach the tastier morsels that were always just so close to his reach. Perhaps, no, surely that would be a most useful use of his growth than a slightly harder hoove. There would always be something to stomp on, and they grew stronger just as his hooves did. With a more flexible appendage than his front legs and hooves, he’d be able to rip out the spines on those rats. He’d have more food to eat and he could even use their sharp for to.. to..

Ugh, his head hurt too much thinking about it. More food though that seemed promising. But also hard hooves, no he needed long jointed things at the end of his legs instead, but they had to be hard like the Razor Rats or he’d just hurt them if he missed his swipe. No, make them flexible and use their sharp quills to.. to.. That thought makes no sense. How would that help him to crush them.

With a pounding headache, Manning ripped his mind from the mind of his creature. Its primitive thoughts had begun to erode away at Manning’s will, though he was pretty sure a large part of that was him trying to force it to skip several steps and teach it about wielding tools. At the end of the day though, he was pretty sure he was going to see a solid impact of his influence.

That Fungoar was just one of his many attempts to get closer to evolution and it was, at that point, its fifth time storing enough energy from its enemies to change itself on a fundamental level. How many more it would take to get its shape right he couldn’t begin to guess, let alone modifying its mind to be more intelligent.

He let his attention sweep through the glowing mushroom biome, making a nudge to a creature’s thoughts every now and then. Most of his creatures didn’t warrant more attention like the Fungoar did. If it weren’t for the fact that it was improving so rapidly since its birth only a few weeks before, Manning probably would have even noticed it. He had several tribes of boars growing in different directions, much like Cara was doing with her Troglodytes, each with different qualities and territories.

Eventually, he planned to open the various biomes open to visitation as a sort of trial but he first needed to figure out how he would convince the sapient races that they were tests and not attacks. He was even more sure that the way forward for his creatures’ evolution was battling sapients after sifting through the Fungoar’s thoughts. Most of the evolutions it wanted to push itself toward were direct counters to the fauna it had been battling day to day.

If there was one thing he’d realized by then, it was that nothing killed elves and humans quite as well as other elves and humans.