A dungeon monster could be a person. It was a vile, sickening thought… because it implied that the problem in this relationship was Archimedes himself.

Just because he had too much power over his creations—too much insight into their thoughts, to the point that it blurred the line between observation and control—he had refused to acknowledge them as independent creatures.

But they weren’t, the dungeon realized with a sinking feeling. In the past, I didn’t have access to creature cores to give them physical independence, and I never tried making creatures that would think for themselves. They were my behemoths: they only needed enough intelligence and free will to succeed in battle.

But at any time, if he had wanted to, he could have looked past his own immediate survival and created something more. He might have failed, might even have died sooner, but he could have tried.

“Papa, are you okay? You feel sad.”

Sad, he thought. Am I sad?

Thesia’s gelatinous body started to encompass the dungeon core once again in a hug.

“… I won’t kill myself for now,” he said slowly. “But I’m not happy. I’ll acknowledge you as people, so… please help me.”

There was a general echo of surprised quiet throughout the shared mind of the dungeon.

“Of course,” Thesia said warmly.

A faint window from Vow flickered into view. There was an attempt at an image resembling a smile and the words

“You’re lucky I’m so nice,” Merina huffed.

“Don’t take your problems out on other people, you jerk,” Lilith muttered. “Start with this next time.”

Zemnes sighed in relief, and Theoria slumped now that the tension from before was gone.

“I don’t want Archy to be sad either,” Alphio peeked down the hole to the third floor and smiled.

“What is ‘sad’?” Minute pondered.

Perhaps this was the first time Archimedes had a real talk with his creations, without his prejudices in the way. But Thesia had said one thing wrong: Archimedes wasn’t in their heads; they were in his. The emotions and minds of the beings inside a dungeon seeped into its walls, forming and changing its ego. The consciousness called “Archimedes” was essentially half calculating construct and half an amalgam of the first hundreds of monsters and thousands of humans that left their mark inside of him.

And ever since that first rise to consciousness, there came a fear of change: a very real worry that the continuing presence of new monsters and outsiders would change him into someone unrecognizable, even driving him insane as countless mental structures merged and overlapped.

And if that was the risk, why not make only unintelligent beasts, then? Why not slaughter every unpleasant mind and heart that wandered in and left its dirty fingerprints on his identity? Why not fall back on his mechanical core anytime he didn’t know how to handle his own emotions?

It was a primal fear, and only death had been able to loosen its hold; death, and the apathy toward life that followed. Why not change? Why not use his power to look into the minds of others actively and understand them? Maybe he would go mad or irreversibly change, but after all, he had never been perfect in the first place.

***

The mood feels a little strange in here today, Cherise pondered, stepping into the dungeon. He better have finished his third floor by now. It’s almost the time that we promised to let the explorers back in, and I’ve already had to come here twice for this.

The wooden golem from before came to guide her downstairs, which she took as a good sign. It was a surprise for sure, but a welcome one, when the valley on the second floor unfolded itself into a spiral stairway going down.

She climbed to the bottom, and there it was: the core of this place. Floating there peacefully as if he hadn’t just broken every world record for a dungeon’s growth speed.

“You actually did it,” the demon commented. “Alright, can we proceed?”

A small wooden sign appeared between them: “We can. By the way, are you able to leave a small hole in the barrier?”

“A hole?” Cherise’s brow furrowed. “Putting aside the fact that that defeats the purpose of having a barrier in the first place, it’s not a spell I came up with; I can’t just modify it on the spot.”

“I can. If you lend me some mana, I’ll do it myself.”

Cherise pursed her lips. According to guild regulations, she was supposed to make the protective barrier personally, to ensure nothing went wrong. But the dungeon was asking for a modification that she couldn’t provide, and she couldn’t just learn a new modified spell on the spot even if she asked the dungeon to share his method.

With a sigh, the junior guild inspector (promotion still pending) started gathering up a ball of pure mana. “I guess you used up everything you had to make this new floor. Fine, but if you’re going to make your barriers personally, you’ll have to sign that liability waiver I mentioned last time. Luckily, I brought one along this time, just in case.”

“I understand.”

Cherise released the sizable black mana orb she’d gathered and watched it disappear. After another moment passed, she watched a transparent, glass-like film form a bubble around the dungeon core. At the bottom of the barrier was a hole about wide enough for Cherise to stick her head in, horns and all; wide enough for the core itself to slip out if he wanted to.

While wondering how the dungeon was planning on protecting his core like that, Cherise watched him raise a cylindrical pillar out of the floor, plugging the hole in the barrier with it. It looked like a pedestal for the core.

She blinked. “I see. You can use the dungeon itself to block the hole.”

She thought it was a clever solution to a problem that she still found wholly avoidable at the end of the day.

“But where did you learn that spell, anyway?”

“What a question. You showed it to me yourself, don’t you remember?”

Cherise’s brow creased. “You’re telling me you analyzed a spell—that I didn’t even finish casting—to the point where you could replicate it?” She shook her head. “Tell me that’s a joke.”

“Don’t your people research dungeons?” the core wrote shamelessly. “You don’t even know what we’re capable of?”

The junior inspector folded her arms, “I’m not a dungeon researcher, personally, but I was taught a fair amount in order to do my job. I’ve never heard of a dungeon copying our spells before.”

After a moment’s pause, the ink on the sign changed again. “It’s just a slightly more advanced application of mind reading,” it read.

“So you say,” Cherise raised a brow, “but I haven’t heard of a dungeon reading minds before. Assuming you’re not just teasing me, that’ll be yet another unique trait I’ll have to report to the guild.”

The letters on the sign didn’t change after a while, so the demon sighed. “Can I have the updated layout designs?”

A stack of documents appeared at her feet, which she picked up. She then pulled the liability waiver out of her bag just to see it was already signed.

Nodding curtly, she glanced at the dungeon core. “As long as nothing big happens, we shouldn’t need to see each other again. Try to stay out of trouble.”

A Man-Eating Bat hanging on the ceiling, that Cherise hadn’t noticed before, opened its mouth, chirping a brief but headache-inducing cry. The demon pressed her hands over her ears and glared at the monster.

“Then do your job and keep trouble away from here,” the monster spat.

Cherise pursed her lips, biting back a reply. She hadn’t meant to imply anything with her words, but it seemed she’d struck a nerve.

“I misspoke,” she sighed. “I meant to say: be well.”

The wooden sign was still unchanged, but the bat monster seemed pacified, and the wooden puppet had returned to guide her out.

***

Archimedes confirmed that the guild inspector, who he had bad chemistry with, left his sphere of influence, and he pondered to himself.

I don’t believe I’m special or unique. As long as there are other intelligent dungeons in this world, they’d have all the tools they need to analyze the minds of outsiders.

He suspected either that those dungeons were collectively keeping their insight a secret—which he admitted had its benefits—or the people who researched dungeons were keeping that knowledge from the public. Perhaps they thought it would be upsetting to know. Lilith certainly couldn’t stand it when she arrived, and it still sometimes got on her nerves now.

Then again, it was also possible that the other dungeons were abstaining from using that power, perhaps in an attempt to better preserve their egos, but they surely wouldn’t all make that same decision.

Archimedes put ‘the differences between Rachon and Usain dungeons’ down on his list of things to ask Vow. She had spoken up fairly recently, however, so he decided to hold off for now and let her rest.

More importantly, he had work to do on his third floor.

The first thing he did was officially accept the Trick Spider as his free monster model. Next he created one to see what they were like. It was an eight-legged creature about the size of a guinea pig: smaller than he was expecting. It was covered in orange fur, with faint, reddish stripes. Two large front-facing eyes and a beak-like mandible dominated its face, and a series of six smaller eyes dotted its head. Its body was short and stout, equipped to climb walls, spin threads, and wield magic.

Archimedes could tell immediately that it was intelligent, though it didn’t have the ability to speak. Its mental structure was childish and leaned heavily toward being a prankster.

Yet another creature with an ego. Willing to change though he may now be, Archimedes would still need to pace himself with these, adjusting to each one as it came and recentering himself.

Since his new monster was intelligent and self-aware, it needed a name. He was tempted to name it Calipso, in honor of his once-happy fellow dungeon, but this specimen was male.

Let’s see… were there any captured “male” dungeon cores I met and liked in my last life? … Ah, there was one.

He’d made his environment a hellscape of lava, such that even monsters couldn’t live there, bar a few. But ultimately he had been captured by priests of the sun and fire gods. He was optimistic, even in his captured state, and Archimedes had hoped to keep him around for company after killing the sun priest that wielded him, but that group had panicked and fled for their lives, managing to escape.

This monster’s bright fur did slightly resemble that dungeon’s fiery orange core.

“Your name is Helios.”

The little arachnid twisted his body to look left, then right, then straight at the core. Archimedes felt him sifting through his memories, trying to get a grasp on his situation.

Finally, the little creature tilted his head. “Daddy?”

Archimedes froze. If he were a human, he would be sweating. Did he do it again? Like with Thesia, did he subconsciously make a monster identify itself as his child?

“Sorry,” he sighed. “I’m not your father, I just made you. I am a dungeon, and you are a monster. You know what you’re supposed to do, right?”

The little creature bobbed his head. “Protect daddy. Trick people. Play and have fun.”

Archimedes contemplated digging a deep hole and burying himself in it.

“I’m going to be doing construction on this floor,” he squeezed out through his mental anguish. “Go upstairs and meet the others.”

“Okay.”

The little arachnid climbed and hopped up the stairs. Archimedes heard a surprised shout from Merina a few beats later:

“It’s cute?!”

Helios was quickly making friends, from what he saw. Archimedes took a deep breath and pointed his attention at Zemnes, hanging from the ceiling, then at Minute, who was making his way down to the third floor at the dungeon’s call.

“I’d like to get some work done now. What ideas do we have for a library floor’s design and puzzles?”