[Item Making] automatically acquired.

Inner Voice intruded on the sweet bonding moment between my kobold and myself, shoving my much-needed ego boost to the side to announce I had somehow gained a new skill. My goal all along had been to cheat things and get myself a new skill, of course, but this wasn’t the one that I had been expecting.

As always, Inner Voice was loud enough that I was forced to pay attention to it, and then instantly left questioning what it had said and how I had managed to gain that skill. Was it because my kobold had built the door inside the dungeon walls? Why hadn’t I gained [Door Building] if that were the case? It was a door that had been built, right? Was it just because it wasn’t placed into the hole yet? That had to be it, right?

“Well… I just gained a skill. It wasn’t [Door Building] like I had hoped it would be, it was [Item Making] instead but… Maybe the door has to function as a door first before it counts?”

My monster looked at the door in her hands, frowning at it as she tilted her head first to one side and then to the other, the tip of her tongue poking out the way it did when she was concentrating extra hard. “That… Could be the being it? Even if it is not being the door it could still be the working to be the blocking badgers?” Somehow she managed to sound even more uncertain than I did, shrugging her narrow little shoulders with a soft noise as she looked past the door to the ceiling.

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that, so instead I repeated the noise that she had made when she shrugged her shoulders. It seemed to be a noise that meant “I don’t know” the same way Mama Badger’s snorts when she was annoyed seemed to mean “I’m upset”. That appeared to be a good enough response for my monster because she stood up carefully, still holding onto the makeshift door, and made her way up to the hole that connected the two tunnels.

It was interesting to learn that I could communicate with just grunts and noises that apparently had a secret meaning to them, though wasn’t that what all words were? Just a bunch of sounds that had a meaning assigned to them? I quickly shook off that thought. The last thing I wanted was to fall down a hole of puzzling out how I, a being who couldn’t make sounds, seemed to understand what words and language were. It was better to just focus on the moment and pretend I had never had that thought in the first place.

That didn’t stop me from feeling briefly as if the world were unraveling, but I just ignored that and carried on.

My creature moved to place the door into the opening, but it didn’t quite fit. Not because it was too small, but instead because it was too big. The door was square, and made so that it would cover the entirety of the soon-to-be doorway, but of course when I had built that doorway I had made it round. My monster made a frustrated growl in the back of her throat and grumbled to herself, “I should have been the seeing this coming.” I projected a soft sigh at her, trying to sound reassuring.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”

There was nothing to fit the door into due to its shape, the corners keeping it from sliding into the passage, so the obvious solution was to use my tendrils to carefully shave off the edges of the hole. I proceeded to do so, slowly changing the shape into that of the door, making the passage square rather than round.

While it might have been easier, quicker, and more cost-efficient to use [Tunneling], I instead did it manually, that way I could make sure I got the shape right. Sure, it used up a bit more of my MP than [Tunneling] did, but the skill worked in a way that just wasn’t suited to more delicate work. Whenever I used [Tunneling] it wanted to work until I had eaten a certain amount of material, and there just wasn’t that much dirt in the doorway. I didn’t want to find out the hard way that I might be forced to keep on eating until [Tunneling] decided it was finished.

Once the hole was the exact right size for the door, my kobold pushed it into the space, completely blocking the tunnel that led to the badgers from the one that led to my core. We had finally done it.

[Wall Building] automatically acquired.

“We did it!” my kobold cheered, her voice lost underneath my confusion at the sound of Inner Voice announcing yet another skill that wasn’t the one that I had been expecting. At least it worked though, right? I couldn’t see what I would need to build wooden walls for, but if it would help keep the badgers out then I was happy enough.

Error. The Dungeon Core needs an unblocked path from the entrance to the core.

My tendrils snapped out on their own without my wanting them to, grabbing the door and jerking it out of the hole, where it clattered to the ground at my kobold’s feet. I hadn’t even known that I was able to do something like that. I had never been able to touch objects before. I reached out with my tendrils to touch the door again, only to find that they passed right through it the same way they did with anything that wasn’t dirt.

While I was busy trying to figure out what had just happened to me, my monster was staring down at the fallen door, clear confusion written all over her face. After a moment she looked up to the ceiling, head tilted and one hear lifted as if listening extra hard. “My Core? Was there something the wrong with the door?” she asked.

“Yeah… Apparently, it was a wall and not a door, and Inner Voice didn’t like that… It made me pull the door out…”

“Oh. I am the seeing… The door was not being the able to swivel, so it was not the door it was the wall.” She continued to frown at the object in question, squinting at it as if it could reveal to her some secret knowledge on how to turn it into the thing it had been created to be. After a moment of silence, my kobold picked the door back up, jamming just one side of it into the hole. “Make the rest of the doorway the bigger, yes? It should be the swinging then.”

I agreed with her plan and began to carefully trim off more of the passage so that it wouldn’t hold the door tight all around the edges. Once that was completed my kobold pushed the door back into the hole, managing somehow to swing it into place so that it closed.

[Door Building] automatically acquired.

Finally! I did it! It took way more mana than I had hoped, but I finally made it work! The two of us working together had finally made it work! The door was finally in place!

My monster was quiet for a moment as she waited to see if there would be another reaction from me, and when the door wasn’t jerked out of the wall and thrown onto the ground again she decided to let out a happy little cheer. “It worked! This time!” She clapped her hands together, her tail swishing from side to side in happiness, her body wiggling with barely contained glee.

Don’t get me wrong, I was happy that we had succeeded in our goal, but now that the door was in place and I was really looking at it? I felt like it just wasn’t good enough. If my kobold could push the door open easily, then couldn’t the badgers do the same? It wasn’t really blocking anything from them if they could just lean against it by mistake and open it. Maybe if I used [Door Building] on the door it would make it into something more solid?

I focused on the door itself, thinking of my new skill and trying to imagine it activating. I wasn’t sure what exactly would happen, of course, but I tried all the same. The absolute worst that could happen would be that I pulled the old door out of the way before building a new one in its place, right?

My tendrils moved on their own to wrap around the door, almost the same way they had done before they had jerked the object out of place, and then they seemed to seep into the dirt around it. I felt something shift and move beneath my grasp, and then in the next moment the door became something much more solid.

It happened instantly, without any sign that anything had changed. One moment it was the branch and vine door that my kobold had built with her own hands, and the next it looked like something completely different created by a master. Instead of branches and bark, it seemed to be made of flat sheets of wood. The vines were completely gone and replaced with long lines of even more wood, little bits of something shiny and silver driven into the door, holding the long planks to these pieces. Yet even more wood lined the door on all sides of the hole, closing the small gap that had previously existed so that everything was flush and secure looking. In addition to all of that, there were now small squares of extra wood on the door itself, across from each other on one side of the door.

My kobold made a soft noise of amazement as she reached out, giving the little square piece of wood a twist before she pulled the door open. She pushed it closed next, a quiet click ringing out, and then she gave it a push as if to see if it could be forced open. The door didn’t so much as budge an inch, which caused a wide grin to spread across her face.

“That is being the perfect, Core! This will be the keeping them out for sure!” she cheered, squeaky voice full of bubbling glee as she turned to look up at the ceiling.

I felt relief flood through me at having that potential disaster finally averted. Finally, I could really relax. I didn’t need to worry about the badgers getting in and potentially attacking or killing my monster, or getting run off by said monster if they decided she was scarier.

There was really only one thing left to do, and that was to honour the promise that I had made to my kobold. I still wasn’t sure how giving her a name would keep her safe from dying, but if it could do anything to aid her then I wanted to take that chance. She was far too helpful of a minion to just replace her.

“I guess it’s time for us to give each other names then, huh?”

My monster’s tail seemed to wag even faster than before, causing her to practically wiggle in place as she held her clawed hands against her chest. “Yes! I was the thinking very hard, and I have the perfect name!” She sounded so enthusiastic and sure of herself that I couldn’t help but find myself getting excited as well. Finally, I would have a name! “It is Core! Core is Core!”

“Core. Like… Dungeon Core. Like what I am.”

She must have heard the disbelief sneak into my projected tone because she waved her hands as if to fend me off. “No no no. K-O-R. Kor. That is the name. It is being the kind of name that a kobold would be the having, which is the fitting for Kor, since Kor is being the smart as the kobold is being,” she said, squeaky voice a little nervous. I must have sounded more annoyed than I thought given how eager to cheer me up she seemed.

I felt a bit flattered to hear that she thought I was smart, and so I couldn’t help but decide that I liked the name. Even if it sounded a bit too similar to what I was, she had apparently put some thought into it, and that made me happy. I only wished that I’d had a bit more time to think about her own name, but it was the first thing that I had thought of, and it seemed to be the most fitting to me.

“Kor… I’m Kor… I like it. If I’m Kor then… I guess you’ll be Cobble.”

My kobold, Cobble, tilted her head as she squinted at the ceiling. She didn’t look as happy about her new name as I had hoped she would be. “Cobble… Isn’t that the sounding too much like the kobold? Isn’t Kor just giving me the name kobold?” she asked, her tone suspicious.

Like she was any different! She gave me the same name as what I was too, basically! I would have told her as much if it weren’t for the fact that the world quickly became black. Before I knew it I was passing out.