The crash was, in a word, brutal. Faceplanting into solid ground at several hundred miles per hour would have been bad enough on its own, but it was even worse when the impact had the momentum of nearly a quarter million tons of steel behind it. Of my pre-existing Titan chassis, everything from the middle of the torso up was completely obliterated, the legs snapped off what little remained of my torso and tumbled off into the distance, and all my currently running reactors were knocked out of commission instantly, along with almost all of my minions. It was sheer dumb luck that I had my core in the most intact section of my chassis (namely the lower torso, directly above the waist joint), and even then, the piece of hull I was in would be best described as wreckage.

It was, in a way, a lot like being reduced to a starting dungeon all over again. Still, now I had significantly more to work with in terms of blueprints, meaning that I would only need to wait on the power output being available to re-build, and this time I would be doing things right. My stored mana reserves were almost entirely gone at this point, except for the small stash of beads I still had to work with. However, Mark 2 Proton Piles were still really cheap in the grand scheme of things, and that meant that my remaining 20 loose mana was plenty to work with to conjure one up.

With that first reactor, re-building started in earnest. The first time I got myself mobile, it had taken a bit more than half a week to do the job. This time, I would be taking a bit of extra time to equip myself with proper weapons and get decently good at using them before I needed to use them. Yes, this was a major setback, but I'd built myself up to a Titan once before, and I could do it again. This time, I budgeted about two weeks to get myself going; yes this risked the dragon coming to finish me off, but it had already been demonstrated that doing a rush job with getting myself built wouldn't help me all that much.

Given that I would want to be making several new pieces of hardware to mount to my Version 2 chassis, I figured that it made sense to conjure up some Gremlins to work on projects for me. I spent the mana to conjure up a Basic Gremlin... only to be let down almost immediately, as I felt the life being sucked right out of my minion in a way that reminded me quite distinctly of that crazy woman with the sword. Just to quickly check if my other minions would be affected, I also called up a Mutant and a Basic Clockwork; the Mutant died quickly, but my mechanical minion was fine.

I decided two things then and there. First, as long as I was here I would be sticking entirely to mechanical minions, so that I wouldn't be feeding whatever asshole was draining life even more power. Second, I would be killing them before I departed; I had a pretty good idea now why this region was completely devoid of life, and whatever being thought this was a good way to gain power deserved a nuclear piledriver to the everywhere.

With my next goal set, I began well and truly building my new Titan chassis.

It had been a week since Seth had received the strange self-propelled carriage-house from that bizarre metal dungeon. In that time, he and his family had managed to cover a distance that Seth had previously considered beyond the reach of any human to travel in such a short time. Very quickly, he and his family had decided that the course of action least likely to see them snatched by the Drake Guard and subjected to a horrible death would be to keep their conveyance out of sight of any significant towns, and disguise it as a relatively normal house once they had gotten a few counties away from their starting point.

This process had taken significantly less time than Seth had ever anticipated, and he was about to take his sheep out for their first grazing in this new location, when suddenly a white wall panel Seth had thought was decorative until now lit up with projected light, showing a simple drawing of a face. A mechanical voice then spoke, saying "Hello Seth, sorry for not calling you sooner, but I was a bit preoccupied with rebuilding myself. Anyway, I'm just calling to let you know that I am both in acceptable physical condition, and that I am no longer in the location where we first met."

As Dungeons were typically immobile, Seth couldn't help but ask "You moved? How?"

With that, the face on the screen was quickly replaced with an extremely detailed engineering diagram showing a humanoid figure with what looked to be a very much compacted Dungeon inside of it. The Dungeon elaborated "Ever since I first became a Dungeon, it has been my goal to achieve independent mobility. I did this by basically building a vastly up-scaled version of my clockwork minions, with my Dungeon interior inside. Anyway, I managed to get ready to move about the same time that gigantic dragon showed up, and I wound up crashing in a place which you shouldn't visit in the near future if you value your life."

Seth nodded along, before saying "We've moved too; I'm actually amazed at how fast this carriage you gave us is." Seth wasn't quite sure what nagging bit of curiosity caused him to ask "Curiously, why shouldn't I come visit? I mean, unless you landed in the Dead Wastes, a visit shouldn't be life-threatening in and of itself." but ask he did.

The projected face returned to the screen, and the Dungeon replied "If by the Dead Wastes you mean a broken landscape where anything living is sucked dry of life almost instantly, then yes, that's exactly where I landed. You wouldn't happen to have any idea what caused this, would you?"

This is when Djain decided to speak up, saying "I wasn't there, but I remember the stories my grand-dad told from when it happened. He said that when the Dead Wastes first formed, people in the towns in the middle of the place knew something was wrong and ran for it. He said that he saw a massive walking thing made from bones and gore from the back of the carriage, sucking the land around it dry of life."

There was a brief moment of silence, before the Dungeon replied "Thank you for that piece of information, and I think I figured out what happened now. One of the biggest issues I had towards getting myself mobile was the absolutely staggering amount of mana required. I managed to get it by making machinery that could generate Mana, but other methods are theoretically possible, including the consumption of life force."

Pieces of the puzzle clicked together in Seth's and Djain's minds, and they replied, as one "You mean that the Dead Wastes might be the fault of a Dungeon who wanted to get up and go somewhere else?"