Uno

Everything was ready. My network of wires curled just under the surface, more and more strands of metal pushing the soft soil back, like a plant eager to grow and blossom. My Ratling helper was standing nearby, breathing heavily after all that hauling. The artificial eye wasn’t that big, but dragging it through the tunnels was awkward at best. Not an easy job for anyone, rats included.

Ignoring the wheezing presence I began my work in earnest, merging the singular wires into a lattice capable of keeping the camera upright. The stalk thickened, copper growing rigid - within reason of course. I wasn’t able to energize it as I did with the iron, nor was there a need to do so.

Then I tried to connect the eye-camera to the metal, delicate wires sliding in and out of the near-biological construct. I got it right only after a few tries, a sudden influx of information heralding my success. It was a bit wobbly, like a scoop of ice cream perched in a cone, but I could see well enough.

And so an eye-flower was born.

Now to only seed it all over the world...

Just kidding.

I laughed briefly and stopped wasting time on idle thoughts.

Instead, my focus turned towards pushing the stalk through the brown soil, slowly moving closer to the surface. The ground gave away easily until inevitably I bumped into a rock. This forced me to change the direction of my ascent, and since a straight way up wasn’t viable anymore I tried to change it to about 45-degree angle instead. The force I exerted rose time and time again until I felt the roots appear all around, a clear sign that I was closing in on my goal.

A few seconds later and my efforts were rewarded with a beautiful sight - a beam of light that cut through the darkness. It was a different sight than I was used to. Both the color and its intensity were much warmer and seemed in a way more natural when compared to the cold lighting I was using underground.

This pretty much screamed to me life, life, there’s life here! That’s why I was surprised when the eye-camera opened completely and I was greeted by the similar plants to the ones that were growing all over my own dungeon. Weird...

Wait…

Taking a closer look... they weren’t simply similar. More like identical! How did they even get up here? I remember Ratlings describing a grove of trees present aboveground, but hearing about it and seeing it directly were two different things. Mostly because I imagined them to be of a “normal” variety, not the silvery types that I made.

To make matters worse I was still trying to get used to the change in perspective. It was weird. I was not used to being so close to the ground, every common sight gigantified. This made recognizing faces and guessing how big the buildings were rather hard.

Now that I think about it… I could force the wire to crawl along the ground and climb a tree in order to get a better look since not many people had a tendency to check what’s above them… there were risks too, like a higher chance of discovery, but still…

After a few seconds of consideration, I decided to give it a try. What did I have to lose?

The coppery wires would look a little out of place on the tree bark, even silver one, but that was something I could deal with. A few swishes and swashes and a group of Ratlings took care of the metal, covering it with crushed soil.

The wire was still shining through, but oh well… nobody’s perfect.

At least the clusters of the copper grass growing nearby made it's metal counterpart easily camouflaged. Now that I took a closer look it seemed like patches of my creations were intermingled with sparse green flora. It peeked from behind knife-bushes and somehow just… fit. However if one considered this place a battlefield it was clear that my own creations were winning. It was a bit weird, as I don’t remember making them that competitive.

Whatever. Not my problem.

The crawl had ended and I was happily twisted around one of the bigger branches of the silver Ironbark. Now I only had to hope that nobody discovers the creepy little eyeball hanging from a tree, like some kind of an abominable fruit.

I turned attention to my surroundings. The eye-camera ended up on the edge of silvery growth - about ten or so meters behind it the lush, silvery-green forest suddenly devolved into a bleak wasteland with a few sparse bushes and grasses barely clinging to life. It was monstrous sight, but also strangely poetic, like the work of a mad painter, splattering shards of life amongst the overwhelming canvas of death.

The wastelands were unchanging and monotonous, cut only with a small stream slowly trudging from the west to the east, moisturizing the dungeon oasis and then disappearing underground.

For a moment I considered how big was a chance to just have a water source present in the place where my dungeon was founded. I was suspicious. Considering its rarity in the surroundings…

And then it struck me. I scoffed, seeing a gap in my reasoning.

It was the other way around.

This place was once a town. A castle was built with soldiers, artisans, crafters, and mages. With people. And people need food, water, and shelter to survive, so it was a logical conclusion that the location in which they prospered was bound to have access to all three.

With time said shelter had already turned into ruins.

The food sources, both plants, and animals neared extinction, devoured by the unforgiving wastelands.

But water… water was eternal.

Unlike something really catastrophic happened the river won’t disappear.

This line of thought, however, made me worried about my Ratlings.

I had an army outside. Strong, loyal and I couldn't use it. Because it was starving.

It seemed that while they stayed in the dungeon their needs were taken care of. If I had to guess by the mana ever-present inside. This wasn’t, however, the case as soon as they left my premises.

Because of that most of my rats had to scavenge, searching for berries, hunting small animals and even fishing. All while trying to not get caught by the sentients.

It was unsustainable in the long run too.

This place was barren in normal circumstances.

Adding Ratlings, their beasts, and sentients? Recipe for a disaster.

It was high time to make some kind of nutritious plant capable of sustaining life, but doing so would mostly help the humans camping above my entrance. Which I was unwilling to do. It was also hard to think about countermeasures. The most that I had planned was to make two types of food, something like a potato and maybe a tomato (one to plant in the dirt and one to grow above ground) which would be poisonous when eaten separately.

I had a few problems with this solution.

First, my Ratlings didn’t cook their food. Remediable.

Second, new plants were bound to gather attention. Anything that the dungeon make was studied by the sentients, so it was only a question of time until they noticed their purpose. And the correlation between both fruits. Or were they classified as vegetables?

Whatever.

It was the third problem that I felt was the worst. My knowledge of poisons was superficial at best, which meant that my Anima had to be used in filling the gaps. And that was dangerous for my sanity.

Which moved the whole idea into the folder labeled “to-do when completed the third floor”.

I switched gears again, feeling at ease after all this brainstorming.

Was it still brainstorming when I was talking to myself?

Who knows.

New figures appeared in my sights.

Humans.

Lots, and lots of humans.

They were moving, swarming around, always busy and always loud.

Like ants.

I observed their skittering for a few long minutes, trying to get a feel, a sense for all this chaos.

It was hard.

It was hard to focus my attention since I felt an itch each time a worker underground shaved another piece of rock connected to the dungeon. My subconsciousness was screaming at me to move my mana in an empty space and claim it.

And again.

And again.

Maddening.

What however grabbed my attention was the fact that the people aboveground were also digging. Unlike their counterparts, however, they stopped as soon as they hit the rock. Which meant the upper part of my dungeon in this case.

After doing that they moved to the next part of the moat.

It was a moat, right? A long, winding hole built just before palisade.

Did I mention they had a palisade now?

It was incomplete yet, but nonetheless being quickly built. The parts that were already made did look a bit shabby though. If I had to guess they didn’t have anyone smart enough to make it sturdier? But then again I too wasn’t an architect.

As I stared at the place trees were being cut down and stacked, only to be turned into roughly similar planks or barely processed poles. These, in turn, were moved as a part of the defensive line or to make various buildings. What was their purpose? No idea. The tempo of their work was impressive - both men and women sweated, cursed and screamed while giving their all in the process.

It was clear to me that there was only one reason for humans to manifest such unity.

Fear.

They were preparing for war.

I grinned.

Getting to the surface suddenly was a bit higher on a list of my priorities. All this energy to gather and use it to grow. War was a profitable business. All more when you’re a dungeon core.

I focused once again on the scene.

It was clear that the village above my head contained a large number of military forces. In my head, I divided them into two types - soldiers and warriors.

What was the difference?

Soldiers were clearly a part of the military unit since they working together well and were wearing matching uniforms. Their presence seemed welcome amongst the masses.

The warriors were different, most of them carrying a unique or simply weird weapon, with small parties of three to nine people wandering around. They looked just like adventurers from video games.

It was easy to understand that they were trying to avoid work, doing only as little as possible. This didn’t make them any friends amongst the workers and the tensions naturally rose.

I anticipated they would be butting heads soon, but surprisingly it didn’t happen. People simply focused on their work, choosing to ignore the idlers.

It was strange.

Unnatural.

The human race I knew was much more belligerent than that.

Should I risk sprouting another stalk a bit closer to the main camp? Was that worth it? It would probably get noticed right away and the reaction…

The reaction would surely be bad.

While in a contemplative mood I didn’t notice a danger coming right at me.

Around the chaos of work younger and older children buzzed like flies, busy with doing laundry, cleaning, cooking, scavenging for food - searching for the rare plants that somehow withstood the pressure of my metallic flora or hunting down small, scurry animals similar to rabbits. And sometimes even taking on my rats.

Yup.

The children.

Most of their faces and hands were dirty and bruised. They seemed like they were used to scavenging all kinds of bits and bobs amongst my murderous plants.

What they weren’t used to were eyeballs growing from orange stalks.

Staring at them.

The specimen that found me was a girl maybe ten years old, with two small braids on the sides of her head. She was brown-haired and brown-eyed, like most residents of this world seemed to be. She also wore a pretty cute, but visibly weathered white dress and wooden clogs on her legs.

My mistake was twisting around a branch of the tree that used sharp, falling leaves as weapons.

Of course, people wandering under them would look up.

Her already big eyes grew even larger after noticing my demonic-looking camera and after a moment which felt like eternity… she screamed.

“Kyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” A very girlish voice echoed through the encampment, eliciting an immediate response.

The men ran towards the source of the noise while preparing their weapons.

It was useless though.

Not that I was a threat.

But...

A goblin-like thing hiding nearby sure was.

It was a small, greenish creature that shrieked in response, rising up from the nearby cluster of knife-bushes and lunging towards the child.

How did it even get here?

Why did it leave the safety of the hiding place?

And why the hell did it have three arms?!

All these questions were thrown to the back of my head as I saw the monsters attack the child with its claw. The girl couldn’t dodge and a long, serrated wound appeared on her chest. The force of the blow threw her back, screaming. She landed on the ground and started to bleed while thrashing around as the goblin closed in to finish the job.

Its advance was however stopped by one of the soldiers, brandishing the spear and a shield combo with an ease of a trained warrior.

“Protect the girl!” He shouted to his companions. The one in the back quickly nodded, immediately taking bandages out of his back and immobilizing the still screaming victim.

“Let’s murder this thing!” A large brute was one of the people answering the call for action, a monstrously large sword dragged behind him.

“You stay back, vagrant. The Royal Army will take care of it!”

“So be it.” The giant laughed back and continued to speak in a taunting way. “You’ll change your tune when the bulk of the horde arrives.”

The goblin tried to flee, using their quarrel as a distraction, but it was promptly cut off by another soldier.

I had a moment to fully appreciate the beast for what it was.

It seemed mutated in some way, with twisted features, toothy mouth, and claws gleaming on the tips of its fingers. And on a third, rather useless, arm. It was nothing more than a stump, not the powerful appendages I was used to seeing on Mortal Kombat Goro. The goblin was not much bigger than a child, maybe one hundred twenty centimeters in height and yet with constant hunched posture it looked much smaller. A few pieces of rags covered its nether regions while leaving the rest of the body bare. There were numerous scars on its skin. And bite marks. Lastly - it stank. Not that I had a sense of smell, but the reactions of the surrounding soldiers were telling enough.

One of them thrust his spear forward without a warning, but the little bugger dodged downwards while screeching. A taunt followed, only to be cut short by another stab from its blind spot. The weapon pierced the goblin’s chest and its eyes instantly were filled with pain.

Another merciless stab followed, pinning the monster to the ground.

And then it died.

Overall pretty good.

They reacted quickly, culling the enemy before it had a chance to retaliate.

Everybody was happy with this.

That was when not counting the child’s body, currently being cradled by her mother.

She was repeating words “wake up, please wake up” without end.

Yes.

The attack of the monster was too deep. Too fast for anyone, but me to react.

So the little girl didn’t survive.

People around them stood rigidly, glancing at each other’s awkwardly, not knowing what to do. The adventurers only scoffed at the crowd reactions and turned to leave.

All these wandering eyes... It only took a few moments for somebody to notice my eye-camera.

“What the fuck is that thing?!” Screamed a nearby worker.

“Demons!”

“Save us!” The panic quickly grew.

“Belle’s tits!”

“It’s the Corruption!” Shouted a white-robed man standing in the back. “Soldiers, destroy it immediately! We can’t let it spread!” He ordered.

“We need to bring new samples to master Vincent first, padre.” Answered one of them, while the rest shifted uneasily.

“It’s a spawn of the wastelands, one of the servants of the Corruption. In the name of the Guardian Gods, I order you to destroy it!” The man huffed, pointing directly at my camera.

I made it blink.

His reaction was hilarious.

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” He shouted while clawing at his eyes. “It cursed me! IT CURSED ME! Destroy it! DESTROY!” He screamed while I cackled in amusement.

And then the line was cut short.

I guess one of the soldiers heeded his call.

Too bad.

My focus returned to the dungeon. And to the constant banging of the miners and the constant discomfort. It reminded me how my neighbor was always renovating his flat.

That was why I accepted Guardian’s reappearance with a sigh of relief. It was something that I could use to busy myself.

It was at this moment that I noticed with disappointment that Tinna died.

She succumbed to her injuries and grey-ification in the time I was checking out the surface. In silence and alone. Her body was already cold. Then again, maybe it always was since she contracted that grey... thing. The thief’s still open eyes were staring into nothingness.

[I should probably close them, eh? Sanctity of the dead and all.] I mumbled to myself.

[Yeah, right. Get in my belly!] Changing my decision immediately I screamed and waited for her to dematerialize. The sapient races were only good as a meal for my dungeon. It won’t push me through the threshold, but you know… every bit counts.

That’s why I was surprised when nothing happened.

Hours passed as I stared at her body, and she still just was lying there, unmoving. I was beginning to grow bored, but then I noticed something weird.

Her eyes had turned black.

Like black-black, without any pupils not just the color.

And then she sat up, her only arm clutching the bed frame and lifting her whole body. A feat of strength she was unable to accomplish earlier. Then a groan-like voice emerged from her mouth.

“I… won’t… forgive…” She spoke, mincing every word.

I quickly used my Analyze, trying to understand what she turned into… because that? That thing was clearly no longer a human.

Revenant (damaged)

named Tinna

A type of an accursed undead whose sole purpose is to haunt the living and exact her revenge. This being looks just like a human at a first glance, however, deeper inspection reveals completely black eyes, grey complexion and, most importantly, the unmistakable stench of death that permeates the surroundings.

Revenants are masters of death, but that affinity manifests itself in many forms. This undead uses her newfound power to hide and ambush her foes. She stalks the darkness and uses two corroded daggers to kill and maim the targets. Her small frame may be mistaken for a child, making her easily capable of hiding in plain sight. The target of her revenge is an entirety of Geinard Kingdom and she will do whatever possible to see it burn.

Threat level: D--

Gangria, you crazy bitch... what have you done?