I’m looking at half of the former slaves women are gathered in what is starting to be known as the Maze Square, in front of my maze’s entrance. They are discussing the third of my Laws, the one about the abortion’s interdiction. In truth, only a few of them are really talking and the others are mostly listening. The few men who come to listen in on them are looked with such silent and heavy looks that they quit the place in a minute or two for the most tenacious.

“Yes Melinda, we get it, you’ll take care of the children of any woman who doesn’t want to keep hers. But you can’t force us to carry them if we don’t want.” States Felicia, a blond woman standing with dignity in the center of the crowd. She’s the head of the group of women that go in my maze with a sole man.

“Would you kill those poor children without even a chance at life? You are monsters.” Argues Clara, another blond woman. She’s very tall, measuring 1.86 meters she’s the tallest of all the women on the island and taller than most men. She’s also slimmer than the majority of the other women and has a big and ugly scar on her left cheek, I understood she got it by an angry pirate when she laughed at his small dick.

“It is we who decide what we do with our bodies. Not you, and even less that fucking dungeon.” Answers one of Felicia teammates.

“I don’t say you can’t decide for yourselves.” Says Melinda with a calm voice. “I’m just saying that if you don’t want to kill the children neither to have them I will take care of them. I understand you don’t want to raise a child born from a rape with a pirate as a father.”

“You’re lucky, your belly’s big enough to be sure you were pregnant before being captured, you must know the child’s father.” Says Felicia.

“Yes, it’s my dead husband’s child. He died trying to defend me and my two sons from the pirates. I know what it’s like to have children and to lose them, and despite the pain I feel every day, I know that the joy this child will bring me will surpass it.”

“What I would like to add.” Intervenes a fifth woman. This one is not Human, she has pale skin and blue hair and is very small, she’s the smallest of the three Gnomes in my Dungeon being only one meter tall. Her face is really cute but she has a strange light in her eyes, making her face a bit scary. “It’s that you don’t have an easy way to proceed. You want to abort? It’s fine by me, I don’t care. But how will you do that? I highly doubt the Dungeon will give you some plants to make a decoction and have an easy sleep on it. No, if you truly want to do it, then you’ll have to put a stick between your legs or hit your belly with enough strength. Those are dangerous methods who can fail. But if you're brave enough to do it, come to me, I’ll be happy to help you. First I’ll put the stick between your legs, then I’ll make it move up and up until I reached the end of the womb, after that I’ll make it move in all the direction, making sure to kill the child, but I could ravage your insides by doing so, and you could become sterile or bleed to death. The other method is less risky for you, but they are fewer chances of success, and if your body doesn’t expulse the dead child on its own, it could start to rot inside. You need a decoction to do it safely. And remember that you only have a week to do so, after that the Dungeon will take this as an infraction against its Laws.” Her name is Helgyra, and she says all that with a maniac grin on her face, widening it at the end of her statement.

The other women look at her with varied shocked expressions.

“Now let me pass, I need to eat if I want my child to grow strong.” The little Gnome says. The other women hurry out of her path and after an awkward moment of silence, the discussion resumes. But it is not the same with Helgyra’s explanations of the processes in her minds. Those gross process could be the best arguments for my case, as I will obviously not provide them with the plants to make their decoctions.

I keep an hear on the discussion but change my focus point. There is another thing I want to do.

I find Franziska in her house, the Dwarf woman is not attending the women meeting. She’s meditating, trying to attune her mana to mine. I can see she’s really better at this than Grundy.

From her position and the way she’s controlling the flow of mana in her body, I think she already has some training in meditation. Anyway, I start to gather more mana around her head, like I did with Grundy in the safe room. With a start she opens her eyes and takes a look around.

“Dungeon, is that you?” She whispers.

Yes, it’s me.

Keep meditating like that, I will help you.

Take my mana in you, breath it by your nose, make it flow in all of your body and mix it with your own. Try to attune your mana to mine and then gather my mana in your hara.

Ones you have gathered enough of my mana in your hara make it flow once more in your body and expulse it by your mouth.

Repeat until it’s done, you’ll know it at the moment.

I write on the wall in front of her and resume on focusing a small bubble of my purest mana over her head, slowly but surely infusing it in her respiratory tracts and in her body. I see her mana bubble slowly reducing itself as she’s absorbing mine bit by bit.

---

She feels a bit awkward doing that.

It’s been a long time since she last meditated. She used to do that with her father.

Her father…

He had been banished from his clan because of his ideas. He had ideas about how to produce new kinds of alloy, using methods of infusing the blacksmith own mana in the process that were against traditions. When the heads of the clan Ironknuckles, asked him to forget his ideas he refused. He was a Dwarf, and like all the Dwarves he loved traditions and his clan, but he preferred his studies on blacksmithing.

Not bothering himself with his clan demands he kept working on his theories and when his clan proceeded to take the matter on trial in front of a council of his pairs he made a scene.

In front of the heads of his clan, he declared that he would not bother himself with traditions if those would stop his work. Like a lot of Dwarves, he was too stubborn for his own good and prefer exile over repentance.

With his wife and his only child, he left his clan and the mountains to live among the human and keep on working. Being only 27 at the time Franziska was only a child and didn’t remember all of the events.

A few decades later, while Franziska was starting to learn blacksmithing and metallurgy from her father and fighting from her mother, a dwarven delegation come to their house. This group of Dwarves, led by her mother’s brother, tried to convince her father to drop his work, but it was useless. They then tried to convince Franziska's mother to quit her husband and rejoin the clan with her own daughter, but she was as stubborn as her husband and too in love with him, she refused her brother proposition.

In front of their refusal the dwarven delegation challenge Franziska's parents in a fight. And they accepted, it was that or an assassination. Franziska had been forbidden to participate by her parents, and a Human friend of the family was there to prevent her from interfering.

The fight was fierce at two against five. But even if Franziska’s father was a Second and her mother a Third, four of their opponents were Second too and their leader was also a Third. The confrontation last from dawn to twilight and at the end it was thanks to her father works and her mother's talent for fighting that they could take on five Dwarves warrior.

Unfortunately, even if they were stronger than their opponents, they were still two against five, and Franziska’s dad died during the fight. Her mother won it but was too severely wounded to hope survived the night.

Knowing her daughter was as stubborn as her parents, Franziska’s mother made her daughter promised to not seek vengeance if she could not be sure of her victory. Since it was her mother dying wish, she refrained herself from attacking her former clan head-on and dying uselessly there, so she trained for all her life.

Then some decades later, as she was mentally preparing herself to join a war between Humans as a mercenary, she was tricked. She was planning to gain experience there and hoping to become a Second in this war. She had time, as a Dwarf she had centuries to enact her revenge.

She was having a drink in a cheap tavern and the fucking innkeeper had drugged her. She woke up the day after that chained in the basement with other prisoners. Then she lived the same events as the other women on pirates ships. But luckily for her, as a Dwarf, a Virgin, and a trained fighter she was treated with more care than the other slaves since she would have reached a higher price. Unluckily for her, as she never obeyed the orders, she was often on a fasting diet, suffering from hunger all the travel.

Then destiny changed. She was released in a strange place where she could hope to grow stronger than all Dwarves and finally take her revenge. If only she renounced to her free will. She had understood that becoming a ‘Civilian of the Dungeon’ was becoming one of its monsters, but she had quickly weighed it over the chance to get vengeance and had decided to do it. The Dungeon had sworn to her that it would help her in this. And even if she wasn’t completely trusting it, it was offering her free will or having it eventually taken away.

All that had led her here and now, meditating with the help of a Dungeon.

She’s feeling its mana flowing through her and she leads it in all her body, slowly permeating in all of her organs. She’s amassing the Dungeon’s mana in her hara, this place in the abdomen where the mana of each living being is naturally generated. She can feel it, little by little the Dungeon’s mana is replacing her own. She doesn’t care, she can feel it’s purer than her own and stronger too.

Slowly, she feels her senses growing outside of her body, she can perceive her surrounding more and more clearly than with every previous meditation. At the same time, her hara is growing in her. Her mana is almost depleted and the Dungeon’s mana is not the same in her. Her senses may grow sharper, her body seems weaker with each minutes passing by, her mind his heavier, it’s harder to think clearly, those are the signs of mana exhaustion. She knows them, she’s used to depleting all of her mana when fighting or working in the smithy.

Then the connexion establishes itself.

And it’s a whole new world that opens itself to her.