“To the East, not much is known…but there exists a people more in touch with Eryth than any of us could ever hope to be. They are methodical, fascinating and multifaceted. Yet you would think them homogeneous if not for the way they govern themselves; there we have kingdoms of traders, of monks or Vulpeskin. Less is known dear reader because our forays to our eastern neighbors are few and far between. But for the two seas that separate us, Oceania Cen’orbis, the central ocean that graces our beloved shores and Oceania Eurusia, the eastern Ocean that comes after we would have learnt more. It is also simply too treacherous in the air, just as there are leviathans and krakens in the depths, so are there wyrms that fly through the clouds,. –Oceans and Landmasses by [Geographical Researcher] Keanu Silvertongue.

The morning after, the party woke up, had breakfast and checked their gear as per usual. Kervir went ahead to scout the way and returned to lead the rest of the party to the final room. Caution was to be had for this floor, because there was an apex predator of the Bowl; the infamous sand wurm.

It was a nocturnal monster, coming out to feed when the Bowl’s nights were cooler or when food was plentiful enough to warrant its attention during the day. The specimen in the party’s sights was an adult and it was the damn size of a Shinkansen.

Its hide was a mellowing orange and a sandy yellow that camouflaged it among the dunes whenever it lay in ambush. It was also sort of scaly like an alligator, though Arthur didn’t know whether it belonged to a family of worms or reptiles. Thankfully, it didn’t have its younger and more active offspring, otherwise things would’ve been hard even with stealth.

“Uh—where is the dungeon core?” Arthur whispered, eyeing the sand wurm hibernating in the depression.

“Up there” Livierre pointed to a suspended platform, many Arkiliuses tall off the floor where the sand wurm was slumbering. It was hoisted from the ceiling by enchanted chains which also doubled up as the mana conduits.The conduits fed the dungeon its power and conveyed control to the dungeon itself.

From the looks of it, it was meant to be lowered onto a pedestal that stood in the middle of the sand wurm’s lair. The same pedestal which the sand wurm was coiled around like an overgrown snake. It needed no saying that there was no way they were getting over there without awaking the gargantuan monster.

From the ledge overlooking the depression on the floor, were the remains of what might have been a bridge connecting where they were standing to the pedestal. There was also a terminal with a crack running dead center of its crystal like a broken monitor.

Arthur saw it for what it was, a derelict control terminal or an equivalent of it. Using [Diagnostics] and [Basic repair] was just a gamble. There was no time to be doing that with a monster that looked like a sneeze away from devouring them.

“Can we teleport?” Arthur whispered offhandedly as he looked at Nora and Kervir.

“No, and if you mean using Kervir’s and Nora’s ability, you should know that [Shadow Step] is short range and [Shadow Port] has never been used to carry another person. Her mana always drops precipitously if she carries any other object bigger than her hands can hold.”

“Oh, that’s a bummer.”

“What’s a behind got to do with it?” Kervir sneered..

‘Dude,now… really?!’

“I guess our only option is to fly.” Arthur looked at Livierre . “I hope you are not afraid of heights because I think only the two of us can go.”

Livierre’s face turned a paler shade of blue. She did not look like she was going to enjoy her first flight—

They flew up to the platform with Livierre strapped to his back. Arthur ran the Cloud Surfer’s engine as quietly as he could make it on their ascent. Up-close the platform it was a large cuboid edifice made of material that was so dark it seemed to drink in the light. It resembled extremely dark nullsteel if there was such a thing, but it was closer to obsidian rock rather than metal.

As they set foot in the entryway, they saw the dungeon core. A dodecahedron prism that had a mesh of runes and mana conduits running across its surface which flashed and sparkled like an overly customized glass gaming rig.

If it had a name, Omen seemed like it would have fit the theme just right; the runes were flashing red. It even hummed as the mana passed through its conduits like it had cooling fans.

‘Yea, that’s not ominous at all,’ was Arthur’s observation.

“Is it supposed to be doing that? Should it be something like, I don’t know, green or blue or something?”

“What do the colors have to do with it?” Livierre said as she walked on the balls of her feet besides him. She was a master of stealth, just like the rest of the tieflings.

“Red means danger, blue is neutral and green is friendly.”

“Mmh, you have strange connotations for colors. Perhaps if the dungeon core was made up of a quartzite crystal…but thus far, it is some elusive material that people haven’t been able to define. Who knows what it's neutral color is supposed to be?”

// Wᛖᛚᚲᛟᛗᛖ!

Letters seemed to erupt into their minds. Both interlopers jerked and glanced at each other to confirm they were not the only ones who were seeing it.

“Vesper pits!, I have no idea what that language is” Livierre whispered.

“What do you mean you don’t know? How am I supposed to fix it?”

‘This is some roundabout way of wanting to get rid of me you know?’ he didn’t voice it but it was simply absurd they let him come in blind. A frigging dungeon core and some arcane language? They might as well have blindfolded him and told him to go fight the sand wurm.

“I didn’t know, okay? Give me a moment, I have a journal here somewhere, maybe it’ll tell us what to do.” Livierre said as she fumbled with her pack.

“Great, we have to learn a new language on the fly; as if escaping a slumbering shai-hulud is not incentive enough!” Arthur whisper-shouted.

//Dᛖᛏᛖᚲᛏᛁᚾᚷ ᛚᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ

The voice intoned again.

It was all sorts of gibberish and not something their tongues could pronounce. Actually a voice would have been an understatement. It was like the words or whichever script that was, directly imprinted itself on their mind to convey both visual and audible ideas.

“What’s it doing?”

“How in the pits am I supposed to know?” she replied, getting frantic. She was down on the floor, rifling through a dog-eared, moth-bitten, soot-stained journal that looked like it could come apart if handled roughly. Yet she was flipping the pages like some cheap comic that had been read one too many times.

//Pᚨᚱᛋᛁᚾᚷ ᛚᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ

//Pᚨᚱᛋᛁᚾᚷ ᛋᚢᚲᚲᛖᛋᛋᚠᚢᛚ

“Huh? It's repeated the first word.”

“You comprehend what it says?!” Livierre almost exclaimed, then palm-slammed her mouth when she remembered where they were. Both turned to look towards the opening, and down where the sand wurm slept; it did not stir. Arthur gave her a reproaching look.

“I wish,” he deadpanned. “This looks like some convoluted language or code for dungeon cores. No wonder we can’t understand it.” He tousled his hair in frustration.

The whole thing was getting on his nerves; a sand wurm on their doorstep and the possibility that the dungeon might be springing another intricate trap. Who knew if it was going to vaporize them to cosmic dust with the magical equivalent of a laser beam?

//lᚨᚾᚷᚢᚨᚷᛖ eᚱᛃᛏᚺᚱᛖᚨᚾ cᛟᛗᛗᛟᚾ.

//LINGUISTICS UPDATED!

“Oh, so that’s what it was doing. Last two words must be ‘Erythean Common’ ”

//STATE DESIGNATION!

“Uh oh, administrator.” Arthur hurriedly blurted. The prompt had come from somewhere out of left field.

//PARSING…

“Fool, what did you do?!”

“What?”

“The dungeon core might know we’re not the overseers. It’ll reset!”

“Aeris breath!” Arthur threw up his hands whisper-shouting. “I didn’t know, it just caught me off-guard. ” He’d just mouthed out the first thing that came to mind. He couldn’t help but feel on edge.

//DESIGNATION ACCEPTED

“Huh, that was too easy. Always works” he showed Livierre a toothy smile. Livierre just collapsed on her rump in relief.

“ You’d have doomed us to Vesper’s pits. How’d you do it?”

“Magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced science” Arthur yammered.

“Sai’ans?” Livierre tilted her head uncomprehendingly like an owlcat.

“Ugh, you wouldn't understand.” Turning to the dungeon core—

//INITIALIZING…

//SYS.SELF.DIAG.START

//CORE INTEGRITY…FAILING

//CORE POWER STATUS…FAIR

//DECISION PARAMETERS…UNCHANGED

//CORE DATE…ERROR

//SYS.SELF.DIAG.END

//CURRENT STATUS:

//CORE INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

// DATE PARAMETERS UNKNOWN

//INTERVENTION OVERDUE.

“What is it saying?”

“Hmm? I think the dungeon core has been running for a long enough time that it's falling apart.” Arthur said as he examined the scintillating polyhedron. The runes were flaring and stuttering yet it had managed to run the dungeon’s traps unwaveringly.

“That does not bode well. No wonder the desert was moving further into the oasis. Any ideas on what we can do?”

“Oh, you didn’t tell me that was happening.” Arthur gave her a reprehensible look of slit eyes. “I think it’s long overdue for technical support…”

“What?”

“Lemmi try something—Hmm, Show status?” Arthur turned his head to the ceiling as if words would write themselves in the air. When no response was forthcoming, he went on”—nowpe…command, command prompt…nada.”

“Anything I can help with?” Livierre asked, getting up from her seat on the floor. She dusted off her leather bottoms and returned the contents of her pack where they belonged.

“I am looking for a keyword that’ll let us respond to the dungeon core. It has to be a key prompt, like an interface—” he paced around the perimeter of the core.

//KEY.PROMPT…

//…I

“No way, a command-in-line interface? Well, I’ll be stumped!” Arthur’s face brightened. On the other hand, Livierre was like a fish out of water.

// PARSE FAIL…

//KEY.PROMPT…

//… I

“Uhm, system, run diagnostics on climate enchantments” He said breathily, excitement evident on his face. After being thrown into a world full of magic, he’d never thought to interact with a semi-intelligent inanimate object; a guy could be forgiven for nerding out sometimes. The runes of the core flashed and glittered and then, the core executed commands like it had done a millennia ago.

//SUBSYS.DIAG.CHECK

//CORE.CLIME.CONT.

//PRECIPITATION…UNCHANGED

// HUMIDITY LEVEL…UNCHANGED

//BARRIER INTEGRITY…HOLDING

//WIND PATTERNS…UNCHANGED

//SEASONAL CYCLE…STATIC

//SUBSYS.DIAG.END

“Do you know how to change the weather enchantments?” Livierre asked.

“I think so, I guuuesss,” he drawled, contemplating his next course of action. “If the weather has been the same way or even degrading it’s because the dungeon core has been operating that way for years; centuries even. Climate changes all the time.” He furrowed his brow in contemplation, as the core wound up its processes.

“I think we should change how the oasis adapts to the outside climate. I see... the option for seasonal cycles is set to static. That might be the problem.”

If he had his way, he would put a rotating hourglass because the time between processes was filled with a blankness of inactivity. One could not tell if the core was still actively looking at the request or it had ground to a halt. Maybe he could pick up another class, but perhaps being magitech, it was already under the purview of what he already had.

//CURRENT STATUS: MICROCLIMATE STABLE

//INTERVENTION REDUNDANT

//APPEND CHANGES?

“Yes,” Arthur supplied elatedly as the core renewed its prompts. This was it, once he fixed the core and altered the parameters for the climate, he’d have another idea, he’d…he’d have something to do with a primitive computer.

//PARSING…

//PARSE FAIL.

//CURRENT STATUS:

//CORE INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

// DATE PARAMETERS UNKNOWN

//INTERVENTION OVERDUE.

“Crumb! Of course it couldn’t be too easy,” he almost pulled out his hair.

He was at an impasse; he’d come to the dungeon thinking that perhaps whatever passed for a control terminal was in working order after all this time.

After all, it had been controlling the climate for leagues of the oasis for a long time thus it had to be very durable. Then out of the blue, he was told to be a dungeon core programmer—what a short end of a stick.

There was no way any of his skills could help out here because one look at the core already stumped him. Given its ancient age and complexity and low level as he was, even [Diagnostics] would have been hard pressed to glean anything off the thing.

Unless given time, which he had in scant supply. [Detect Flaw] was a no go, as in, where would he start? He would be like an intern bumbling around a super server. Super servers were a different kind of fiend.

“Don’t you have any skill that can help us fix whatever issues this thing has? Something like [Advanced Repair] or something…you said you were high level right?” He fired off query after query at the tiefling who was going bald from thinking.

“ You got nothing? Nothing at all?” Arthur commented. The tiefling looked up from her ruminations with a grimace that bespoke her take on the matter. She didn’t even reply to the second part of his question. Going towards the platform’s opening, he peered on the sleeping sand wurm. There was one last card Arthur knew they could play but it had a chance of awaking the leviathan of the sandy seas.

“I have an idea, but it might be risky.” Livierre followed his gaze. He took that as his cue to voice his thoughts, “We can force a reset—”

“Resetting the dungeon won’t change anything. It was made to operate that way.”

“…I meant the core itself. Not the dungeon. The core is one entity and the dungeon is another. If it works like a system the way I think it does, we’ll have to purge it.”

“Why do you think that will work?” Livierre eyed the core. The doubt written all over her face was hard to miss. She thought that perhaps they had been way over their heads; even a [Weather Mage] was underqualified for this sort of thing.

Even if the dungeon was the closest thing to magitech as the brooding young man’s flying craft was, they were still light-years apart. Maybe the clan would have to reconsider another way to thrive. She clenched her fists and ground her teeth in frustration.

“I think, one—” Arthur put up his index finger, “the core has been running for so long it has lost count of the time. Two—,” his ring finger, “the dungeon core reads, records and responds like it’s supposed to, like true system, which brings us to three—,” he put up his middle finger, “the core is losing integrity because its ability to record information is becoming less durable as time goes on and there is too much of it that it can’t do nothing else…”

“So—?” Livierre seemed to follow his train of thought.

“Then like it says, I think the dungeon core is overdue for maintenance because the overseers who built it were supposed to periodically remove unwanted things. That also qualifies as maintenance.”

“I see,” Livierre sighed. “We have no other choice. But purging the dungeon core would mean that massive amounts of mana will be lost in the process. The sand wurm is bound to awaken.”

“Well, that is a risk you’ll have to take for your people.” Arthur shrugged. Livierre seemed to consider it for a while. Arthur took that time to continue meandering, inspecting the interior of the small room which enclosed the dungeon core.

There was nothing much to look at save for the mana conduits that went towards the core like circuits to a processor—that is what it was;a magical processing unit.

Livierre exhaled, “I think it is worth taking the risk. In the end, the desert will kill the oasis and we’ll have to move anyway.”

“Then...”

“Let’s do it—purge the core,” She reiterated. “I’ll go signal the others to meet us in the safe room on the third floor. Once the dungeon core reset starts, we have to make a run for it.”

“Right, just do what you have to. I am not looking forward to being wurm chow either.”

Livierre went to the opening and signaled the rest of their party down at the ledge where Kervir was keeping watch. Using hand signals, she told them to move back to the safe room and that they should prepare themselves for escape. Kervir was rather adamant at the plan they’d come up with going by the disgruntled hand-speak that seemingly strangled the air, but he consented.

“Ready ?” Arthur said to Livierre when she looked like she’d finished signaling. Livierre just nodded. He braced himself.

“Key prompt,” he mumbled in apprehension. Depending on how long it would take, they would have to fly fast out of the sand wurm’s den when the process started. Better to be safe than sorry; who knew how it’d respond?

//KEY.PROMPT…

//…I

“Purge Core; reset core climate parameters; set seasonal cycle to dynamic.”

//PARSING…

//PARSE POSSIBLE

//PURGE.CORE.SYS

//RESET.CLIME.CON.

//APPEND SEASONAL CYCLE

//STATIC>DYNAMIC

//PARSE IRREVERSIBLE

//APPEND CHANGES?

“No…”

//PARSING…

//INVOKE CHANGES?

“Yes damn it!” both intruders blustered.

//CHANGES INVOKED…

//PURGE COMMENCING…

The dungeon core’s hum became a piercing squeal that was reminiscent of tinnitus to Arthur…well, it was more of a sustained whistle. That had to have woken the tenant downstairs. Nobody wanted to find out what happened when you caused a ruckus in that kind of neighbourhood.

By the time the dungeon core’s room lit up with the brightness of mana conduits working full tilt, Arthur had already jumped to the hover board as Livierre clung to tightly to his torso

They shot out of the platform, diving towards the exit where they’d left the rest of their team. And the sand wurm had been roused by the noise sensing the flying intruders gave a guttural below that showcased its maw full of teeth like a lamprey. They even rotated around its oral cavity like something you’d use to debark a tree in a saw mill.

‘Hells no!’ Arthur and his passenger swerved away from the sand wurm’s flying spittle or mucus…or phlegm. Arthur did not want to find out what sort of consistency would muck him against the walls where he'd be trapped like an insect in a flytrap. The flying slime-spit was also green.

The sand wurm prepped for a lunge from the way its muscles contracted visibly beneath it’s rough hide. He was not going to let it finish. Calling upon his well of power he tried to at least excoriate the sand wurm’s hide with a [Thunder Bolt] to buy time because however much he was to lob spells at the thing it would just shrug them off.

It recoiled, and that was enough for them to fly over its eyeless head with space to spare. Fortunately, its retaliatory lunge was stopped short by the small aperture that was the exit leading to the third floor. A resounding boom shook the ceiling and peppered them with small rocks and dust but apart from the blast of air blown against their backs, they’d made it out.