While my orc avatar was busy learning enchanting magic my dungeon mind was also hard at work. The goblins had managed to complete the eighth room of my dungeon and the third goblin room. Which brought my dungeon up to thirteen rooms, including my bedroom and bathroom. The newest goblin room was running parallel to the rest of the dungeon. The goal was to eventually link it back to the rest of the dungeon. It would give enemies multiple paths to my core. But it would also give my goblins a way to retreat, and would prevent enemies from cornering them by blocking a single passageway.

Eventually I planned on turning my dungeon into a kind of maze. That meant creating multiple branching pathways and deadends. It would also have multiple pathways that my monsters could travel through to flank intruders. Although there would also be numerous chokepoints that intruders would have to go through. There was no way I was going to depend on hidden pathways that intruders could use to skip large sections of my dungeon.

That was just the most basic of the plans for my dungeon layout. There were weaknesses with most mazes that made them easy to solve. If I did things right nobody was going to be able to simply make a right, or left, turn at every intersection in order to reach the end of my dungeon. That flaw may be difficult to prevent if your maze was two dimensional, but working in three dimensions resulted in a variety of ways to counter that strategy. The simplest being to create multiple floors and have the entrance to the next floor be in the center of the maze. If no wall was attached to that center then intruders that were trying to follow a wall would travel in circles instead. And that was just a non-magical solution, using magic there were endless ways to counter that weakness.

Building all of that was going to require more goblins though. Using my accumulated mana I created another seven goblins, which brought me up to thirty five goblins. Of course I didn’t want my goblins to only be miners. Focusing too much on my dungeon and not enough on my defense would be foolish. I had to strike a good balance. A large dungeon would help defend me against powerful intruders that I was unable to kill, they would either give up or it would give me time to try to wear them down. At the same time if I faced a large number of weak enemies they could just fill up my dungeon and make any maze design useless.

I ended up pulling Chief Sharpstick and ten of the goblins for training and left the other goblins either expanding my dungeon or resting. No matter what I was keeping enough goblin miners to keep working on increasing the number of rooms between my core and the entrance of my dungeon. That could only be increased one room at a time, and at least for now I couldn’t think of any reason I wouldn’t want to increase that number as much as possible.

I should have predicted how goblin training would turn out. If the internet was still working, and I had a video camera, I could have been famous. I started them out with simple marching. Quickly it turned into a comedy of epic proportions. When the first goblin accidently stabbed a goblin standing behind him I thought it was an abnormality. Then less than ten minutes into the training a second goblin managed to stab themself in the stomach. Considering the spear was at least a foot taller than the goblin I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. I quickly replaced all the spears with blunted versions. Hopefully that would minimize the number of goblins I’d have to use healing on, which would save me some mana.

My hopes were short lived. When the goblins squared off to spar against each other it went from a comedy to a tragedy. The goblins had been carefully instructed not to even think about hitting their sparring partner. Instead they were simply going to bang the spear against each other. Considering the spears were more like quarterstaffs than spears it seemed like a decent idea.

I quickly realized it was a terrible idea. When Chief Sharpstick told the goblins to start, three of them started wildly swinging their blunt spears around like they were trying to swat bees. Of course their opponents frantically got out of the way, or worse started swinging crazily themselves.

None of the goblins managed to strike their sparring partners. I was pretty sure that was because in the ensuing chaos the goblins lost track of where their sparring partners were. They also lost track of where any of the goblins around them were. Instead they seemed to be focused on swinging their spears around as quickly as possible. Pretty soon three goblins had unintentionally been struck. One with enough force that they had a cracked skull. Unfortunately that was an injury I couldn’t fix with blood magic.

I called the shaman. He looked at the unconscious goblin and then shrugged. Before I could stop him he grabbed a regular spear and drove it through the goblin. “It take many weeks to heal goblin. If goblin die, then goblin heal in one day.” The shaman said proudly. I had to admit that the shaman had a point. Although it wasn’t the type of healing I was expecting.

Changing my plans I ordered the goblins to create some practice dummies. After that I made sure that I only had a couple of them practicing at a time, and made sure there was around ten feet between each of the goblins. With any luck that would minimize the number of issues. Although I was sure if there was a way for one of the goblins to hurt themselves, or another goblin, they would find it.

My stomach growled, reminding me that it was almost dinner time. Earlier I hadn’t wanted to intrude on Jennifer’s work so I had ordered my goblins to bring her lunch. Although the real reason I hadn’t eaten with her was fear that she would bring up the fact that she was my captive.

If the professor said that she wanted to be free I didn’t know what I would do. She hadn’t even asked but my mind was a mess trying to figure out what I should do if she did. I cared about her and part of me rebelled against keeping someone I cared about prisoner. At the same time she would be in danger if she left. But another part of me was sure that keeping her captive would sour our relationship. If I wanted to keep her, eventually I’d have to let her leave and hope that she would be willing to come back and spend some time with me. Otherwise I’d lose her, even if she was inside my dungeon. So I was convinced I would have to let her leave eventually, but that didn’t mean I had to let her leave as soon as she asked.

My biggest worry was her safety if she left my dungeon. Creating a set of enchanted equipment to keep her safe would go a long way towards assuaging my worries. I’d also have to make sure that Jennifer kept on learning how to fight and use magic. The combination of those two would be a good start, it wasn’t enough to fully relieve me, but I doubted anything but Jennifer staying inside the dungeon would.