Having a way to lure monsters would have been very useful an hour ago, before Avery had spent all her mana digging down below the third floor and gotten another negative two hundred and seventy mana regeneration. Assuming it worked the way she thought it would, she could maneuver the slimes into each other’s paths. That wouldn’t do anything at all for most monsters, but slimes were the lowest tier of monster for a reason. With their combination of near-mindlessness and incredible fragility, it was possible to reduce slime numbers by simply walking around them while they attempted to engulf their target, causing them to burst each other.

With a lure, that would be easy to accomplish.

Activating the option in the menu, Avery finds that all the slimes are highlit on her map function. Apparently most of them were congregated between the opening of the tunnel on the third floor and the hole that led up to the first floor. A lesser accumulation was diffusing through the forty-nine rooms of the second floor, turning what Avery had intended to be a series of puzzle rooms leading to keys into three gauntlets of easily dispatched enemies. Wonderful. That was exactly what she wanted, something that wasn’t even a puddle of mud to invaders. There were also several slimes trickling down from the second floor down to the third, but the staircase was preventing any from returning to the previous floor. Apparently she had a built-in disincentive for monsters to exit her dungeon. Also sarcastically wonderful.

Now that she thought of it, why wasn’t there a greater concentration of slimes on the third floor? If they had dug the tunnel downward, there should have been at least more of them toward that direction than there were on the stairs. As it was, the density of the slime icons was more along the lines of an expanding ooze moving to reach the start of the tunnel than a hive that had excavated the stone itself. Well, if the theory didn’t predict the data, there was something wrong with the theory. There were a few holes in her understanding of what had happened while she was unconscious already, and while Avery was pretty sure the Invader knew more than he had told her, she wasn’t going to just ask about it. The first new theory she could think of had him as the reason everything had gone terrible.

First, and most blatantly, was the fact that there were slimes in the dungeon and yet her body was uneaten. Three hundred slimes going down and ignoring fresh meat on their way down into a hole to eat a gem was suspending her disbelief already, and the new information wasn’t helping at all. It was more plausible that the Invader, whether by accident or malevolently, had brought a single slime with himself to the cave much as Avery herself had not so very long ago, only for the then contained slime to multiply on the second level. With the monster’s needs provided for entirely by Avery’s mana, the creature would then do what came naturally to slimes and split repeatedly to fill the available space. Following that, the creatures would burrow to create more space, which would then fit the data of the tunnel existing.

However, that led to the question of where the slimes that dug the tunnel had gone. Again, the only unaccounted for variable was the Invader. While she was unconscious, he had retrieved her core from the second floor, which provided a lower base level of combat prowess separate from the stats she had managed to get a read on. However, that did not give an upper boundary. It was perfectly feasible that the creature could have made its way down to the lowest reaches of her dungeon and slaughtered its way back up. After a complete depopulation of the slimes on the lower level, the ones remaining on the second floor would need to redivide and expand downward once more. With regenerative capabilities, nothing that didn’t specifically bypass the healing factor would pose a threat to this monster. It would therefore only be a matter of time and effort to obliterate the slimes from one end of a linear path to the other.

Avery was going to need to work on that linearity.

With both questionable circumstance feasibly being the fault of the Invader who was most certainly not freely providing the information about said incidents while also almost certainly at least having knowledge of what occurred, the necromancer was not inclined to blindly trust the monster that held her soul in its hands. Even being cut in half by a blue slime activating reverse mitosis while attached to the creature could be a ploy to make itself seem vulnerable and make Avery lower her guard. She hadn’t paid it much attention at the time, given that there were special abilities being found simultaneously, but the Invader had a listed intelligence stat of eighteen, three points higher than her own fifteen. The only other measure she had of that was the slimes having a one, but with only fourteen points of difference between her own intellect and that of a mindless blob of water, she was inclined to believe that an additional three points could lead to the creature in question thinking a few levels ahead of her when it came to manipulation of the environment to suit its own narrative.If Avery was going to get out of this mess, it would be through careful experimentation and solving these mysteries on her own.

Make that rapid experimentation. Noting once again her extremely limited supply of mana, the necromancer selects the Greater Blue Slime on the map. A tiny orb of mana forms near the creature, and the slime immediately moves toward it. Deciding that she would rather not wait to see what happens when it reaches it, Avery selects a room of the dungeon that passes through several of the more dense clumps of slimes, and watches. The blob of blue jelly and teeth rolls forward toward the lure, which moves automatically away from the creature. Tantalizingly close and yet out of reach, the slime continues to lunge for the mana as the orb travels slowly to the destination point Avery had designated. Fortunately, it continues through the lesser slimes as it travels, popping the green blobs with the sharp teeth around its hide as it passes by, each destroyed monster providing Avery with a small burst of mana. With each slime providing twenty three, twenty two now, mana, all it would take is constant effort to stay in a positive flow.

Until she ran out of slimes, or they stopped providing mana, at least.

Fortunately, the Invader had reached the first floor, so Avery could stop thinking about that for a minute.

“Solve the puzzle and open the chest to get your spear already before I demolish it for the mana.”

“Sheesh, impatient are we?”

“Get on with it already!”

“Fine, fine. ‘Golden treasure lies within’. Heard it before. Egg.”

As soon as the Invader answers the question, the lid of the puzzle chest opens up, and the stone spear floats up in front of it.

“Huh, neat. I’m not doing that. So I just grab it, right?”

“What kind of puzzle was that! That’s just a riddle. Rip off! Do I have to make everything manually?”

“Uh, you wanted me to get this right? Didn’t you just make an easy puzzle?”

“No! I used the automatic puzzle box thing. Now I’m going to… Dang it, have to wait until you’re off the flood before I can get the mana back from it.”

Wrapping its tail around the spear, the Invader pulls the chunk of stone out from the hovering position above the chest, and immediately drops it.

“But why? Why would you make it out of rock? Rock is heavy.”

“Suck it up.”

“Fine, I’ll just concentrate a bit.”

Looking back down into the hole, the invader weighs the gem in its hand thoughtfully.

“If I leave this up here, can you still communicate with me? Might need to three hand this thing for a while, and it seems somewhat unlikely that the safety of a fragile gemstone can be assured while I’m focusing on not-that.”

“We can find out the answer to that together. I’m fairly certain that’s a yes, considering how before now you didn’t have a gem and were able to listen to me telling you to get out of this cave before you ruin everything, but who is to say that events of the past are in fact indicators of the future?”

“Valid points, both of them. Into the chest it goes!”

Tossing the black stone into the chest, the Invader picks up the stone spear with tail, hand, and hand, before jumping down into the hole. Behind it, the chest closes itself with the core still inside, locking to prevent easy access to the contents. Avery seethes in impotent rage, and plots ways to lure slimes into the invader for the purpose of murder.

“Flooding, huh?”

“Yes, apparently there was an underground reservoir,” Avery responds, luring the Greater Blue into a patch of greens. “Unfortunately the water isn’t rising fast enough to reach the slimes before I run out of mana at this rate.”

“What kind of flow are we talking about here?”

“It was a veritable flood at first, but it seems to have hit an equilibrium of sorts between the levels in the cavern and the levels in the tunnel. Now it’s like eleven liters per second or so.”

“That still seems like a lot. Is that a lot?”

“Well, each ‘hallway’ of the tunnel is about four hundred meters in volume. Multiply that by a thousand to get how many liters that holds. So, each hallway would take about ten hours to fill.”

“Huh.”

“It’s still an inexorable amount of liquid coming to ruin everything but it’s somewhat less pressing than the rapidly draining level of ambient magic and the swarm of slimes.”

“So you can demolish things to generate mana, yeah?”

“Yes, but only nonanimate matter within the confines of my dungeon.”

“And the dungeon is flooding in addition to being host to numerous creatures draining said mana?”

“Which I cannot demolish because the creature are alive.”

“What about demolishing the water though?”

To that, Avery had no response.