Several hours pass in peaceful silence. Your fame ticks up. Your stone and wood increase as hunting parties come and go. The monolithic progress bar moves toward its middle point, set back when you expand a room to cover the area above the insect room, and again when you set a staircase into the second level so that Amanda will be able to travel across the level without having to climb anywhere. Necessity before innovation.

She pouts slightly, when you explain this, but cheers up when you sigh and point out that she wanted some stairs for a few of her trap ideas anyway.

You find the tedium... refreshing, in an odd sort of way. It's been a while since you just sat and punched a wall, but watching the numbers drift upwards is satisfying. Evidently, not everyone agrees with you however, and Sith wanders away mid morning, and Amanda not much later. AT least they sent replacements.

“.. of course, that was in my younger days,” croaks Clatter, absently swiping a walking stick that he's picked up from somewhere at the young goblin currently trying to climb your back spines, missing and instead hitting you in the ribs. You grunt, partly at the blow and partly at his words. Are they... smoother than they were when he arrived? Or are you imagining things?

Replacements of a sort, at least.

Clatter continues his story, something about his tribe repulsing an attack by a dozen adventuring heroes as part of some update years ago, and the children continue to run around, sometimes hitting the wall by pure random chance hard enough to count as a strike towards building.

“Of course all that was before these damned crystals. We had to steal a dozen before we got the tribe back into shape, and they got pretty rare after a week or so. Even the damned bears wanted in on the action by the end but -”

That's enough to pull your attention back to him. “What?”

“Oh yeah, some kind of bear only forest or something. You know how hard it is to talk to them anyway if you don't have a tongue skill but -”

You shake your head to cut him off. “No, not – not the bears specifically. You were hunting Claimant Crystals?”

Clatters looks confused. “Of course. I assumed you already... how did you get this lair set up if you didn't get a crystal?”

“I got it accidentally.”

The goblin elder chuckles at that. “Well, some get all the luck. By the end of the first week, it was probably less than one in five heroes had a crystal on them around our camp, and we had quite the territory. Half that by the end of week two. The chief even considered ambushing level one and two heroes, sacrificing captured wolves to them and then killing them once they levelled up to level 3. We never quite got around to it.”

He trails off, leaving your mind a whirl. You suppose it's not unreasonable to see that other monsters would notice that some adventurers dropped crystals that turn you into a boss, but you haven't seen a limit to how large you can make your dungeon yet, if only within the limits of the cliff face itself. You have a second crystal yourself but unless there's a hard limit on needing one crystal for every two floors you're not sure why you'd need to use it.

Or maybe the monsters are just giving into their instincts to hoard shinies?

You turn your attention back to the wall, and Clatter returns to his stories. You suspect you may have been put on baby-sitting duty, but you can't find it in yourself to be too annoyed. Every so often one of the children will enter the hyper focused and inquisitive state that they are wont to do and spend a few minutes helping, until they inevitably grow bored, and you haven't spent much time with your newest minions anyway. You let Clatter's voice wash over you with tales, mostly fabricated you suspect, from his life in the forest as the progress bar slowly fills.

It must be pushing into the afternoon when your stomach rumbles, breaking you from the half meditative trance you've been in. You inspect your progress – three quarters finished.

You nod, and stretch, your spine popping with the movement.

“Good enough for now I think. Time for a -”

“RED!”

The voice is loud enough to reach you on the second floor. Mercy's tone is clear enough. Worry and excitement war within her.

“THE DOOR!”

You're moving before the words have made it all the way to your brain. Half way to the stairs you turn and fix Clatter with a stare.

“Keep them here. The children. Do not let them come downstairs.”

The aged goblin barely manages a nod, shocked and unsure. You force yourself to stop and look at him.

“Adventures are here. The children won't respawn without a name. They must be kept safe. Do you understand? There is no one else who can do it.”

This time the nod was firmer.

“Good.”

And then you're gone. Racing through the lower floor even as your minions gather themselves, forming a blockade and advancing towards the door.

Something in your instincts, not from your species as a Drakelet but somewhere deeper, screams at you. Something about their advance is wrong. The sudden feeling of displacement is so strong it causes you to stumble and you have to fight to throw it off.

But watching the kobolds assemble in the pool room is making you grit your teeth. Seeing Mercy ready herself for magic combat, without her wooden armour, makes your skin crawl. Seth, manifesting long black claws makes your vision blur.

What is happening?

Something deep inside screams that you're doing it wrong. Using a saw as a hammer, putting your hammer in a bucket of water for storage. Being stupid.

The countdown on the door is already at twenty seconds.

You don't have time for this.

This new feeling screams and fights as you push it away.

Later. You'd think about it, but LATER!

Your vision returns. Your breath evens out, as the count down approaches zero.

You take your place on the midline, alongside Sapphire astride Hyena. Steve scuttles up the wall above the entrance. The goblins and kobolds form a wall of mismatched weaponry.

The door opens.