Chapter Nine

Three, tangentially located in the alley behind Pa Pa Jiang’s Chinese Restaurant, New York City, Day 41

Rather than concentrate on figuring out Ms. Winters’s vague explanations, Three got the gist and outright panicked. Ms. Winters had revealed himself and potentially lured in attackers, and it was completely unprepared. As a two level dungeon, with only one creature and no ability to spawn, the only thing it could think of was to collapse the entrance chamber down and hide, pushing the surface area into the first room of its dungeon instead.

As Three began to close down the tunnel behind Ms. Winters and the woman, it felt the familiar pain of trying to defy its creator. It was not completely restrained, however, so Three pushed and gradually shrank its entrance chamber to being barely larger than its entrance, it pushed to squeeze the tunnel down to only a few inches across, twisting the tunnel entrance around the chamber, the pain approaching the point where it rebounded last time. Worried, it stopped shrinking the tunnel and entrance chamber, and the pain immediately began to ease, much to Three’s relief.

Now that Three had made its dungeon more secure against the immediate threat, it returned its focus to Ms. Winters, “Why did you break into the building? I asked you to be careful?” it asked, ignoring an inexplicable twinge of discomfort.

Ms. Winters returned an impression of emptiness, and after several other attempts, was able to convey that there wasn’t anything else to bring, so he went for the cat. “Are you sure?” Three asked.

Ms. Winters paused, working to finish moving the woman to a corner of the room, and returned an impression of confirmation, which was suddenly cut off by a feeling of uncertainty, and then an impression of denial, followed by a rapid-fire burst of impressions of toxic scents, and then them falling away, and scent releasing papers which must have helped mask the toxicity. Three was astounded, “Why didn’t you bring those papers? Being able to address the toxic environment would have been incredibly helpful,” It responded.

Ms. Winters frantically gave impressions of apology to Three. It’s too late now, Three sighed to itself, “it’s okay, it’s okay, don’t worry about it, I’m just going to have to handle this somehow,” it reassured Ms. Winters, momentarily distracted by some discomfort.

As Ms. Winters began to calm down, Three was proven to be just in time as its entrance opened, and a human hand reached down into it apparently searching for something, but giving up soon after. Three kept an eye on the entrance, and noticed several more intrusions in the following minutes, but they eventually seemed to stop. Three decided to devote the minimal amount of attention to its entrance and move on to focusing on the woman.

Luckily enough, the woman was still unconscious, so Three felt that it should be easy enough to take over her, but after it channeled the first dose of mana into her and tried to take her over, it noticed that there was a rapidly increasing mana disparity, she was somehow taking over its mana. In a gut reaction, Three immediately drew as much mana as possible from her and her surroundings, and checked again. Yes, she was subsuming the mana it had channeled into her.

How strange, Three thought, the ability to subsume mana is an ability limited to higher beings, wait, is she a human? Three posed the question to Ms. Winters, and got a vague impression of affirmation and uncertainty, so it concluded she was probably human. This meant that humans were potentially major threats, being able to take over its mana, maybe that’s why my creator wants them conquered? Three pondered, regardless, I have no means of handling this woman at the moment, maybe it would be better to just kill her, but the thought of giving all that miasma to its creator was incredibly unpleasant, what if I found another use for her instead, Ms. Winters immediately came to mind, loyal but too weak of mind to be of real help, made more than clear by this debacle.

As a higher being, it’s only natural that she would be more intelligent and magically capable, regardless of her other failings, honestly, no fur, no claws or fangs, no scales, these humans have nothing but their intelligence behind them, Three lamented. It would take some work, but maybe it could use her to help out Ms. Winters eventually, and anything would be better than just giving miasma to its creator. For the meantime, however, Three used some of its mana to create a cage to contain her, and then pulled the corner she was in out into a small room connected by only a small tunnel near the ceiling, allowing Three to drain as much mana from the chamber as possible while it considered possible methods to approach the task.