Becoming a real dungeon, part 3

The days go on, missy keeps sending her thoughts about a moss and mushroom infested cave. I ignore her, I am not an architect, nor have any qualifications to build such a thing. All I know about making underground structures is that you should build something to maintain the roof.

What I do though, is deepen the hole I am in. I direct my mana to extend my territory downwards. I extend my territory by making it a cylinder with a 10 cm radius, I tried with lower sizes, but after some distance I lose too much control over my mana. In the air I have no issue, but the dirt is disrupting my mana control for some reason.

It is a bother, but I work around it. 3 days after I began directing my territory expansion, I dug nearly 5 metres deep into the ground. At 2 metres deep I was already moving some rock out of my way. But since I reached the 3 metres cap, I find very little dirt. The underground here is composed of a greyish kind of stone.

With those stones I was stuck, the first was just the size of my territory’s size. But just under it is a literal boulder. I don’t know its size, but no matter what I tried, it did not even budge.

What unlocked the situation was as simple as it could have been. I could shape the dirt, displace it and all, with mana. When I tried it on the stone it did not work at first, but while I tried infusing my mana inside it, I could make changes to it. A bit like how I can make changes to animals, what I used on the spider.

All I needed to do was pump a good amount of mana inside the part of the stone I wanted to modify, and then cut parts of it and make them go away. While it costs about 6 times more to get stone out of my way than the dirt does, stone will be useful when I want to build something.

And talking about building, when missy saw the first deformed rocks I got out of the hole’s entrance, she started sending me views of bricks. She wants me to make bricks for them to build? Seriously? Just for the fun of not complying I made sure to make every bit of stone I get out as irregular as possible.

After 2 days of not getting any square blocks, she gave up her idea of making me a stone quarry. I think what worked well to make her understand I won’t help her is when I began getting bricks out. Little things the size of legos, it cost me a bit more mana to make that much cuts, but the look on her face was worth it.

It was 3 days later, on the 20th, that I finally reached the 10 metres deep. From there I think I will follow what missy wants, I would still require some moss and mushroom first though. I don’t think I can just create those from nothing.

While I will comply with her idea of a cave thing, I don’t want to let her dictate everything either. I think she wants to use me to make an underground complex or something like that. I don’t really care for such things honestly, I already said that I don’t have any qualifications in the building department.

I must say that I find it quite pleasant to dig like that, I don’t know if I will still think that in a week or two. But for the moment I kind of like digging this hole, it is like how I used to make sand castles with my niece before her accident… Fuck me, why do I have to think of this again? Am I not sad enough?

I once again go all out on the work to keep my mind busy. I focus fully on increasing my control over my mana, it is the most efficient thing to do to not think of other things. And I need to escape this feeling of strangling remorse!

It is 4 days later that I am taken out of my trance-like focus. Missy looked inside my hole, no pun there, my territory is really vertically built. And saw how I continued going deeper and deeper. So she now asks me to make something horizontal, and to stop digging deeper. I accidentally got to 16 metres deep instead of the 11.5 I wanted. It would have made me laugh to see them crawl to navigate inside.

I got too much stone out, meaning I will move the stone to fill the gap instead of getting the stone completely out of my territory. And doing so I find out that I can fuse the stone, making two separate pieces one, as if it was naturally formed like that. So instead of filling the extra depth I move my core inside of it and make a 3 metres thick cover over me.

That way I have half a metre of space here, and I will make the cave 2.5 metres high, with height variations. I am again amused when missy finds out that I am not embedded on the side of the hole’s entrance. At first she searched around, then she tried to feel something using mana. I could feel that because she displaced mine while doing so.

When she did not sense me in the hole, she began to panic. I felt her mana got about 2 metres inside the stone slab I fused with my mana manipulation, but as she did not get any deeper, she did not detect me.

She quickly got out of my control range, and got back 5 minutes later with the indigo hairs guy. He found me way too easily, I think he followed the natural mana’s movements. I could feel his mana brush my surface in barely seconds after he stopped in front of my entrance. I did succeed in getting some of his mana. It seems I am not the only one affected by distance and soil getting my control weacker.

Indigo hair turned and returned to whatever he was doing outside of my range. And funnily enough, he slipped a bit on the heap of loose dirt and stone that agglomerates around my territorie’s surface. And that actually gave me an idea.

Missy wants me to make a cave? Okay, I will do just that. But I will add a little twist to this cave. What about traps? I am sure I can make some nice designs with the mana manipulation I have. I could make traps to break ankles, parts of the floor to collapse, or even pit traps.

Having something to draw my attention now, I begin to focus on achieving that. I expand my territory sideways now, I make my entrance look more natural first. I do it slowly though, as not to be too obvious. I also make the ground and walls irregular, I try to make it as natural as possible, but I must have wasted at least 2 days just like that.

It took me nearly a month to make what I thought about. They also stopped marking the tree outside, so I need to count the days myself. We are at 47 today. And now my territory looks nice, to me at least.

My entrance is a bump of dirt I made look like a broken termite mound, I don’t know why, I just thought it would be funny having a 5 metres tall, 7 metres diameter termite mound as an entrance. The thing looks like multiple colonies decided to build their mound next to each other and something split them in the middle.

It looks like an anime character used a sword strike to cut a part of the mound apart. It results in the mound missing a part on one of its sides, which presents the entrance to my underground.

From there is a 12 metres free fall, well, not that free as I made sure stones would hit your sides while you fall. Then stone spikes wait for you for a prickling landing, the spikes are merely 5 cm tall, but I want them to break bones and unbalance, not to make people bleed.

From there you are in a hall of sorts, it is hexagonal, it’s centre right above my sphere, still hidden under there. The Hexagonal hall is quite cramped to be honest, the radius stands at 2 metres. From each side goes a corridor a mere metre across for 2 metres high. The ground is mostly horizontal, I tried making it seem natural after all, so it is still irregular.

Every corridor is triangular in shape though, I remember something about stone being a sediment and not supporting tension well while supporting pressure easily. So I made my corridors the shape of a triangle, and I think I did well, it would hinder your arms movement as well as be more claustrophobic.

Each corridor does not go further than 5 metres though, I sadly did not have enough time to make it bigger. But what I did make was traps, 1 for each corridor, so 8 in total. I made a pitfall with spikes to puncture, walls that would push inwards to crush anyone between them, a closing part to trap someone inside and simply make them die of suffocation, or thirst.

I also made a corridor with irregular cavities in the ground. When someone steps onto one, the ground part collapses and it should make their ankle twist, thus breaking it. I made one corridor collapsable, I also tried making some kind of wolf trap.

But to be honest I failed, I would need metal to make such contraption. So instead I made a little gear work so that when you step on the trigger you get 4 times your weight on your ankle’s sides. It should make the ankle go 90 degrees towards the side, the kind of breaking that hurts and heals bad.

For the last two I made a combination of the others, ankle twisters and a closing entrance. The oher got a pitfall with a collapsable roof, I made it so when the roof collapses it will either crush the body or push it to impale it on the spikes.

The change to my entrance was the last one I did, and that made missy and the others interested in it. But to my surprise, the girl that originally wore armour, she was not at the moment, destroyed a big part of it, giving it a hit with her mace.

It vexed me quite a bit, and the others in her group seemed annoyed too. I think she is drunk, she is laughing like a drunk person would. I close my entrance’s hole with dirt, just a loose and fine slab of dirt.

This is quite effective as she is stepping all over my ruined termite mound to break most of it. But when she steps on the loose dirt over my entrance, she passes right through the dirt and hits the walls hard. She took a nasty hit in the head while falling, and when she hit the ground with her left foot and right knee, her knee made a snapping sound.

She collapsed on her side, taking her knee between her hands and saying what I think are bird names. While she is in my territory I can hear her, even smell, taste, see and feel her. Her knee is broken, that I am happy with, but her head seems oddly fine from the hit she got on the side of it.

I would have thought it would have at least stunned her, perhaps the alcohol in her bloodstream helped? It can dull the pain, and from her smell, she must have drunk a gallon of booze.

Unfortunately for my vengeance, but fortunately for her. The others quickly get to my entrance when they hear the cries. I tried closing my entrance, but I could not do it quickly enough to prevent them from helping her.

Surprisingly, missy takes out a rope that should not have been able to be held in the small purse she has. She passes one end to the buffed guy in the group, and he holds it while 2 of them enter my territory.

They are the indigo haired guy and the secretary looking one, indigo inspects the surroundings with his mana while the secretary guy crouches and examines the still shouting woman.

Then he just uses a stupid amount of mana in a formation in front of his hand which and points the palm at her. The mana in the formation then goes inside of her by strands, it goes to her wounds. Her head, foot, torso and knee.

With a popping sound and a scream, her knee goes back to its normal working form while I can see her scrapes and scratches healing at a speed rivalling a certain mutant wolverine. This is bullshit, she broke my entrance, I should break her bones! Why do they have a healer? Get away!