Dungeon Man Sam and the Orphaned Core, page 1
Contents
Dedication
Opening Quote
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Interlude 1
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Interlude 2: Mustering
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Interlude 3: Traveling
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
A Note From The Author
Stay Informed
Acknowledgements
Author Information
To my parents, who always believed
The smallest lever may shift the foundation of the world.
— Inscribed on the doors of the Collegium Arcanae
Author Unknown
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS FIVE in the morning. Samuel Tolliver sat at the kitchen table, an unrolled toolkit on his right, a fire-supressant orb on his left, and the critical components of a decommissioned dungeon core scattered in front of him.
Ten hours it had taken him to get to this point, and with a pleasantly surprising utter lack of explosions. Maybe this time he’d actually gotten it right.
It had cost him three months salary to purchase the old Opal core off of Pop’s quartermasters, part of that was for the actual core and the rest was to keep the gnomes from telling Pop about it. It wasn’t that Sam thought his father would disapprove, it was…
Well let’s face it. When your pop is the foremost dungeon builder in the world, and you buy something from his crew in order to try and make the entire dungeon building industry obsolete, the conversation could get a little awkward at family dinner.
People had called him crazy, to buy something so expensive and delicate only to rip its guts out and scatter them all over his table. People might have wondered what in the world he hoped to gain by it. Pop, especially, might have called it a fool’s errand.
They might also have commented on the fact that the last time someone attempted a complete disassembly of a dungeon core, the result had been a twenty-foot crater and an inability to identify the body except through necromancy.
He smiled to himself as he reached for his toolkit and plucked out the enchanted copper-frame glasses he’d built last week. Kulricstein, the aforementioned crater-maker, had been a chump. He’d been sloppy, ill-prepared, and impatient. Sam was none of those things, which was why he was going to succeed.
He had to succeed.
Because this was where everything started. Uncover the secrets of the cores, and all else would follow. All the way to the eventual destruction of every single dungeon in the world and the removal of the need for good men and women to spend their lives delving them just to prop up local economies.
It was his life’s goal. And it all began right here, at his ma’s kitchen table. Hopefully before she woke up and boxed his ears for getting grease all over her good tablecloth.
He settled the glasses onto his face and waited as the menus flickered to life and scrolled across the lenses. It had taken another two months’ salary and work to get the eye-wear up and running, but they would be invaluable in assessing and analyzing the components of the core. They also allowed him near-instant access to the menu system without needing to cast the display spells, and without the need to remain near-motionless while using them.
Even better, he’d baked a slew of identification spells into them that he could cast straight from the menu. That would make it far easier to examine the core, especially if he suddenly had to identify a piece while his hands were full and couldn’t perform the intricate finger motions necessary.
The core’s orichalcum shell, and the dozens of now-inert mana sigils etched into its silvery surface, would be of interest later when he was tracing power outputs and command structures. But right now the whole thing was just in the way. He quickly removed and placed the silvery metal on the wood floor beside the table.
No, his sights were set on the gem and the collector apparatus it powered. What methods did it use to connect to the essence of the world? How did it convert the raw stuff of creation into treasures and mobs and energy to power itself and the dungeon it controlled. All these and more he hoped to answer in the very near future.
Again, preferably without explosions.
And if nothing else he could recoup some of his investment later, maybe by letting Pop’s goblins melt it down for saw blades. Not the preferred option, of course, but one had to be pragmatic when pursuing a life’s goal.
He turned back to the remaining components and began a meticulous inventory, jotting everything down on the Notes tab of his glasses menu. Complex mana circuitry and more orichalcum made up the inner sections of the core, and were placed in a spherical configuration around the opal gem that was its power focus. The gem still glowed softly, reacting to the ambient essence in the air. Without looking he reached over and grabbed a long-nosed pair of insulated pliers and the thin-bladed snipper. This would be the tricky part.
He had to extract the gem and its setting from the innards of the orichalcum without allowing it to brush against the metal while it was drawing power. The very properties that made orichalcum such a perfect conductor for the torrential energies that flowed through a dungeon core also made it extremely volatile under certain situations.
Or to put it simply, he thought with a little smirk, touch the sides, die in a crater.
He went carefully, not noticing that his tongue was clamped lightly between his teeth as he concentrated. With a small expenditure of mana he activated the cutting head of the thin-snipper and used the glowing tip to slice away at the mana leads, and to cut away the inscribed runes and command sigils. With the pliers he gently peeled them away from the jungle of circuitry and sigil plates, placing them carefully on the tablecloth next to the suppressant orb.
It took another hour, and by the time he was done the light from the mana lamps in the kitchen had been supplanted by sunlight streaming in through the first-floor windows. Longer than he would have liked, but not bad under the circumstances. He paused for a moment and cocked his head, but heard nothing. His parents must still be asleep on the second floor of the little house they’d rented for the duration of Pop’s current construction project.
Good, he still had time.
Slowly, carefully, he pulled the gem and collector assembly from the center of the spherical mechanism. He held his breath and his hands as steady as a surgeon, and when the faceted edges of the opal cleared the last metal plate he let out a whooshing sigh that emptied him out all the way down to his toes.
Right. The hard part was over. Now for the really hard part. He glanced up from the gem and at the menu screens projected into his glasses. With nothing but eye movements, he swiped to his spell list and scrolled down until he found the identification suite he’d engraved into the glasses a week before, and he—
"Samuel James Tolliver," his mother's voice bellowed right into his left ear, "you had better not be taking apart your machines on my good tablecloth again!"
Sam nearly gave himself a hernia not jerking in surprise.
“Don’t do that, Ma,” he hissed between his teeth and gently set the assembly down onto the table. “This is very delicate work!”
“Very delicate work done on the kitchen table,” his mother said archly. “Young man, you may be all of nineteen years old but don’t think for a minute that I won’t still box your ears. And taking apart a core? You might have killed us all in our sleep.”
“Ma, it’s perfectly safe,” he said, barely moving his jaw as he bent closer to the gem. With the glasses enhancing the magnification up to almost a thousandfold, he could just barely make out the hairline shapes of sigils and runes on the gem itself. Hah! Karbunkle had been right! The essence must inscribe the mana runes directly into the gem matrices automatically, somehow. He felt giddy even as he tried to assuage his mother. “Nothing’s gonna happen, I promise.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that one before,” he heard the bemused disbelief in her voice. “And the suppressant orb is for decoration I suppose?”
Um. Sam blinked and glanced at the device. “Would you believe it’s to cool down my drink. Er, when I get one?”
“Not in this lifetime, son of mine,” said Ma.
Sam didn’t reply. He was too busy staring at what his glasses were showing him. There was circuitry on the gemstone too, by all the gods. He selected a setting in his menu, and the magical lenses highlighted the most complex spiderweb of mana circuitry he’d ever seen. It was too small for the human eye to detect on its own, and it was written all across the gemstone facets and--
Into the stone itself! Sa
No, not the wrong place. The wrong damn dimension!
“Gotcha,” Sam breathed, and the accumulated stress of the last three months slowly started to bleed out of him. He still had to test it, of course, and that web of circuitry was so dense he was going to have to invent new examination spells just to begin untangling it, but the theory was—
Whack!
Sam let out a yelp and ducked his head, dropping the tools and flailing his hands to fend off the spatula his mother had retrieved from a cabinet drawer and was now brandishing at him. The blow hadn’t hurt so much as startled when it landed on the top of his head. A notification message popped up in his glasses display; a pale blue text box with white borders and blocky white text that read:
You have been Mom-Whacked.
Status Effect Applied: Wrath Of Ma.
Duration: 60 Seconds
Effect: You are unable to speak and can hear only the Mom who Whacked you. Next time, maybe think about cleaning your room before things reach this point, hey?
This effect can only be neutralized by the mother’s decision, or by getting out of range of the mom. (Effective range: 100 feet x momlevel)
“Ma, what the hell?” Sam tried to say as he swiveled in his chair to glare at her. But no sound came out, and he wound up just opening and closing his mouth like a fish. He settled for lowering his brows and giving her a Look.
“That,” his mother said with a very self-satisfied smirk, “was for ignoring me. And for disobeying. Oh, and there was one more thing, what was it… Oh yes, almost blowing up the house and your entire family along with it. That was it.”
Sam scowled at his mother and stood from the chair. He called up another menu with a swipe of his hand—the glasses read hand movements just as easy as eye movements, he’d made sure to get that added in—and glared at the information it provided.
Quick Status:
Name: Samuel Tolliver
Race: Human
Subrace: None
Class: Son-Of-A-Boss
Subclass: None
Essence Level: 4
Health: 160/160
Mana: 23/23
Conditions:
— Mom-Whacked (42 seconds)
Sam rolled his eyes and waved away the text box. 42 seconds. Well, at least she’d used the lower-tier version of the ability. Last time he’d gotten it for almost ten minutes, and it had been excruciating.
Of course, he’d also been eleven at the time.
He’d just have to endure it. He was tempted for a moment to make a run for it, but his ma had been a high-level adventurer before she retired, and her ‘mom radius’ extended for roughly a mile in every direction. More, if she took the time to cast a buffing spell or two.
“Does your father know you’ve borrowed tools from the work site?” Ma asked, plucking the suppressant orb off the table and eying the toolkit.
Sam raised an eyebrow and made a meaningful gesture at his open mouth.
“Hmm? Oh,” Ma laughed and made a complex little motion with her fingers. Sam felt the effect flow out of his body, and heaved an audible sigh.
“There,” Ma said. “Now, did you take these from Jack’s work site? You know he gets grumpy when you do that.”
“I still can’t believe you spent all the essence it took to learn to do that,” Sam grumbled.
“Best six exchanges I ever spent,” Annie Tolliver grinned wide and waggled her spatula playfully at her son. “Now answer me my question or risk getting hit with it again, my son. Are these from your father’s work?”
“Just the suppressant orb,” Sam said, rubbing the top of his head. “The kit’s mine. Bought it a few weeks ago. Even Pop’s stuff isn’t good enough for this kind of work.”
“Isn’t it now?” That made his ma’s eyebrows climb her forehead. “And what kind of work are you doing that would need something even finer than what my Jack has in his supply huts? You’ve been mighty secretive these last few weeks, Sam.”
“Yeah, that was kind of on purpose,” Sam said, raising his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. “I figured Pop would blow a gasket if he knew.”
The smile on his mother’s face turned warm, and she reached out to ruffle his shaggy black hair.
“Your father loves you, my boy,” she said with a soft chuckle. “Or did you think he didn’t know you’re planning to put him out of business someday?”
Sam’s head jerked up and his eyes flew open wide. “He—what?”
“Sam Tolliver,” Annie Tolliver said with a motherly smile, “you are the brightest boy I have ever known, but you are your father’s son. He could never see what was right in front of him either until I taught him how.”
“You both knew?”
“Of course, Sam,” Ma said, and her voice softened. “We loved Marie too, you know.”
Sam sucked in a breath and waited for his heart to repair the crack that had just formed, then gave a quick nod.
“So we all had our own ways of dealing,” Ma continued. “And your father and I made sure we knew how you chose. And while he might whine a bit about how his own son wants to destroy the business that puts food on his table, we’re both proud of you for it.”
Sam closed his eyes and nodded. “Thanks Ma.”
“Now, can you tell me now what’s had you up late every night this past week?”
Sam drew in a deep breath and let it out, turning the glasses over in his hands.
“If I did it right,” he said slowly, almost afraid to speak it out loud, “The beginnings of a way to understand how the cores work.”
“Truly? And this knowledge was worth risking a mother’s wrath?”
“Was kinda hoping I’d be done before you woke up,” Sam admitted.
“It’s a good thing you’ve a better grasp of engineering than you do of time, my son, Otherwise we’d be in a crater right now.”
Sam turned the glasses over in his hands again. They were warm to the touch, and the lenses glowed softly.
“”And what have you there?” she asked, tilting her head. “I don’t remember you saying your eyes were going bad. Too much time squinting at those mana sigils of yours?”
“Huh? Oh,” Sam raised the glasses up so they caught the morning light. “No, these are just something I invented to help me study the cores. It’s a new way to interact with the menus. And I think maybe the system in general, actually, though that was just kinda a happy accident.”
Ma blinked. “Say that once more, but slow?”
“Okay look,” Sam stepped up and offered her the glasses. “You know how you can only summon up one menu at a time, and you can’t move when you have it up? Well, I figured out a way to hook these into multiple different menus at once. The trick is to project them onto a stationary surface.
“Well,” he paused and frowned thoughtfully. “Okay, the trick was figuring out a way for like twelve different skills and spells to work together in one enchanted item without it blowing up, melting down, or getting confiscated by the gnomes. But the other trick was to project the menus onto a stationary surface.”
His ma took the glasses with a strange look in her eyes and slipped them on. The heavy copper frames suited her broad features, he thought. He’d considered trying for something a bit more fashionable, but really he needed the thicker frames for all the mana engraving it had taken to get them working.
What his ma would be seeing now was the main status screen, with her health and mana bars up at the top-right of the display and any status effects immediately below those. Along the bottom were the quick-access slots, all of them empty for the moment because he’d not assigned anything to the extra-dimensional spaces they represented.
And right next to them were the hot-buttons that he could assign spells and skills into if and when they were learned by the wearer.
He was especially proud of those. Technically no one without six tiers in the Inner Strength skill should have access to those, but he’d discovered a loophole; if you engraved the correct sigils and circuitry into the frames, then had someone who possessed the skill wear the glasses and access the quick-slots, the glasses would remember the action and allow anyone afterwards access to their very own inter-dimensional storage spaces and instant-cast spells.
