Blue Core, page 44
part #1 of Blue Core Series
"Sure," I said, though just from the sound of it things were bad. It didn’t take me long to find the man, since he was on the same level, also in bed. His troubles were more severe than Shayma’s.
Yamal Gen
[DEPLETED]
That was the entirety of his stat block I could see. No Class, no Skills, no level or even stats. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t, this time, a failure of the overlay or whatever. No, the status meant that he’d been cut off from all that stuff completely. It’d all been consumed. Even if Purifying worked on men, which I did not want to test at all, it wouldn’t work when there was nothing left there to fix. That wasn’t even a probably; with my new clarity of mind I could feel [Tempered Wisdom] at work once again. To cap it all off, the Primal gem I’d given him had crumbled, lining his pocket with dust. That last seemed the most final.
"It...doesn’t look good, Shayma. It seems like his entire Class got ripped out of him. I’m not sure what happened to all the mana but honestly I’m surprised he’s still alive."
"Isn’t there anything you can do to help?" Shayma knew best of anyone what she was asking, and was really the only person who could ask me. "We went back to get him after the fight and he was just out and his sword was gone."
"I’m afraid not. So far as I can tell there’s nothing there to Purify. I have a few vague ideas how the process works and he doesn’t have any Class or even any of his own mana anymore for the Skill to work."
Shayma nodded glumly. "I was afraid of that."
Ruilin by now had managed to break through the various people hovering around Iniri and deliver the message. It seemed to me Iniri was glad to hear the news, or was at least grateful for the interruption, excusing herself and bounding up the steps with Ruilin laboring behind.
She burst into Shayma’s room and stared around her, as if she was trying to catch my nonexistent eye. "What in the Abyss happened?" She demanded.
Ah. She hadn’t been hurrying because she was happy, but because she was angry. Well, I was a little pissed myself, but since Shayma was the only one who could hear me I refrained from yelling. "You can tell her the dungeon here was half again my level. I did win but it wrecked me pretty bad."
Shayma dutifully repeated that and Iniri deflated somewhat. "...it was a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated. I thought with just one city and no army...and it’s not like he was even competent."
"Yeah it was pretty rough. I’m going to be spending the next, oh, week repairing everything."
"What about Yas?" Iniri asked, before Shayma could even convey my comment.
"Blue says...there’s nothing left there to purify. His whole Class and mana are gone."
Iniri growled wordlessly, pacing in the small room. "Isn’t here anything he can do?"
"I’m afraid not. I am trying to understand Purification more, so maybe there will be something in the future, but at the moment no."
"This is not the victory I was hoping for," Iniri sighed, sitting down on the bed next to Shayma. "We definitely can’t go against Tor Kot without the Adamant Fortress. Assuming even that is enough. It’s not like any of us have seen it before."
Shayma made a motion to put an arm around Iniri, before wincing and stopping. "Well we only have one cube left. Um, assuming that the fourth one was still here in Meil. Blue?"
"Uhh let me check."
I had to cast around in the inventory for a while, which was now absurdly huge thanks to Meil, but eventually I did locate all four cubes. I dropped them onto the nearby desk, interrupting Shayma and Iniri’s conversation with the sound.
"Well, that’s one thing gone right, at least." Iniri patted Shayma’s shoulder, gingerly, then stood up to run her fingers over the cubes. "Though I guess one less mage-king in the world is its own reward."
"Could you tell Iniri that I want to actually have a meeting thing with you and her and Ansae...err, maybe tonight. It’s going to depend on how long it takes to get things working again. I’ve got a lot of sorting and cleaning to do."
I was weighing discussing the trait options with those three too. I mean, it was my Status, but we had common cause for the immediate or maybe even long-term future. They might have some insight I was lacking. Then again, they might not, since I was a dungeon and my Status and the whole way everything worked was different.
"Oh, so I finally get to meet this mysterious other resident of Blue’s." Iniri smiled without much joy. "That should be interesting. So far as getting things working again...half of my petitioners want me to make you fix things and the other half want me to kick you out of Meil. They don’t understand the realities of the situation, but if you could give me any sort of answer to any of that, it’d make my life a lot easier."
"I can do both. I don’t want to keep Meil anyway." I had to figure out what to do with the second core. Put it inside another core defense setup, clearly, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure. "I’d fix all the damage I did myself anyway, but cleaning up the whole city isn’t going to be completely free." Sure, it would be possible and maybe even easy once the rest of my infrastructure got repaired, but it would set a bad precedent to work miracles just because someone wanted me to.
"I wouldn’t expect it to be," Iniri said dryly. "Favors from Powers are dangerous things. What would you want?"
Right. It took me a minute to come up with something, actually. If I wanted gold, Ansae was a better source. Plus I had enough of it at the moment. Other raw materials I wasn’t sure about, since I didn’t know what exactly...ah. Perfect. "I’d like a loan of crafters. Ones who can make Affinity equipment and the like. I’ll be supplying some of the materials but I’ll need cloth and leather."
The Status sigil had been a bust, but maybe if I saw how other sorts of things were made I could duplicate it myself. Or if nothing else, I could get them to make new equipment for Shayma. Cloth producing plants I could grow, but I didn’t have anything that would process them, so maybe I could get inspiration for that. Leather was more of a problem, since Digesters and Maws just converted things to Biomass and leather was somewhat involved in its production, but there might be a chance. I’d have to buy herd animals anyway, if I wanted to be sufficient enough for Shayma and her gang.
Actually one thing I hadn’t done was try and shove any animal corpses into my metallurgical devices or storage crystals. I didn’t see why that’d work but I’d gotten some Skills and other unlocks from attempting things before, whether or not they made much sense, so it was worth a shot.
"That’s surprisingly reasonable," Iniri said, looking fairly relieved. "I haven’t forgotten about the payment for the farms, either, but we’re still working on finding the bits of the treasury here that weren’t plundered."
"I’ve waited this long, another few days or weeks won’t matter."
"At least I can go give some good news to people. They’re less thankful to be freed from Vok Nal than you’d think." She snorted. "Some of them anyway. Those who didn’t have family fed to the dungeon here."
"So long as they don’t think I’m the same way." I wasn’t sure if any of the survivors of Meil would be able to do me any harm but I really didn’t want to deal with people trying to take revenge against me for something Vok Nal did.
"Yes, I’ve made it clear that you’re different but I will make it extra clear that if they bother you, they don’t get their property restored." Iniri stepped over to Shayma and gave her a very careful hug. "I suppose I should get back to it. Keep me posted if Blue has any more issues, hmm?"
"So long as he tells me about them," Shayma said with a smile.
"And stay in bed! [Regeneration] or not, healing takes a lot out of you."
"I’d say I’d get Keri over here but...she’s completely tapped out on stamina and mana and it’s going to be a while until I can do teleports anyway." I wasn’t used to having such paltry resources.
"I’ll be fine," Shayma insisted, both to Iniri and to me. Iniri left, and Shayma dutifully reclined on the bed again, carefully laying her arms down.
"So, I seriously do not remember anything from basically right before the attack to right before I contacted you. I missed the whole fight. Think you could fill me in while I work?"
"Sure, though mostly I just watched until the very end." While Shayma related the trials and travails of dealing with Vok Nal, I continued combing through the various broken bits inside me. Apparently whatever the dungeon instincts were up to while I was out weren’t limited to just fighting the Meil dungeon.
My boring beetles had dug a number of haphazard tunnels down from my main body, long wandering things that dead-ended in moderately-sized spherical chambers, all empty. At least, that was what I assumed before I remembered my boring beetles were all over near Meil, and a second look showed that these weird tunnels were not made by anything of mine.
It was an infestation.
Armored Tunnel Crawler
Level 33
Armored Tunnel Crawler
Level 34
…
Armored Tunnel Crawler
Level 32
I’d more or less forgotten about the tunnels beneath Ansae’s old lair, having closed them up and focused more on the mountain above, but they hadn’t gone away in the meantime. Even if I’d put up walls the tunnels still went somewhere. I had seen before that creatures were attracted to my mana, as it could still be felt even if it was invisible to most people’s [Mana Sight], and I had the feeling there was a lot of stuff down there. Ansae probably kept it trimmed back before, between eating all the mana and eating whatever bothered her, but now that she was ensconced inside the dungeon things were coming up.
These looked like my boring beetles, only larger. They were armored, of course, as the description said, cattle-sized things that were steadily chewing away at my stone underpinnings. There were fifteen of them, though that count was loose since some were trundling in and out of my limit of perception, heading out and down the tunnel network.
Unfortunately I was low on resources to deal with it. No mana, very little stone or metal...but I did have lava. Some of it had cooled, where the red chrystheniums had died, but I still had the stuff in my resource pool, so it wasn’t too hard to form a spigot and flood the chambers.
Well, flood was a relative term. It was molten rock, so it didn’t move very fast, and I didn’t have anywhere near enough to fill everything all the way to the brim, but it’d be enough to discourage the crawlers. Or so I thought.
Instead the damn things thrived off the lava. Several scurried close to the glowing front and apparently ate the heat from it, hardening it in a matter of seconds before starting to crunch down on the solidified rock. Even as I watched, three more Tunnelers wandered into my range of vision from the deeper tunnels.
Clearly I needed to work on my defenses again. Again. Surely there was something I could do using a more advanced knowledge of physics and mechanics than I’d used so far. Unfortunately, I didn’t know many details about a lot of useful weapons, and for those I did know the details of, I didn’t have the ability to make high-powered Fields or synthesize chemicals. I’d have to work within the system I had.
Ultimately I didn’t have much that I could do at the moment though, so I sealed everything off with ice, and that seemed to work, at least for the time being. I was glad that my problems right now were of the unintelligent variety, because if they’d been smart and hell-bent on causing me trouble, I’d have to rely on the remaining Classers or beg Ansae for help.
It’d hold for a while, so I went to check on other things. For some reason all my copper had been stuffed into the crucible and my magicite ore was in the infusion crystal, waiting for some metal. The latter was actually an interesting idea, but I wouldn’t want to use all the resources I had for it.
For whatever reason, and I was thankful for it, the dungeon-self hadn’t touched any of the habitation spaces, but there were a lot of little things in the experimental areas and the lava- and ice- portions. Various traps blocking off sections, the beginnings of a labyrinth in one of the icy places, and chunks had been taken out of the platforms strung over the lava so people could harvest the fire Affinity plants. It was like walking into your house to find someone else had been doing renovations, and it was really creepy.
That sense of unease was not helped by Shayma’s tale, which was far too close for comfort. "Jeez. If I hadn’t made that ring…"
"Or you hadn’t been able to Purify Iniri. Or...really, we were lucky. I thought we were over-prepared with three fourth-tiers and everything, but if Vok Nal actually knew how to fight…"
"Yeahhhh, let’s not do that again." From the sound of it the mage-kings were powerful enough to breeze right through anything I could put up to defend myself. It made me wonder why they didn’t conquer more, actually. The only thing I could think of was that they needed to be in or at least near the dungeon territory to take advantage of that sheer amount of power. "I’m surprised it was that easy for Iniri to chop off his head though. I guess even fourth-tiers would die from that…"
"Probably not, actually," Shayma disagreed. "Liril was surprised too. That was just basic control of light Affinity mana, which wouldn’t do much to a fourth-tier. I guess without his dungeon boost he was just...I don’t know, first tier?"
"And where is - oh." His head was actually on a pike, out in front of the manor Iniri had claimed. Well, a big metal pole anyway, and it was a huge head. Death had done him no favors, but if he looked like that in life he had been very unfortunate. "...has anyone else ever killed a mage-king?"
"Not that I know of."
"Well, even if it was by the skin of our teeth...good job us." It came out a lot less enthusiastic than I intended.
Shayma giggled. "That’s the spirit."
Day 115 - Ansae
It would be a stretch to say Ansae had been scared, but she had certainly been concerned. Watching Blue’s various constructs fall apart one after the other was a lot like watching someone die, but since none of the mana that traced his actual body ever collapsed the straits weren’t too dire.
On the other paw it was fascinating to see dungeon-to-dungeon combat. She hadn’t known it was even something that happened and she wasn’t sure how Meil’s dungeon could infiltrate back this far, but it had. Little jabs of foreign mana manifested to disrupt Blue’s most complex constructs, or attached themselves to bits and pieces and slowly ate away at them.
She completely severed the connections to her lair once one of the probes tried to touch her cottage. Less to protect it than to keep any hint of a Red Core dungeon well away from her. That severed Blue’s connection too, but he would have to cope. Soon after that the mana flows inside her lair collapsed and the lights went out, but so long as everything else stayed intact that was fine.
If any of the foreign mana had shown a hint of being able to reach Blue’s actual core she would have ripped it out and taken it away, Blue’s wishes be damned. It was a wide world and she knew there were plenty of places to hide and recover that weren’t in striking distance of the mage-kings. Of course she thought this was such a place but that had been centuries ago.
What was really irritating was that she didn’t dare protect Blue directly. The foreign mana might well carry Depletion with it, and to put her own constructs in the way would be the same as disconnecting Blue from the front. She could only keep a close eye on things and be ready to act.
Eventually the counterattack stopped, but Blue stayed slow and sluggish and a little strange, showing none of the crisp command of dungeon biology or oddly sloppy mana control she was used to. The lights didn’t come back on, the mana dynamos didn’t get repaired, and what small bits of mana movement she did spot didn’t make sense. He did repair the severed mana link, but it was a sluggish and uncharacteristically tidy patch job and was left alone thereafter.
When the lights finally did come back on, it took her by surprise and she was perhaps less complimentary than she should have been, but at least Blue was back. Which meant that a mage-king was dead. Just a drop in the bucket as far as she was concerned, but a good start.
It annoyed her that she could merely watch on the sidelines, because she was the Silver Woe and by all the gods she had some woe to bring to them. Alas, she was not yet fit to contend with the world. But, she consoled herself, she would be soon. In years, not centuries, if Blue survived.
Speaking of which, she had more to do dissecting the Red Core fragment Blue had provided. It was the first time she’d seen any dungeon core close up, and it was a fascinating piece of magic. Or more specifically, it was an Artifact, for nothing else had that close interlinking of matter and mana. That wasn’t a surprise since the first Great Dungeons were, at least in legend, the direct creations of the gods. Blue and the Red Cores clearly weren’t. She wasn’t much of a god-botherer but she’d happily gut anyone who thought otherwise for blasphemy.
The fact that the Core fragment was an Artifact accorded with the fact that every single dungeon she knew of other than Blue was under someone’s control. Artifacts were things. Tools. Each had a purpose but none had a will. Unfortunately that helped not at all with understanding Blue, because it only made him more impossible.
The fragments she had were the same all way through. Complex, yes, beyond her ability to understand how they worked, but definitely the same, precise and rigid. Not only was it not in the nature of Artifacts to be thinking beings, Power or not, but if Blue’s Core was anything like these than he shouldn’t be so bad at controlling mana. He shouldn’t be capable.
He wasn’t likely to make jokes, either. Even bad ones. Especially bad ones. Then there was the way he let Shayma run around without any sort of leash, which would be inimical to something as strictly and finely tuned as the crystals she saw. It was a complete puzzle, which put her in quite a fine mood. The mysteries surrounding Blue seemed to never quite go away.
It seemed unlikely he was created a Dungeon Core. He’d phrased things in certain odd ways that made her think he was not simply a three-month-old dungeon. Shayma hadn’t seemed to notice, but the girl wasn’t stupid so either she was letting Blue keep his secrets or he didn’t want her to know. Given her species description, if Blue preferred Shayma not realize, she wouldn’t even if it were spelled out to her.
