Chapter 59: Impressions (Patreon)

Aby had just finished taking stock of its halls once more, already long used to this part of its routine. It had just sensed the first party of many that day cast an unseen shadow into its entrance, exactly on time, and for the most part it spread around its awareness to better manage its many halls. That’s when it noticed its drake, who managed to spend over an entire day sleeping on its hoard, finally begin to stir.

The core was equal parts relieved and frustrated at the slowly awakening reptile, but above all else, it was excited. Something about him looked, and more importantly felt distinctly different, and as it gave a might stretch, and let loose a yawn that could only be described as booming. The drake had gone through some minor changes physically, he was nearly half a meter longer and absolutely more muscular, and the earthen crystals embedded in his jaws and skull seemed to be growing with him, now beginning to obstruct the vision in his left eye with their presence, and threatening to impede his ability to close his mouth at all if the growth continued unabated.

Unfortunately, Aby had no means to correct the poor drake’s deformity, and the beast himself didn’t seem to have any issues with this in the first place, though he could simply be ignoring even the possibility of removing the gems in fear of the pain it brings. Either way, for all the impediments his crystals threatened to bring, he seemed positively brimming with power, and more importantly, eager to put it to use.

Aby couldn’t help but be eager to see what he could do now, and held out hope that one of the groups of invaders could beat the odds and make it to the twelfth floor so that it could test out the drake’s new potential. Until then, though, it recalled the small band of kobolds and the drake kin it had stationed to act as guards, and they wasted no time fleeing from their newly awakened kin.

The roar that echoed throughout the twelfth floor, even bleeding into the surrounding floors, promised the return of a menace that many of the other creatures had foolishly hoped to be gone. It also meant that Aby had no more business watching the beast, and it left the reptile to rampage.

The gemstone continued to passively examine its halls after that, and while most of its attention was focused on organizing its various creatures and keeping track of the growing number of invaders, it still had to make sure the rest of its floors were running smoothly. More importantly, it needed to keep tabs on some of the more unique and free spirited inhabitants of its domain, and on the floors they had claimed for themselves.

One such level was the fifteenth floor, over the past day or so Aby had seen the omnipresent crimson begin to give way to a deep blue in one specific section. Most of the lesser creatures of the floor, from jellies, to fish and seahorses, and even a few coral, had started congregating around the flagship in the outer reaches of the floor. It had carved a corner for itself in the scarlet arena, and the very floor itself had started to reflect its expansion.

For his part, the wyvern seemed uninterested in the flagship’s growing navy, though he had taken to attacking anything blue that strayed too close to his spirit coral. Something about the piercing azure that the victims of that fleshy lump of tentacles took on upset him deeply, and he had no desire to see his precious spirit coral corrupted like that. That said, he was still the undisputed tyrant of the fifteenth, and of any other floor he decided to go to. 

However, this very tyrant didn’t seem all that interested in travelling, instead curled up on the rocky perch of his spirit coral, napping contentedly. The past few days had seen him shift from a restless terror to the exact opposite, and more and more of his time had started to be taken up by huddling against his favorite coral, where the water was far beyond boiling point, and sleeping. Aby wasn’t sure what made him so tired, and couldn’t help but examine the creature’s body once more, in the futile hope that maybe it could find some hidden injury or similar development.

After finding nothing of the sort, Aby had to give up, hoping that whatever was wrong would resolve itself like it had with the drake, and it turned its attention to the last of its trio of reptilian overlords. And unlike the two draconic beasts she’s grouped with, the wyrm was neither cripplingly lazy nor single-mindedly aggressive. Instead, she found a hobby, something for her to do when she wasn’t taking care of any invaders who found themselves in her presence.

Granted, it was a bit generous calling the wyrm’s budding campaign to wipe out everything on the thirteenth floor that wasn’t a snake a hobby, but to Aby, it was much more productive than mindlessly rampaging or constantly napping, so it was proud of her all the same.

She, too, had experienced some changes beyond her newfound goal of total cephalopod subjugation. She still continued to grow at an alarming rate, and was now nearly sixteen meters from head to tail, and the inky black markings that were painted across her otherwise deep blue scales had grown more complex. Her hood was almost always flared now, and the spines that lined the edges had only become more ornate, looking like a proper, if oversized, crown adorning the royal serpent.

The wyrm was every bit the monarch she appeared to be, at least as far as Aby could tell. All of the gemstone’s ‘acquired’ memories that involved something with a crown pointed to its wyrm being a proper ruler. She didn’t acknowledge any of her subjects beyond domineering orders, had a temper shorter than her smallest serpents at anything not of her own kind, and was equipped with a rabid desire to do nothing on her own unless absolutely necessary. Everything was in-line with Aby’s knowledge of royalty, and as she was a Royal Serpent, the two were probably similar enough to be equivalent.

The comparison wasn’t quite as on-the-nose with Aby’s newest interest, the Royal Rifle Shrimp. Despite looking the part, if a bit small, the shrimp was very different to the wyrm. Domineering and aggressive, sure, but the shelled menace simply seemed much less imperial than the wyrm, at least compared to Aby’s admittedly lacking knowledge of the outside world. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t a certain feeling in the way the young crustacean carried himself, as even some of the more testy creatures in the dungeon gave the shrimp a wide berth. 

It also wasn’t lacking in the leadership department, as the shiny thing could mobilize dozens, hundreds of its lesser kin should it so desire, and even rally some of the more docile groups of fish patrolling the floors. He had only done so once in the short amount of time Aby had been observing, and only because some smaller invaders felt that they had free reign to excavate the tunnels that Aby has for its creatures. Even worse, they chose one that lead almost directly to the hive itself. 

Watching hundreds of crustaceans converge through a group of seven tunnels throughout the floor, only to meet and surround the strange serpentine humanoids was truly mesmerizing to watch, and the shrimp’s influence only seemed to snowball before the ‘encounter’, leading to more than a few reinforcements, from the odd groupers and their packs, to a few serpents not yet under the dominion of the wyrm.

The only thing Aby could really say about the spectacle was that it was disappointing at first, the amount of bodies flinging themselves at the invaders made everything trivial, and by the time the more curious, or frantic, invaders made it to the source of the commotion they’d no doubt heard throughout Aby’s walls, there was nothing but a recovering patch of corals and crystals.

Still, as anticlimactic as the so-called battle turned out to be, it was a valuable insight into the new creature’s capabilities. Though the creatures showed almost single-minded cohesion during the event, they just as quickly disbanded once their king saw that the threat was anything but. The fish swam back through their tunnels, formed back into shoals, and almost arbitrarily decided on following one big fish or another, all while the shrimp collapsed back into a mostly competitive mess inside the hive, though there was a deep respect, bordering on fear or awe, for their ruler even when he slept.

Even Aby Felt a bit better about the shrimp after that, mostly because his own means of disabling intruders was leagues more successful in the core’s mind. The rifle shrimp were debilitating, but seemed to be mostly useless against anyone wearing a simple bit of protection over their ears. Their king may not be as loud, but nobody seemed to have any of their ear protectors that worked on their eyes. Aby made sure to test, too, and found that the flash left any victims blind for quite some time, if it wasn’t totally permanent.

Only a small few managed to make it out of the gem’s newly made ‘arena’ for the shrimp, and almost none did so legitimately, much to Aby’s frustration. Those that didn’t cheat their way out of the core’s clutches usually fell not too long afterwards to a random group of snakes, a goliath grouper or two and their lackeys, or if they still presented some problems, a band of kobolds.

That was another thing Aby noticed, the kobold tribe was growing rapidly. Not only had the first clutch of kobold eggs practically fully matured by then, another clutch had been laid, developing just as readily. The drake-kin clutch was lagging behind by then, and while the kobolds in that group seemed nearly ready to hatch, Aby had still yet to be presented any prompt for the drake-kin themselves. The core was growing a bit frustrated with the lack of progress, since it felt a bit cheated at needing to wait so long already, but it figured that it’d be worth the wait. 

The mature drake-kin helped solidify that opinion for Aby, proving to be far more effective in physical confrontation than any of his tribesmen, apart from the chief herself. Even the former shaman couldn’t showcase that sort of physical superiority, though she still managed to be a better combatant overall. Water being spontaneously boiled, manipulated to scald anything she desires, or obscure vision with steam was incredibly useful, Aby found. The core wished the wyvern could figure out how to do the same, but that wasn’t too large a concern, given just how aggressively superior to the tribesmen in nearly every other aspect he is.

The core gave one last quick glance at the kobolds still in the tribe, deciding there wasn’t really anything more to check out when the kelpie practically collapsed in on himself to follow his rider. Aby still had a morbid fascination with the strange beast, even all this time later. Something about him was oddly interesting, he felt wildly different than the vast majority of the core’s creations and it made it easy to spend a few moments longer watching as his chest distorted and limbs deformed to crawl through a gap in one of the smaller tunnels.

Unfortunately, much as Aby wanted to watch the duo dispatch a disoriented group on the third floor, something else drew its attention. Rather, something wandered inside, and practically demanded its attention through sheer presence. This was unusual in itself, nothing before had ever gotten such a reaction from Aby, not since its very first coral had dropped into Aby just after it opened its rather pitiful entrance.

Even then, something felt very different this time around. The coral simply lingered for a short while before it ‘died’, something that Aby felt was pretty much randomly chosen since there had been no indication that the cluster of soft coral had been alive beforehand nor that anything had changed to make it die. This time, there was no loitering, and Aby was fairly certain there would be no arbitrarily decided death for the invader.

Something instinctual inside of Aby was screaming as the core rapidly examined this newcomer, practically yelling and clawing and demanding that the core do something, and do it immediately. Something about the diminutive newcomer was dangerous, and Aby was concerned, especially when everything about the tiny thing seemed utterly harmless. The core immediately began rallying its creations en masse, something it hadn’t done in a very long time, and never on the same scale, while the invader began to paddle forward until his feet touched something solid.