Chapter 84: Getting Newly Reacquainted, Part 1 (Patreon)

Hi guys, I should've had this out ages ago and I'm sorry I didn't. Part 2 should be a lot less delayed, I'll probably get it done sometime this weekend.

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Once the core finally set its mind to reviewing all that happened since its final moments of consciousness after the confrontation, it swiftly realized that it had a lot to go over. It might have had plenty of time during its slumber to review its own memories or the thoughts that it knew it had pillaged, but there was some severe sluggishness when trying to look at anything that had happened in the moments following the shattering and dispersal of the enemy core.

That was still there, but as Aby’s prodigious mind finally woke up in earnest, it was able to brute force the search through its own memories, odd as it was to need to. It started from the very beginning, the moment that the younger core’s exterior shattered, marking its death. It remembered Vol’s congratulations, the awarding of a Feat, and the System bestowing something new to the dungeon, but it took a moment to find what it had earned.

• Congratulations! For successfully slaying a foreign Dungeon Core for the first time, you have earned the Feat “Usurper”
• As you have personally slain the Core, you are awarded the following:
• All (1) Templates unlocked by the slain Core
• All stored knowledge within the slain Core

This was the last it could dredge up clearly, and now that it was able to review it, it realized the rewards were a mite lackluster, for all the trouble it had gone through getting them. Still, the core wouldn’t question what Vol saw fit to reward it and any acknowledgement was better than none at all. Digging a little further, it found some information that had been denied it earlier.

• You can now spawn “Slime”

And indeed, it knew exactly the template, little nugget of knowledge and instruction and pure instinct, where a flex of will would weave the simple creature into existence. With Aby’s newfound ‘scientific’ mindset, it did exactly that, and a small lightshow heralded the birth of a tiny gelatinous mass on the sands of the twelfth floor.

The slime was as many, many fallen invaders remembered: a deformed ball of translucent, viscous fluid contained in a sticky permeable membrane, with a solid lump of similar looking material suspended loosely in the center. Aby had cleared the area of any larger creatures, letting the more mindless residents interact with the slime to observe. Right away, the core was acutely aware of how unintelligent the jelly-thing was.

It wasn’t entirely surprising, the creature had no nervous system to speak of and the soul that did form in the gel’s core was small, weak, and not incredibly capable of controlling the rest of the body with anything approaching dexterity. What was surprising was the fact that it wasn’t an animal, plant, fungus, or similar to anything else the core could spawn or was knowledgeable of. It was odd, being so markedly different to the rest of its creatures and from what it could tell without more experimenting, the thing just sort of worked, sponging up nutrition and mana from the environment and slowly growing.

It would need to pick that apart more thoroughly, and was already dedicating a portion of its mind to doing so. A few more orbular things tumbled onto the sand, and Aby watched them go. The first was already changing color, ringing around the core with a faint teal and a skin slightly yellowing, but otherwise it was unremarkable. Another one slopped itself over a small hermit crab, then slid it through its skin slowly, before trying to drown or dissolve it in the lightly caustic solution.

However, the most enlightening event- and the one making Aby glad it hadn’t chanced into slimes the first time- was when a handful of them found their way to some puddles in the floor, and went into them. Without fail, each one of them bloated startlingly rapidly, turning a myriad different shades of blue before some minor perforation on their outside formed or widened or something, and all of their viscous viscera would spill out in a moment. Unusually, some of the slime or even skin would occasionally be left behind in far greater amounts than blood from other deceased, but the cores were always dissolved.

Still, Aby found itself quickly moving towards writing off the creatures just based on the fact that they were nearly useless considering that most all of its domain would result in their death. It would spawn a small bunch more on the eleventh, twelfth, and eighteenth floors, to see how they fared on the sands or in the mangals, explicitly banning them from committing suicide in a way it hadn’t needed to do before, and then would see if they could prove to be interesting, or if they’d just be another novelty template that simply wouldn’t see use.

Moving on from the absolutely tepid prizes earned from the infant core that dared enter its domain, Aby finally decided it was time to look around at what had changed from its own actions. It remembered grabbing hold and shifting more mana than it had ever even attempted to do so to before. It remembered feeling its own soul strain and tremble and even start to tear as the mana got closer and closer to the invader before his death. It remembered hearing tinny, crystalline popping echoing within its own core room at the very last second, feeling physical pain and terror mixing with the rage and-

And it wouldn’t think any further on that, perhaps it was for the best that some of those memories weren’t immediately and easily available, and it would avoid dredging up anything more for some time. It gave the gemstone that was its body a very thorough examination, though, more than a little disconcerted by the last seconds of memory there, and was relieved to find that, if anything had happened to it, it had either healed or been too small to be observable, and the latter was very difficult indeed with the core’s sight.

It would go to great lengths to bury the noises it remembered deep in its mind somewhere, and it began working on that as it once more returned to the tenth floor, taking stock of the rather drastic alterations it had inadvertently caused. There was no longer the serene, almost otherworldly grace to the floor, and instead it seemed almost like it had been recreated through a faulty, pessimistic lens.

Slush sloughed off the now-staggered icy coral, and plumes of crystalline matter would grow upwards, only to chunk and flake apart and rise to the surface. The white of the walls was now a dull pale-blue, the floor was a dirty light grey, and there was a garish patchwork along one side where everything seemed sickly and lightly rotten on the edges. Most of the white was no longer natural color, instead being bleached coral hanging on to life through means Aby couldn’t yet tell, especially when healing the stuff resulted in no real change.

It wasn’t all bad, though, because while the scenery had been altered in what many would call a bad way, Aby couldn’t find a reason to think the fauna suffered the same fate. Again, soft whites and greys and blues had been hardened and sharpened, becoming matte or glossy, but they had their own beauty to them. There were even some sudden, unprompted natural evolutions that Aby got to review.

Some of the icicle barracudas, for example, had become Thawed Jaw Barracudas, deeply influenced by the massive influx of water mana. They looked much the same, save for being even harder to spot by virtue of them seeming to almost melt right into the water, but they were so loaded with water mana that even swimming at a languid pace could nearly match one of their former kin moving at full-tilt.

The snapper, likewise, had some improvements. Snowflake snapper became Slush Scaled Snapper, and a small handful became Hail Scaled Snapper. Oddly, the latter seemed a bit less capable offensively than the rest, with their bodies being nearly encased in a crush of icy scales. They were blunt, large, and not fine enough to shred like the mustard scaled snappers, nor were they properly magical like the slush and snowflake to stick and freeze and ruin. They seemed more like obstacles than anything, but some variation was always welcome and they were at least much more suited to the environment there than slimes.

The slushes were much more exciting, seemingly capable of everything that the snowflake snappers could do but a degree better. They looked like snapper, unsurprisingly, but each of their scales was puffy and swollen, ending up sagging and drooping downwards. They were slower than their kin, but those scales were so magically dense that anything they touched would be pumped full of immense amounts of water mana, then flash frozen. The unlucky victims seemed waterlogged and shattered at once.

Similar themes were apparent in all of the creatures pushed to adapt to the overwhelming mana density even for a brief moment, and Aby realized that if the density of mana increased as it had been as it grew, such spontaneous evolutions could one day become the norm, a day the core looked forward to eagerly. It gave the tenth floor a few more examinations, then gave a quick acknowledgement to Arctuross and the knucker for their roles in defending the core from the last invasion. Or at least, the last invasion it was aware of.

Down a floor, it was once more struck by the remarkably new appearance of the eleventh, a little bit shocked by how radically the heavy-handed approach to killing the foreign core via mana intrusion had impacted everything in around the area Aby had forced all that mana to. Structurally, the tangled mess of halls that made up the floor were nearly identical; the stone was smoother than it had remembered it being and it wasn’t really porous like limestone normally would be anymore, but most of the rock took on different textures when reinforced with mana, just not this much, typically.

What certainly wasn’t familiar was the new sand, a rich blue quilt of sediment that covered the entire floor and even started to spill over into the twelfth and eighteenth floors, spreading and getting everywhere as sand was wont to do. Aby knew both instinctually and from stolen knowledge that the sand was something odd, a mundane material so saturated with mana that it was inherently magical itself.

Wet sand, Aby took to calling it, because it behaved as water did sometimes. Walking across it was like trudging through mud, and sprinting made it act like water. Things trying to dig through were having a difficult time, and plenty of crabs and other invertebrates, as well as the odd stingray, were stock-still, completely surrounded on all sides by the blue stuff that simply refused to budge and allow them motion. Meanwhile, anything digging too fast would just zip along then spin out, endlessly amusing to the kobolds while they were on their own endless hunts.

Kobolds were yet another thing having gotten a rather radical rework after Aby’s tantrum, with changes for better and for worse- especially the hatchlings. Former hatchlings, rather. Kobolds already grew rather fast naturally, and as dungeon creatures they had a boon to maturation on top of that. Aby had been asleep for no more than four days, the kobolds themselves only hatched maybe a week before then, and already they were adolescents, not that Aby or their parents would say that they were robbed of much childhood.

Already, they were joining their parents on excursions, mostly the tentative exploratory ones they were making to reacquaint themselves with their own home without expecting much in the way of difficulty. Most of them fell smoothly in with their elders, learning tactics and strategies that they couldn’t practically use until the next invaders arrived, an event long overdue now, and one Aby wouldn’t mind lasting indefinitely.

There were a few that were standing out, however. A young kobold already fluid enough at magic to rival the tribe’s shaman in ease of use, if not yet raw power. He was green and mottled blue, colored just right to look like a patch of algae on the deep blue walls and floor of the layer, but it was an advantage he would hopefully not rely too heavily on if he ever ventured out.

The other noteworthy change was in a young drake kin, all of whom were less physically developed than the rest of their ilk but in this one it was striking. She was sandy yellow, same as her brethren, but she had criss-cross striping in blue. Those markings were cracked and brittle, looking like very dried skin and scale, torn open and weeping water and blue blood. The core had already given everything in the dungeon a cursory healing before having to focus so much on the wyvern, but it seemed not to be enough for the terrified child and the core tried healing her again.

It didn’t work, even as the core pumped more and more mana into her, they remained like lacerations that the rest of the tribe had long since given up on closing. They oozed briny water, far in excess of what the reptilian should have been able to produce but from what it could tell she just hadn’t stopped for as long as this condition had been present. The core could feel her terror ebbing away into grim acceptance, reluctant acknowledgement that whatever it was the core had done she’d be stuck with possibly forever now, just as it had felt the same come from the drake and was dreading to feel from the wyvern, but it would never consider unravelling them, taking their souls apart to spare them its own mistakes, not unless they just gave up themselves.

But the drake had not given up, nor had the drake-kin, and Aby would bet everything that the wyvern wouldn’t either. So Aby would fight with them, and make sure to give them all the best chance at thriving as its instincts demanded of all its creations. It turned its mind one floor deeper, the twelfth, and was ready to review how the drake was doing after his own exposure to the influx of mana, it had a feeling that its crystals had some sort of reaction, and hopefully not one too painful.