Runic Dungeon, Chapter Two (Patron Preview) (Patreon)

This is still pre pre pre alpha writing.  I actually haven't done much more on this on this story, but maybe by the time I'm ready to release it to RR (after Blue Core is finished) I will.

It took a number of repetitions of the same grind to get anywhere. Each time he expanded he’d re-draw the stale gathering rune, and then etched new ordinary runes on the ceiling of his rock chamber to keep them from overloading as the total mana flux increased. He would have to stop eventually, and maybe even reverse his runes to prevent stale mana from reaching the core crystal, but not until he was done with the dungeon system for the moment.

He tried expanding the room without tipping over to the full use of mana, like he had when drawing the runes, but there seemed to be a fundamental difference between altering the stone and destroying it or absorbing it or whatever he was doing. When he pushed to expand things, nothing happened until after a tipping point, and then it all went at once and the point of mana vanished. When he’d excavated a room that was about thirty by thirty feet the dungeon system seemed to finally realize he was doing something.

Core Room created!

Summoning Dungeon Sprite…

An incredibly complex whorl of magic appeared next to his core crystal, and he scrambled to do something about it. He didn’t like the idea of summoning anything to him, especially not something he had no control over. A few frantic attempts to grab the assembled spell form with raw mana control utterly failed. Whatever was forming it was far stronger than he was, which only made sense if it was the dungeon system itself. The only thing he could do was rework the gathering rune into a protection rune, and try and connect all the ceiling runes to it to fuel it. With the name given by the system it wasn’t likely to be hostile, but he wasn’t about to trust it.

He need not have bothered. The spellwork snapped into place, and nothing happened despite mana continuing to pour into it. Almir was hardly an expert in summoning spells but it seemed something had gone badly wrong if the completed spell failed to function. After a full minute of watching it work, he was starting to wonder if he would be doomed to have a failed spell construct sitting next to him for all eternity. Finally, though, it spat something out.

A desiccated corpse not much larger than his core appeared and plummeted to the floor. By the look of it, the thing had been dead for years or decades or even longer. That did not bode well at all. In fact it made him think something, somewhere, was quite broken.

He’d never heard of a dungeon sprite before, but he’d never gone into a dungeon himself. Almir had been more of an academic and crafter, considering runes weren’t the fastest way to turn mana into effects.  Judging by the fact that the dungeon system had tried to get one for him the moment he qualified for a core room – something that he probably could have done instantly if he didn’t have such massive damage to his core crystal – it was something meant for every early dungeon.

Almir mused over that, starting to worry about having to deal with, instead of a failed spell work, a moldering body, when the corpse itself dissolved and vanished.

Dungeon Sprite corpse absorbed.

Forbidden material absorbed, bonuses nullified.

Penalty applied: absorption disabled for 100 hours.

His banked anger flared again as he stared at the notification. Something was wrong with the dungeon system and he was the one penalized for it. Not that he really knew what absorbing things did for him, but he could guess. As unnatural as dungeons were, they needed some way to deal with the inevitable results of monsters roaming around inside them, and why not use that to benefit the dungeon itself? The big dungeons had more materials than just stone, so clearly they had to get it from somewhere.

Almir dropped back into the meditation and a visualized deep breath, running fingers through his beard. It really shouldn’t matter to him, since he hadn’t known about the absorption before and didn’t know what it did even now. Being denied the ability to use it for a few days was irrelevant.

“I am going to go insane if I don’t have anyone to talk to,” he decided. Stewing on things by himself was not helping at all. It was obvious to him that a normal dungeon would have been much further along after however many days it had been, or would have collapsed from rampant mana. He had no such issues, since he could subvert the mana flux with his runes, but that meant that it might be weeks before he breached the surface.

Obviously he wasn’t going to find any intelligent being to talk to, but a pet might help. He had to assume that things he summoned didn’t need more than ambient mana to survive, else the little he knew about dungeons made even less sense, but if not, he was the inventor of stasis runes. He was certain he could keep a small animal alive until he was ready to break out to the surface.

When the mana regenerated again he directed his mental energy at summoning a Common Snake critter. The result was fascinating. Something very much like a spell matrix appeared inside the core, but only long enough for the mana point to deplete. It wasn’t actually a real spell matrix, but some function of the dungeon system – which didn’t mean he couldn’t figure it out, but it would take a lot more time than the brief glimpse the summons gave him.

Then, suddenly, there was a small snake in the room. It wasn’t a species he recognized, not more than a foot long with the soft, dopey look of a boa. He hadn’t really kept pets himself, but his dear wife Miriam had been a fan of hunting lizards and several of his children had small fuzzballs of cats and dogs and rabbits so it wasn’t like there had been a lack of them in the household.

“I shall call you Asgil,” he decided, watching the newly-created or newly-transported snake nose about the empty room. He could sense it in an odd way, not just through sight but as if the snake were slithering over an arm or something similar. Pulling up his meditation room once more, he formed a pseudo-Asgil and rubbed the snake’s head where it draped over his shoulders.

“Very well, Asgil, let us decide what to do.” Outside the window, the real Asgil flicked out its tongue, slithering along the periphery of the room. “We can’t possibly allow any sort of breach of mana before we are equipped to defend ourselves. Actually, why should we allow it at all? Better to use all the mana ourselves than let anyone else get it.” He took a moment to rub the snake’s head again.

“So I can have five rooms, and let us say ten feet of hallway per room. If each one is thirty by thirty by ten…” Almir trailed off and rifled through his rune books. “That is a goodly amount of surface area. The question is whether the mana flux will continue to go up as it has. That will determine what defenses I can create.” Asgil, wisely, said nothing.

“I suppose we should start. Soonest started, soonest finished.” He dropped out of meditation and studied his chamber. After a few passes around, he could tell that his senses covered the entire chamber at once, though there was some degree of focus that kept him from absorbing it completely, panopticon-style.

It would be far easier to start digging things out if he had any idea what was around him, but he didn’t. His sense extended exactly to the stone walls and no further. Or rather, into the thickness of the stone walls, which was a good six inches, but since they were entirely featureless it didn’t help. At any point he could break through into open air or a hidden cavern, but he couldn’t be too paranoid about it. Up was usually the surface, so he’d simply go down for the moment.

Almir crafted another set of runes into the floor, energizing them from one of the collectors, to determine the cardinal directions. For most things it didn’t matter, but he’d always felt more comfortable aligning himself to north and south and it would irritate him if he started by making things askew.

First, he squared his chamber, keeping each individual change under the one-mana threshold to cheat the system. It was already reasonably square, but it was rough, lumpen, and unsuited for the precision work that Almir had in mind. While he was bent on making the floor level, the walls plumb, and the ceiling smooth, Asgil coiled up by the dungeon core and decided to go to sleep. Frankly, Almir didn’t blame him. Runework itself could be tedious, and the preparations for it doubly so.

Of those preparations, the first he made was to etch a hexagon into each of the four walls, five feet on each side. Without a proper rule it took him several tries to get it right, but once started properly it was easy enough to finish. He had been tempted to make the entire room a hexagon, say, twelve feet to a side, but just squaring the first room had taken long enough. Almir liked hexagons. They tessellated nicely and fit rune styles far better than squares.

Then he started pushing the stone back inside the hexagon as best he could, whenever the mana returned. Annoyingly, the stone didn’t want to follow the clean lines, but rather a roughly squared tunnel about six feet wide and eight feet tall. He’d have to go in and fix it himself, which would take, well, a while. Not that he was intending to extend it too far, just yet. First he had to see what expanding a corridor did to the mana flow.

The answer was that it screwed it up good. Not that he had anything that depended on a steady and predictable flow, but the initial room provided a consistent flux of stale mana from each surface, presumably attracted from the surroundings. The corridor gave him far less per surface area, and combined with the asymmetric nature of both the corridor itself and its position in the room it washed chaotically through the existing flows.

Almir grumbled and retreated back into his meditation, petting an Asgil that was now coiled up in his lap as he sorted through the books representing his knowledge and experiments. It seemed he’d have to section off each room and corridor – though in a sense he was planning that already – and gate the mana through if he wanted to achieve anything of value. The thought itself made him glance out the window and he cursed as he saw how much fresh mana was accumulating around his core. He’d been lax in drawing his gathering runes, forgetting how paltry they were, and pressure was starting to build.

“Dammit Asgil, why didn’t you warn me!” Not that Almir actually blamed the sleeping snake, but it felt good to say. He dropped the meditation room and worked on building more gathering circles, working outward from the protective circle around his core. One that Asgil had gone right through, somehow. He’d have to figure that issue out later.

The basic rune for gathering pure mana was at heart a spiral, with a few flourishes to keep out stale mana, and it had enough room that putting three together into a trefoil pattern was no problem. For the very clever and patient student, two trefoils could be merged into a hexagon, which was one reason Almir favored the polygon, but for the moment he stayed with the trefoil design. Not just with the runes he etched into the floor, but for the pattern he was making with all the runes, collectively. Meta-runes were not as useful as they often seemed, since they massively restricted the connections and the geometry, but for the moment he had a lot of mana and not much to do with it so he needed a better way to contain it than just stone etchings.

He interrupted his work a few times to sit and pet Asgil, or at least, the imaginary Asgil, and rest his mind. He still wasn’t sure how fast his mana was regenerating but it was fast enough that he had pushed the hallway out three times before the gathering runes were finished. They sucked up enough of the ambient that the distortion caused by the hallway didn’t threaten to break his runes anymore, though it was but a temporary solution. He needed to start using the mana, or else he was just building a bomb.

He sketched out a quick map in his visualization, taking up most of the desk. His core needed to remain inviolate, but in truth any one who was marginally competent would be able to bypass any number of protections if they could see or even scry the core. The first defense would be to hide and protect the room it was in – no, scratch that. The first defense would be to hide that there was a dungeon at all.

The best way to do that would be with a rune matrix that generated some kind of illusion, but without a casting matrix he couldn’t specify the illusion to go into that matrix. That wasn’t going to be an option anytime soon, along with every other metal or illusionary effect, since every one of them required investment from a spell matrix. No, he’d have to cobble something together from blunt instruments.

To start, he reshaped the passage into a proper hexagon for a few feet, because he was a great believer in redundancy. Three sets of paired runic script, both to soak up the mana and just in case one set failed, something that was sadly probable considering he was just working with basic rock. Anything more complex than the gathering runes he’d set up was likely to detonate the moment the mana flux faltered.

The foundational rune for each side of the hexagon was a mana gate. Normally there wasn’t any need to direct stale mana, since it was just an ambient field and only the pure mana actually did anything. Inside the dungeon, that absolutely wasn’t the case, so they were twice as complex as usual. Next came a physical shield, then a light shield. That made the hexagon utterly black, but it did burn mana, which helped actually not at all since the stale mana simply was recycled by the core.

He was going to have to find better storage or he’d have no choice but to let the excess mana vent to the outside. Unless he wanted to take his chances with controlled mana manifestations, and considering that his core looked like it was about to fall apart at any moment, he really didn’t want to. The problem was that he needed the mana flux to do the dungeon things, but more flux meant he was fighting a losing battle against mana saturation. No matter what, he was on a timer.

“This would be a lot easier if I could have you cast things for me,” he told Asgil, watching the snake poke its snout against the barrier to the hexagonal hallway. Looking closely, he could see it wasn’t really the physical barrier that was stopping it, so much as the mana gate. That meant the summoned critter was more mana than flesh-and-blood.

“I could write at least three papers just on you alone,” he continued, but Asgil paid him no mind. Almir sighed and focused back on his work. Shield, light, mana gate. Shield, light, mana gate. When his mana point refreshed he tried extending it vertically downward, rather than outward, and was pleasantly surprised he could make a pit. With three dimensions to work with, he had just a little bit more time before something terrible happened. With that in mind, he used the next bit of mana to open a new passageway opposite the first.

Clay absorbed.

Absorption locked for 89 hours.

New material available in 89 hours.

Absorption benefits available in 89 hours.

Quartz absorbed.

Absorption locked for 89 hours.

New Material available in 89 hours.

Absorption benefits available in 89 hours.

Dirt absorbed.

Absorption locked for 89 hours.

New Material available in 89 hours.

Absorption benefits available in 89 hours.

That was only moderately terrible. It was better than punching all the way out into open air, but it was only a matter of time and he couldn’t draw runes in clay. He could barely draw runes in stone!

Almir growled and returned to his meditation, running his fingers through his beard as he tried to bank down the anger that came with yet another issue. Normally he wasn’t so irritable but for some reason being stuck in a featureless stone room on the verge of death had been rather trying on his nerves. Annoyed as he was, he could still think, and it was obvious that he could somehow change or add materials in the dungeon. Somehow.

Material

Create Value

Absorb Value

Stone (Sedimentary)

5 lbs / mana

50 lbs / mana

Clay

locked

locked

Quartz

locked

locked

Some brief focusing on the dungeon system actually answered the question, now that he knew how to ask it. The quartz entry was so tantalizing. If he could create quartz, even in small amounts, he could make something worthwhile instead of awful cludges to try and keep the mana density from exploding. The question was whether he could make it eighty-nine hours until the quartz was ready.

Probably not.

At least he knew where he was going to come out into the surface, so he had about four feet of stone to put as many defenses into as he could. Shield, light, mana gate, one right at the entrance to his room and one right before where the stone stopped. In between the two, thermal projection runes, running all the way around the hexagon. Easily stopped by someone who knew magic and knew to look at it, but otherwise they’d flash-heat anything that crossed them. Not as obvious as jets of flame and far more useful. Mostly he put them into hot plates but by fiddling with their distance strokes they made perfect reasonable weapons.

Linked to the big gathering meta-rune in his core room, it was a barely adequate defense. Oh, it would keep out wild animals, but any mage worth their salt would be able to locate and disarm the runes with a mana pick. Producing pick-proof runes was another layer of complexity altogether, one that would require…

Almir shook himself out of the paranoid spiral as Asgil came back to the core and coiled up again. If he did things right there would be barely any mana signature at all, and even if there was, it wouldn’t last. All he had to do was keep his head and not waste time on unnecessary projects.

He shoved his other passage further down and started expanding it, while starting a mana sump at the intersection. Technically any full-ordinal intersection could be a mana sump, but he’d always felt better putting them in the downward direction, especially since solid stone wasn’t mana-permeable until the densities got really high. The rhythm was expand the room, inscribe the rune, expand the room, inscribe the rune. Until suddenly the dungeon system noticed what he was doing.

New Room created!

New Room lower than core room. Reassigning core room…

“No! Stupid system!” He shouted at the notification, but that didn’t help at all. Another one of those incredibly complex, pseudo-spell-matrix frameworks appeared in his core crystal and suddenly it was in the mana sump he’d been making, and the mana flow for everything was completely different. Instead of gathering at the center of the rune setup he’d so painstakingly crafted, everything wanted to flow past it, down to the dungeon core and back out.

The unbalanced flow popped the mana gates, which detonated with small sprays of pebbles, which took out the light blockers and the outer shield by the eventual entrance. The inner passage was more reinforced and took the change in mana flows better, but that was only marginally helpful because he had to redo all the runework he’d built up around his core. Or, well, some of it, because it was obvious that he couldn’t put himself at the center, or even at the arbitrary point, of the mana flow. He was always going to be an endpoint.

Worst of all, poor Asgil was stuck in the old room, looking confused. Or as confused as a small, unintelligent snake could get, at least. At least with the mana gates temporarily destroyed, the critter could make it out of the old room.

“Come on, this way!” He told Asgil, trying to will it toward the black hexagon, with no idea whether the snake got any actual feedback from him or not. So far it hadn’t much reacted to anything, but then, snakes tended not to when they weren’t hungry.

He couldn’t spend too much time trying to coax his pet away from the potentially-unstable middle room, though. He needed to get the new core room going before everything collapsed. For the moment, when the mana refreshed he used it to reshape the passageways and the new core room rather than dig anything else, too focused on building a proper flow and runic connections to deal with more space.

At some point during his work fugue, he found that Asgil actually had slithered over core-wards, and was negotiating its way down the vertical passage by gripping the runes etched into it. Almir had no idea what would happen when the poor thing reached the bottom, but it could probably survive a ten-foot drop. He hoped, anyway.

He had finished maybe the first part of his new pattern, enough to power the inner defenses, such as they were and what there was of them, and stop mana from condensing too far inside the core chamber when time ran out. Or rather, it was his own damn fault for repairing one set of mana gates and not the other, because it meant all the free mana that wound up above the core room was captured by the gathering runes and of course, those only could take so much.

One of the petals of the trefoil failed, popping in a cascade of reactions and sending an enormous – comparatively, at least – amount of mana into the air. Which, given the mana gates and the hardness of stone, could only go one direction. The mana suffused itself into the exposed clay and soil, latching onto the roots of grass or trees, and causing a sudden burst of growth. Something toppled, and ripped away the dirt.

Dungeon entrance created!

“No! I was trying to not have anything open you stupid…” He used other words, less polite, ranting at the system that had decide to mess up all his planning. What stopped his tirade was Asgil dropping directly down on top of the core with a plop and flicking its tongue against the stone. It tickled.

“Okay, you’re right, getting mad won’t solve anything.” If he’d been inside his meditation visualization, he would have rolled his eyes. It was the advice he’d given countless students, when they got frustrated with the intricacies and weaknesses of runecraft. “I have to make do with what I have.”

He checked the entrance runes, and started repairing the mana gates first. The sudden opening meant that the mana pressure had been completely relieved in a burst that probably anyone within miles would notice. That didn’t mean he was content to keep leaking mana, and a small opening in the dirt was far less noticeable than the mana that was pouring out of it. The inner shield rune still worked, as did the projection runes, though they had less power than he would have liked. A third of his stored mana had simply vanished, after all.

Ultimately, he didn’t have much time. Only a few minutes after the entrance appeared, something hopped inside. It looked like a squirrel, only three times as big and with a massive third eye. The moment it crossed the threshold, he lost control of the stone he was working in order to make a rune-connection, something in the dungeon core closing in on itself.

“Oh, come on!” He complained. It wasn’t exactly clear why that would happen, but he definitely did not have control over the dungeon core stuff, though his mana manipulation still worked. For whatever good that would do. Almir glared at the squirrel-thing as it sauntered in, first in anger, then in shock. No wonder it looked so weird – the poor thing had been absolutely soaked in stale mana, to the point where its body was saturated with it and had been mutated by trying to adapt. Frankly it was surprising it was still alive.

Not that it stayed alive very long. It hopped forward until it jumped over the thermal projection runes, and then died as its brain was cooked almost instantly. After all, thermal projection raised the temperature of everything in its path, and brains didn’t function very well when they were a hundred degrees hotter. The thing collapsed on the floor and then after a moment it dissolved, just like the first corpse had.

Mind squirrel corpse absorbed.

Absorption locked for 76 hours.

New monster pattern available in 76 hours.

Absorption benefits available in 76 hours.

Then he had control again. For a moment, Almir considered spending his mana on a thin shell of stone to cover things up, but he had to finish his capture runes before that would do anything but cause another blowout. Instead, considering that he had creatures invading, he worked on running deeper runes from the intact branches of his trefoil to the functional runes at the entrance. Obviously the thermal projection runes would protect him against incidental wildlife, but anything with real mana would still blow past it like nothing. But for now, it was incidental wildlife that worried him.