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The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea
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The CHI raid group had revealed a few things about the Tenth that needed changing, but they hadn’t fully explored it. Therefore, I had to make changes based on incomplete knowledge. As fun as it was to poke fun at Layla by using only ‘harmless’ animals like rabbits as monsters, it was a bit limiting and didn’t quite form a complete food chain like many of my floors.ww
Thus, I took a group of the animals the Minotaur herded as they began their evacuation.
The Steel Wool, Mithril Wool, and Copper Wool sheep were already pretty beefy as they were. Twice as large as a normal sheep, with very sharp front-facing horns for both genders and wool composed of their respective metals. Their main weakness was their vulnerability to lightning magic, which I addressed by giving them a lightning affinity and modifying their hooves with metal to create a toggleable ‘grounding’ effect. If struck by lightning, their wool would store the charge, and they could use their own affinity to either return it or discharge it into the ground.
They could generate their own lightning, of course, and as a flock of a dozen individuals, I imagined they’d generate quite the voltage.
The cows the Minotaur had tended, however, were still relatively mundane—something I needed to rectify ASAP. First, I reverted them to their ancient Auroch form. Twice as large, agile, muscled and aggressively defensive. I gave these new Aurochs Earth magic, which they could channel instinctively into their hooves when charging, shaking and cracking the earth and hopefully throwing their targets off balance.
The chickens got an upgrade into what I was calling the Cockatrice. Unlike the Cockatrice of myth, these would be unable to turn people to stone. No, I called them that more for their appearance than anything else. They retained a chicken-like head and feathers, but the rest was a sort of half-dinosaur. Partially feathered, partially scaled, these would flock and act as the scavenger/pack-hunter of the food chain for the Tenth. Unable to fly, but capable of leaping and extending their jumps with their small, taloned wings, I knew they’d be a real menace.
The pigs were easily turned into boars, and their bristly hair into full-on quills. On top of that, I made them much, much tougher and capable of selective firing. I also gave them a broad spectrum of possible affinities, meaning that one Quillboar might fire quills that burst into flames, another might discharge lightning, etcetera, etcetera.
The Auroch and various sheep spread through the plains, while the Quillboars took to the forest, and the Cockatrice were more omnipresent.
Where previously the floor had been relatively peaceful, disturbed only by the occasional Unihare duel, now it flourished with life. And all that life would be ready and immediately aggressive to any guilder who activated hard or ‘Invasion’ mode, as I was calling my newest setting. Hard mode was made for individual agents, making their lives more difficult in a way easily visible to their potentially less homicidal fellows.
Invasion mode was all-encompassing. All my monsters would begin assaulting invaders in waves of overwhelming numbers, and if they managed to make it through, would descend to follow them, harrying them from behind. Doing all that took about a whole week of work, and with only two weeks left until the crusade launched, I felt time slowly slipping through my fingers. Despite that, I was proud of all I’d accomplished in my prep. Floors One through Ten had been evacuated and prepared for a far more lethal, overwhelming combat style. The Eleventh was almost overpopulated, and the Twelfth was coming along nicely.
But with all that said, I couldn’t really do more with the time I had left. Which meant it was time to focus on something more game-changing than new monsters and traps. A new mana type. But what type? You ask. It was true that I’d already discovered all the ‘tier one’ and ‘tier two’ manas with my discovery of Gravity and Sound. Death mana was the only ‘tier three’ I had, and it was high time I fixed that.
Mana was extremely conceptual, but grounded in reality. Fire, Sound, and Darkness are a few examples. Fire mana leaked into the material world from the plane of Fire through, you guessed it, fires. Darkness mana was found in small amounts through normal shadows, but was readily available in the deepest, darkest pits found far from light. Sound mana existed only within the waves through which it travelled, though so many things made noise that it was plentiful.
Death was only found in the moment a being’s soul passed on, disappearing from the world in the same instant as it took the soul away. The other tier three manatypes were just as elusive. Kata had explained which ones they knew about and why tampering with them was dangerous. Death mana was so vanishingly rare after the genocide of all necromancers that using it risked catching the attention of the God of Death, the Ferryman.
All the other ‘third-tier’ mana types were similarly rare, difficult to find in nature, or so diffuse in the background of the world you couldn’t pick them out. Only where extreme examples of their concepts were found would you find their mana in any appreciable amount. Unsurprisingly, they were often found in pairs.
Time and Space, Order and Chaos, Energy and Void, Creation and Death.
I decided to go with Time and Space, as the most lenient personifications of the lot. Order was supposedly strict on who they allowed to wield their magic, and would strike down those who tried when he disapproved of them.. Chaos and Void were, as with Death, banned mana types, supposedly too destructive and disruptive to society to wield safely. Energy, Time, and Space were too preoccupied with their domains to care who wielded their mana unless it was an overly large effect. Creation was the most mysterious of the lot. Kata insisted that they existed, but that there had never been a mage who wielded their mana.
Sounded like a challenge to me, but back to mana.
Time and Space were intimately tied together. One invariably affected the other; the warping of space warped the passage of time, and space changed as time passed. Luckily, I just happened to have two huge, warped spaces, thousands of times larger than the spaces they occupied. I examined the edges of the Eleventh and Twelfth for any hint of a mana I couldn’t identify.
It was only one tiny mote, but once I saw one, I seized it, studying and examining it from every possible angle. Until I was able to recreate it, converting my unaligned mana into this new kind.
I infused all this mana into a manacore, watching as it slowly turned an ethereal light blue. All I had to do now was test what kind of mana I’d discovered…
Something I didn’t think I’d be able to do on my own. Hmm.
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The Port, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea
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Layla pulled her grandfather into a hug as he stepped off the gangplank. He let out an oof, and a light chuckled, bringing his arms around to hug her back. “There, there, Layla, I’m alright.”
“I thought they might have caught you,” Layla sniffed. When she’d heard the news that the crusade had chosen Port Laviet as their staging ground, Layla had felt fear spike through her heart. Her grandfather had practically raised her; she couldn’t lose him, too! She felt two more sets of arms encircle them, and blinked as she realised Jerrard and Isid had joined the family hug—the last of their family, finally all in one place.
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No! Don’t cry, Layla! Be Strong!
She cried silent tears. Not a noise left her mouth, and she would fight anyone who said otherwise to the death!
After a minute, she regained control of herself. She took a shuddering breath and stepped back, looking up at her grandfather. Beatram Losat looked… older, somehow. She wasn’t sure if it was the lines around his eyes or the way he seemed to have less hair than the last time she’d seen him. “How are you, grandfather?” She asked, trying to regain her decorum. Not that many people were around to see. The only people around were the few sailors unloading the ship and her own people helping them. “It’s been quite some time.”
“That it has,” he said with a smile. “You’ve really come into yourself, Layla. I’m glad at least one of the reasons I set you up here has been good for you!” At Layla’s tilted head, he chuckled. “You were listless, Lay. I could see it. You had no idea what you wanted to do with yourself. Now, you’re respected. You’ve finally got together with that boy you’ve been making eyes at for the last decade. You look healthier, more confident in yourself!”
Layla’s jaw dropped at some point during all that. At her aunt’s chuckle, she turned to her, betrayed.
“He’s not wrong,” Isid explained, with a strange smile. “You look more and more like my sister every time I see you.”
No! Layla wouldn’t cry twice!
“Why don’t I take you to the Guild Hall? Layla proposed. “We have… a lot to talk about, Grandfather.”
“I imagine we do,” He agreed, rubbing his wispy beard. “I’d also like to meet the dungeon at some point. I have some ideas for him.”
“You… want to talk to the dungeon?” Layla asked, eyebrows shooting up past her blindfold.
“Well, it’s not every day you get to talk to something like him, is it?” Beatram said, gesturing vaguely toward Obsidian Beach. Polish is also eager to talk to another dungeon core. She’s been really antsy about it since she learned he could talk.” Her grandfather tapped his staff on the flagstones, and the crystal atop his staff briefly glowed.
“I…” Layla felt a little at a loss for words. “I didn’t even think about that… Can your staff speak?”
“Of course she can,” Beatram snorted. “I’d be a terrible partner if I didn’t teach her to speak. Who else would help keep me entertained through all those boring meetings?!”
Somehow, Layla could actually sympathise with her grandfather. She’d probably had a dozen silent exchanges with Felin across the room during meetings with ex-baron Davad Medean, back in the early days.
“Shall we?” her grandfather said, starting to stride further into town. “What’s for dinner? I’m famished!”
Layla sighed. She’d kinda asked for this, after all. She knew what her grandfather was like. “Coming, grandfather.”
She saw isid and Jerrard share a glance behind her as she walked away.
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The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea
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I watched the Green-scaled Drake-kin scientist, Gaian, as he examined the staff I’d thrown together. At the tip was the small manacore that, ever so slowly, leaked out more of the mana it contained. The staff itself was made of Potentium, for maximum enhancement and effect of spells cast through it. The Drake-kin adjusted his moonsilver-rimmed manasight glasses, examining the crystal and how it flowed through the staff.
“-and you have no idea which one it is, Creator?” He asked my avatar, which was almost looming over him. We were standing in an empty valley, a little down the mountain from a small mixed Kobold-Drake-kin-Snowbold settlement. A short way up the hill, a group of scientists had set up an observation post.
“Absolutely no clue whatsoever,” I responded, with a shake of my head and a sigh. “It’s most likely to be Space, but it could very well be Time. Either way, I’ve used the same enchantment to ‘shoot’ a ball of mana at something. Firebolt, windbolt, you get the picture.”
“So we could get a spacebolt, or a timebolt?” He said, sniffing disdainfully.
“I mean, I was planning on calling them something like Chronobolt and Spacial Rend, but go off, I guess,” I answered, finally getting a thumbs up from the observation team. “Anyway, they’re ready up there. All you need to do is give the staff your target and activate the enchantment.”
Gaian nodded thoughtfully and turned to face the target. A little further down the hill, a slime jiggled in place. It wobbled as a burst of wind ran over it, but remained in place. Gaian aimed, took several deep breaths, then opened his eyes dramatically. The energy in the staff swelled, and a bolt of energy launched itself at the slime.
The bolt hit the slime, and it froze. And it stayed frozen! Gaian and I approached the slime, observing its form. Ten seconds after we reached it, it started moving again, though going from nothing to normal at what looked like an exponential rate after whatever timestop was imposed ran out.
“Fascinating…” Gaian wondered. He aimed and fired another bolt. The Slime froze once again, and when he poked it with a stick, the stick failed to do anything to it.
“So, Time, then,” I said, rubbing my illusory chin. “Very interesting. I was almost sure it would be Space. Anyway, not important. Time is good. This looks like your standard ‘Freeze’ type effect. It probably doesn’t experience the time in between being hit and unfreezing, though we’d have to test that on something with a brain to be sure. It doesn’t seem harmed, but it can’t exactly tell us.”
“Then why use it as a test subject?” Gaian asked, watching the time-stopped slime through his manasight glasses.
“Because I wasn’t sure what would happen,” I said, just as fascinated by the effect as he was. “Imagine if it were Space mana, and it forced the target’s atoms to be a hundred times further apart all of a sudden? I don’t want a death like that on my conscience, as little of one as I have. Slimes are perfect for this; They’re plentiful, disposable, brainless, and I don’t feel bad about them dying.”
“I could have healed any minor injuries, but I definitely couldn’t heal that,” Gaian commented with a shudder. “I’m a Life Shaman, not a Death one.”
“I know, Gaian, I wouldn’t have expected you to,” I reassured. “Anyway… This is big. With access to Time mana… I wonder if we could make a time dilation chamber?”
“A what?” The drake-kin scientist looked confused, and I rushed to explain.
“It’s a chamber that makes whoever is inside experience time faster,” I lectured, making an illusory hologram of a chamber and two drake-kin. The one inside moved at normal speed, but the one outside moved comparatively slower. “One second inside is ten seconds outside, for example.”
“What purpose would it serve?” Gaian asked with a tilt of his head.
“Well, it would just be a proof of concept,” I explained, getting more and more excited as the idea grew in my mind. “A prototype. If we proved it worked… I could make one around the Tenth and Eleventh. The actual space they take up isn’t that big; I could make one around the floors, and speed up time inside however much I wanted…”
“We’d have… Infinite time to prepare for the invaders,” Gaian wondered, his eyes widening as he caught on to my idea.
“Not just that, we could spend literal centuries, or even millennia living down here,” I imagined, now projecting a map of the floor with kingdoms, roads, towns, and such all connected to the floor. “There could be established towns and cities with thousands of years of history, all across the floor! I wouldn’t have to rush anything, I could take my time, really craft every dungeon right down to the cracks in the flagstones.” Gaian looked at the illusion with awe written across his face.
“But.. What would happen to you?” He asked, suddenly concerned. “Your whole body is the dungeon. If just one part of it is time-accelerated… what would that be like?”
“That’s… a good point,” I acknowledged. “I suppose one of three things. If my core is inside the acceleration, I would likely experience time as you do, while time in the rest of the dungeon slowed to a crawl. If my core was outside… I’d be better able to maintain the time acceleration, but I probably wouldn’t be able to interact with you all as much as I do now. I’d become an absent god. The third option, no matter if my core is in the acceleration or without, I experience both at once, and go insane as I try to keep up with experiencing thousands of years over the course of a week or two.”
“That’s something we can test,” Gaian said confidently, slamming a fist into his other palm. “With that prototype, even. When we turn it on for the first time, we test whether the second or third scenario is true by setting the acceleration to 10 seconds per one, as you said. Then we could test the first afterwards!”
“You’re a genius, Gaian!” I cried, pointing dramatically at the sky. “Quick! We have no time to waste, if we want time to waste!”
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