Chapter 59 Nest (Patreon)

                   The dungeon could not help but watch as the mages came through and killed two of its humans and kidnapped the dungeon's favorite, Ernest. Losing Ernest was a blow to the dungeon's plans as Ernest was the smartest human produced so far.

                   The dungeon knew what loss, frustration, disappointment, and anger were supposed to feel like, and the dungeon felt none of that. He even knew it was odd that he didn’t feel any of those emotions, but he did not even feel odd. Everything was just information to the dungeon. Information and the realization that because of this loss, it would take longer for his curiosity to be quenched. The dungeon wondered if the mages knew how cruel it was to take away all those emotions while still allowing curiosity to burn in him.

                   That said, even without emotions, the dungeon could fall back on his personal rules. They said he had a responsibility to the humans under his care. Most of these humans were now experiencing death for the first time, and so he sent his face bear and did his best to help them through their grief.

                   While the humans were grieving, the dungeon was not idle. The dungeon decided the best thing he could do was to build a nest at the top of the labyrinth for the humans. Originally, the dungeon decided not to build habitable areas like the bulbs in the root of the dungeon on the tree tops because the dungeon assumed the mages would have some way to fly and reach them easily. But since the mages had ways to go through the earth, and worse, turn the ability to turn earth into magma hot enough to eat through the carbon nanotubes that most of the labyrinth was made of, it was clearly safer to put these humans in a high place instead of a low place.

                   The dungeon was sure the mages would have some way to get through the carbon nanotubes that made up the top of the nest, but the dungeon figured that without dirt to fuel their magma spells, they would have a harder time. Besides, the dungeon wasn’t just going to make one nest; he would make dozens of them, with only one for the humans. The dungeon had already learned that the mages and their warriors were not the most thorough people when it came to mapping the dungeon, and so the dungeon was going to make dozens of next to give his people security through obscurity.

                   It only took the dungeon two days to make dozens of nests in the tree top of the labyrinth. The dungeon could have done it in a day, except the dungeon had to pump water from the bottom layers of the labyrinth all the way up to the nest, and it took a little while to design, test, and make all the plumbing. Beyond that, the nests were practically copies of the bulbs that infested the root system. The only major change was an elevator system from the human bulb to the human nest, an elevator system the dungeon would get rid of the moment all the humans were safely in the nest.

                   While the humans grieved, one of them asked the face bear, “How did they kill them so easily?”

                   Through the face bear, the dungeon answered, “With vacuum.”

                   “Is there anything you can do to protect us from vacuum?”

                   “I don’t know, but I will try.”

                   “Thank you.”

                   When the dungeon said he would try to protect them from vacuum he meant that he would try to give them the ability to resist vacuum. It was one of several changes that had to be made if he was going to have his essence beast effectively fight and counter the mages, as they were obviously over-reliant on the vacuum spell as a means of defense and offense. If he could negate that spell with some, or even all his essence creatures, then he would be able to protect his people, and probably kill at least one mage every time they entered into his area of influence. With that thought, the dungeon wondered how much his area of influence would grow once he started killing mages and how long it would take for his area of influence to grow to the area it needed to.

                   Although the dungeon had a lot to work on, he had already started a project, the floating bear. The reason for the project was simple: wind magic did not work in a vacuum at all, but using superconductors to float on the magnetism of the planet worked in a vacuum. The prototype proved that a floating bear could float inside the vacuum of mages; now it was time to make a second prototype that could move quickly.

                   Since the superconductor was metallic hydrogen, the dungeon simply took away the ring of metallic hydrogen from the original prototype and added a coating of metallic hydrogen to the bones of the bear. The dungeon was not surprised to find that this allowed the bear to float in air, but it moved just as poorly as the bear with a ring around it, and the dungeon decided to see if this was a case where less was more.

                   With that in mind, the dungeon removed the coating of metallic hydrogen from most of the bones on the bear, only leaving the coating on the bear's paws. Once the transition was finished, and the bear only had metallic hydrogen on the bones of its paws, the dungeon was pleased to find that the bear could still float. The bear could go up if he resonated correctly; he could go down if he lowered the output enough, but the bear had difficulty walking as its feet did not want to move once it had electricity from its core, powering the metallic hydrogen. The dungeon figured the bear would be able to move much faster if it was able to power each paw individually.

                   Although the solution sounded simple in effect, this meant giving the bear four essence channels with the same effect so it could control the electricity going to each paw. The redesign of the floating bear’s essence channels took a few weeks, and by the time the dungeon was finished, all the humans had moved high into the branches of the tree and into their nest, which was nearly identical to the one they had left.

                   The third prototype was everything that the dungeon wanted. On the first test the bear, almost flawlessly, walked on air. Technically, the bear was walking on the magnetic field of the moon they were on, but the reality was that it looked like the bear was able to walk on air. When a paw had enough electricity going through it, it became stuck, in what looked like thin air. Turning that off and on for individuals gave it the same firm foundation as if it was walking on the ground. If the bear lowered the electricity, that paw began moving with resistance, or if all the paws had low electricity, the bear, as a whole, slowly floated down. The bear quickly learned how to run at full sprint on nothing and then began doing tricks. Most of the tricks reminded the dungeon of free runners. For instance it was a common trick to see a free runner bounce off one wall to make a shaper turn than they could on flat ground, except the bear could do that on air thanks to the superconductors in its feet.

                   Now that the dungeon had a working prototype the dungeon gave this ability to the projectile bear first. Thanks to this ability, the projectile bear no longer needed to hide with the ghillie dragon. Albeit the projectile bear only had his bottom two paws given this ability so the bear had to walk on two feet when it walked on air.

                   The next creature to get this was the ghillie dragon, which could now hide on the ceiling of the bulbs or nests and among the branches of the Great Black Tree Labyrinth. The dungeon thought the ghillie dragon walking on air was the oddest thing he had ever seen as the dragon had lots of skin folds and looked like it should be able to catch wind and fly, but that was impossible due to the weight of the ghillie dragon, but thanks to superconductors and an electric core the several ton essence creature could walk on air, and float.

                   The third creature to get this gift was the deer. The dungeon was thrilled when he saw that the deer could walk on air, and the dungeon was not as thrilled that the deer used the ability to irritate the wasps that kept the BAPS fed, but the dungeon didn’t care too much since the deer did not kill them.

                   What the dungeon cared about was the way the mages were able to wipe out his essence creatures so easily the next time they showed up. It wasn’t just one problem. First of all, even though several of his creatures could now fly through the vacuum, they still couldn’t survive it for more than a few seconds. The second problem was that his creatures could not see the mages when they made themselves invisible, but they could see the illusions of light that they used as decoys. Third, the mages had some way to spot his creatures even when they were hidden behind other objects. Fourth the mages could use all sorts of long-range attacks, particularly a shadow attack able to go around corners, to attack his creatures. Fifth, at this point, there was little point leaving any descent essence creature out in the open as they were killed before the mages entered his area of influence, so all fights had to take place inside the labyrinth.

                   The dungeon still had so much work to do before he killed one of those mages... assuming his projectile bear didn’t get lucky, and there wasn’t any point on putting the projectile bear on top of the labyrinth and picking off mages. If he killed them outside the dungeon's area of influence, the dungeon wouldn’t get their mana, furthermore, he would just upset the imp, and, worse, the immortals. Perhaps if the dungeon had emotions and felt the death of the two humans who died and the loss of the kidnapped Ernest, he would seek revenge, but the dungeon lacked the emotion to make such a bad choice, and perhaps that was one reason why the mages took emotion away from the souls they snatched from other worlds.