Chapter 64 Upgrade (Patreon)

                   The dungeon was a bit disappointed when his void dolphins failed to kill any of the mages, but he received a lot of useful data from the encounter. For instance, the void dolphins were confused by the mage's ability bend light, which made them invisible on the visible light spectrum. The void dolphins' radar ability gave them the ability to sense that something was amiss anywhere light was bent, but they couldn’t see through it. That said, radar gave them the ability to completely ignore the mages’ illusions, because radar couldn’t see the illusions as the illusions were light and radar waves could not interact with light. Overall, this was a massive improvement.

                   Thanks to the dungeon's ability to see everything in its area of influence, the dungeon had a long look at what the bending light spell did to his void dolphins' radars. Because of how radio waves work, being very long waves from the length of a football field to the length of a planet, the bending light spell distorted the radio signal the void dolphins depended on for radar, instead of smoothly moving it around them to give the impression of invisibility. If the void dolphins had not been moving, then it was possible the distortion would not have happened, but void dolphins were designed to move very quickly, so they noticed the area in the world that their radar signals did not bounce off of correctly, and were able to send their projectiles in the direction of the mages. Not at pinpoint accuracy, but close enough. Especially considering all the other essence beasts chased after the mage’s illusions.  

                   This led to a few problems for the dungeon. The mages were able to weather at least one volley from his void dolphins, and the void dolphins could only fire one volley of rail-launched projectiles from their internal rail guns as the act caused them to melt from the inside out. This meant that the dungeon needed to focus on perfecting a coil gun.

                   Coil guns had many advantages over rail guns in theory. When fired, they could produce significantly less heat if the coil gun was using a floating bullet, like a maglev train, which also meant that the coil gun, nor the essence creature it was attached to, was not damaged when fired, unlike the railgun. The problem was that coil guns were far more difficult to make, particularly at the level of power the dungeon needed for it to be effective.

                   One of the issues the dungeon had with the coil gun was that the dungeon needed the projectile to float with magnetism to reduce the problems caused by friction at the supersonic speeds the projectiles were fired at. There was no reason to make a coil gun mechanism around a barrel because, at the speed the projectile needed to fire, the heat generated would nearly be the same as the rail gun. The dungeon even tested to make sure. With that in mind, the dungeon began doing the tedious work of making a coil gun with floating ammo.

                   For the next thirty years, the dungeon worked on it. Every six months mages showed up and collected various things. Each time they came, the void dolphins became more and more accurate with their shooting, but since the mages only had to defend from one shot from each dolphin, they were able to defend themselves rather easily. In fact, every six months they seemed to improve bit by bit.

                   Every decade, they made their way to the top of the dungeon and took one human, always male. They even intentionally went out of their way not to take the females, and to the dungeon's surprise and relief, they did not kill any of the humans as they hunted down one of the males and kidnapped them. Albeit the labyrinth humans fled before the mages, so it wasn’t like the mages had to fight off resistance. At least not from the humans. Anytime the mages came to take humans, they killed at least a third of the essence creatures in the labyrinth, as the dungeon was not too keen on letting his researchers go. The dungeon could have sent a sacrificial human to them to avoid all of this, but the essence humans were his and he would fight to keep his humans.

                   As for the essence humans the dungeon now had over two thousand living in the tree tops of the labyrinth, they lived in one of the dozens of ‘nests’ at the top of the tree, or in the top of the tower itself. When they first started living in the labyrinth, the dungeon gave them whatever they needed, but as time went on, the dungeon did not have time to meet all their needs. The dungeon could see everything in its area of influence at once, but he could not respond to every need at once. The dungeon was limited to being able to do one thing at a time, and so the essence humans began working jobs.

                   Many of the jobs were simple, like farming, or raising animals for food and slaughter. Others were more complex, like blacksmiths, welders, electricians, and machinists. The dungeon gave them the tools and equipment they needed to make more tools and equipment for themselves, and of course everything ran off of electricity. The dungeon had all the electricity it needed for millions of homes, so all the essence human’s energy needs were taken care of.

                   One of the most coveted jobs was that of teachers. Teachers had the job of teaching children the things they could not learn over the radio in their heads, and since the dungeon was extremely invested in using the essence humans to develop technology the dungeon wasn’t smart enough to create on his own the dungeon often created things the teachers asked for, as long as the dungeon thought it would be beneficial to the education of the children.

                   That wasn’t to say the teachers were the only one to benefit from the dungeon's help. For instance, the farmers had limited space to grow their crops at the top of the labyrinth, so the dungeon gave the tools necessary to make vertical farms, and the craftsmen had the ability to make the equipment necessary for the vertical farms.

                   Furthermore, the most creative people and the smartest people were made into scientists by the dungeon. The dungeon paid them in iron, copper, metals and other resources which they used to pay other people for their needs, and so the essence humans had something of an economy going. Researchers were at the top, followed by teachers, and then everyone else. The thing was, since the dungeon could see everything at the same time, the dungeon knew when the researchers were actually doing their job and when they were not, and so the dungeon was able to individually choose the best individuals for research.

                   Oddly enough, the most creative people and the smartest people were often not the same person. Often times the most innovative people were not the most academically gifted, but when placed with an academically gifted person as a partner, the two could really come up with some great ideas.

                   For instance, the dungeon lucked out, and the researchers were able to figure out how to make a very basic computer to help with timing on some of the vertical farm equipment. They needed the electronic calculator because the vertical farms that the essence humans were building were starting to become over a hundred feet cubed, with tens of thousands of trays. The vertical farm gave the researchers a specific problem to build an electronic computer around, and so they developed a thirty-ton behemoth to help manage the farm.

                   Here's the thing, because the essence humans were able to talk mind to mind with the radios in their head, and come look at the ginormous computer, they began trying to find better ways of doing the same job. Why wouldn’t they? The dungeon had made it very clear that they could make very powerful calculators that could fit in the palm of their hands.

                   A few months after this, a couple of the researchers managed to make transistors. The dungeon had heard of transistors in his previous life, but back then, he didn’t have a clue how they worked beyond somehow using binary to run the world. It turned out that transistors worked by allowing electrons to stop, flow positively or negatively, and amplify signals.

                   Once this piece of equipment was made the essence humans began working out ways to combine the transistors with their current set of tools, and before long they managed to find dozens of ways to use transistors to make their tools better, but before long they came across a problem, each transistor had to be wired to every other transistor in each of their projects to work. The more complex a problem they were trying to solve with transistors, the more wires and transistors they needed, and many of their calculators were growing gigantic once again. One of the major issues the essence humans faced was that if any component was broken or installed wrong, the entire project would not work, and mind to mind, they went back and forth discussing how to fix this.

                   A few years later several of the essence humans came up with what they called a circuit board, as they found a way to put all the transistors they needed on one board, and from there the essence humans began learning how to make circuit boards smaller and smaller, while making them program more and more complex things.

                   The reality was that the only reason why this small community was able to build these circuit boards so quickly was because the dungeon was able to outrightly build the small circuit boards, and the tools they needed to make them out of thin air. The dungeon was VERY invested in making computer chips.

                   Although the essence humans were able to use the circuit boards to run their equipment more efficiently, the dungeon soon found a different use for circuits. They were exactly what he needed to make the coilguns work. The only difference between the dungeon and the humans was that the dungeon could make the circuit boards much smaller.

                   With that in mind, the dungeon recreated one of his projectile bears, only this time he made it with a coil gun arm instead of a railgun arm. Over the course of a few months, the dungeon made the circuit board control the coil gun in two stages. The first stage was to hold the projectile, six ounces of pure iron, in the exact middle of the bear's coilgun arm. The second stage was to fire the piece of iron at over two miles a second, without the iron bullet ever touching the sides of the coilgun.

                   The first stage was very difficult as the projectile bear needed to move around, and as it moved, it needed the iron ammo to stay in place for when the bear shot it. This required the dungeon to actually install lights and sensors inside the coil gun so that the circuit board could automatically adjust the magnetic strength of the coils to keep that bullet floating dead center in the coil gun.

                   The next part was a pain. The dungeon had to use the circuit to control the coils so that they would fire the bullet at two miles a second. Coil guns were a lot more finicky than rail guns. With rail guns as long as the rail and ammo survived, the more electricity you pumped into it, the faster the projectile goes. With coil guns, massive amounts of electricity has to flow into the coils in exact timing or nothing happens. Fortunately, the dungeon had the ability to create stuff out of its internal energy stores.

                   It took some time, and the improved designs of the circuit board, which the dungeon wasn’t ready to call a microchip yet, before the dungeon was ready to call his coil gun experiment a success, but eventually thanks to the circuit board he made projectile bears and void dolphins that could fire multiple rounds of ammo at two miles a second.

                   The circuit board was instrumental. The dungeon had long dealt with brains, and brains were good at a lot of things, but precision down to the nanosecond wasn’t one of them. This circuit board could be set up to industrially give the same pulse each and every time desired, and so, without mechanical precision, the coil gun would never have worked.

                   With this project finished the dungeon was looking forward to the next time some of those mages came to his labyrinth, and began experiencing the joy of mechanically precise weaponry.