Chapter Four-Hundred Ninety-Four (Patreon)

I hum to myself as I design the test for the kids, occasionally checking in on the progress on the fort and the other projects.  I can feel Doppler and Slash trying to listen in, but it’s just the random hums of a dungeon at work.  I get the feeling they still dig it, and I briefly wonder if I should try to make some kind of jazz room.

Nah, that can be a project for the scions, if they want to try it.  I have plenty on my plate already.  I’m also having to constantly toss out things, not because they wouldn’t be something to make the thing a deathtrap, but because I don’t think they’re the sort of thing the Betrayer would do.  I’ve played and watched a lot of rage games, things that troll the player with unfair traps that are also hilarious, things that train one way of thinking before punishing it, and so on.

But I don’t think the Betrayer will try to be funny.  I think he’ll just try to kill.  I’m kinda sad to see some of the more complex traps go, but I need to prepare them for the Betrayer, not for me.  I might do a redesign for the Gauntlet after things settle down, though.  I bet there’s some delvers that’ll love learning a troll gauntlet.

For the Betrayer, it’ll probably be deathtraps and ambushes, and I still have to guess for a lot of his spawns, too.  I go over Tarl’s notes from the meeting on the potential threats, and my gut says the flies are specialized for support.  So far, the least and lessers seem to be full-on offense, maybe even melee specialization.  Buffs and debuffs would make them even more potent.  I take the time to go over Honey’s notes and my own theories about the other spawns.  Something tanky will definitely be in there somewhere, along with something ranged.  I frown at the last spot and look over at the fly specializations.  Tarl thinks they’ll either be assassins or support.

An assassin would round out the lesser, but so would a support.  I’m also not sure how restricted his spawns are.  He might be able to make a support a part of the lesser spawner.  I chew on it for a few moments before discarding the idea.  With the two spawns we know so far, he likes to specialize.  Trying to hammer a support into the lesser line feels like pounding a square peg into a round hole, instead of the square hole everything goes into.  On top of that, the movement options shadow gives for support are too good to pass up, as the Unseen demonstrated.

I nod to myself and slot an assassin into the least line, with shadow fly support.  They may have Harbinger support, too, but I have no idea how many he’ll have.  I feel like dozens might be a conservative estimate.  I might actually be outnumbered in scions here, which is a sobering thought.  On the bright side, though, I don’t think I’m outgunned.  Rocky and Fluffles have shown they’re strong enough to deal with them, and I’d wager Poe and Sue can handle one as well.  We’ll need some mental protection, but that’s being worked on in the background.  I don’t really have any revelations for the mind, so nobody is trying to reinvent the wheel with that particular enchantment.

I settle back into designing, keeping things simple yet ‘lethal’.  Traps and ambushes aren’t exactly elegant, but they’re definitely effective.  I start organizing encounters, and make sure to write them down so Goldilocks can have a look at them later.  If I’m going to try to emulate the Betrayer’s spawns, why should only the kids get to face them?  The other delvers should get the same chance to prepare, too.

As I work, Honey comes to take a look at my personal little library, the little Seeker of Truth able to smell some juicy new information.  I let her go over my theories, and she doesn’t outright label them as bad, so that’s nice.  I don’t think she can really compare the truth out of them just yet, since we don’t have much new information yet, but I’m hopeful.

The expeditions feel like they’re getting close, with a good line into the mantle proper established now.  It took a bit to get down deep enough to get past the deep rocky intrusions, but now they’ve made it, they’re working to home in on where the deities said it’s supposed to be.

I take a look at the latest reports, and they’re promising enough that Leo and Poe are working on trying to find a good spot for a forward base, and a better route through the twisting maze that actually leads into the mantle proper.  They’ve been finding more and more stagnant mana, and we’re pretty sure the Betrayer would be the main source of it so deep.

It’s interesting that mana down that far feels so steady, most of the time.  It makes me wonder if there’s some dungeon in the core, or if maybe the smoothed mana dungeons make tends to settle toward the core, pushed down by the turbulent and stagnant duking it out more on the surface.

Either way, we’ve got to be getting close, so my scions are giving the incoming reports extra scrutiny.  We all remember when the first Harbinger subverted some of my rockslides and was trying to feed us bad intel.  There’s no way the Betrayer himself wouldn’t try to do the same.  But with making sure denizens get rotated out regularly, we hopefully won’t have any controlled denizens trying to mess things up for us.

The biggest problem right now is the number of denizens we can send out.  Only my dragons can really handle it, and their spawner isn’t exactly pumping them out.  Ideally, I’d make the spawner into a lair, but even the normal upgrades are expensive.  I don’t want to even look up how much it’d be to upgrade it to a lair, let alone upgrade it further after!  I can afford another ordinary upgrade for more spawns, though, so I do that, and weigh my options.

With the magma protection enchantment, my other denizens should theoretically be able to go, but I don’t want to tip my hand and show the Betrayer what all I have.  He’ll notice the dragons, and he’ll notice whatever else I send, and he’ll figure out I’m not content to sit back and wait for him to come for me again.  On the other hand, I don’t know if my dragons are numerous enough to even spot everything I need them to.

My usual infiltrators aren’t going to work too well, and will stick out like a sore thumb.  The rockslides might work, maybe.  They’re still individually small, but rocks that far down will eventually get noticed.  Same with my plants.  They could be even sneakier with spatial shenanigans, but I wonder if that might cast some kind of shadow for the flies to notice.

My only other sneaky option… oh hey, they might actually work, and they’re a lot cheaper to upgrade than the dragons.  They’ll just need some magma protection collars or something.  I look over my fox spawner, liking the idea the more I think about it.  I even made it a lair a while ago so they could populate the forest and maybe create a spy network outside of Fourdock.  Those numbers, as well as some illusions, could get them into an even better position to observe than the dragons!

I take a look at the options, curious if I could afford to give them mental affinity, too, but that’d bump their price up to not be that far from the dragons, and the whole point would be saving mana.  Still, Torlon definitely shows illusion can fool even mental affinity, if they’re good enough.  Or far enough away.  I don’t expect to actually sneak in, but getting a better look would be right up my foxes’ alley.

I dig through the options for the next spawn, deciding to take a more direct hand in selecting what the next denizen will be.  There’s all sorts of options for tricky foxes, with even a few lines gaining an affinity for the last few spawns.  They’re tempting, but those lean more toward offense than what I need.  There’s also the option to design my own affiliated line with gravity.

While it’d be really cool to give my foxes’ illusions some literal weight, I still need to try to keep them from being spotted, rather than giving them more combat options.  I could try to play with gravitic lensing to bend perception, and maybe even an event horizon fox for the final tier, but I don’t even need to look to know those would be incredibly expensive.

On the other hand… the horizon fox would probably be the last spawn, so shouldn’t impact the price too badly just yet, right?  I start tinkering, saving a lot of options for later as I try to make the next fox good at stealth, without driving the price through the roof, and I manage to come up with a good synergy.

It’s easy to get distracted by the impressive gravitic things like black holes, and forget about how gravity is keeping you planted with your feet on the ground.  The mind expects for down to exist, even more than it expects water to be wet.  So the illusion taps into that ubiquitousness to make the fox seem like it belongs.  Like I’ve told Pul: the secret to stealth isn’t to be unseen, but to be unnoticed.

Spotting one of my new foxes wouldn’t stick in the mind any more than down existing.  I almost want to call them a downfox, the logical opposite of updog.  Nobody falls for updog, everyone falls for downfox, literally if it attacks.  I don’t think anyone will get it, though.  I settle on Unremarkable Fox for them, and am happy to see they’re not going to break the bank if I take them.

Later upgrades probably will, especially if I make the horizon fox at the end, but that can be future-me’s problem.  Current-me needs better infiltrators, and it’s not like I wasn’t planning on making them covert operatives in the first place.  I spend the mana and watch the first one exit the lair, looking… well, unremarkable.  I smile to myself as it surprises one of the mischief foxes, and soon the two go off to mess with some delvers.

Zorro grabs the next one to get it ready to go on an expedition, and I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction the delvers have to them.  I don’t need mental affinity to be able to mess with people’s minds, and it’ll be good practice for the real thing, I hope.