The Dungeon Traveler

by Alston Sleet

  A scout admitting to being lost was a scary prospect. It scuttled any idea that a scouts skills could allow them to get from one place to another, something that dwarven scouts take great pride in since much of their time is spent either in dark forests or deep tunnels.

  The rest of the team looked at each other uncomfortably at the last admission. In a different situation the squad would have given Mela a hard time over getting lost, but under these conditions, it was concerning.

  Mela looked away before she checked her Voice of the World notification. When she looked at the new notice to her status, she gasped, drawing more concerned looks from her comrades.

  “Scout Mela?” Captain Feld asked, his eyebrows raising into full concern signaling position.

  “Sir, I just earned an Achievement! [Champion of the Copper Agility Challenge]”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Batter Up!

  The next two weeks were a whirlwind of activity followed by periods of utter calm. Each day started the same way. The dwarves would march a team into my hallway, and they would take up station inside. Once this team had taken up positions within the vestibule, another group would march in and prepare for the challenges. Each time they would attempt to enter as a team, and each time I wouldn’t open up my one-way entrances to the challenges. I would just let them meet a solid wall. Once they tried to enter one by one, I would let them through.

  After the first three days of that type of testing of my rules, I decided to play a bit of a prank on them and added another hallway opposite the Hall of Champions. The two trial hallways, when I failed to let them through the one way pass-throughs, now connected back to this unnamed hallway. The first time the team thought they had been let through but had instead been looped around back to the vestibule, it had almost left me in tears. One of the stationed dwarves referred to it as the ‘hall of failure’ which started me up on laughing again. Rolling laughter is far more comfortable when you don’t actually have to stop to breath.

  My first kill came on the third day.

  The team which entered had younger warriors and entered my halls far more boisterous and noisy than any team before. They were bragging about how easy the melee challenge was and how each would finish it faster than any of the others. The dwarves holding their position in the vestibule seemed to be slightly disgusted by the attitude and to be honest so was I.

  The first to challenge the copper melee hall was a tall dwarf who was wielding small axes. To my mind, a war ax was a massive weapon that had two giant wings of metal on either side. Apparently, my fantasy art and games had lied to me. A war ax was just a two-handed version, meaning it was only just slightly longer in the handle than what I would call a hatchet. The version he was using was so small that I would have mistaken them for throwing tomahawks if I hadn’t watched him using them.

  With a bit of reflection, it made sense. There was no reason to make gigantic axes like my fantasy art showed since you only really hit with a small area, the point of an ax versus a sword, and would just make it heavy and unwieldy for no real gain.

  The troops they were sending through were the elites, most of their warriors being pikemen or short sword and shield users. Both were useful weapons to train in when defending a castle or tunnels.

  So this young buck, full of himself and proud of his capabilities rolls into the melee area and smacks one of the target shields on my spinning training dummies. He stepped back and to the side to let the swinging blade pass and just watched it as it rotated around. After it took three revolutions, he stepped up to the next dummy and slammed it around. He methodically smacked around every target and avoided each spinning blade. The entire time I was watching his lazy attitude and smirking face and growing more disgusted by his actions. The challenge was easy because it was designed to be easy. I wanted it to be only dangerous for idiots. No one had progressed past the copper challenges. I had expected someone to rush ahead, but apparently, their command had solid control over them.

  After he completed the challenge, he scooped up his two copper coins and strutted out of the hall of champions. This is where things went horribly wrong. The moment he was out he started bragging about how many times he spun the dummy around. This started a bit of a competition and the next lad to step up was using a war hammer. To my eye, the war hammer was even less like fantasy fare. Apparently a ‘war hammer’ is a framing hammer that has a handle that is twice as long. My dreams were being crushed left and right. Still, though, a lump of steel the size of the weapons in games I had seen before would have weighed hundreds of pounds and probably been impossible to swing. Awesome, but impractical.

  This young dwarf, while still bragging about how awesome he would be, seemed a bit more aware that things could go wrong. He stepped up to the hallway to the jeers of his friends and enter the challenge. In his defense, he took a practiced and careful swing at the first target. It was probably a textbook combat swing and stance. The target swung away, and he carefully moved aside to avoid the blade. It left the edge pointing almost directly towards the next dummy.

  Seeming to gain confidence from the practice swing he stepped around the first dummy and lined up with a massive baseball swing on the second target. His eyes were jumping between the target and the blade before he reared back and swung. The impact was enormous, he actually managed to dent the reinforced target. The blade spun back at high speed and then he made a horrible, horrible, mistake.

  He jumped to his left out of the way of the swinging blade and directly onto the first dummies blade.

  His sideways leap was entirely out of proportion to what had actually been needed. I guessed that he had been so worried about how fast the blade would swing around that he decided to just leap after his hit and get entirely out of the way.

  The blade slid up and under his arm, through the thin padding of his leather and directly into his chest. I watched his eyes go wide when the blade slide inside his flesh. The look said he knew that he was doomed. The blade entered his chest, and the continuation of his jump pulled the razor sharp blade through his still beating heart. The weight of his dying body pulled him off the blade, and the moment the edge left his heart, the blood pumped out as if to follow it.

  The young dwarf lay in the ever-growing pool of blood for a few seconds more, his eyes staring wildly as his left leg tried to scramble against the ground. Then his breath finally left him, his eyes drifted away and into the distance and then…he died.

  I sat there stunned, watching this young dwarf bleed out in my halls because of overconfidence and a single stupid mistake.

  Minutes later I started to absorb his body, a process I had long resigned myself too, and as I absorbed him, I suddenly…knew him.

  I knew Jorgen. This was his first outing after being assigned to the elite troops. He had tasted first blood in the Turten northern lands against the few still wild Kobold clans. His father was a blacksmith, and he had gained the necessary skills while under his care but he had refused the class and joined the guard. Jenna had been his first crush when he was twenty, an age far too young for the maid of thirty-eight, but when she died in a bandit raid, he never recovered. He never felt he was good enough for the elite troops and thought the tradition of luck from blacksmith and blacksmith son’s using a war hammer was the reason he had been selected for the elites. He was determined to prove his worth, and he prayed that…

  …And then it slipt away.

  I knew what I knew about Jorgen, but it was like reading a fact sheet instead of tasting the sweat of the forge or the flush of his first crush. His armor and weapons told another story, of the stone and then the flame, the hammer and leather wrap, then the fight against Kobolds, then nothing. A far cleaner and less emotional story but there just the same.

  I sat there stunned trying to assimilate what I had just experienced even as I contrasted it with the death of the wizards. With the wizards, I had consumed them without having formed a domain. I knew something about them, but…nothing
like what I had just experienced. Was it that Jorgen had died in my domain? When I looked through my skills, I noticed my [Etheric Pattern Formation] had risen to twenty-four. Was it just that I had the [Etheric Pattern Formation] skill now? Was that what had given me all of…well…that?

  I found myself eying up the other dwarves considering the sensations of life, the stories they held, the taste of the memories I had just gained. I was sickened by the idea of consuming more life but oddly tempted. I was no longer considering traps and defenses just to protect my life, I was now considering murder just so I could taste life again.

  My craving was upsetting on multiple levels. I was both sickened and joyful over what I had just done. But mostly I was concerned about what this feeling might drive me to do. I had died having let my urges drive me in life. Porn, alcohol, diversions of all kinds had been my balm in life. I had died deeply depressed and knowing that I was not just a failure, but a failure of my own making. I had let a breakup, a breakup of a relationship I had known was doomed to failure, destroy all parts of my life. I had drowned my shallow sorrow and deepened it without reservation. I was prone to chasing small pleasures at the expense of my life.

  Was I doomed to do the same here?

  I watched the waiting dwarven team as they chatted and relaxed. After about thirty minutes, a time far longer then it had taken the first man to complete the trial before they start looking concerned. The rest of the dwarven team formed up and gripped their weapons as they walked through the entrance challenge hall together. The boisterous laughter had dropped, and only nervous commands remained. I watched as they looped around to the rejection hall and out to the vestibule again. Once they found themselves back around their concern and anger grew, and they hollered for Jorgen.

  One of the dwarves was ordered back out of the hall leaving the rest of the team, and the guards in the vestibule, waiting with deepening concerns. I used my [Far Seeing] to watch the messenger as he traveled through the castle until he knocked on a door. A few seconds of waiting had the door open only to show nothing but blackness within. The messenger stepped into the darkness, and my vision snapped away. Whatever that darkness was it blocked any chance of my magical sight within.

  I was left waiting nervously along with the two teams inside my hall. Eventually, the messenger returned and instructed the next dwarf to enter my trial and to keep an eye out for Jorgen as well as to be extra careful. The man that entered the trial area had flecks of grey in his beard, and I guessed he was the leader of the troop. Why he hadn’t led the challenge first, I couldn’t imagine, but I would bet the loss of Jorgen would show poorly for him.

  His trial was relatively simple. He entered and carefully eyeballed the challenge area before stepping forward. He walked all the way to the pedestal and checked into the closed-off exit hallway before he returned to the starting area. His attacks were carefully controlled and barely left the blades making a full revolution. He only had to step aside or block with the haft of his two-handed ax a few times before he made it through and collected his prize; two copper challenge coins.

  The return of their leader left the rest of the troop viscously angry. Again the younger messenger was sent off, and I followed along until he entered the blocked off room. His return signaled the continuation of the trials.

  Most were angry and sullen traversing my trial, but one of them seemed to enter a rage when he saw my target dummies. His hand axes chopped down on each of the arms of the mannequins until the blades of his weapons started to chip and bend. He raged on my targets until his arms grew tired, the sounds of his axes pinging off the metal of my dummies echoing within the stone room. Eventually, he stood in front of the first target deeply breathing before he half-heartedly slapped aside the red circled target shields and blocked the blades. He collected his two coins then huffed and stomped his short body through the champions hallway.

  The drama of the day ended there, the next two teams seemed solidly locked on, and they traversed the melee combat challenge with almost laughable ease. At that point the guard team formed up and left my halls, leaving a different team stationed outside my door.

  Once my halls were empty, I breathed a sigh of relief. The emotional turmoil of the first death had deeply concerned me. I had wondered if I would be attacked, if they would abandon my halls, or suggest that I had unfairly killed Jorgen. I didn’t know what it would be, but my fears were eventually left to rest. The conversations between warriors waiting made it clear that this was training, and in training, some people die.

  It wasn’t until I had been empty for a few minutes on that third night that I discovered that I knew a lot more about Kobolds. I knew how they moved, what they liked in a den, how the males cared for the young and even how the drab colored females led the combat. I knew that Kobolds were usually matriarchial. That they preferred traps and hit and run tactics instead of a straight fight.

  My knowledge of wild monster Kobolds wasn’t complete, I couldn’t make any, but I could almost taste the possibility. Apparently [Etheric Pattern Formations] wasn’t just memories or the imprint of materials like the new silver and bronze which came from the coins in Jorgen’s pocket. No, it was more and less than just memories or just materials. It was the imprints of things done and felt, actions taken and emotions spilled. I could almost feel the Kobolds that Jorgen had slain, I could practically taste the memories of their life on his hammer, but it was just out of reach.

  I wasn’t able to create a dwarf, that felt entirely beyond my reach, but a Kobold…that was close.

  If I gained a few more deaths, I would be able to create whatever those dwarves had killed, or at least whatever they had felt strongly about while killing. It wasn’t clear if it was intent, emotion, or just repetition, but one or more of those factors were involved. I spent that night considering what it would be like to taste more of a dwarf’s life, how it would be nice to taste and breath and smell things again.

  The rest of those two weeks were a repeat of the prepared and ready dwarven teams testing themselves in the copper melee challenge. Those two weeks left me feeling like a junkie who wasn’t addicted to their new drug yet, but like I was eyeing up for another dose. I resisted every urge to change things, to alter the challenges to be more dangerous, to kill just one more dwarf. I did adjust one challenge. I filled the pit of the platform agility challenge with spikes. I just kept envisioning someone failing a jump then slowly dying over days, the trial being blocked off the entire time.

  My chief consolation was that they would have to start in on the more dangerous levels eventually.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rare Drops.

  I kept fretting over the idea of becoming addicted to eating sapients. The fact that I wasn’t worried about killing people said everything about how I had already changed from becoming a Dungeon Core.

  The joke of the ‘hall of failure’ stuck with me. Eventually, I decided to do something to remember poor Jorgen and everyone else who would follow him.

  I created The Hall of the Fallen.

  Instead of a simple hallway that looped back around when I wanted to redirect people away from challenges in use, I created a large room, stretched further through [Spatial Manipulation] to be far more extensive on the inside. It was actually the most significant expansion I had ever done, and I could start to feel some pushback from the space itself. I disliked the feeling of the space pushing against my hold. Instead, I expanded the walls out further and let the expanded space ease.

  Then I placed a simple copper plaque right at the entrance from the vestibule.

  All it said was ‘Jorgen Stonemass,’ in a simple plain text. I had considered grouping plaques by species or by the challenge they died within. Instead, I decided just to place them as they fell and use the metal for the plate based on the trial. With this, you would see the name of copper challengers (hopefully few) versus platinum or mithril (eventually). I wouldn’t make distinctions by species because I wanted these trials to seem
as fair and as inclusive as possible.

  I waffled on the name for a while but settled on ‘The Hall of the Fallen’ for a few reasons. It matched the naming scheme with the rest of the halls, and it emphasized a level of respect that I wanted for my goddess (and by extension from me). I wanted people to come and show respect, not rage and work to attack me. People will die to take revenge, but they would also fight to preserve a memory. A memorial to the fallen would help me resist my temptations as much as it would protect me from revenge seekers.

  I still remembered the dwarf’s rage as he slammed his hatchets into the arms of my dummies because of the loss of his friend. I couldn’t imagine what someone filled with actual power might do instead of the flailing of the near powerless soldier.

  The response to the new hall was understated and calm. The elites guarding the place started the day with a broad area sweep, just as they had each morning. They quickly noticed the change in the new hallway, and that sent a burst of hand signals, and they formed up into their travel positions again. Their scout ducked into the hall, pulled back, paused, then moved in again. After quickly scouting around the empty room, she signaled the captain to move forward. His response was to stare at Jorgen's plaque for a moment, and then he frowned as he ran his eyes over the entire room.

  I would have liked to commemorate the champions as well, but I had no actual knowledge of the winners. I couldn’t reward them with a named plate since I didn’t know their names! Once I started to have champions further down in my challenges I would think about trying something with the Hall of Champions, maybe scenes from their wins, or statues.

  I decided that I would stay in the dwarven city for thirty days total, and I was starting to worry that my copper agility and melee challenges would be the only ones the dwarves would try against. For some reason, the dwarves protected their mages the way fantasy had led me to believe they would defend their gold.