by DB King
Corsair’s Prize
Dungeon of Evolution 2
DB King
Copyright © 2021 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Other Series by DB King
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
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About the Author
Other Series by DB King
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Chapter 1
The soft hiss of the rain was constant beneath the clang of hammers on metal and the low grumble of the forge. Marcus stood over a heavy iron anvil, sweat running from his brow and landing with a sharp tiss on the red-hot metal of the half-made sword he was working on.
Around him in the dimly lit forge, a small group of men and women were bent over their own tasks. The big central forge glowed a deep red, and oil lamps hung around the walls to add extra light for the workers. Kairn Greymane, the exile dwarf, worked the forge bellows himself, watching the color of the flames with his critical, expert eye.
Outside the open door, the constant rain was a gray sheet falling straight down.
A month had passed since the battle of the Underway. Marcus and his allies had fought off a horde of monstrous ratmen, giant iron-clad battle spiders, and warg-mounted cavalry to keep control of their home territory.
That territory was a small corner of the giant and mysterious underground labyrinth that was known as the Underway. Its full extent had never been explored, but Marcus and the Gutter Gang had lived in one small, defensible corner of the Underway for years. For a long time, they had lived there fairly peacefully, just a small group who had nowhere else to go.
But since Marcus had met Ella the dungeon faerie and been granted the power to create and manipulate dungeon chambers, all that had changed. The power allowed him to create magical chambers underground that would gradually evolve into fearsome trials for only the most brave—or the most foolish—warriors. And with this incredible power, Marcus could change things—for himself, for the Gutter Gang, and for the entirety of Kraken City.
Marcus turned the blade he was working on, eyeing it critically for a moment then beginning to hammer it again. He was not an experienced smith, but he learned fast and had been making progress under Kairn’s expert instruction. Like all those of his race, the old dwarf was a natural when it came to metalworking and stonemasonry, and he was more than happy to pass his knowledge on to willing students.
Marcus enjoyed the smithing work. It gave him time to think. So much had happened recently that time for reflection had become rare. Since the battle of the Underway, his status had increased dramatically. There were many decisions needing to be made each day, and many people wanting a piece of his time.
Also, he missed his dungeons.
During the battle of the Underway, Marcus’s dungeons had played a critical role in achieving victory for the Gutter Gang. Normally, Marcus used the dungeons as challenging arenas where adventurers could fight unique monsters and gain rewards. During the battle, however, they had become weapons of war.
Marcus had been able to channel a great portion of the enemy force into the dungeons, and the dungeons had responded by producing an army of monsters which had, in the end, broken free of their chambers and taken to the field to turn the tide of the battle. But since the battle had ended, the dungeons had closed themselves off, and they could not be reopened.
Ella the faerie said that it was because so much energy had been expended in the dungeons during the battle, and that made sense to Marcus. Dungeons were powered by the actions of those inside them; they used the energy expended in combat to create monsters and, once enough energy had been built up, to allow Marcus to create entirely new chambers.
Since that last climactic battle, however, any attempt to open the dungeons had met with a message that flashed up, words written like a bright afterimage in front of Marcus’s eyes:
Crucible chambers: Stasis Recovery Cycle in progress
Ella, who had granted Marcus the power over the dungeons, had done her best to reassure him, but he could tell that she was concerned, too. Her strange, green-skinned, elfin face was expressive, and Marcus saw his own worry mirrored there when she thought he wasn’t looking.
She had not heard of anything like this happening before, she admitted. Dungeons were rare in this age, and it had been a long time since anyone had used them in warfare.
Their only option was to wait.
And so they waited, and Marcus focused on building his stronghold.
“Marcus,” Kairn Greymane said. “Heat your iron again.”
Marcus glanced down. The iron had cooled enough that his hammer blows were making little difference. He nodded and moved over to the forge.
“You are distracted, my friend,” Kairn said, over the hollow whoosh of the bellows and the roar of the fire.
“I am,” Marcus confessed.
“You are thinking of the dungeons?”
Marcus nodded.
Kairn shook his head and smiled. “Don’t worry, Marcus. It will take time, but you will regain control over them, I’m sure of it. You’ve made good use of the time since the battle, and I know you’ll continue to do so.”
Marcus gave the dwarf a wry smile. Kairn was right, of course, but Marcus could not help hoping that it would not be too long before his dungeons returned to his control. Since he had formed his alliance with Ella, creating and using the dungeons had become the defining element of his life. It was strange to have that removed from him all at once.
But Kairn was right. They had made good use of the time.
The iron blade was bright a
nd hot again. Marcus drew it from the forge and beat it again with the hammer.
He shaped this iron as he had shaped his stronghold—inch by inch, and with a great deal of help from Kairn. The dwarf turned out not only to be a master metalsmith, but also a competent and knowledgeable builder in stone. He knew how to lay the foundations for a building, how to dig trenches that would hold up against the rain, and how to drain the boggy wetlands on which they were building.
Day by day, over the course of the last four weeks, the stronghold rose and expanded.
They were building in the boggy, haunted area known as the wasteland. Here, a wide expanse of waterlogged terrain dotted with knots of scrubby trees and bushes extended for several miles between the sea-cliffs and the edges of the slums of Kraken City. Every day, they worked within the sight of the great island city.
The edge of Kraken City was a mile away, on the same level they were on. It began abruptly, with tightly packed slums that lay like a thick growth of damp moss at the base of a tree. Beyond the slums, the slopes of the island rose steeply, and the slum district gave way to the richer, less congested area that was called Merchants’ Town.
Merchants’ Town populated the lower slopes of the mountainous island. Here, in warrens of steeply sloping cobbled streets faced by elaborate buildings of stone, the artisans and traders dwelt and plied their trade. Here also there were districts of inns and taverns, and the great plaza of heroes where the statues of the old legendary lords of Kraken stood. There were administrative buildings where the Traders’ Council did its best to regulate the affairs of the city. There was the guild quarter, the temple district, the street of the moneylenders, and many other areas dedicated to one particular trade or other. Kraken City was the busiest trading port in the known world, and as a consequence it had become a bustling, thriving metropolis where many different kinds of people mixed.
For a long time, Marcus had been one of the lowest of the low—a thief, an exile from one of the guilds, a dealer in stolen goods. He had been forced down into the Underway after his exile from the thieves’ guild, where he joined with the Gutter Gang. The Gang were outcasts, criminals, men and women whose hard lives had driven them down even lower than the slum dwellers.
But all that was changing now.
At the core of Marcus’s dungeon power was the intention of the user. He who approached the power with ill intent could expect swift destruction, but he who approached it with good intentions would be rewarded.
For Marcus, the most important thing was to see those around him raised up from their lives of hardship and drudgery, and so the power had manifested through him and begun to influence the others around him. He had seen the broken, worn-out people around him become strong, confident, healthy, and energized as his aura worked its magic on them. Old Jay, the ancient, blind spiritual leader of the Gang had been restored to a hale and hearty middle-age by the dungeons’ evolution magic. He had even had his sight restored.
The dungeons were a marvel to behold. They began as empty chambers. Marcus would put ingredients into the chamber, close it up, and wait. The ingredients could be anything—a dagger, a handful of coins, a scattering of sand, a feather, anything worked. Once the dungeon had been left to evolve for a few hours, the ingredients would develop into the different elements of the dungeon experience—monsters, traps, and environment. In one dungeon, gold and iron had evolved into a juggernaut of metal with four blades for hands—the bladehand. In another, a duelist’s rapier had evolved into a host of ghostly duelists. A feather from a man’s hat had become a monstrous harpy, and in another dungeon, seafarer’s charms and some salt water had become a pirate’s cove, complete with monstrous lobster-like creatures who acted like a pirate crew.
Adventurers would come to try their luck in the dungeons. When the dungeon had been cleared of monsters, the adventurers found a stack of valuable loot waiting for them at the doorway—gold and silver coins, ingots of precious metal, even bags of jewels and precious stones. It was a quirk of the dungeons that Marcus himself could not take this loot from the dungeons. When he fought through one of his own dungeons—as he often did—the loot would appear, but he could not lift it.
This meant that Marcus needed the adventurer teams as much as the dungeons did. The dungeons needed them to expend energy in fighting, but Marcus needed them to remove the loot from the dungeons. As the dungeon master, Marcus controlled access to the dungeons, and so he took 20% of the adventurers’ loot as a fee for allowing them in.
It worked well. Marcus had built relationships with two teams of adventurers from Kraken City, both of whom were pleased to cede him 20% of their winnings for the privilege of running the dungeons. Kraken City had no lack of fighters, and that was good for Marcus.
During the battle of the Underway, his adventurer teams had ended up playing a small but critical role. Unexpectedly, they had turned up during the final phase of the battle, and they had roused the down-trodden population of the slums, who had also taken up Marcus’s cause. The slum dwellers had been well-rewarded with gold, and Marcus’s magical influence had immediately begun to take effect on them too.
They had come to his aid, and he was pleased that he had been able to reward them. He had shared out the gold that he had collected from the dungeons, but the influence that being in his presence had on people was even more valuable than gold. The people became more confident, stronger, and healthier—and those were things that no amount of riches could buy.
After the battle, the slum dwellers had flocked to Marcus. Their elders, seeing the potential to better their circumstances by throwing in their lot with him, had sworn an oath of loyalty to him that very day. Marcus had accepted, and set them to work.
Under Kairn’s instruction, an area of the wasteland had been cleared and drained. In the ruins of an ancient building near an entrance to the Underway, Marcus’s people laid the foundations for his new stronghold. They dug shafts down into the Underway and excavated stone from deep within the tunnels to use in the walls. Now, the stronghold had two levels—one above ground and one in the depths of the Underway. Flights of stairs joined the above-ground level to the below-ground level, and the Gutter Gang’s Underway dwelling became the basement level of Marcus’s new stronghold.
With so many hands to work at it, the structure rose incredibly quickly. In the course of only four weeks, a squat drum tower had risen up from the ruins, surrounded by a stone ringwall and a deep ditch. Between the wall and the tower there was a generous space for outbuildings, and here Marcus had asked the builders to make the forge where he was now working. A forge was a necessity for any project like this, of course. Nails, iron fittings, bolts, hammers, spades, picks, shovels, wheel axles, barrel bindings, and countless other items had to be created. At first, a smaller forge had been built to service the builders, but once the main body of the building had been finished, Marcus had set up this bigger, more permanent operation.
Hundreds of slum dwellers now worked day and night on the project. Marcus and Kairn had organized them into teams with competent people to oversee different elements of the operation, and Marcus’s adventurers had taken charge of trading for supplies on the docks and bringing cartloads of food, timbers, and other sundries back to the building site.
Everything had run smoothly—more smoothly than anyone would have thought possible for such a big project—and yet Marcus could not fully enjoy it. The dungeons called to him, but every time he attempted to open one of them, he received the same maddening message.
Crucible chambers: Stasis Recovery Cycle in progress
“Marcus!” called a high, feminine voice from the doorway of the forge.
Jolted from his thoughts, Marcus blinked and looked around. In the doorway, a small figure hovered about four feet from the ground, framed against the gray sheet of the falling rain.
It was Ella.
The faerie was small, only about three feet high, and she made her way about by flying. She had big, gossamer wings
like those of a dragonfly, but they didn’t flap to keep her aloft. Rather, they acted as a vector for her magical power of flight.
When they had first met, Ella had been a captive in the gloomy cellar of Diremage Xeron’s house, trapped in an iron cage and destined for a dark fate at the Diremage’s hands. Marcus had saved her, and she had smeared a pinprick of her blood on his skin, creating an unbreakable magical alliance between the two of them. Through the alliance, the power of the dungeon master had been granted to him.
Ella was an old being—Marcus did not know exactly how old—and she knew a lot of the lore of the dungeons. She could not create or manipulate dungeons herself, instead she needed an alliance with another being for that to work. That was where Marcus came in. With the alliance in place, Marcus took on the power of the dungeons.
She hovered in the doorway now, dressed in well-fitted black wool garments, made to measure for her by a member of the Gutter Gang with tailoring skills. She had tiny leather boots with gleaming brass buckles, and gloves of black sable that kept her hands warm. Her skin was the dark green of pine needles, and her eyes were big and round, set more toward the sides of her head than the front. With her pointed features and small mouth, she had an almost insect-like appearance. Despite her strange looks, however, her face was expressive and her voice and mannerisms were very human.
Ella had pushed her deep hood back, revealing sharply pointed ears and a mass of wild, straw-colored hair that stuck out from her head like a haystack. She grinned, revealing sharply pointed teeth.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said, her voice barely cutting through the din of the hammers and the roar of the forge. “Can we talk? I have news.”
Marcus glanced at Kairn, who nodded and reached out to take the sword Marcus had been working on. As Marcus turned to the door, Kairn picked up Marcus’s hammer and worked the iron.