Despite not really caring about what everyone thought of her, Tacca had no desire to tarnish the memory of her parents – who were reportedly well-known and loved in the Dungeon Assistant community. From overheard conversations between some of her instructors, she was pretty sure that their reputation was the only thing that had kept her alive and safe when she was growing up. Regardless of whether that was a fact or not, the last thing the former Assistant-turned-Dungeon Core wanted was to taint the vague memories she had of them.
Therefore, she left her corpse alone, though she would probably move it later and possibly cover it to keep any future Raiders away. She’d rather be known as a failure – which, honestly, isn’t something new – than a deserter, so she needed to make sure whoever came to check on her found her body and reported back to the Council. The whole situation was a bit macabre, though she could tell that her new form was already making things such as dead bodies a bit less impactful as they were when she was a Fairy. It wasn’t necessarily that she was starting to become desensitized; it was more like such a thing was…normal.
I suppose it would have to be like that, because a Core that’s bothered by killing Raiders or watching their creatures be slaughtered wouldn’t last long.
Putting the existence of her former shell out of her mind was difficult, but not as difficult as she feared; within minutes, she was ignoring it as if it wasn’t even there, a blind spot that didn’t even exist for the time being. As her mind firmed up from the trauma she had experienced and her new determination to make the best of the situation she was in, Tacca finally acquired the information she was lacking before she chose her initial starting selections.
Dungeon Core Status
Dungeon Core Name:
Tacca GloomLily
Core Improvement (CI) Level:
1
Core Improvement Points (CIP):
0/100
Core Improvement Pending/Countdown:
0 in 30 days
Special Characteristic Points (SCP):
0
Current Primary Assistant Bond:
None
Dungeon Force (DF):
500/500
Dungeon Force Regeneration:
3 per minute
Reward Tier:
1
Control Limit:
0/100
Core Options:
Carve Earth
Targetable
5 DF per minute
Place Environmental Object
Targetable
Variable
Teleport
Instant
40 DF
Dissolve Assistant Bond
Instant
1 DF
Create Creature
Targetable
Variable
Create Trap
Targetable
Variable
Core Access:
Creature(s):
Canine Family (select for options)
Variant(s):
All
Trap Specialization(s):
Enchantment
Environmental Access:
Forest
Permanent Assistant Sub-bond:
Tacca GloomLily
Special Characteristics:
Access all Variants for available dungeon creatures
All
All creatures are reduced in Level (cannot be less than 1)
10
Core Improvement Points are reduced when earned
95%
That’s…different. As she had suspected, her maximum Dungeon Force and regeneration had been cut in half – similar to her Fairy Mana; fortunately, she had a bit of warning so she wasn’t completely taken off guard, but she knew that it would be a hardship. Luckily, what surprised her to see was something under the Core Access heading: Permanent Assistant Sub-bond. Her name was there, but also under the Dungeon Core Name category – which made sense only when she considered what had happened. Tacca already knew that she still had access to some of the same Abilities she had when she was a Fairy, so now she was technically a Core and an Assistant at the same time.
That didn’t prevent her from being able to Bond with another, living Assistant, though – at least according to her Status. Instead of listing it as a “Current Assistant Bond” – which was what it was supposed to say – it was showing as a “Current Primary Assistant Bond”; she figured it was a result of her “Sub-bond”, though she didn’t know if that meant she could acquire another Sub-bond if she wanted one. Not that she desired for this to happen to someone else, but it was nice to know her options.
What it also meant was that she was open to being Bonded by another Fairy Dungeon Assistant – which worried her extensively. What happens if they find out I was originally the corpse on the floor? Will they try to have me destroyed as some sort of abomination? Will they try to remove my soul and insert another in my place? Can I hide who I am and all of my knowledge from another Assistant? The only saving grace she had was that Assistants couldn’t actually see or access any of her Core information…or can they?
She knew that the Bond between Fairies and Cores was similar for them all…but what about a Bond between Fairy and former-Fairy? There were a lot of unknowns there, and that was what worried her the most. She needed to protect the secret of her existence and act as close to a “normal” Dungeon Core when that time came, though she vowed not to let it affect the ideas for her dungeon. Tacca had plans already in motion with her initial selections that she couldn’t afford to change, and she would be darned if some Fairy came and messed things up.
There’s not much I can do about that now, I guess; I’ll worry about it when the time comes. She put those concerns away for the moment, because it was time to see if her risky plan with the Variants worked; success was promising, mainly due to the fact that she could see “Canine Family” as her creature, with something that said “(select for options)” next to it…so, obviously, she selected it.
Creature List (Select for Variants)
Fox
Jackal
Dog
Coyote
Wolf
They’re…all here! She wasn’t one hundred percent sure it would work but seeing every type of Canine available was amazing. The real test was if she could actually create one, but first she needed to select a Variant. Since her dungeon was fairly small at the moment, she chose something that was relatively small compared to something like a Wolf: Foxes.
Fox Variants
Fire Fox
Shade Fox
Sand Fox
Arctic Fox
Cape Fox
Root Fox
Bush Fox
Crag Fox
Gliding Fox
Camouflage Fox
Tacca selected the Root Fox, since if she remembered correctly it would work the best for her Forest Environment – and because it was relatively small.
Root Fox
This Root Fox Variant specializes in hiding amongst the exposed roots of trees and attacking unwary passersby. Because of its close ties to the forest, this Fox has tough bark-like skin and fur, granting it a higher defense than normal.
Cost (Level 1): 5 DF
Control Requirement (Level 1): 1
Creation Time (Level 1): 3 Minutes
Physical Attack: 1
Ranged Attack: 0
Physical Defense: 2
Ranged Defense: 1
Elemental Resistance: +25% Nature
Specials: Bonus physical defense due to hard, bark-like skin and fur
Pack Hunter: Bonus to physical attack if in conjunction with others in the Canine family
As soon as she selected it, she felt an internal prompt to choose where she wanted it placed; all of her Status screens disappeared, and she was looking at her small space around her Core. Looking towards the edge of her ovoid-shaped Core Room, she picked a spot where she wanted her new Root Fox and figuratively crossed her fingers as she confirmed the placement.
Tacca experienced her first use of Dungeon Force as 5 units of it left her Core in a transparent glow and flowed towards what now appeared as a silhouette of a small animal with a slightly bushy tail. It was a surprise to the former Fairy, because she had never seen either before; the silhouette and the sort-of-visible Dungeon Force was only apparent to Dungeon Cores. As a Dungeon Assistant, she had been taught that what she was looking at was normal – but she never thought she’d actually see it herself.
It took three minutes for the new creature to fully form – which wasn’t that long of a time – with it quickly becoming more and more substantial as time went on. From her former viewpoint as a Fairy, it looked like the dungeon creatures just “popped” into existence, but obviously they were formed invisibly and didn’t actually exist until they were complete.
Root Fox (Level 1) complete!
Would you like to automate the replacement of this creature? Yes/No
Tacca was startled by the sudden notification but was also expecting the question, as it was a normal part of operating a dungeon for a Core. When a creature was killed in the normal process of a Raider invasion, “automatic replacement” would do all the work itself in replacing the creature when the dungeon was empty of invaders. There was a priority that she could assign to each defending creature, and Dungeon Force would automatically be taken from her available pool to replace it – though she could also designate a threshold that it wouldn’t take any more from. For instance, if she wanted to always have at least 100 DF at all times, then the replacement would stop as soon as that threshold was reached, only resuming when more was regenerated; on top of that, she could place the entire process on hold with just a mental flip of a switch, in case she needed to change something in the dungeon or needed to use Dungeon Force for some other reason.
Really, the entire ability was to streamline the whole process of replacing dungeon creatures exactly where they were before – which could eventually number in the hundreds or thousands when she grew stronger. For now, however, she didn’t need to automate the replacement of this Root Fox because it was mainly just for a test…so she chose No.
The deep brown Root Fox just sat there on the edge of her Core Room with a blank expression on its face, but Tacca was happy – because it worked! She instinctively knew that any of the other creatures she chose to create would also succeed, but she didn’t want to take the time to create any of them…or to use any of her Dungeon Force unnecessarily. She had other plans for it, after all.
Leaving her new creature alone except to give it instructions to guard her – not that she expected anything to attack – Tacca got to work creating her new dungeon. She could vaguely feel the direction that the surface was in relation to her Core, though how far away it was remained a mystery. Her first Core, Jeremy, had mentioned that he could sense that he was close to breaking free, but from what she learned at DAPS was that a Core had to be fairly near the surface – as in, within 10 feet or so – to tell for sure. Since she didn’t feel like she was anywhere close, Tacca figured she could be anywhere between 11 feet and a mile or more away from where she wanted to end up.
The surface was above her at a steep angle (almost straight up), though, which gave her a little more information; most Cores started anywhere between 400 to 700 feet below the surface, which allowed them to build rooms and sloping tunnels to eventually rise far enough to break free. If her Core was typically placed – and she had no reason to think that it wasn’t – then she had quite a bit of ground to cover before she had to worry about opening herself up for attack by Raiders. Even if Tacca were to find that the surface was nearer than she expected, she would go another direction to prolong her arrival in the world – because she was in no way ready to face the rest of the world.
After activating her Carve Earth option, she felt and saw a small stream of her Dungeon Force flow out of her Core and impact against the far wall. The dirt and stone almost seemed to distort and melt at a slow pace, disappearing into nothing after a few moments. Tacca watched in amazement – even though she had seen it being done hundreds of times before this – because she was doing it now. Her amazement was short-lived, though, because the process was just…so…slow.
Carving through the dirt and stone took 5 DF per minute to maintain, which wouldn’t be a problem for a normal Dungeon Core with their DF Regeneration – they canceled themselves out. Even a brand-new Core could work on carving out tunnels and rooms every minute of the day for weeks or months and not run out, as long as they didn’t spend any DF on anything else; for Tacca, though, she only regenerated a little over half of that amount, which meant that she could maintain the tunneling process for just over four hours before she ran out completely. Not that she would keep it going for that long, because draining your Core completely and keeping it at that level could cause damage.
Just like her own Core, which was already cracked in a couple of places from the whole sucked-in-a-Fairy-soul-and-forced-out-the-previous-soul incident that had happened. At three and a half hours of constant tunneling through the dirt using Carve Earth – which got her about 3 feet down in a 4-foot-wide, 7-foot-tall hole – she immediately shut the process down when it felt like someone had shoved a knife in her non-existent stomach. A tiny crack appeared in her Core where there wasn’t one before, though at least the others hadn’t widened any more than they already were.
This is…bad. If Tacca couldn’t consistently keep her tunneling going, then she was going to have some issues making her dungeon the way she wanted it. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do it eventually, but it was going to take a while. As for her damaged Core, she was almost certain that when she raised her Core Improvement Level – which would take at least a month – some or all of those cracks would be repaired. Damage to Cores wasn’t exactly common, but it wasn’t unheard of either; those in the past that had been cracked had that damage repaired upon the next Improvement Level, so she had to hope that it worked the same way with her. She just had to make sure she didn’t make it any worse, which meant that she had to take special care to prevent any more cracks from happening – essentially by going even slower than she had planned.
This just keeps getting better and better.
Chapter 13
Three weeks passed with boring regularity, as Tacca continued to use her Carve Earth to create a tunnel 20 feet long, and from there to start on a room that she was planning on being at least 50 feet on each side. She would’ve guessed that it was even longer despite the regular schedule she was keeping for her work: one hour of constant digging, then waiting an hour for things in her Core to stabilize and for her DF to regenerate, then another hour of digging – and so on. It might be a bit too cautious, but she didn’t want to risk shattering her entire Core just so that she could go faster.
Regardless, she was making progress. Again, not as much progress as she wanted – but until she repaired her Core, it was the best she could do. Of course, she wasn’t getting much in the way of Core Improvement Points that would be tallied up to increase her Level, so she was going to have to do something about that before the month was up.
Core Improvement Point Awards (95% Reduction)
Type
Variable Conditions
Potential CIP
Current
Rooms Constructed
Size
1 – 2
0
Traps Installed
Complexity
1 – 2
0
Monsters Created
Levels
1 – 2
1
Rewards Placed
Valuation
1 – 2
0
Raider Presence
Time
1 – 1
0
Raider Deaths
Quality
5 – 500
0
Core Improvement Point Countdown
Core Improvement Levels 1 – 20
> 1 Month
Core Improvement Levels 21 – 40
1 Year
Core Improvement Levels 41 – 60
5 Years
Core Improvement Levels 61 – 80
25 Years
Core Improvement Levels 80+
N/A
Current Core Improvement Status
Current Core Improvement Level
1
Current Core Improvement Points
0/100
Current Core Improvement Countdown
1 in 8 days
So far, Tacca’s progress towards gaining a Core Improvement Level was a whole…one point. That one Core Improvement Point came from the Root Fox still in her tiny Core Room, and she hadn’t received any more from anything else – because all of her Dungeon Force was going towards the creation of the dungeon itself. Fortunately, being a Dungeon Assistant as well as a Core had some perks – because she knew how to game the system, at least initially. Normally, this strategy wasn’t needed; the typical year when the CIPs would accumulate and then take effect was normally enough for every Core to raise their Core Improvement Level by at least one or two – but usually ended up being a lot more. When they didn’t have a 95% reduction in their accumulation of points (like she did), they were able to gain hundreds or thousands of CIPs by that time.
The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) Page 12