DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

The last few seconds of the core creation ticked down, only a couple of minutes after he had finished creating the dungeon. Nate waited, his breath coming in shallow gasps as nothing happened.

Finally, after several long seconds, a new message appeared.

‘The creation of the Dungeon Core has been completed. Would you like to finalize the creation of the dungeon and its placement?’

He breathed out in a long exhale, feeling as though his already weak body was about to give out. Okay, at least now he knew he hadn’t needed to rush quite so much. That was good information for the future.

He leaned back and clicked ‘No’ for the moment. Now that he knew he had some extra time, he was going to take it. While he was mostly satisfied with the design of the dungeon, it had still been done under a perceived time crunch.

Now that the timer was gone and he could think clearer, it was time to look at the design again.

What he found was a mixed bag. It truly was a decent design with the information he had on hand. There was no vegetation or nature that they could use for their attacks, though he wasn’t even sure if that mattered. And that right there was the crux of the matter, knowledge. There was simply too much he didn’t know about them.

Nate made a couple of last-minute changes and then told the dungeon to finalize the creation and its placement.

New screens appeared above his current one that showed in real-time the dungeon being created. It sprang up out of the ground around the portal, his first time seeing the dimensional tear, and then covered everything. One of the screens switched to a view inside the dungeon aimed at the portal, while another went to the core.

That left him with three screens, one he kept on the outside view of the dungeon. The last two he could freely move around the dungeon as he wanted, seeing how effective or not everything was.

The entire process only took a few minutes to complete this time, though he had a feeling that future changes to it would take longer.

He shifted again, struggling to find a comfortable spot with his aching body, but also unwilling to go to sleep just yet. Nate was determined to see how this played out at least in the beginning.

Unfortunately, he failed to account for one thing. How often, or in this case, how rarely, beasts or monsters tended to come through the portal.

It wasn’t always a large number of them, otherwise humanity would have been overrun years ago. At the same time, it was a fairly steady rate of a couple every hour, normally.

That meant he had to wait several minutes before the first beast monster appeared inside the dungeon. Right off the bat, he noticed that the energy resource had ticked up a fraction with its appearance. The monster was giving him, well, the dungeon energy just by being inside it. That answered how he got one of the resources, but not the rest of them.

The beast was a rather ugly-looking brute that resembled a cross between a monkey and its own butt. It was entirely smooth, with no fur and rippling with muscles. Not to mention it was obvious the thing had been taking steroids. Nate almost felt sorry for the females of its species.

It stood around in confusion for several moments before approaching a wall and beginning to pound on it.

The walls held, but Nate noticed that his energy production had stopped. The dungeon appeared to be using energy to reinforce the wall, equaling out the energy production instead of sending him into the negatives.

He breathed a sigh of relief. That was one less thing he needed to worry about. As long as the dungeon used the same amount of energy that each monster produced, then the walls would probably never fail.

The Butt-Monkey pounded on the wall for another minute before giving up and wandering around the room. He stumbled across the door, but was clearly unaware of how to use a doorknob. Not that he let that stop him from breaking the door down. It turned out that doors were a lot less sturdy than walls.

However, it did start to repair itself after the beast had walked through, for an additional energy cost. Nate frowned at that, already rethinking his idea to use so many doors. With how many it would have to break through, they would for sure slow it down. The cost to repair them all, however, would make any gains he made almost negligible.

The beast stopped in the middle of the third room and sniffed the air. It looked from side to side and then backed up, a wary look on its ugly smooth-cheeked face.

Nate checked what he had in the room and grimaced. It was an acid trap. If even this ugly monkey thing could smell the acid, then those traps would be no good in this particular dungeon.

As far as he knew, monkeys didn’t have particularly keen senses of smell. At least not compared to a canine or a feline. Yet even it was detecting the smell of the acid.

He made a note to remove those traps and not use them in any future dungeons with monsters that might have a better sense of smell than normal.

The beast made a decision and took a running leap, jumping through the spot in question. A spray of acid hit the ground behind it. The energy production for the dungeon halted again, as the ground was fixed from the attack.

Nate yawned and flicked his eyes to the other screens, seeing if there was anything else happening. There wasn’t, so far, it was just the one monster inside the dungeon still.

He shifted as another lance of agony ran through his body. He didn’t think just pushing himself to stay awake would result in this much pain. Yet, here he was, confined to his bed and unable to find a comfortable position to even lie in.

All he could do was focus on other things.

Nate looked at the endless line of traps that led up to the Dungeon Core. He couldn’t forget about how the disgusting-looking monkey had responded to the acid. It might be a good idea to include the acid as his first line of defense there. Just load the first passage up with enough that they wouldn’t even think of going farther.

He made another note on his laptop and set it to the side while he watched the show.

Finally, everything ended seven rooms in when the stupid thing fell into one of his spear traps. The pointed metal death dealers sliced through its skin without a problem. In moments, the hole-ridden body had bled out and died.

The resource counters for iron, copper, acid, and more spun up as they collected everything they could from its blood and body. Energy increased the most with its death. However, he was sure there was something else going on behind the scenes. There was no way that body had nearly the amount of resources he had gained from it.

Not that he was going to complain. That would be just stupid. At least he now knew how to get more of what he needed to build up the dungeon. He just needed to have it keep killing things. It wasn’t enough to let them walk through it. He would get energy from that, but nothing more.

They needed to die.

With the show now over, Nate pulled up the information on the dungeon and began to change the parts he was unhappy with. The first to go were the doors, at least in their current form. They slowed down the beasts, which he liked, but they were too flimsy. He needed something that they could either open eventually or wouldn’t break as easily.

That was the hard part. He couldn’t select what the doors were made from, the system wouldn’t let him. Each room needed to have a way for the monsters to get in and out of. The doors were only allowed if they were weak, and the doorknobs because they were considered a form of trap.

With a growl of annoyance, Nate decided to put them back, leaving them alone for now. He would keep working at them when he came up with a better idea. For the moment at least, he would simply have to put up with them being constantly destroyed and repaired. Hopefully, the delay they provided would make it worth it.

Next, he started on the acid traps, concentrating on the one closest to the portal. He removed the first and was pleased to note that he got back the resources that had been used in their creation. However, it did take energy for the removal.

Energy was definitely going to be his most precious resource going forward. Everything depended on it in some form.

Now he just needed to decide what traps to create in their stead. Did he want to use more pit traps? That had been effective against the last beast, but would it be the same against something smarter or faster?

He decided to change things up a little and went for arrow traps instead. Making one of them an acid arrow just to see if they could detect that one as well.

A new beast appeared just as he was finishing up. Thankfully, he could still make changes while they were inside, but the creation of the new traps slowed to a crawl. He would need to remember that in the future. If he made changes at the wrong time, a monster could walk through parts of the dungeon completely unmolested.

The new beast was a leopard with three whip-like tails.

Right away, it was clear that this monster was smarter than the monkey from before. It didn’t try to attack the walls pointlessly. In fact, for several long moments, it didn’t do anything. It simply studied the room.

When it finished, it approached one of the doors and smacked it four times with its tails, shattering it into pieces. It was a different door than the previous beast had taken. An action that Nate found odd. It should have been able to smell it still, yet it decided to not follow the same path.

He made a note of it and went back to watching the leopard study the new room. It was a cautious one. He had to give it that. Every time it entered a new room, it would stop and study everything.

That caution and awareness helped it to avoid all the traps he had placed throughout the dungeon. Yet, none of that was able to help it get out. The beast was so slow that Nate simply started changing the traps he was unhappy with.

The cautious leopard was showing him the faults in where he had placed the traps. Or where he had used the wrong ones entirely, as they were too easy to get around.

Nate was taking constant notes, documenting the beast’s entire journey through the dungeon. This was valuable information.

He began to line some of the walls with retracted spikes that activated when anything got too close to them. That had been a pain to type into the search bar. He thought it was worth it after he saw the leopard run on the wall for the fifth time.

He began to make a list adjacent to his other notes containing all the traps he could remember from video games. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very long. Only a few of the most common ones seemed to rise to the surface of his mind.

Instead, he made a note to do a search on the internet later.

The beast had actually managed to take a roundabout path towards the exit when it ran along the walls for the final time. His newly installed trap. The wall spikes sprang out and pierced through it.

The monster had made it twelve rooms into his dungeon before dying.