Dungeon at the End of the Universe

As the trio of Sipalians readied themselves, so did the opposing constructs. Unlike the adventurers though, none of them had any specializations. They were just basic all-purpose constructs, the Dungeon hadn’t even made them with combat in mind.

All this meant that once Ram rushed forward towards them, they stood no chance. One of the was immediately barrelled over, squished underneath her heft. The other two focused on her, which meant they didn’t see the mana bolt flying at one of them, nor the nimble fist of Dittillapp approaching the other.

In a matter of only a few seconds, the fight was over.

The three victors stood frozen, shocked by the easy of it all. Well, mostly Prshky. The others not so much.

Clap, clap, clap, Faellen alerted them to its presence.

“Congratulations,” it said, “let this be a lesson to you of the importance of teamwork. You’re going to need it in the future. Now then, ready for the next one?”

At the others’ nods, it gestured towards the far wall of the room, where a door had appeared.

“After you.”

In the next room, there were four constructs of the same make. It was time to grind.

Metal, metal, metal… How does one check what kind of metal they have? For some reason the System refuses to tell me more than that it IS a metal.

Ah, I’m sure it’s going to be fine. I can just go ahead and use it and figure it out later. Maybe once I get a different kind of metal the System will start differentiating between them.

In the meantime, I might as well check out how my first delvers are doing.

Aha! Up to five constructs now. “Very good!”

“Yeah? Then perhaps you should finally make a Boss for them to fight. At this rate they’ll get bored soon enough and start asking questions again,” Faellen spoke up out of nowhere.

“Ahh! You scared me,” I accused.

“Then get better at controlling what you send through our Bond. Seriously, it’s been how long now? Years?”

“Hey now^[1]. That’s not fair,” I tried to defend myself, “I’ve been focusing on more important things.”

^[1] you do not understand the willpower it took to not continue the sentence with: “you’re an all-star...”

“Yeah, sure, anyway: Boss?” my unfaithful assistant redirected.

“Yes, yes, fine, I’ll go make a Boss. Any tips?”

“I don’t know, you’re the Dungeon here. Make it big, I guess,” and with that it returned its attention back to the projection up above with the delvers.

I, on the other hand, now had to figure out what monster to Create. Over the years I’ve had a few opportunities to experiment with various combining of creatures, mostly when I was resting and bored, but at most I’d always make something that was only a sum of its parts.

None of that ‘the whole was greater than the sum of its parts’. Truthfully, most often it even ended up as less than the sum.

But when is a better moments to experiment than in the present? Especially right before a big performance. Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical.

Anyway, let’s get to it. I only have three things I can Create, constructs, Wyld-trees, and Purge Slimes. Why not try to combine them all? Especially since with metal I should be able to make a much better construct than before.

And so I got to work. Purge Slimes, I quickly realized, were the weakest link. Used to deep space as they were, they collapsed pretty much as soon as they came into contact with the slightest atmosphere.

The solutions? A metal shell around it, keeping it in a small vacuum. Then I tried something which, up until that point, only had a miniscule success rate. Making a construct out of something living. Specifically, a Wyld-tree.

Which left me with the decision of which variant to choose. But a memory from way back at the beginning of my journey surfaced and grabbed my attention. If I remember correctly, running too much mana caused the wood of the trees to fleshify… and then explode.

But what if I found the correct balance where it was just enough to become flesh, but not enough to explode? Yes, that could perhaps work. Definitely, if combined with enchantments.

I got to work.

The first step, figuring out how much mana to use, took a while. The trio in my Dungeon even progressed all the way to fighting almost an entire ten of my constructs, but I managed in the end.

Fortunately, step two was solved immediately after. Since I was directly injecting mana into the trees to reach sufficient quantities for fleshification, it meant that I could directly Control how the tree grew. Thus, I needn’t worry about shaping it after the fact.

But then another problem arose. The mana needed to be constant. Otherwise, as soon as I stopped providing it the tree would revert back to its rigid form.

And maybe I could’ve kept powering it myself, but something about that didn’t seem right to me. Invaders shouldn’t face off directly against the Dungeon Core. At least not before reaching the Core Room.

Luckily, the answer was right in front of me. In fact, it was the very first thing I made for this Boss monster.

Purge Slimes were sort of like reverse slimes. Instead of consuming, they produced. How did they produce? By consuming mana and converting it to matter. So I just had to stop that conversion and redirect that mana into the Wyld-tree.

Which meant it was time for enchanting. That’s how it would all come together.

I prepared myself and made another wood-flesh puppet body. I inserted the metal core with the Slime inside it. Then… then I began to gather truly gargantuan amounts of mana.

If this worked, this would be my greatest Creations yet.