No Need for a Core?

Mordecai made his way back towards the start of the third level as he sent his awareness out to check on something else. This talk of defending the dungeon made him think of the hidden path, and he wanted to see how everything there was going. He started scanning through the dank path and decided that overall he was rather satisfied.

The mana he’d injected into the sludge had born fruit, so to speak. Ooze-type creatures and molds had grown and mutated rapidly as such species are very wont to do. The molds hadn’t done anything particularly unique in his experience, various patches had taken on some different elemental aspect to alter the environment near them, and all of them were some sort of infectious, but that was fairly common.

Some of the slimes on the other hand had interacted interestingly with the crystal flowers and the bunbees that had started visiting them. In turn, those bunbees had evolved as well and started a separate hive from the rest. Mordecai mentally marked that hive’s honey as unusable. It might still be technically edible, but he found it probable that the honey had acquired a special flavor that no one wanted to taste.

As for the slimes, unlike molds, these more mobile creatures tended to be somewhat predatory in addition to their organic-scavenging diet, and the only creatures around to hunt were the bunbees. Several species of slimes had learned to stretch their pseudopods into far-reaching but thinner tendrils, which was pushing the bunbees in this area to become faster and more aggressive. Both had also been influenced by the crystal flowers, with the bunbee's exoskeleton hardening along the biggest plates to create better armor, and the slimes developing a technique of incorporating bits of crystal to embed in the tips of their pseudo pods, letting them potentially spear a bunbee.

While that aerial war raged, some smaller slimes had taken to being tricksters, forming shapes mimicking the flowers, and creating a shimmer on their surface to mimic their crystalline nature, but in truth making their surface stickier than most slimes of their size.

Ooze-type creatures were generally not picky eaters, nor above eating oozes of other types, so some had begun specializing in hunting other slime species. In pursuit of this goal, they had incorporated shards of crystal into their form, slashing with the sharpest edge out to slice open other slimes and let their liquid forms splash out for the predator to consume. With this tactic, they didn’t even need to kill their prey, as slimes were able to lose a certain amount of mass and still live if they escaped the encounter.

The continuing arms race of ooze and crystal had then created armored slimes, a terrifying concept truly. When sitting still, all the exposed surfaces of such a slime seemed to be covered by a single translucent carapace, though closer examination would reveal tight-fitting seams. Of course, getting that close would get a person attacked, which would open up a question: Is it better to be hit with a harder surface, lacking any of the give that a slime’s pseudopod has, or better to cope with the acid clinging to you while hopefully having fewer broken bones? The hydraulic power behind the slam of an ooze was enormous, topping that with a crystal contact surface just made it worse.

Another interesting variant had internalized the crystal material in a different way. A significant portion of its life force and a concentrated version of its substance were encapsulated in a crystal sphere. It was an interesting survival technique, so long as this crystal was not breached, the slime could actually sacrifice most of its body so long as the core got away to begin forming a new one. It would be weaker at first of course, and it also was a weak spot in that cracking open the crystal would probably kill the slime even if the rest of the body was fine.

Hmm, what happened here? Mordecai’s attention focused on an unusual body, and after examining the bunbee corpse and the surrounding area took back what he had thought about the molds not doing anything special. There seemed to be only a single patch right now, but this one had been able to incorporate crystal too, and looked like a lumpy bit of broken flower. Breathing in its spores would be a bit like breathing in living glass that would then begin to grow into larger crystal shards inside your lungs and body, transforming most of the biomass it consumed into more crystal. He was glad Kazue was already disinclined to send her focus this way, the results were rather gruesome.

None of this strange evolution could have happened so fast without the high density of magic, nor could the changes that copied traits from other creatures have happened at all. Until he had been able to venture out into the world beyond his dungeon he had been confused why so many of the creatures and people that came in were so similar to each other, not knowing that he was the exceptional case here.

The other key thing that allowed this arms race was that the oozes and molds were not even guests, let alone inhabitants, so he was keeping monsters in their dungeon that were capable of attacking guests and inhabitants, but by their very nature they did not strive to explore, they simply moved where they could. So Mordecai felt there was not any true danger to the dungeon, nor was this strange bunbee hive in danger as a whole, whatever happened to individual worker drones. He hadn’t been thinking of all the bunbees becoming such tight-knit hive minds given that they’d started with bumble bees for the form, but subconscious associations probably influenced their development and each hive was closer to one organism than a collection of individuals.

The changes he’d seen here were giving him some interesting thoughts about a possible boss, but he had no idea where it would fit. Possibly a roaming raid boss later, but he had some other priorities first, so it was going to be a while.

He was able to complete his evaluation of his hell path in the time it took his avatar to reach the playwrights and quickly switched his full attention there. Unlike the troops, the actors had no reason to gather in competition, so when he got to the first room he asked them to gather the rest who had been practicing together, as they were spread across all the stages.

The laganthros took to the audience seating and Mordecai took to the stage, only to then sit down on the edge. The more military guys might need a speech to get them fired up, but with these guys, a more conversational style fit the mood. In the end, his message was still much the same, he didn’t want them to devote their entire lives to just the one duty that they had accepted when Kazue had called on them, to be complete people they needed to do more.

While not as organized as the troops, they had a defacto leader named Briant who managed to corral them when they got too disorganized, and he promised to spread the word amongst those who had missed this meeting.

When he was done there, Mordecai headed off to the nearest of the large warren caves to begin socializing, and it was there that Moriko eventually joined him after she got back from her little ‘hunting trip’. He couldn’t help but be a bit distracted, however, as he was also keeping some of his attention on Kazue. She was close to done but he could tell that her exhaustion was building, and the two of them didn’t stay too long, wanting to be ready to take care of her.

Mordecai’s concern proved well-founded, and when the time came he pulled the kitsune’s avatar to their suite so that he and Moriko could pamper her a little and let her mental state recover. A dungeon core could not become physically tired, but they could still tax their minds and mental focus and need to rest for a while.