The Dungeon Child

I am back in school.

Once I felt fully recovered, the Mother decided to put me back in the inane location obsessed with doing essentially nothing and teaching essentially nothing. To say that their attempts at education were helpful would be an astronomical overstatement.

Either way, I was seated at the squat little table in the reading class, adamantly ignoring whatever it is the teacher is going on about and conducting an extraordinarily important experiment.

With my eyes shut tight, I'm forcing small amounts of mana into the floor and infusing it as securely as I can into the overall structure of the building. If I can build a foothold in the school, as large as it is, then I'm confident I can begin to build quite the army of minions. Especially considering the number of empty spots and hollow floors inside the building.

After a few moments, the mana takes a good grip and solidifies, slowly spreading. A moment later, I sense my core-self back home flare up, and the mana beneath my shoes suddenly increases in speed exponentially, blasting through the floor and expanding at an incredible rate.

I'm more than a little surprised. Actually, I'm blatantly stunned. There's no way that my core would have been able to access portions of my dungeon without directly having access to it via a channel of mana or even another hallway, but here there are at least twenty miles between me and the house.

So why is it different now? Is it because... it's because I'm human. I am both in my dungeon and at school, which means that my mind and mana is split between the two. It's revolutionary as far as I'm concerned, and I can already imagine several major advantages to the difference.

Unbelievably, the area of the school that my dungeon occupies is already at a fifty-foot radius and spreading faster. It's a rate not even comparable to my original dungeon, but it's more than enough when compared to my attempts at manual dungeon conversion in my current body, so I'll accept any advantages I can receive.

A slight tap on my shoulder startles me out of my thoughts and I look up to see the teacher standing over me, his arms folded. "Jason? Are you listening?"

I blink. "No."

He sighs, shaking his head. "Are you stupid or something?"

My eyes narrow. He has no idea how close he is to being killed right now. "Are you?"

Rolling his eyes, he heads back to the chalkboard, and I close my eyes again.

I can sense a good number of insects occupying the area beneath the floorboards, and my core-self gets to work converting them to my will in no time. Since there are several hundred of them, I don't bother worrying about naming any of them and just get straight to the part where I make them bigger and smarter.

Relatively speaking, strength and speed is the most important aspect of any minion, but unfortunately, there's only so much mana to go around. My first priority is to convert the entirety of the school into a dungeon, and the second priority is to stock up defenses. At some point, I'll need to create a boss monster, but for now, a horde of weaker entities should do the job just fine.

For the second time, my attention is disrupted by a poke on my shoulder, and my eyes flick open. The writhing crowd of bugs underneath the school pauses briefly, directing their gaze upward, and I look at the disturbance.

Charlie's eyes are wide with excitement, and she asks quietly, "What's with the magic? What's going on?"

I glance down at the streams of blue mana flowing from my legs and seat into the floor, which should be invisible, and back up at Charlie. "You can see that?"

She nods eagerly, and I blink. "Huh." It's an egregiously inept statement considering the breadth of my vocabulary, but I honestly can't think of anything accurate to say. In what way are the frequent pulses of mana infusing her changing her physiology? Would she be considered a monster, or a bound entity? I've never acquired any human minions before and I have no idea what it entails.

She scoots back over, whispering, "I'm going to do reading now."

Shaking my head, I return my attention to my dungeon for the second time. Inspecting the army of insects, I infuse them with a fraction of extra mana and sharpen their mandibles and fangs, increasing their venom, making them tougher. There's only one problem that I can figure out at the moment, and that's whether or not they can survive the reduced amount of prey. To make up for it, I decide to yank back some of the mana from a select number of the insects and force them to begin huddling together. They'll start breeding in no time, and then I'll have a suitable food supply for the horde.

For the third time, I am alerted from my thoughts and to the present world, and I promptly glare at whoever it is disrupting my attention.

Buck, the fat child who wants whatever I have, is smiling stupidly at me. "Can I pet your spider?"

I squint at him in total confusion. "What?"

He indicates my shirt. "Your spider. Can I pet it?"

I blink in surprise. "She's not here."

He scoots in just a little more. "But can I pet her?"

I stare at him for a long time. "She - she's not here. How can you - there's no way - why?"

I have no words. Just when I thought human stupidity could not descend any further, Buck proves me wrong.

He'd make a pretty good goblin.