Dungeon Robotics 10 - 3

Good Morning!

Chapter 3

Regan

My visit with Louella was only one stop of many for me. There were several factors around my various dungeons that I needed to give some attention. I really had to thank Ignea for keeping everything and everyone running with me working on more than one person should actually be handling.

Teleporting to a ship in orbit, I looked around only to feel an impact as Alara jumped on my back. “Regan!” she said squeezing me tightly. That was saysing something since my body could withstand quite a lot. “How is your mortal?”

I chuckled and walked over to the console. “Louella is fine. She is handling the mortals,” I said as I brought up the data that the scouts and Louella’s people had gathered over the last couple weeks. My sub-cores were easy to make, but they were also a weak point for me. I had to make sure I prepared for everything that I could before I started.

The seed project needed to be completed sooner rather than later. Every day they sat gathering mana would mean more energy to use against the coming threat. The overall goal was simple enough, I was taking my Steel Spire and placing them over any city I could find. With my orbital fleet, I could plant all the cities in the continent in minutes but worried doing so would cause the mortals to flee the cities.

I also wanted to plant dungeons over the Fuizol continent. That might seem counter productive since I just tore most of the dungeons from that continent, but it made sense. There were millions of monsters inhabiting that continent. It would be foolish to ignore that mana. Plus, without the dungeons there were bound to be considerable environmental changes that I needed to correct before they grew too much for the creatures living there.

Alara looked over my shoulder at the screen. “That’s good. I like that one best of all the mortals from your dungeon.”

“I think Louella is quite fond of you as well,” I replied. “Though she has a lot on her plate at the moment.” It wasn’t easy bringing a country together on a normal day. She was trying to get two formerly separate countries together all while working under the Machine Father banner. That was a nightmare if I ever heard of one.

Alara nuzzled her head next to mine. “She helped me in the past with the beastkin in my dungeon.” She pointed at the screen. “I would like to place one of my cores here.”

I focused on the spot and saw it was one of the replacements for the Fuizol continent. One of the insect cores had been there before and at last count, there were still over five million burrowed throughout the area. That said, the area was much to Alara’s liking, due to the tremendous forest that looked like it had never been touched by mortal hands. Excluding, of course, the large crater that was nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter caused by yours truly.

“Are you sure?” I asked worriedly. Mortals were one thing, but monsters would be unpredictable to the extreme. I’d rather not find out the sort of pain that came with something happening to a sub-core.

“I’m certain. It will suit me greatly and I’m not that averse to insects. They are part of the great chain that feeds the forest.”

I leaned back and she shifted her place to my shoulder. Her lithe body had no problems maneuvering around mine which always brought me a chuckle. I reached up and took her hand. “If you’re sure. I’m going to be designing the guardians. You should watch and copy them. I will supply you with the mana.”

“Another child between us?!” Alara asked excitedly.

I smiled warmly at the exclamation. “I suppose so.”

I spent the next few hours mapping and planning out the locations of the seeds. I wanted to get every city, but that would cause a good deal of overlapping once the cores grew to tier four. There were also the local cores to consider. Even if we get most of our mana from mortals, if I stole the ambient mana as well, there was a risk that they might starve.

“So we have ten cores to speak to?” Alara asked while I was checking the map over.

“Yeah, at least on the Thonaca side of the mountain. I plan to drop a core in the middle then try to mentally talk to them all at once. That way I don’t have to repeat myself so many times.”

“I think there are less than when I was born.”

Raising an eyebrow, I pulled up what information I had on the subject. It took a second, but I was able to cross reference different reports to get an answer. “Sure enough. The number has drop by almost half in the last hundred years.”

“Do you know why?” Alara asked with concern. I couldn’t blame her. It took a lot to break a core let along get through all our defenses. I’d never heard of an illness that could affect dungeon cores, but there were stranger things out there in the universe.

“I know at least three of them died for quote over enthusiastic adventurers, end quote. It is suspected that international sabotage was the cause of the others over the years. Lecazar and Thonaca have always had a hard time getting along and dungeons are basically treasure chests that refill every day.”

“The two countries killed a dungeon to stop their rival from getting stronger?” Alara asked. Anger rolled from her in waves, but she was doing well to control herself otherwise.

“A sad truth of the world. If one person can’t have it, then there is a chance they will destroy it instead. Looking over the records again, I can see this is most likely the case for most of the dungeon deaths in the last century. A war was taking place involving the area the dungeon resided.”

I shook my head at the thoughtlessness of it all. Sure, you stopped your enemy from getting a bit stronger and from getting a few more resources, but even without the dungeon, the mortals could grow their cultivation. They could mine resources and hunt monsters. It was a stupid waste, which was apparently agreed upon by the last Emperor and King as they signed new laws regarding dungeons.

Dungeons were needed to cleanse tainted mana. If they all died, there was no telling what might have happened to the continent. I pause my browsing when I spotted a curious mention. An unnamed researcher proposed that the Saymar continent ended up the way it did due to the destruction of all dungeons on the continent.

“My love. Have you heard of anything about the Saymar continent?” I asked Alara.

She shook her head, pink hair bobbing around her. “No. Only that is lies on the other side of the Maelstrom to the north. Adventurers and the necromancers used to discuss it every now and then. Though, it was all idle chitchat.”

“I see. It might serve me to send a few exploratory vessels over there. I have mostly written it off since I didn’t spot much life from space.”

“Ah! I remember one thing though. An old guy back when I was still only a year or two old mentioned that it was the birthplace of the elves.”

“The elven race is less populous than the human and beastkin. I guess if they were original refugees that would make sense.”

We discussed the topic a bit longer, but it was more or less conjecture. I finished up my core seeding plan and moved us to my workshop. Before we started placing cores, we needed a guardian that I was confident would be able to defend it. That meant being able to fight general class demons.

“Mana is more or less useless right?” Alara asked. “What do you plan to do, love?”

I nodded slowly and held up my hand. “This body is fairly decent for fighting the demons. I also have my nanites and anti-matter weapons. I needed to factor all three of these into creating the guardian. Ah, here.” I grabbed her hand and placed a few grams of each in her palm. She got what I wanted and absorbed them. This way, she would gain the knowledge of the materials.

“So many details. I doubt I could have ever made something like this without you,” she said a few minutes later. I noticed that she was holding her head. The nanites could be created with magic, but once they existed, they were purely physical machines like from Earth. That was why they made good weapons against the demons.

“Leave the complicated stuff to me. You just focus on being cute,” I said with a chuckle and earned a smack on my hand as she frowned though I could see she was trying not to smile as well.

I rubbed my hands together and strode into the middle of my workshop. It had been a while since I had hand crafted a creature like this. Closing my eyes, I considered everything I wanted to basically shove into this being. Soon a holographic image appeared in front of me of a man and woman, two versions that had mana values that threatened to break the counter.

Soteria or Soter. They possessed adamantium skeletons with living metal skin and organs. They each had a small sliver of core in their bodies like Puppet. This would allow them some access to the mana in my core network and they would be a much stronger fighting force if they could manipulate the world around them like a core. My avatar could do it, but it took a lot of concentration and effort. With a core sliver, it would be less draining for them.

Likely because she was with me, the female looked like a tall version of Alara. White hair that colored to pink as it reached her shoulders and blue eyes that had lines of circuitry made quite the sight. Her pale almost silver skin reflected the light. She looked like an elf, with four wings. If one didn’t know, they likely would have thought she was mortal.

The male version reminded me of my human days. He was tall, but shorter than my avatar’s height. With black hair that possessed white tips at the end. It would have been impossible to tell that this was anything other than a human if you didn’t know. Unless you looked into the eyes. They were composed of circuits that could see as if into your soul.

“She looks like me,” Alara commented circling the female.

“A little,” I admitted rubbing my head.

“And he looks like you,” she added now circling the male.

“Have I shown you my old human form?” I asked mainly because I simply couldn’t remember.

I got a nod. “Are all the guardians going to look like this?”

“I would make them more individualistic, but that would take time. I’d rather make a model. If they want to change their features, they have the ability.”

“For now, I’m going to make these two with these settings. I’ll place them in Steel Spire or Tearfalls.” I groaned as the mana started to flow, but now was the time to do things like this. With all the high race people in my dungeon, I would recover the expended mana in just over a day. Plus, as I was at tier four level nine. I had more mana than I thought a single being should have. Might as well use it for something.

The holographic images in front of us took form before finally dropping to the ground. They looked at each other than us, before a swirl of mana went around them and they created their own clothes. “Father. Mother,” Soteria, the female, said as they kneeled in front of us.

I looked them over then nodded in approval. “Good morning.”

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