Dungeon Robotics 10 - 1

Good Morning Everyone! I hope the week is treating everyone good. I know I said that I was going to take a week, but i decided to go ahead and post since i have it. Enjoy

Chapter 1

Regan

I’d seen bickering before. When you had access to thousands of shows spanning nearly two hundred years, then you got to see plenty of it. Earth was particularly skilled at creating all sorts of scenarios for their entertainment. Needless to say, here on Murgin wasn’t too different.

People argued with their friends, families, lovers. They argued over the same political, racial, economical reasons that humans on Earth argued over for thousands of years. Thus, it was almost a relief when I found that the same could be said for Deorus and the Demon kind, as I watched Quin and Thogran bicker back and forth from their cells in my dungeon.

I had to say I was a bit surprised that Quin was apparently the little sister of Thogran. They were almost different species of beings when I checked them genetically. At least, they were missing the markers that usually were present to indicate relation. However, I supposed that demon breeding or whatnot might function in a different fashion that humans.

“Mother should have turned you into a paste!” Quin shouted while Thogran just laughed.

“I wasn’t the one that failed. Little sister,” Thogran replied waving her off like she her words were annoying flies.

“You two are related?” I asked. “As in biologically or just in the same family unit.”

“We have the same mother and father as you put it in your language. Demons are genetically modified after birth. The further one can go the greater their rank once they reach adulthood,” Thogran explained. “I managed to endure everything to reach the general rank, something like your tier four or five.”

“Oh. Looks like I wasn’t through enough in my interrogation,” I said tapping a finger on my arm as I looked at Quin. Though the hard part with dealing with the demons was that I couldn’t slap a collar on them and get all the answers. The magic just didn’t work properly.

Even on Quin, while my nanites certainly did damage, that was because they were physically altering the cells make up. They weren’t skipping any of the processes via magic. Looking at the demons, I couldn’t help but be impressed that their technology had come far enough to allow them such control over their bodies.

“You don’t ask, how should I know what to tell you?” She asked sticking her tongue out like a child.

“That said, I’m surprised you volunteered the information so easily,” I commented looking back to Thogran.

“What can I say?” he said with a shrug. “You spared my life. Most of the other generals would fight you to the death, but I’d rather live. Looking through the memories of the man’s body I took, I am actually interested in spending some time in this world.”

“I would have thought you’d want to get back to Deorus?”

“Are you kidding me?” he asked with a loud laugh. “That place is war, kill, murder, murder. Having lived through two transitions, I’m sick of it. Why do you think my precious little sister hasn’t done more to reach home?”

“I had wondered,” I replied with a nod. Even if she was weaker, Quin was basically unkillable for the locals. She could have sought out all the sealed generals and they might have been able to reach back through the void to their home planet. “Is that the case?” I asked.

“I lived like a queen with everyone afraid of me. Back on Deorus I was little more than a foot soldier. My moronic brother is right. Why go back if I am nearly immortal here without competition.”

“Alright. I understand why you two don’t really care to go back,” I said rubbing my temple. “If that’s the case, why didn’t you give me more information?” I asked looking to Quin.

“Does it matter?” she asked with a humored look. “Deorus lost its connection to Murgin over five thousand years ago.”

“Ah, sister. You are quite slow,” Thogran said shaking his head. “You think that is the only way to reach another world. Our race has been conquering other planets since we first touched the stars.”

“So they do have another method to reach us,” I said narrowing my eyes at Thogran and getting a nod.

“An inefficient method, but one that suits a race that does not age and can go for long stretches of time without nutrients.”

“Interstellar travel?”

“At the heart of it yes. If five thousand years has truly passed, then they should be arriving soon. Don’t bother asking for an accurate date, that would be impossible to give you.”

“I was right! I knew it.” Slamming my fist into my open palm, I got a bit excited. Not because there was a force of hard to kill demons coming, but because I wasn’t crazy. I was glad that my preparations weren’t the doings of a mad man.

I ground my teeth as my mind started moving a mile a minute. I had a lot of work to do before the enemy arrived. I may have captured all the wild dungeons on the Eurio continent, but I needed to work to get the Fuizol continent dungeons ready and working together. While they would be more developed then the wilds, I had to make sure that I didn’t push them too far. The last thing I wanted was a dungeon to go crazy from my doings.

“Is he alright?” Thogran asked Quin behind me.

“Probably not, but I’d rather not piss him off.”

I turned around and opened the cell next to Quin’s. I was sure they had things to talk about and everything down here was monitored more heavily than fort Knox was back on Earth. “I’m fine. I have more questions for you, so come into your office.”

The day had worn on by the time I had everything I thought I would need for the time from Thogran. As I expected as a general, he possessed a far wider range of knowledge than Quin as even she would ask a question here and there. The demons, or rather than Tilirean as they called themselves in their mother language, were much more war-driven than Quin let on.

Every aspect of their lives was decided through strength of arms. This path of life worked for them, as like both Quin and Thogran have demonstrated, the demons were hard to kill even to their own people. Only a few original blood lines suffered as they called it from aging and were killed off if one was found to prevent the gene pool from being tainted.

“Surely after this long they’ve been wiped out?”

“You’d think that was the case, but every couple thousand years they try to overthrow the way of life. Every time they are defeated horribly and driven back, but we do lose a far amount of our weaker members. They have access to the same technology after all.”

“I’m getting the picture. Do you think this element will be present when they arrive here?”

“I have no doubt. Five thousand years might have passed, but for us years are more like days.”

I tapped my finger against the table in thought. While this element might be a while card, it could be one in our favor. “Alright. I’ll try to think of a few plans to try and contact these rebels. It would be nice if an entire world wasn’t against us.”

~~~

I sealed the cells with as many defensive mechanisms and magic as I could think of before I left. Both Quin and Thogran possessed the nanites and other instant kill methods in case they should escape, but I’d rather not take any chances. Whenever I thought about it, I was still pissed that the body of Reed had been stolen by some being.

After consulting with Duilin, I was sure that it was a celestial that had been in limbo. Although nothing has seemingly come from it, it doesn’t mean the entity was friendly. Not to mention, I’d had my fill of extra-dimensional beings as of late with the Pretakrin. Those things were still trying to breach my dungeon and when I risked peering into their dimension, it was a scene straight out of a nightmare.

Thousands of forms pressed against the divide, with every form being more twisted than the last. I wasn’t sure if they were a threat yet, but the fact they could sense something that might give them entry to this world told me that might be the case. A far amount of mana was being poured into the inhibitor that I created to seal the breaches, but at this rate, I feared they might simply break the barrier due to the sheer power that they consisted of.

“If it is not one thing, it is another,” I mumbled to myself as I stood in my core room. While I had more mana than I could hope for, mainly due to the high races that were housed in my main core’s dungeon. There was a bit of a strain. That was from trying to stop from ascending to tier five. It was another worry since I had no information what happened to a dungeon that reached tier five.

Alara moved next to me and took my hand. “My love. May it is time for us to talk to the others. You were planning to anyways, right?”

I pulled her hand to my lips and gently kissed them. I wasn’t sure what my life would be like without Alara in it. I knew that before I saved her, I had once been going down a different path. Sure, that was mainly caused by the unholy mana’s taint to my core, and thus my mind, but it was still me. I was the one that had been cruel. I knew that from my experiments and the data I had gathered. It was a capacity that I possessed.

I shook my head to clear it. “You’re not wrong. I’m just worried about triggering an all new end of the world event.”

She put her face next to mine and gently pressed her cheek to mine. “We’ll handle it together. Besides, I’m going with you, so I’ll make sure to watch for and evil binding trees, multi-layered seals, or storms that hide enough secrets to crush a man.”

I laughed with a grin. “I’ll leave it to you then.” I turned and enjoyed the sensation of her soft lips on mine. I broke away after a few minutes. A benefit of not having to breath. I took her in with a single glance. Her pink hair and pale skin nearly glowing. “You get any more beautiful, and I won’t be able to look at you directly.”

“The unholy taint is completely gone, so I have more mana.”

“How are the mortals that were in your dungeon?”

“Louella and the girl named Rin has helped out considerably. They are talking, though limitedly, and have stopped fighting for the most part.” Ignea had lent Rin to Alara’s dungeon fairy Lena a while ago to try and get beastkin mortals that had taken refugee in her dungeon to behave. Rin was the leader of a small town of beastkin that I had in my dungeon formed from beastkin from the north that had too much unholy taint in their bodies to think rationally. It looked like everything had worked out.

“That is good to hear.” I scooped her up in a hug, enjoying the feel. If I could enjoy this every day, then I would gladly live forever.

“Yes.” She placed a hand on my jaw and pulled my gaze down to lock with hers. “I want to try making a second core.”

“Are you sure?” While the strain was mostly on the initial creation of the sub-core, there was still a lot of mental pull as the cores grew.

“Don’t we need as many cores out as possible?” she asked, her eyes growing hard. “You have your seed plan. Just include a few of mine.”

To be honest, that would help out significantly. My seed plan was to create dungeons in any location that has a decent population of mortals. They would be towers since I need them to defend from a possible orbital attack. If Alara took command of even two of the possible seed locations, that was a tremendous burden off my shoulders while they grew.

“Alright. If you feel so strongly about it. I’m not going to stop you.”

“Thank you, my love. I love you!” Alara locked her lips with mine and the world fade around me.

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