Dungeon Robotics 9-22

Hey guys! sorry for the late update. I had to take my laptop to get looked at since it refused to start this morning. 

Regan

Watching the five beams of light that were almost as thick as a mountain burn their way thought the atmosphere was a completely different experience from Obolus’s dungeon. Without the proper preparations, I would have flash boiled most of the breathable atmosphere on this side of the planet. Jarvis and I had fine tuned the weapon though and we had everything covered.

To be on the safe side, I had placed a shield over the village at the center of the continent. They were sort of my responsibility, and I didn’t want to kill them all in the event that something went wrong. Considering my past plans, it was bound to happen.

Once the all the weapons had finished their firing sequence, we allowed them to cool before firing them again. While it would do little more in the terms of damage to the dungeon, the attack would burn off a tremendous amount of mana from the dungeons. The less they had to work with, the easier our lives would be.

The second attack began the staggering. This would allow for any adjustments that needed to be made in case something doesn’t work as we expected. I turned toward the moon as the first of the second attack started. I manipulated a large ring that went around the moon into place between the planet and the moon.

“What exactly is it supposed to do?” Alara asked looking at the massive structure curiously. As a dungeon core, she was able to replicate quite a few things that I did with ease once she understood the principles behind it. We hadn’t been able to really explore it much due to the constant threats around us, but her construction ability was easily on par or better than mine. She had a much better grasp of aesthetics that my modern brain tended to avoid.

“It will act like a focus for the gravitational force of the moon. With it so concentrated and then further boosted by magic, if I’m not careful I could rip the planet in half, but I’m being careful and should be able to essentially scoop out the dungeons one at a time. Aura and all.”

“It’s a good thing I love you. Otherwise, I might be too terrorified to trust you,” she said moving over to grab my hand.

“That’s probably Orina’s problem. Too scared to trust anyone. Have you made any progress with her?”

“No, but at least she is willing to talk to me when I do call on her.”

“I would say that’s progress.” I patted her hand then focused back on the task at hand. I snapped my fingers. “Sophia time for you to step up.”

“Are you sure… I can handle this?”

I smiled when I saw that she could still act her age. I only took her in a few months ago, she was still technically ten years old. “I’m the one handling it. You’re just to make sure that I don’t make any mistakes. Jarvis is handling the heavy end of things. I want you to cover the more… instinctual side of things. Use your gut.”

“Telling a lady to use her gut,” Sophia said flipping her hair, but she looked much calmer now.

Taking aim at the dungeon that inhabited the mountains, I magnified on to the spot over where the core was located. Apollo’s Arrow did its job and removed roughly eighty seven percent of the dungeon from the top. That left little over ten floors and a few bits here and there from the floors that were only partially destroyed.

“You certainly don’t know how to hold back,” Alara commented looking at the screen from a spot on my shoulder. I couldn’t argue. The mountain range that held the core was more of a basin now. Only a few of the foothills to either side remained. Given time, it would make a nice highland sea or lake.

“Got to get the job done.”

With a thought, I activated the gravity well. Like a bubble, it slowly expanded down toward the planet. I used the modified Starfalls as anchors to guide the gravity before using the much denser dungeon aura as a sort of sponge. Dungeons could absorb gravity to an extent after all. The wounded dungeon was absorbing the little energy that wasn’t tainted by my own aura.

“Thirty minutes. That took longer than I would have liked,” I mumbled more to myself as the gravity well finally encompassed all of the other dungeon’s aura. Here was where the truly dangerous part started. Mentally flipping a switch, I reversed the gravity well that was wrapped around the dungeon’s aura. As if Murgin itself was protesting, nothing happened for a few seconds.

Then Jarvis shouted through the comms. “I have tremendous seismic activeity! The entire mountain chain is moving!”

“Here we go! Time to try and not break the planet.”

I held out my hands and shifted all my mental focus to my core on Krona. Like a fisherman, I began reeling in the dungeon core. There was an explosion that traced the outline of the dungeon aura as several hundred thousand tonnes were pulled into the air. As the mass got further from Murgin, my hold and pull grew stronger.

Panic started to flood toward me and I realized it was the other dungeon core. What was happening was so far out of its understanding that it had basically started having a panic attack. I might have stopped at that point, but with the mass being several hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet, it was dangerous to release it. I wasn’t confident, I could let it down gently as it were.

“Alara! Try to calm… the core. I can’t… afford to stop. If you can convince… them to submit… willingly, then all the better,” I sent to her haltingly. It was just that dangerous to let my concentration slip even a microsecond.

“I’ll try!”

“Jarvis… Sophia… We need to… balance the gravity fields in… four minutes.”

I wanted to use the cores as a defense line. What better way then to make them into artificial satellites. Even with the mass I was pulling up with them, it was less than one thousandth of the total mass of Murgin. Even the moons made the mountains look like toothpicks. As long as we balance the fields before I release them, nothing too major should happen.

I vaguely felt the communication between Alara and the core, but didn’t have enough concentration to spare them a moment. The four minutes passing felt more like four days. Each minute took an exuberantly increasing amount of effort to get it where I want the now asteroid dungeon.

Finally, the large chunk of earth… Murgin, made it to the point that it wouldn’t just fall back to the planet. I slowly released my grip over the gravity field and allowed it to return back to the moon and normalize with Murgin again. I was about to fully release it when there was an oscillation in the fields and as if the planet wanted it back, the asteroid sized mass was momentarily pulled back toward the planet.

Being in the process of releasing it, I couldn’t swap in the middle of the action. Sophia and Jarvis reacted in time and managed to use some gravity waves to counter the pull from the planet. I took a deep breath and that almost made me laugh out loud considering I was standing on the outside of a vessel in the void of space.

“We need to hurry! She is about to kill herself!” Alara shouted before I was really back in the moment.

“What?”

“The core!” Alara grabbed me and teleported us right as a chunk of stone the size of a, well, a mountain passed right over us. Some loss floating debris slammed into me, but a quick shield cleared the space around us. The aura of the core was making all sort of shifts. I thought I knew why Alara was in a hurry. A core could implode if they mess up their aura and cause it to fold back on their core.

Alara wasn’t waiting for any answers. She had a sword made from one of her plants and was slicing through the stone better than any miner could. Even in the void, she was moving almost faster than the eye could see. I decided not to ask anymore questions and started lasering through the sections around her.

In a matter of minutes, we were through into what would be the core room of the dungeon. Just as we stepped into the core room, a fluctuation of the aura grazed the side of the core by less than a millimeter, but the scream that resulted caused even me to sympathize with the core.

Alara and I rushed over to the core, and I poured my aura out to prevent the core’s own aura from causing any more harm. I would have liked to talk to the core more, but I decided we were passed that point. I held my hands out on either side of the core and quickly created a core binding much like Obolus’s.

As my control over the core solidified, I took control of its aura and stabilized that as well. I realized this was what caused it to almost fall back to the planet at the end. The core had tried to effectively reach back to the planet and ended up grabbing the gravity field. It just showed how adaptive a dungeon core was, and their frightening ability to manipulate the energies of the universe.

If there was one thing I was pleased about all this was that this went a lot better than I expected. Even in a low gravity situation, the core could have tried to fight back. I was glad that it hadn’t.

“Come out. We won’t hurt you anymore,” Alara almost cooed to the core. It was true. Unlike Obolus, there was zero resistance to the core binding magic. The core was either so terrified by the change or by us that it wasn’t fighting the magic at all. Getting towards the end of the binding magic, I started to repair the core like Obolus. It was much easier now that I knew what I was doing.

A few moments passed as Alara continued to coax the core to form an avatar. Finally, a bugbear that looked like she had tried to copy Alara formed in front of us. In the end, it look like a bearkin, a goblin, and a human had made a baby. Thankfully, she mostly pulled from the human form and it was mostly balance to the point that it worked. The form was still nearly four meters tall with four arms that was slightly lithe in her figure.

“No… hurt!”

“We won’t hurt you,” Alara said. “I promise.”

She ignored Alara and glared at me. “Not… you… Him!”

I held my hands up. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you anymore.” I was honestly a little surprised. The village chief on the peninsula seemed convinced that the cores were evil. Looking at this core, I wasn’t sure what to think anymore. Rather than evil, maybe they just didn’t know any better.

“Dungeon… not supposed… to fly!” she shouted pointing at me with indignation.

I shrugged with a chuckle. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?” She only looked at me curiously and I realized that while she understood the words, she didn’t completely understand my meaning. Sighing, I shook my head. “Never mind. For now, what is your name?” Obolus had known his own name, I was sure she would to.

“Ubala.”

“Alright Ubala. Please rest and don’t do anything until I tell you otherwise. For now, concentrate on repairing your dungeon. I’ll help you adapt to space once I have captured your siblings.”

“Siblings?”

I tilted my head. “The other dungeons on the continent that were with you. Obolus, err, the snake dungeon said you were all part of the the same original core.”

She nodded slowly as if realizing it as I said it. “Yes… Others were… annoying. Always… wanted to kill. I… hid in the mountains… Superior beings didn’t… care.”

“Superior beings?”

She just shook her head. Either her memory had degraded from that time, or she just didn’t know what to tell me. I didn’t want to push her too much at this time since that would only make it that much harder for us to get along in the future. I might have bound her core, but as a person I’d rather not remove the cores free wills unless I absolutely had to.

Turning my attention back to the world underneath us, I looked my next target. Even though less than an hour had passed, it was dangerous to wait any longer since the dungeons will be given that much longer to adapt. I still wasn’t sure how much of the continent they were able to see, but I’d rather not give them too much time to figure out how to resist me.

I grabbed Alara’s waist and brought her close. “Be ready to help the next one. Hopefully they won’t panic as bad.”

She reached up and cupped my cheek before giving me a proud smile. “Count of me.”

We returned to our spot at the edge of the station. Focusing on the next dungeon, the edges were still melting from the intense heat of Apollo’s Arrow. I repeated the process of infusing the gravity field down around the dungeon’s aura. Alara was already attempting to communicate with the mind of the dungeon to almost help it brace for the coming craziness.

I found it was also a good distraction. With the damage from Apollo’s Arrow giving the dungeon more than a little pain, my gravity field basically went unnoticed with her talking to it. This one might go even smoother than the last one. “Alara, what is the dungeon’s name?”

“Heulos. He is in pain and understandably very angry.”

“Got it. Maybe a sky dive will cool him down,” I replied then thought about it. Does it count as a skydive if he was going up? I would have to think about it later.

Once the gravity field was complete, I sent a message to Sophia and Jarvis to be ready. With a thought, I flipped the switch again, and the area around the dungeon experienced a high-level earthquake like with Ubala. With even more data this time about what to expect, the modified Starfalls that made up the anchor for Apollo’s Arrow were able to absorb the energy even more efficiently.

Soon, the dungeon that was a chunk of earth that easily had a radius of six hundred kilometers, the outside not as large as the inside thanks to the space magic that dungeons used to manipulate their bodies, was rising through the air. In addition, Heulos was smaller than Ubala since he didn’t have a couple hundred thousand tones of mountain above it that the Arrow had to melt through.

“Three minutes until he reaches orbit!” I said through gritted teeth.

Next:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/47507173

Previous:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/47340513