Dungeon Robotics 128

Good Monday Everyone! I hope the weekend was well received by everyone. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I know it can be difficult out there, especailly us in the USA, but if we work together we can get through this craziness, hopefully stronger for it. 

Regan

It took much less time for us to get to Alara’s dungeon. Thanks to the transponders I placed when heading this way, I was barely able to make teleporting work. That gave me an insight into how to circumvent the issue but would require a great deal of infrastructure being created before it would be truly workable.

Even with the transponders, we had to hopscotch our way up to her dungeon. While we did so, we paid a visit to the dryads along the path. With my overwhelming control of the area even before I subdued the lich core, they had gone unmolested by the undead that still wandered the area. 

The first one we visited was already taller than everything around it. Being the farthest from the source of unholy mana and nearest to my main area of influence just outside the mountain, the unholy mana was cleansed much faster around her. This allowed the dryad to switch to the cleaner nature mana sooner. 

Its guardian Treant wasn’t slacking either. The creature was about half the size of the dryad at close to twenty-five meters, but the density of its mana was on another scale. If any undead did manage to get this close to the dryad, they would be quickly returned to the soil.

“How is she?” I asked Alara. She might not be bound to the dryads like she was when they were born, but she could still communicate with them. Alara was basically a dryad herself after all. 

“She is thriving. Your son, Anubis. His metal has given her a sort of immunity to unholy mana. She still needs to process it herself, but with it she has a buffer rather than using her own body.”

I looked at the girl in my arms. She had taken to riding on my shoulders or being carried by me whenever she got the chance. Not that I minded. “I see. That is fortunate. I had expected something like that when I saw him give them a piece of himself, but that is better than I anticipated. I shouldn’t be surprised given she’s technically your daughter.”

Alara blushed but smiled happily. “I know it was painful for them, but their existence was cursed and wicked. I thank you for helping them even while trying to help me.”

Rubbing the back of my head, I said. “Well strategically it made no sense to leave them behind me, but I do admit part of it was for you.”

Alara leaned forward and gave me a kiss of the cheek. I grinned in response. “Are you done talking to her? If so, I’ll move us to the next one.”

“Yes. She is healthy and happy. Once the snows and winter is over, she will likely grow to three times her current size.” 

I looked to the dryad’s tree, and noticed a young girl peeking out from behind the trunk. She waved before she vanished in a burst of green light. If she was already able to create a spiritual image, then the dryad really was well on her way to recovery. I was glad that the forest was recovering so quickly.

Connecting to the transponder network, I used its aura to move us to the next dryad. We visited all the dryads over the next couple hours. It would be hard for Alara to cross the distance without my assistance and it was only right to allow her to visit her children. Maybe I was spoiling her, but something just made me want to make the girl happy.

It was twilight when we finally arrived at her dungeon. The land and top that had suffered the most damage due to Starfall had already been repaired through the efforts my floating city core. That only extended maybe twenty floors down. It wouldn’t due for me to influence her dungeon with my own. 

With one last teleport, we were in her core room. The dryad might have been a beautiful creature of nature, but the tree at the center of the room that housed her core would always seem otherworldly too me. It had a solid appearance, but the branches and leaves took an ethereal appearance that bordered on almost ghostly.

Alara hopped down from my arms and moved over to her tree. Placing a hand on it, she sank into the tree without any resistance. There was a glow that permeated the room before she reappeared up in the branches. “Regan!” She shouted just as she jumped from the branches aiming for me. 

Of course, I caught her without issue. I wouldn’t be able to call myself a man if I missed her. “What was that about?”

She looked back at the tree with a forlorn look. “That is part of my core now. I took the idea from all that spellwork around your core. It will protect my core from anything that would harm it.”

“Not a bad idea.” 

Next to the tree were several floating crystals that had complicated metalwork around them. These were the filters I’d made of her to help cleanse her dungeon just a little bit faster. By all rights, she should be a higher tier than me. She had the entire forest in the north that worshipped her like a mother. The unholy mana just twisted the faith and herself so severely that she could breakthrough. 

“What is your plan? You have that ‘I’m better than everyone else’ grin right now.”

“Huh? Was I making a face like that?” I asked rubbing my face. I didn’t know that my metal features could shift like that. 

Alara laughed which reminded me of tinkling bells as she rubbed her hand over my face. “No, but I know you well enough now to know that’s what was going on in your head.”

“Fair enough. Well, its simple enough. I’m going to purge the remaining unholy mana by cleansing it myself and leaving the mana for you to absorb as you get to it. It should be much easier than the unholy mana which is inherently uncooperative.”

Alara gave me a concerned looked and placed a hand on my cheek. “Are you going to be alright? There is still a lot of unholy mana that needs to be dealt with. Plus there is…”

I interrupted her then gave her a smile to show her my confidence. I didn’t want her fretting about me. “I will be fine. I have a lot of ways to expunge the unholy mana that builds up. I will need you to wait here for a bit though.”

She nodded and hopped down. “I’ll be watching over you,” she said as I tipped my head to her before I moved to the thirty-third floor. 

Alara had gone a great job of cleansing the floors, but there was a residual pockets that had held on in a lot of the floors. Plus, the lower floors that constantly leaked unholy mana down the dungeon paths. That was just the way mana worked in a dungeon. It liked to travel towards more dense locations thus flow down. If it was one of the field dungeons, like my Steel Spire, then it would concentrate at the center of the field.

I looked around once I arrived at the center of the floor. There were undead, but they instinctively knew to stay away from me. My body was composed of adamantium which would turn lesser undead into ash if I used a light spell on it. A handy side effect that I found with some testing. 

“Now then. Time to showcase my manliness,” I muttered before I opened my aura to its fullest. Like a flood, it washed over the entirety of the floor. I replaced the natural flow of the dungeon with one heading towards me and forced all the unholy mana to rush towards me like a wave that had crested a beach. 

The unholy mana struck me like a wall, and I turned my cleansing to full power. The only difference was I allowed the clean mana to exit me rather than absorb it for myself. This required me to fight my own dungeon instincts. It didn’t like to give up mana for any reason and for the first time in a long time, the instinct really reared its head.

Grimacing, I ignored the tantalizing desire to absorb all this mana into myself and focused on Alara’s face. It helped bring me a bit of clarity. Even with the dungeon instinct still in the background, I could ignore it. I smiled to myself at the thought of the girl. As a dungeon core herself, she knew my instinct would rear itself.

It took about as long as I expected to cleanse the entire floor. I could have started with the pockets, but the floors would be the most difficult given how much unholy mana there was, thus I decided to do those first. As I finished converting all the mana, parts of my body opened and expelled all the built-up heat that was generated from the process.

The ground under my feet had even melted a few centimeters from the heat I had been generating. As a transformative process, a physical change had to take place. Heat was the least of my worries. When dealing with an energy source that could alter the fabric of reality, I could find myself in a time bubble again. Not that I would allow that to happen.

If there was one thing I was grateful for during the next few hours, it was that I was moving up through the dungeon thus the floors were getting smaller. Starfall had tore through these floors initially but when they were recreated it was in the necromancer version. The unholy mana likely wasn’t as dense as it was before Starfall, but it was up there.

Once I hit floor ten, the last floor that was still corrupted from the unholy mana. I breathed a sigh of relief. The pockets on the higher floors still remained, but those would be easier compared to these. I glanced at my hands, even the adamantane couldn’t handle just how much unholy mana I had processed today and were partially degraded. It would be a day or two until they returned to normal.

I was about to move to the first of the pockets, when Alara appeared in a burst of soil. She rushed over to me and took my hands in hers. “Take a break!” She pressed my hands against her forehead, and I felt drops of cool run down the back of my hand. I realized she was crying. 

I leaned forward and pulled her into a hug. “It doesn’t hurt, and I want you to be whole again.” Honestly, the thought that she had so much unholy mana still in her dungeon had been like knowing your loved one had cancer. I might have said it was due to the threat I knew was coming, but deep down, I was just worried about her.

She gave me a stern look, which was all the more powerful with her eyes red from her tears. “You can afford to wait ten minutes!”

Looking into her eyes, I knew there was no arguing with her. I grinned and just nodded. “As you wish, your majesty,” I said jokingly.