Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

With Laïa’s training now wrapped up, Freya knew it was time to get back to serious matters.

At present her replica was handling the last few details in Evangel while continuing Aldric’s training, which had indeed resumed far more harshly since the warehouse incident, exactly as she had promised him that night.

As for Aria, she was busy with the underworld of Evangel, and no doubt with poor Kyiara too, who was presumably having a very rough time of it right about now.

"Well, it is what it is~."

Freya was wandering through her dungeon as she usually did, making the rounds of the installations and greeting everyone along the way, lost in her thoughts while her feet carried her from one corridor to the next without her really needing to think about it.

The mana she received each day had climbed once again, since the condition for rank 4 was obtaining five upgrades, which meant that all the other Dungeon Lords, or at least most of them, had obviously reached that tier as well.

"Come to think of it, that’s an awful lot of Mana Transcendents capable of controlling the flow. Then again, on the scale of the thing, it must barely register."

She had nonetheless formed a small hypothesis, because if Mana Transcendent was only a stage, which was practically certain to be the case, then perhaps she would become a mana deity one day, and if that happened she would be able to control the flow far beyond anything she could currently imagine.

So what would happen if thousands of mana gods did the same?

She wasn’t sure at all, but she pictured something that resembled the end of worlds rather precisely.

Is that what the event mission tied to the dungeons and their capture is really about? Is that why they pushed us into fighting each other, first through the factions, then through this mission? And is this only the beginning?

Her theory, which she knew might be completely far-fetched, concluded with something along the lines of the world is dying, and the creation of a being who controls mana to make up for it. She had no idea whether she was entirely insane or not, but she did find that in a certain way, it held together.

She stopped when she passed in front of the Universal School.

The building was much smaller than the others, cut into the rock and topped with a pale wooden pediment, with a deliberately low double door and a row of round windows that let you see inside from the corridor. Behind them stood dozens of little wooden desks, all at the same height, all perfectly arranged, facing a black slate board that took up the entire back wall.

Of course, the room was completely empty for now, the Mycofoxes not having produced a single child yet.

Apart, that is, from the 3 Educator Mycofoxes, each wearing a small beige cloth jacket buttoned up to the neck and a pair of round spectacles perched on the muzzle, their mushrooms a creamy shade run through with fine darker lines. One of them held a piece of chalk between his paws and was writing diligently on the board, while the other two laid out sheets of paper along the front row of desks.

All three raised a paw as she went by.

"Kyu!"

"Kyu kyu!"

"Good morning, professors! Are you ready for the big day?"

"Kyuuuu!"

The one with the chalk turned back to his board and underlined something twice that Freya couldn’t decipher in the slightest, before giving her a thoroughly self-satisfied nod.

"I can see that you are. Keep it up!"

And that wasn’t the only building she’d put up over these last 5 days, because when she said her mana income had gone up considerably, she genuinely meant it. She now generated 1,200 points a day on her own, to which were added 4,320 points from the percentage taken off her faction, and that didn’t even count their own income bonuses, so that in practice she was closer to 4,600, which already brought her to the modest sum of roughly 5,800 mana points per day.

Of course, she had also been depositing a few things into her cabinet of wonders over time, items pulled from the Gacha here and there or even hunting trophies, except that it was only bringing her 10 mana points a day for the moment.

Well, it’s only the beginning. One day, with enough piled up in there, it’ll end up paying off nicely.

So, all of that to say that over the last 5 days she had pocketed roughly 29,000 mana points, just like that.

Which was how she had been able to build the rest of the school chain.

The Academy stood right beside it, noticeably larger, with a vaulted entrance and two rooms separated by a stone partition where the desks had given way to long work tables, each fitted with a slanted stand and a set of instruments whose purpose Freya had absolutely no idea about. The 3 Instructor Mycofoxes occupying it wore grey wide-sleeved robes and sported slate-blue mushrooms, and they were in the middle of a heated discussion around a document when she passed the doorway.

"Kyu! Kyu kyu!"

"Kyuuu!"

"Kyu."

Are they arguing? Are they genuinely arguing?

The University, finally, was the most imposing of the three, with a stone staircase climbing toward a circular room ringed with empty shelves running its full height, ready to receive everything the coming generations would eventually place there. The 3 Professor Mycofoxes wore long dark robes and deep purple mushrooms, and each stood in front of a different shelf, perfectly still, contemplating rows on which there was absolutely nothing at all.

One of them turned his head toward Freya very slowly, stared at her for a long moment, then turned back to his shelf without a word.

"Kyu..."

"...Right. Best of luck to you too."

The whole lot had cost her 5,300 mana points, which was, it had to be admitted, an absolute bargain.

She then walked on for several more minutes, arriving in what she had designated as her industrial work zone, where the two generators and one of the mines now stood.

The wood one, which she had already built a few days earlier, took up an entire side cavern whose floor had become covered in dark damp earth, out of which rose dozens of perfectly aligned trunks whose tops crushed against the rock ceiling. And Freya could see exactly how all of it worked, since green Quantimana flowed in continuously from the generator to tighten at the base of each trunk before dissolving into it, pushing the wood up another centimeter or two each time.

The iron one, right next to it, produced the same phenomenon except that the particles were a metallic grey and condensed directly into the rock, forming ore veins that appeared and thickened visibly along the wall.

A dozen Worker Mycofoxes were busy in there, some felling the trunks with axes to cut them into even billets they stacked onto carts, others striking the wall with picks to break loose the iron veins, which they then sorted by size into crates.

"Keep it up, little ones!"

"Kyu!"

"Kyu kyu~!"

One of them outright dropped his pick to wave at her with both arms at once, before being immediately called to order by Roku with a particularly sharp "Kyu."

There, she had simply spent 1,000 mana points on the wood generator.

Then, a little further along, set apart from everything else just in case, stood the dungeon’s newest toy.

The Mana Proliferation Reactor.

It was a cylindrical structure of stone and metal standing close to 3 meters tall, banded with metal rings and pierced along its full height by a vertical slit of thick glass that let you see inside. And inside, precisely, floated the miniature heart, a mass barely bigger than a fist, pulsing at regular intervals.

Freya stopped in front of it, as she did every time she passed, because she never grew tired of the sight.

The miniature heart didn’t draw anything in at all. It was already there, permanently held at critical density, and that was exactly what made it so extraordinary to look at. The Quantimana inside were compressed so tightly against one another that they no longer behaved like particles at all, forming a single mass of light in which billions of colors turned, blended and separated without ever repeating themselves, so bright and so dense that the whole thing looked like a miniature star suspended behind a pane of glass.

It was, without any hesitation, the most beautiful thing Freya had ever seen in her life.

Apart from Aria, again, obviously~.

And she could see very clearly that this differed from the phenomenon of her own dungeon Heart, because her Heart accumulated and grew denser over time in long slow cycles, whereas this thing here never varied by so much as a fraction, holding the exact same threshold at every instant of the day and night.

From that permanent density came the rest. The compressed Quantimana entered collective resonance and released an enormous amount of energy, which the reactor immediately captured along its walls before converting it into additional Quantimana. Part of those went straight back to the core to sustain the critical density, while the remainder escaped through the top of the structure and drifted slowly out into the entire dungeon.

Working around it were the 5 Reactor Technician Mycofoxes, recognizable by their thick grey canvas overalls, their tinted safety goggles pushed up onto their foreheads, and their bright yellow mushrooms which stood out against absolutely everything else. They checked the rings without pause, adjusted small side valves by a quarter turn at a time, and one of them simply never took his eyes off the glass slit.

Freya didn’t say hello to them, because they genuinely hated being disturbed while working, so she settled for going past without making a sound.

It had cost her a small fortune at 5,500 mana points, but she was rather proud of it, knowing that over time it would spare her the building-cost frenzies and would enrich the flows all around the dungeon in the process.

And by extension the world around it, no?

She wasn’t entirely sure.

And it was with that thought that she arrived at the last place she had to check, namely the housing, where the two Burrow Complexes now stood.

Each of them formed an enormous wall hollowed out across 4 floors, with dozens of round openings lined up one above the other, all connected by packed-earth ramps and small wooden walkways zigzagging up to the top level. Lanterns hung at regular intervals along the ramps, and in front of certain entrances, someone had already taken the initiative of laying out small woven mats.

A few Mycofoxes were coming and going as she passed, some with their arms full of straw, another dragging behind him a blanket far too large for him.

"Kyu!"

"Kyu kyu!"

"Are you settling in all right? Do you need anything?"

"Kyuuuu!"

The one with the blanket stopped dead, dropped it, gave an impeccable salute, then picked his blanket back up and disappeared into his burrow as though nothing had happened.

But she knew it, all of this was barely occupied for now, and it would be far more so before long.

Having only built the second complex since last time, it had cost her a mere 750 points.

Then she made her way back up toward the Heart corridor, and she had barely set foot in it before Anubia was already there to say hello in her own fashion, landing on her arm and driving her stinger in without the slightest ceremony.

"Bzzz~~ bz~~ bzzz~"

"Yes, yes, hello to you too."

And around them now fluttered a dozen small crystalline bees, considerably smaller than their queen, which came to land all over her before rubbing their cheeks against her skin while producing a far higher-pitched buzzing.

"Bzz~ bzz~"

"Bzz~"

I suppose they see me as a grandmother? They’re so adorable, my little granddaughters~~

Then she was struck all at once by a horrifying vision of herself being stung from every direction by a dozen bees after her mana.

Thankfully, they feed on the mana their queen gives them, and not directly on me!

The spiders have really gone up in numbers too~!

Because yes, those hadn’t exactly been slacking on the reproduction front either.

She eventually reached the luxury bedroom, where she had placed the last purchasable building, namely the third Storage Vault. She had decided the other two already served their zones perfectly well, and that this one would make life considerably easier for her and the girls, letting them move items from the bedroom to any point in the dungeon.

And standing there, she took a moment to consider what she had actually put together.

Because thanks to all these installations generating resources from mana, mana which was itself now being generated by the Proliferation Reactor, thanks to the academic institutions waiting to teach every generation to come, and thanks above all to the fact that the Mycofoxes could now reproduce among themselves, Freya had, without ever quite framing it that way until this very moment, built her first entirely self-sufficient Mycofox civilization.

And that was how, out of her 29,000-odd mana points, she had only 16,650 left after buying absolutely everything.

Yes, I was so pleased to have unlocked a new tier, and I’ve already speedrun the thing...

But she had kept smiling regardless, because this time, once she had bought every building and every summon of the tier, a window had opened in front of her.

[ Spend 50,000 mana points to raise the dungeon system to level 5! ]

And she was sincerely relieved that this wasn’t once again something designed to make her stagnate for far too long.

This time the upgrade would come far more quickly, because if things carried on at this rate, she could work out the remaining time with a perfectly simple calculation.

50,000 minus 16,650, which came to 33,350.

Then 33,350 divided by 5,800, which gave 5.75.

So, rounding up to whenever her faction’s percentage actually landed, 6 days.

Only 6 days left to wait?!

She had also tried to obtain something else during those 5 days, namely everything Aria had promised to teach her about Quantimana and about controlling the flow, except that the demon wouldn’t hear a word of it.

She had insisted, mind you. Insisted a great deal, in fact, going as far as forcing the issue a good dozen times, but Aria had answered every single time with the same gentleness and the same firmness, saying she couldn’t bear to see her in the state she had found her in last time, and that she would rather wait a little longer.

Well, it’s not as though I had a single valid argument to give her.

So Freya simply decided to take advantage of it by spending even more time with the girls.

"Madaaaaam! Come and play!"

Laïa had just appeared at the other end of the corridor, half hanging off the doorframe, and behind her Freya could already see the others settled on the couches, Naïa with her cup that she wouldn’t have time to finish anyway, Mei squeezed into one corner with a cushion on her lap, and Kaguya sprawled across every last bit of remaining space.

She looked at them for a moment without moving.

Well, I suppose if I push the upgrade back a day or two because of my little sprees in the inter-dungeon shop, that should be fine~~ Might as well enjoy it!

"Coming~!"