A Dungeon’s Survival

Connie

Hey, I'm ready to do your upgrades. I'm assuming you want me to focus on enhancing your agility some more, right?

I directed my thoughts to the miniature dragon as I moved my disembodied perspective to his room. The little menace, unsurprisingly, was laying atop his hoard of copper coins, eyes shut. That had grown to be his natural state whenever there weren't an active crisis going on. The only other times I'd actually seen him stop lounging around in that spot recently had been to join the rest of us for poker, but with everything that'd just gone down, playing games hadn't even been a consideration the previous night, and I doubted it would be for at least the next few. Matters of life, death, and gambling aside, however, he shot straight to his feet the moment my words reached his mind.

“Finally!” he squeaked as he turned to face the spot in the air where my disembodied vision was resting.

Yep, sorry it took me so long to pull myself together, but I'm at least functioning now, so what do you want? Speed is a given, but anything else? More WILL maybe?

I knew Adraugon well enough at this point to know he'd want some degree of an AGI increase; it was the only stat that he seemed to actually care about after all. To him, all others were an afterthought. When it came time for me to do his enhancements, though, he'd surprised me before, so I figured it'd be smart to check with him and see what he wanted instead of just assuming and having to redo the modifications as a result.

“No,” was his answer to my proposed increases.

Well, I guess its a good thing I waited instead of jumping the gun, I thought to myself before utilizing our telepathic bond to say, Okay, so no WILL. Got it. Just AGI, then?

“No,” he answered with the same, singular word.

Okay, what else, then? I asked after waiting a moment for him to elaborate, something he didn't jump to do.

“Nothing.”

Nothing? I confusedly repeated, You don't want me to upgrade you?

“What? No! Of course I do!” he shouted as he stamped his foot in frustration.

You're kind of sending mixed signals here. Help me out, would you?

“I need mana! Don't have enough,” he spat as I faintly felt a surge of reluctance through our bond.

Got it. I can manage a boost to your SOUL easily enough, but you really don't want more speed? That's not like you.

“Of course I do! Speed is best.”

So, Mostly mana and only a little speed? I slowly asked for clarification, the conversation so far leaving me uncertain as to what he actually wanted.

“No!” he cried out, baring his teeth and stamping his foot repeatedly, “I need mana!”

Just mana?

“Yes!”

That was an odd one coming from Adraugon of all people, but it was easy to tell how much the decision was bothering him, especially with the begrudging resolve and irritation that was seeping its way through our bond. Honestly, the reaction to not just throwing everything into AGI and calling it a day made sense coming from the speed-obsessed reptile. His overdramatic tantrums were par for the course at this point, but the fact that he had actively decided against increasing his agility of his own initiative was enough to throw me for a loop. Still, I was happy to see him branching out with his stat allocation a bit, so I decided not to question him on his decision any further. There was no point in antagonizing him, but that did little to sate the curiosity rooting itself in my mind, another distraction that was absolutely not a coping mechanism I was using to stop my mind from wandering to darker places.

I wonder if its his increased MIND stat at work here, I idly wondered, How does that even affect someone's intelligence anyway?

Thanks to his Dragon's Greed ability, the contents of his hoard gave him extra stat points, and while he was currently getting a few others from it, the only stat whose gains seemed to be actively increasing from the mounting wealth he'd been acquiring from our nightly poker games was his MIND. He still didn't seem to be getting much of a boost to the stat, but the four points I was pretty sure were coming from the ability did account for nearly a third of his total. It was enough to make me wonder if his apparent increase in intelligence had led to a shift in the way he thought, freeing up room for him to consider more things such as his build as a whole or methods to overcome his shortcomings. Then again, he could have just been jealous of Vie and Pee for all I knew.

I paused at that thought. After watching Vie's display of power when she manually altered her spells and somehow created a new magical ability, would he be jealous? Of course he would. I sure wouldn't put it past him. In fact, I found myself wondering why in the world I'd even considered the former option in the first place. With their rivalry, which was something I knew I would need to address at some point, I felt like I could almost be certain that was the case. Why wouldn't he be motivated by her sudden growth?

Increased intelligence? Actually putting thought into things beyond going fast and killing prey? This was Adraugon I was talking about. Surely, he hadn't changed that much from a handful of stat points.

“Mana, now!” he shouted, breaking me from my musings.

Oops! I must've spaced out there, sorry.

The glare the lizard shot me could have melted stone. I took that as my cue to dismiss my pointless–definitely not a coping mechanism–thoughts and to bring up a menu. A few quick tweaks to the miniature dragon's soul later, and I'd gotten him just about as big of an increase to his soul stat as I could with the five DP I owed him. I'd even hit the limit of how much I could reinforce his soul with mana, something that I knew from Fabe was the trigger condition for an achievement I'd been excited to get for a while. After that, I spent the rest of the the DP to just stretch his soul out a bit. It was less efficient than flooding it with mana, but it still got results as evidenced by the prompt I got from the System once I finished.

[Cost: 39 → 44 DP]

[Stats: FORT 0 (6), VIT 6 (13), STR 37 (46), END 15 (22), SOUL 77 → 103 (112), MIND 4 (14), WILL 28 → 31 (39), COM 20 → 23 (29), DEX 54 (65), AGI 110 (120)]

I wasted no time in confirming the changes and sending them off to the insect-sized predator for approval. What followed were three messages.

[Waiting for Adraugon to accept or deny proposed Monster Customization.]

[Adraugon has accepted the Monster Customization.]

[Achievement gained: Custom Limits!]

Finally!

I brought up the details on it. Out of the limited number of achievements I knew about thanks to Fabian but hadn't gotten yet, this was among the ones I was most excited about.

[Achievement: Custom Limits

Description: A customization that you have made to a monster has reached the extent possible for its tier.

Reward: The cost of customizing the type of monster part containing the modification is reduced by 10% for all monsters!]

It wasn't the most significant gain. A quick check told me it was only enough to bring down my DP upkeep by two points, and those points had come from Adraugon's cost dropping thanks to his soul modifications retroactively getting cheaper. Silently, I cursed the System for always seeming to round numbers in the most inconvenient way possible and ignoring fractions. Still, I had gotten the achievement to trigger on the type of modification I'd wanted to, so that was good.

For a while, I'd gone back and forth on what monster part to make sure I got the discount on. It was between souls and muscles since both were contenders for the most widely modified part by me and most useful so far. I didn't have an overabundance of magic-focused monsters, though, so muscles were tempting at first.

As for why I'd decided on souls, I was pretending to be a plant and reptile Dungeon. The last time I checked, plants–or, at least, normal plants and all of the plant monsters I'd seen so far aside from Trentis–didn't have muscles. Still, had I wanted to, I could've easily chosen them and spent an extra DP to push Adraugon's over the threshold first. The mana I'd imbued his muscles with was nearly at the limit too, but I wasn't going down that road. While not everything had muscles, every monster had a soul, and that little detail had been enough to make it the most applicable choice in my eyes.

I should give Vie and Pee boosts to their souls too once I have a bit of extra DP to work with, but for now …

There was something else I needed to address immediately.

So, I just got an achievement, I informed the lizard, It lowered the costs of the upgrades I just made to you by a little, so you've got another couple of point's worth of upgrades left coming. Want me to use them to keep raising your SOUL?

At my question, greed and a powerful desire flowed through our mental connection.

“No, agility! Give me speed!”

At his outburst, I couldn't help but to chuckle.

Of course you do.

Well that answered my question from earlier if nothing else. At the end of the day, a higher mind stat or not, he was still Adraugon, and I was proud of him for resisting the potential points of AGI that he had. Besides, he now had over one hundred points of SOUL. That meant his mana pool was over one thousand points in size, even larger than Vie's and Pee's combined by twenty points. He was set in that area as far as I was concerned. What was the harm in a few points of agility?

Bringing up Monster Customization once more, I empowered his muscles a little and flooded them with the last bit of mana they could hold, maxing them out in that regard just as I had done for his soul. The result was two added points of STR and six of AGI that he promptly accepted. With that, one item had been crossed off my mental list. Plenty remained.

What's next, I wondered to myself.

I'd been lucky that no adventurers had come the day following the invasion by the bear and the Berserker. That left me with the time I'd needed to repair my Dungeon and recover from some of the mental shock I'd experienced, but I had no clue when they'd return. I wasn't even entirely sure why they didn't come or about anything that was up with that day for that matter, and unfortunately, without Fabian, I had no good method of figuring it out either. That meant my window of opportunity to solve the long list of problems I had was limited.

I'd already done the math on things. Despite gaining the level I'd spent so long working towards, it hadn't been the solution I'd hoped for. As it stood, by continuing to only summon the Horned Dracos on my second floor once people freed up DP from other parts of my Dungeon and empowering my boss at the same time, I was left with seventy-five Dungeon Points to work with. On the mana side of things, even with the Plated Gator I had to feed to the bear monster on a daily basis, I now had roughly two hundred points of mana more per day than I had prior to leveling up. The question was just how I was going to use it.

The ideal solution was for me to gain another level, but I was still nearly forty thousand experience off from that. I wasn't going to get that overnight, so instead, I needed to use the chance I had and the surplus of mana at my disposal from the past day of not having adventurers sapping my resources to figure something else out. It was a daunting task, and I still wasn't entirely sure how I was going to do it, but it needed to be done.

Okay, time for me to get to work, I thought as I moved on from just thinking about my problems to actually working to solve them.

I had some ideas. It was only a matter of getting one of them to work, so I made to get started, and as I did so, my surroundings came back into focus. As they did, I briefly noticed something was different.

Huh? Where'd Adraugon go?

The spot atop his hoard where he normally laid was empty, but I didn't have the time to question it. Every moment was precious, so instead, I whisked my awareness of to Archie's laboratory so that we could get to work.