A Dungeon’s Survival

Connie

How would one go about defending themselves from a walking disaster in the form of a giant bear? That was the question my conversation with the Custodian had left me with. Obviously, I was also worried about the Fairy Council now that I knew how dangerous they were, but if nothing else, Protection of the Fairy Queen should have been enough for me to leave that problem be for a time. The Onikuma, on the other hand, if Twelve was to be believed, would turn against me well before I hit level thirty as a Dungeon.

As it stood, I'd just made it to level fifteen. I couldn't say anything for certain, but if the bear were to turn against me, me hitting level twenty-five, what Fabian had referred to as the second tier of power, seemed like the most likely catalyst for it. That left me with two options. I either needed to prepare for a fight with a level forty-two beast that could destroy any terrain I made and shrug off attacks from my strongest monsters with ease, or I could attempt further negotiations. The problem with the second option was that I'd be tipping my hand by letting it know I was aware that it was going to betray me, and that had too much potential for disaster to even consider.

That only left me with the first choice, but it didn't rule out the second one for after I was prepared to fight it should things come to that, which brought me back to the question. How was I supposed to fight off such an overleveled monster with so many disadvantages stacked against me in the first place? Frankly, it seemed impossible. I couldn't just accept that, though.

Instead, I turned my focus to Vie and Pee. They were the strongest monsters I had and, as such, the only ones I could imagine being able to hurt the thing so long as I invested significantly enough in their growth. There were two issues with that idea, however. The first was that the bear was so durable that I doubted they'd be able to pierce its thick hid to begin with. Then, there was also the fact that according to Twelve, the Onikuma had a vitality stat of sixty-four and a strength of over two hundred. With that range of stats, I could only imagine its fortitude would be ridiculous as well, and that was the stat responsible for resisting poisons and venom, the method my snakes would need to even begin to stand a chance.

In other words, I wouldn't feel at all optimistic about their fangs being able to pierce its thick hide or their venom working unless they were able to gain a lot more stat points first. To be exact, I considered one hundred fifty points of VIT and two hundred STR to be the bare minimum, a combined total of over two hundred fifty more than they currently had, and even then, the odds in such a fight would be heavily stacked against us. Still, it would give us a win condition, if nothing else. That would just leave us with the issue of dragging a fight out with the bear long enough for the venom would work. I was getting ahead of myself, though. Before that could even be a consideration, I'd need a way to bolster their stats by such a large amount.

The obvious way to do so would be through Monster Customization, but it would be expensive, require maxing out every customization they had that contributed to those two stats, and need me to use their last available customization on a final change that would increase their VIT. Even then, though, it would only barely push them to the numbers I wanted for a cost of well over one hundred DP, and it would require maxing out their size. Big snakes had merit, and I wasn't against using them in general, but for Vie and Pee, making them any larger than they already were would only make them bigger targets and cause them problems.

Aside from that, there were the temporary options. I had other capabilities that could boost their stats for a time, and they had the same. If I were to equip the Limitless title and use my Empower Bond spell, that would mean a five percent boost to one stat and fifteen percent to the other. Add in their Mutant Surge ability and Shadow Enhancement spell, and I could start to see it being enough. Then, there was also the six levels they could get before reaching their level cap and the stat points I saw sitting unspent on their status page.

Wait, what? I thought as I noticed the forty points tagged as to be decided, When did they–oh! Oh! I never assigned the points they got from killing the Berserker, did I?

Now that I thought about it, I also owed Adraugon an upgrade. I really needed to get it together.

Whatever, the proof of concept is there, but we'd still need to hold off the bear for minutes to hours on end depending on how Vie and Pee did against it. I've got nothing that could hope to do that.

If the last time the Onikuma had forced its way through to my core was anything to go off of, it could get there in a matter of minutes at its slowest. Nothing I had could buy us a significant amount of time, so that was where I'd need to focus my efforts going forward. By my estimates, I had some time, but I needed to get something going as soon as possible. For that reason, I decided to make use of my new gains and then to upgrade my two greatest defenders. Luckily, if I could get what I'd been planning for ages to work, I'd be able to increase my experience gain and empower my Dungeon as a whole simultaneously, if I could get it to work.

Okay, let's see what we're working with.

I currently had three new unchosen monsters and sixty DP, fifty-five not counting what I owed Adraugon, to work with. I also had a new slot for an awakened monster. There was a part of me that feared the bear and wanted to reassess all of my options again before making any decisions because of it, but I'd long since decided what I wanted to spend all of those slots on. My current circumstances, as terrifying as they were, only enforced the need for what I was trying to do.

What I needed was to empower my forces as much as I could before hitting level twenty-five; that was assuming my guess about when the bear would attack was right, which it might not have been. Still, that was the assumption I was going with, and that made the alternative roads to power I'd been investing in all the more important. As it stood, my dedicated crafters were making significant progress, and my awakened casters were unraveling the secrets of magic. That was good, but it left one branch of power unaccounted for: skills. I was going to remedy that.

Up until now, only my awakened monsters and familiars could benefit from skills since they were the only ones that retained them through death. As for the rest of my forces, when they died, their skill levels were lost forever, stunting any real growth there. That was where the masterpiece I'd been theorycrafting for so long came in. If all went well, it would be the ultimate expression of what Aspect Extraction could accomplish when paired with the Uattuned monster type, and at last, it was time to see if everything would work the way I expected it to.

Let's see how expensive this ends up being, I thought as I made to purchase the monsters I needed and convert them to aspects.

First, though, I brought up an aspect I'd gotten from my last set of monster choices. It had been in preparation for this moment.

[Aspect: Record Memory

Cost: 8 DP

Cooldown: 1 hour

Description: You can capture memories perfectly.

Effect: You can record a minute of the events you experience in perfect detail per hour. You can recall them as much as you want afterward.]

So far, only Noctis had made use of it, but the entire reason I'd originally picked it up was for its synergy with some other abilities that different monsters had. It was the core of my idea, but it was only a component in a bigger picture. Now, it was time to go shopping for the rest of what I needed.

[Brain Sucker]

I searched for and brought up the status of the first monster I was getting.

[Level: 1

Cost: 20 DP

Health: 10 (40)

Stamina: 10 (40)

Mana: 100 (160)

Stats: FORT 2 (8), VIT 2 (9), STR 5 (12), END 2 (8), SOUL 10 (16), MIND 12 (18), WILL 12 (18), COM 12 (18), DEX 5 (11), AGI 5 (11)

Skills: None

Abilities: Memory Eater, Vocal Mimicry

Description: A necrotic monster native to the Souldrain Swamplands. Largely thought to be the creation of an ancient necromancer, these wormlike creatures feast on the brains of the deceased, glimpsing memories once belonging to the dead in the process. They then mimic the voices of those they consume to lure new prey into treacherous areas in hopes that they will die.

Upgrades: Professional Amateur (+1 to every stat), A Walk in the Park (+5% to DEX and WILL), Too Close for Comfort (+1 to every stat), Deathtrap (+1% to every stat), Forceful Eviction (+1 to STR), Toxic (+1 to VIT), Kill Zone (+1 to every stat), Mass Grave (+1 to every stat), Raid (+1 to every stat), Great Raid (+1 to every stat), Generalist (+1% to every stat), Grand Raid (+1% to every stat)]

It was a parasite of sorts, and it disturbed me to no end. It did, however, have a powerful ability. I converted that ability to an aspect immediately.

[Aspect: Memory Eater

Cost: 10 DP

Description: You catch glimpses of memories when consuming brains.

Effect: When consuming a brain, you can view scattered glimpses of memories belonging to the individual it came from. The more specific of a type of memory you try to view, the less you can see. Your capability to extract more memories and to view more specific memories is dependent on your (MIND) and (WILL).]

Ten Dungeon Points, huh?

It was more expensive than I'd hoped it would be but cheaper than I'd feared. Between it and Record memory alone, the cost of the new monster was already sitting at eighteen points. Considering how expensive I already knew the base monster to be, that was far from ideal.

Oh well, I'll figure something out. Now, for the next ability …

[Remnant Specter

Level: 1

Cost: 40 DP

Anima: 145 (235)

Stamina: 25 (55)

Stats: FORT 5 (11), VIT 5 (12), STR 5 (12), END 5 (11), SOUL 12 (18), MIND 12 (18), WILL 12 (18), COM 10 (16), DEX 7 (13), AGI 7 (13)

Skills: None

Abilities: Spectral Form, Inflict Memory

Description: An undead creature created by necromancers by extracting the memories and anger from a mortal during their death and combining it with mana to give it form. They lash out at all that is living around them, subjecting others to the same torment they experienced in life.

Upgrades: Professional Amateur (+1 to every stat), A Walk in the Park (+5% to DEX and WILL), Too Close for Comfort (+1 to every stat), Deathtrap (+1% to every stat), Forceful Eviction (+1 to STR), Toxic (+1 to VIT), Kill Zone (+1 to every stat), Mass Grave (+1 to every stat), Raid (+1 to every stat), Great Raid (+1 to every stat), Generalist (+1% to every stat), Grand Raid (+1% to every stat)]

I hated how disturbing these monsters were, and even the idea that I could create things that seemingly had memories of lives they, by all accounts, never lived was off-putting. It also raised many questions. Still, the abilities were good, so I put up with it.

Spectral Form was an amazing ability. It was the same thing Archie had that combined his health and mana into a different resource called anima. Truly, I would have loved to be able to give it to whatever monster I wanted. Unfortunately, I was choosing this one for its other ability.

[Aspect: Inflict Memory

Cost: 8 DP

Description: Your touch forces others to relive your memories.

Effect: Whenever you come into contact with a living being, you can force them to experience events from your past. The clarity at which you can force these memories onto others, the amount of memories you can force, and the cost of doing so is dependent on how well you can recall them, your (MIND), your (SOUL), your target's (MIND), your target's (COM), and the amount of resistance your target puts up.]

Combined, Record Memory, Memory Eater, and Inflict Memory could allow someone to extract memories from the dead, preserve them in perfect detail, and share them with others. The process needed to do so was disturbing, but by using this method, I could have a monster recover some of the progress my others made in life and pass it on to the next generation. It would allow me to train my monsters' skills and to have their progress endure through their deaths, theoretically making each new wave of monsters I summoned stronger than the last by giving them head starts. That was so long as their brains could be recovered and assuming that each new wave had some time to practice the motions their predecessors used, anyway.

All of that led me to the last monster I was picking. It would be host to the three abilities and the newest awakened in my ranks. For that reason, I needed it to be flexible, capable of learning and developing a wide range of skills, and at least somewhat okay with the concept of eating brains. A zombie of sorts it was.

The undead was a surprisingly vast category of monsters with an unthinkable amount of horrors contained within. It didn't simply contain things like ghosts, zombies, or other stereotypical horror movie monsters. Instead, it hosted a plethora of highly specialized versions of those abominations. Out of all of them, I wanted one type in particular: a ghoul.

In the video games I used to play in my past life, they were always depicted as some of the weakest undead, but in a few I'd seen, they were also depicted as being somewhat intelligent. That paired with their tendency to eat corpses made them perfect of my purposes so long as all of that translated over to this world, which it did. Still, there were plenty of species of ghouls to choose from, so I'd had to research each one until I'd found something I liked. I had, and there was one, a limited monster, that had something the others didn't.

[Mimicry Ghoul (Limited)

Available: 1 / 1

Level: 1

Cost: 100 DP

Health: 40 (70)

Stamina: 40 (70)

Mana: 80 (140)

Stats: FORT 8 (14), STR 12 (19), END 8 (14), SOUL 8 (14), MIND 15 (21), WILL 10 (16), COM 10 (16), DEX 14 (21), AGI 14 (20)

Skills: None

Abilities: Feast, Decaying, Skill Mimicry

Description: An undead husk with an unusually sharp, though forgetful, mind and an overwhelming craving for flesh. It can copy the movements and actions of those it comes into contact with with unerring accuracy, but it quickly forgets them.

Upgrades: Professional Amateur (+1 to every stat), A Walk in the Park (+5% to DEX and WILL), Too Close for Comfort (+1 to every stat), Deathtrap (+1% to every stat), Forceful Eviction (+1 to STR), Toxic (+1 to VIT), Kill Zone (+1 to every stat), Mass Grave (+1 to every stat), Raid (+1 to every stat), Great Raid (+1 to every stat), Generalist (+1% to every stat), Grand Raid (+1% to every stat)]

Perhaps choosing a monster the System directly referred to as having a bad memory was a poor choice for what was supposed to be a receptacle of knowledge, but my hope was that Record Memory could help offset that problem, and Skill Mimicry, one of its native abilities made the choice worthwhile in my eyes.

[Ability: Skill Mimicry

Description: You can perfectly copy skills you witness being used.

Effect: When you witness a skill being used, you can temporarily copy it, overwriting your own level in that skill should you already have it. When you do so, you gain an instinctual understanding of it but not a conceptual one. You can only copy one skill at a time through this ability.]

My hope was that, with Skill Mimicry, it could also train its own skills by copying others and replaying the actions it took with them using Record Memory later on. That would let it study them and pass on what it learned alongside the memories of other monsters. Then, there was give and take of its last two abilities.

[Ability: Feast

Description: Your recover health, stamina, and mana when consuming flesh.

Effect: Whenever you consume flesh, a portion of the energy contained within is converted directly into health, stamina, and mana.]

[Ability: Decaying

Description: Your body and soul are in a constant state of decay.

Effect: You no longer have a (VIT) stat. You can not recover health, stamina, or mana through normal means. You are also immune to poison.]

Decaying was an unfortunate trait to have, but Feast had one important upside that made it worthwhile. Mimicry Ghouls didn't rely on natural mana regeneration. That meant I was going to need to actively feed it, but it also meant that, as long as I provided it a constant stream of flesh, it would never run out of of mana. If everything worked out as I hoped it would, it would be able to pass on as many memories as it needed to and train my monsters for me while also further developing the combat skills we had access to. With it, I'd effectively be converting skills from a nebulous concept to a functional branch of knowledge that could be developed and improved across my whole Dungeon, though there was the chance it wouldn't work ,and there was also another problem.

A total cost of one hundred twenty-six DP, huh?

That was seventy-one points more than I could afford to dedicate to it at the moment. I was going to have to cut down on costs somewhere before I could make this work. With luck, though, once I did, I would be able to increase my overall experience yield by teaching my monsters skills, improve their overall defensive capabilities, and begin preparing a force that could stall the bear in one fell swoop. That was if everything worked as intended, however.

Okay. Time to do some upgrades. Then, I'll rework my Dungeon.

Freeing up that many Dungeon Points wasn't going to be easy.