[Archived Short Story] A Snail's Tale

This shouldn’t be happening. It makes no sense! Why?

Though I guess for whoever finds this metaphorical message in a bottle, sent out into the Void as a desperate cry for someone to listen, I should start at the beginning.

I’m an unnamed dungeon core. Which to give a little more background, has a lot of meaning in my native realm. The only being that can officially name a dungeon is a person who has conquered said dungeon. To go even a year without a name is rare as every organization I know of has a standing order to conquer every new dungeon found.

Why? Because a nameless dungeon is just too dangerous. See, the realm I live in is pretty big on the whole “True Name” thing. Core, heh, part of reality and all that. Now, dungeons aren’t the only nameless beings, it’s simply that generally if something gets powerful enough reality grants them a True Name. And so, as with all exceptions to the rules, dungeons are targeted hard.

Yet here I am, about to fall to another nameless being! Though this isn’t some ancient sorcerer who has erased their name from reality, nor a natural born golem, free of its kind’s usual heavy restrictions from an inbuilt name. My feared foe lacks even sapience! It. Is. A. Normal. Snail!

Well, to be fair to the snail, the being about to break my century long streak of being unnamed can’t be counted as a ‘normal’ anything at this point. But yeah, a decade ago, when it first entered my halls, the thing was a normal snail. See a ton of them any given year. As with most non-sapient critters, they tend to get attracted to the core’s pure Mana. And subsequently destroyed by just about anything on the first floor. Sure, some hang out in the safe zone, but the draw of pure Mana means most don’t.

This snail, though? All of the luck! I swear, the only reason I wasn’t conquered yet is simply because apparently the world was saving up luck for this one invertebrate.

At first, nothing stood out, at least not beyond normal variance. Even with so many years under my belt, some critters make it to the second or even third floor. Beyond that, more combat capable critters, such as cougars, can make get to the tenth floor and my first boss! Of course, seeing as you can’t move forward without the boss being beaten, they either die or have gained enough in the mental department to retreat.

So, it isn’t impossible for a regular snail. They just have to crawl along the floor and walls in exactly the right way so they never get caught in a trap. Before this snail, the record for tiny vermin was a dragonfly that got to the seventh floor. I thought the snail was going to take first place and I’d be able to add its shell to my collection of oddly competent critter components.

Then I witnessed the first bit of truly noteworthy luck. The snail had gotten into the boss room and was hanging out near the exit on the ceiling, grazing on random bits of moss. Not even a day goes by before a pair of pairs and one loner all make it to the boss at around the same time.

This isn’t odd. Such pick up groups coming together for the boss fight happens all the time. Except, instead of one team inviting the others, the individual was the strongest so they made a new party and did an open invite, allowing the snail to join in. Maybe the loner caught this, but if they did, they probably just thought it was another solo player with some kind of obfuscation skill. After all, how could something without a name be here to join their party?

So yeah, the five delvers easily take care of the boss and that damn snail is counted as having beaten it! The thing grew, like, 16 times stronger from that fight alone. Then it had the nerve to not evolve, not mutate, not any of the recognized paths to power. Because, if the snail had done any of those, the snail would have qualified for a name. But no, it kept crawling deeper.

Except now, it had some power under its belt. This should not have mattered, except the damn things luck! Starting on the eleventh floor, I had added in some stationary monsters. Mainly stuff like shrieker mushrooms to put out the alert when delvers are in the area.

The thing is, they’re still monsters. So when that snail gets on one of them and set about feasting, all I can do is watch as it accidentally kills the monster. Then repeat that a few times as the snail makes its way through the floors. All the while those defeated monsters are feeding the snail experience.

Though on floor twenty, it finally got to show its chops. No lucky pick up groups to let it through the boss this time. Not that the snail needed a group anymore. The snail literally crawled up the leg of the goblin shaman with the entire tribe trying to smash it, then nibbled through something important.

My shaman bled to death! Even its healing magic wasn’t enough to prevent a snail from killing it. In theory, a snail shouldn’t have even been able to hurt a regular goblin, let alone a boss.

Though things really got wild after it got through a couple more bosses. Around the forty-third floor, the snail started to also eat the metal armor of my monsters. Like, I’ve seen the entry in my system provided creature database, so I know about those deep sea snails with iron shells. This isn’t one of those!

Didn’t stop this snail, though. I guess the system wanted to push it to change somehow and a metal shell was all that came up. Not that it had a hard time before this. Even a metal maul wasn’t enough to smash the damn snail! My minotaurs certainly tried their best at it.

Oh, and since at this point the thing had abandoned sticking to its specific species of snail, it basically turned into one of the largest carnivorous non-monstrous snails. Well, large is relative. It was still only about as long as an average male human’s hand is wide, but that’s massive for a land snail! And everyone knows comparing the size of ocean-based critters to land based ones is cheating so we can ignore the aquatic snails.

Anyway, floor fifty was my minotaur boss and the floor actually managed to keep the snail occupied for a while! Not because of my boss, mind you. They actually met early on and after its iron maul failed to shatter the snail’s shell, it was downhill. A normal carnivorous snail is eating things like earthworms and other similar invertebrates.

This snail, on the other hand, had their rasp-like tongue outfitted with literal metal. Its lick tore through flesh in the most unpleasant of ways. I’m just glad that my monsters don’t experience pain in the same way mortals normally do. Pain for them is less of an “ouch” and more of a “oh hey, that’s damaged”. Sort of important for them to keep fighting to defend me, after all.

Anyway, my minotaur died early on, so why did the snail get delayed so much? If you know general minotaur tropes, you likely already know the answer. I had a labyrinth for my halfway point!

Well, that is what the few delvers who have made it the floor have called it. Me? I refer to it as the maze. I know this is a little picky, but a proper labyrinth is a single path. So, since my setup involves a lot of dead ends and such, it is a maze. Most importantly, I made sure that you couldn’t just follow a wall to get to the end.

And guess what, a snail isn’t exactly designed to solve complex mazes. Even more lucky was that I had already figured out ways to obfuscate the flow of Mana from my core. I had tried mazes in earlier floors, it just never worked and I would remove them. With floor fifty, I finally managed to get my main Mana flow to split up and come from multiple locations at once. That way, delvers can’t simply follow the Mana to the floor’s exit.

Though I must admit, the snail did pretty well with the maze. What really slowed it down was simply how slow the snail still was. There it was, going as fast as it can, but only managing a speed reminiscent of a leisurely walk. So, while the snail overall didn’t end up in too many dead ends, each one took so much longer to explore. After all, it isn’t like the snail was just sprinting around the whole time and its “walking” speed was much slower.

This was useful for me as it allowed some time to modify things. For instance, salt floors! And walls, ceilings, and basically everything else. I threw up a thin dusty sheet of salt over just about anything that made sense to.

I hadn’t before, because honestly? The minotaur was sort of my Ace in the hole. His maul could have easily smashed the snail if it didn’t receive that helpful metal shell upgrade. But no, the snail had to go and get a method to protect itself. Though clearly there was more going on with the shell than was visible on the outside.

After all, a simple metal shell would have crumbled under what was basically a piece of metal on a stick that weighed as much as a grown dwarf. And this unnatural resistance should have clued me in. Because the salt on floor 51 did nothing.

Maybe what would have been the best strategy would be to get a monster to pick the snail up and poke at it, except that boat had sailed as well. None of my monsters could even pry the damn thing off the ground and even when they managed to pick it up along with whatever it was currently stuck to, poking it didn’t work too well.

Sure, they could poke it, but only once. The snail would grab whatever was poking it and start to eat the offending object. Stab the snail with a spear? Well, you don’t have a spear anymore. Poke it with a finger? Well, I wouldn’t have a goblin anymore.

So for a while, maybe a half year or so? I did have the snail contained. Sure, the snail would eat anything coming at it from the one side, but it was held upside down by the top of its shell. I had even started to think of ways to weaponise it. Though it was times like that which made me wish I could force delvers physically to leave. Sadly, the safe zones don’t let me manipulate delvers, which would include stuff like pushing them through it.

Anyway, this stopgap solution to the snail didn’t last forever. It eventually became able to stretch itself far enough to reach all of its shell and dislodged itself. So yeah, I had basically no solution to it and the snail went on a rampage through the next thirty some floors before reaching another hurdle.

See, normally a boss monster has to attack the delvers if it can find them, similar to how I can’t do anything to delvers in a safe zone. I have no control over it. Except, on floor 80, my boss monster was one of the exceptions.

That floor had a trapdoor spider for a boss and it fit under the category of ambush boss. This meant that it was allowed to hide until a delver dropped their guard. Then the spider would pounce on them. Of course, it would also attack if found, but the key detail there is that the spider only attacked if a delver dropped their guard.

The snail can not drop its guard. That shell is literally a part of the thing’s body. So the snail got stuck for just about the exact opposite reason as it did on floor 50. Instead of being confused by the floor layout, this time it was stuck trying to find the boss.

Of course, this couldn’t last forever. At some point, the snail started to just grind down every surface it moved across until it breached the spider’s hiding spot. This forced the boss to attack and the fight was over not long after.

And now, here I am. My final boss, a three headed combo of a pyro, cryo, and regular hydra couldn’t take it. Even that monster’s insane regeneration wasn’t enough to survive.

Right now, it is only a matter of time before I’m conquered, the only remaining obstacle being a small distance, my core floating at about chest level for an adult human. Thankfully, the snail still hasn’t developed much of a mind and so it is below reaching up, because things would already be over if it would just realize it could get above me and drop onto my core.

Not that I believe this will keep it at bay for long. I’m not an idiot, I tried previously to suspend the snail with magic and it ate that too. So, given enough time, it will figure something out.