Chapter 144

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The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea

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The conversation with the teen heroes went incredibly well. As well as it possibly could have gone, I think. Sure, they were leery of the whole necromancy thing and asked to see the subjects themselves at some point, but I had them on-side! They'd explained they were at least months ahead of the adult heroes in the temple's grip, and with my help, further training and investments, they'd become a force to be reckoned with.

For now, they'd continue to delve into the dungeon and, by all appearances, come into an incredible stream of lucky loot drops. Gear that fits them and their fighting styles perfectly. Given I wanted them alive, I'd have my Monsters and Children hold off from going lethal, but still make fighting them a challenge. Hopefully, that would be enough to prevent any rumours of full-on collusion from emerging.

In the meantime, I started circulating some other rumours. Nothing that was outright false, either. Just that the temples were preparing a crusade, and Atlantis was the target. That was enough for many to decide to get the fuck out, asap. Over the next week, ships leaving port were full of fleeing guilders, merchants and families. People who, while willing to work with Children who'd proven themselves reasonable people, were unwilling to be the target of what was gearing up to be a full genocide.

I didn't blame them, it's why I made sure the news 'leaked' after all. But in the end, it wasn't the people I considered necessary who were leaving. It was the normal people, leading normal lives, just trying to pull their asses out of the pan before it was shoved into the fire.

No, the important people knew that trying to leave was fruitless. They were known, and if they weren't found here, they'd be hunted down no matter where they went, just like I'd explained to the teen heroes. The CHI group were still throwing themselves against the Tenth, even a week later. Having a place to rest and recoup mid-dungeon was really extending the life of their dives.

But otherwise, the other recently-platinum and near-platinum parties were too well-known among the populace. As much as platinum-rank was a badge of honour, an achievement that raised you to practically celebrity-status... Anyone who reached it was, coincidentally, very well known. Their names, description and achievements, if not their fighting styles. On Atlantis, reaching any floor past the Fourth was considered a worthy feat.

The rest were the Guild's direct employees, the island's management and any humans who had nothing to return to or had faith in my capability to defend them. I was pleasantly surprised at how many remained after the initial exodus. Still, I suppose the majority of those who objected to my existence left after the invasion and my takeover. The rest had already accepted it.

So, slightly gutted as it was, life continued on Atlantis. The farmers farmed, merchants, traded, artisans crafted, guilders delved, and I started on my first precaution. It wasn't hard to decide that the humans who remained behind should be rewarded for their loyalty. After a bit of thought, I came up with the least disruptive thing I could imagine. On the Eleventh, I enchanted a section of unused, open ocean to repel any Children or Monsters, and set upon my secret works.

A 1-to-1 scale replica of Atlantis as it existed on the surface.

I'd watched the port town and surrounding farms grow from a tent city and shaky wooden piers to their current state. With aerial views thanks to my gulls, and close-up details from the rats and insects that thrived in the urban environment, I got it pretty damn close. The main differences were newness. Old buildings had an aura to them. Visible wear and tear, crumbling stonework and rotting wood. I could mimic it, to a degree, and had successfully fooled delvers in the past.

But this was different. The people who would live here would live here, not just inspect the stonework and then pass through. All the little differences would be noticed, noted, and the illusion that nothing had changed would unravel comment by innoculous comment. In the end, though, I had to settle for almost perfect. By its very nature as part of my dungeon, the humans would notice the difference in mana density, that 'feeling' humans get when they step across the boundary into my dungeon.

I was intimately familiar with the island and had completed the project within a week of starting. The only thing left to do was use linked teleport crystals to forcibly teleport the humans down into the dungeon in their sleep. I decided to 'hold off' on that, though, since having everyone on the surface disappear would be pretty alarming to the few merchants who still visited the island.

With that done, I turned my attention to the next part of my defensive prep: a revamp of my surface protectors. The Leviathan was easy enough; I just contacted the Leviathan pod on the Eleventh and asked who was willing to help. The matriarch agreed and was teleported to the surface ocean, where she started circling the island. She was an impressive size, easily twice as large as my last Leviathan, and could only sedately drift around the relatively shallow waters near Atlantis.

The Kracken, well, I hadn't actually remade any since the Bahrain invasion. Same with the Sea Serpent. Thankfully, though, I remembered how to make them and had plenty of ideas for improvements. After that, well...

I'd get started on turning every single room in my dungeon into a deathtrap, designed to bleed the crusaders of as many men as I could.

But first, time to remake the Kracken!

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The Tenth Floor, The Dungeon, Atlantis

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Haythem cried out in triumph as his sword struck true, piercing deep into the hare's side. The momentum from his leap carried them both across the trail, and they collided with a second Jackalope. The giant, horned rabbit squeaked in surprise, then in pain as they crashed into the side of a tree. A rustle, and Bertram leapt from the bushes, his mace already descending. The Jackalope must have seen or heard him, since it tried to throw its head around to catch the mace in its magnificent rack.

It failed. Bertram, having been on the receiving end of that technique three times already, was already moving to avoid the horns. His mace struck the Jackalope on its thick skull and dazed it enough that a second hit on the same spot could break through, killing the beast. Meanwhile, Haythem himself stood and cleanly slid his sword from the dead Jackalope he'd struck through the heart. He flicked his sword, and the giant rabbit's vibrantly red blood splattered across the dirt.

"Finally!" Haythem cried as he grabbed the monster by the horns and pulled it off Bertram's kill. "That took forever!"

"You hear the others yet?" Bertram asked, looking in the direction from which the two giant rabbits came.

"They shouldn't be far off," Haythem replied, picking up the corpse and tying it to his back. Bertram did the same, and the two started trekking through the forest. It wasn't more than a few minutes later that they emerged into a small clearing, in the centre of which they found the rest of the group. They waved and approached with answering waves. From the looks of it, everyone had managed to ambush their own Jackalopes, leaving them just as, if not more successful, than the last two days.

"There you are. We flush them the right way?" Jerrard asked, tying up a third jackalope corpse to a stick between two a-frames. Four other such frames stood near him. Haythem nodded as they joined the circle and laid down their kills.

"Right between us, couldn't have set it up better," Haythem answered as he pulled out a harvesting knife and started to carefully cut the rabbit's hide free. "This is a much better strategy than just chasing them around and hoping they get tired. Good thinking, Duncan."

"I just figured treating them like animals to be hunted, instead of monsters to defend against, was probably a better idea," Duncan replied from his position on a fallen log. They'd cut down three trees to make this clearing into a camp, and it'd worked great. The last two nights, they hadn't needed to return to the Ninth.

Bertram soon followed Haythem's example, and within a few minutes, they had two more huge Jackalope hides, head and horns included. The horns were separated, to be turned into 'The Church Of The Creator' for the reward, while the hides would be traded for access to the village. The rest of the copse was hung up with the others. With everyone's harvesting done, they carried the sticks between two people each and made their way out of the forest.

They emerged from the treeline not far from the path and were quick to follow it. The setting sun cast a rosy glow over the forest, long shadows growing longer by the minute.

As Minos Village grew closer, Haythem was able to get his first good look at it. The walls seemed to be made of some grey, reflective stone, despite looking like it was a log palisade. Behind the walls, he could only make out thatched roofs and a large grey-barked tree. They hadn't seen any similar trees in the forest, but maybe this kind was the one they'd harvested for their palisade?

They stopped at the gate, and the two Minotaur guards eyed them suspiciously. "You have the entrance fee?" The one on the left, who hefted a warhammer, asked.

"Aye, we do," Isid responded, nodding to Duncan. The archer shucked off his backpack and pulled out the Jackalope hides, three for each member of the party, then slung the pack back over his shoulders. The guard on the right stepped forward and inspected the hides, nodding and grunting at each one. 

"These are adequate," the Minotaur finally judged. "You are allowed entrance into the village. Remember The Creator's laws, and there won't be any trouble." He knocked on the massive grey door, producing a dull ringing noise. That didn't sound like wood, nor stone, Haythem thought to himself. That sounded like... metal. Without further ado, the doors swung open, and the humans gained access to Minos Village.

The architecture reminded Haythem a lot of the many farming communities throughout Theona. Stone foundations, walls of wooden planks, and straw-thatched roofs. The cobbled streets were wide, and despite being named for the Minotaur, there were plenty of other Children in the village. Drake-kin, Capriccio, and more... humanoid Children, like the sheep-person they'd met when they reached the Tenth or the cat-people on the ninth. Not all of them were sheep-like, either. Some were even Scaleborn, like the Voice of The Creator! None shared her ethereal mana-wings, though.

In the centre of the village stood the giant tree Haythem had seen. The street circled it, leaving more than enough empty space around it for future growth. Around this circle were a few larger buildings. One looked like a temple, made almost entirely of stone, with a shingled roof and a stained-glass window depicting a teal teardrop-cut gemstone resting prominently above the double-door entryway. The Dungeon Core.

"That must be the Chuch's building," he pointed out to the group. Other buildings here also featured more stone. What looked like granaries, a tavern, a large market, and most likely the headman's house, or whatever the minotaurs called their leader. 

"Well, we should go turn these antlers in first," Isid stated, turning to look at the rest of the group. "Then, the market. After that, the Tavern. We need to figure out how to find the three monsters we need to kill. Maybe someone has seen them in certain areas?"

It was as good an idea as any, and they started walking.

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The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea

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I was pulled from my monster-crafting by a mental ping. The CHI group were in Minos Village! I watched them closely as they interacted with the Beastborn in the Church, trading in their jackalope antlers for a sack of talons, and getting two new sidequests to collect Unihare Horns and Winged Hare Wings. I could tell Isid was alternating between fuming and being impressed. No doubt she'd been the one to advise Layla to trade me rabbits for questions so long ago, thinking I wouldn't be able to do much of anything with them. Ha! At least Jerrard took the reveal that all the monsters on the Tenth were rabbit-based with more humour.

After that, they made their way to the market, where I got to see them have their first taste of Ice Cream. They also sold off the Jackalope corpses they were carrying to a butcher, and bought some good jerky and other long-lasting meats in trade. After that, they settled into the local Tavern, the Milky Cow, for the evening.

While I was looking, I decided to check in on the Teen Heroes. They were locked in 2-on-2 combat in the final trial they needed to complete to gain access to Mushu. They won, and not by a slim margin, either. They were growing in both skill and raw power ridiculously quickly, in comparison to the average Silvers and Golds I'd been observing the growth of for so long. Honestly, they have a decent shot at beating Mushu soon. After that, the rats were more of a gauntlet to push through than explore like the Second and Third. I couldn't wait for them to reach the Fifth and have a real-life Dark Souls experience.

After they teleported back to the surface for the night, I returned to my crafting.

The Kracken were growing well. I'd decided to do what I should have done in the first place, and make a whole species of each sea monster. Thus, growing from an octopus, each Young Kracken was at least five yards wide by the body, with twenty-yard-long tentacles, thick hides and ten eyes scattered across their bodies. The next evolutionary stage, Mature Kracken, had twenty-yard-long bodies and forty-yard-long tentacles. They had even thicker hides, and their suckers could extend sharp, horn-like nails that could dig into a rip through solid wood. I only had one Mature Kracken at the moment, and twenty Young Krackens.

The third stage, the Elder Kracken, would have forty-yard-long bodies and eighty-yard-long tentacles. That's as long as a gridiron field, and roughly the length of the galleons that sailed the Eleventh. A real danger, but manageable. The final stage, the Ancient Kracken, was the real deal. I only planned on having one of these; it was such an investment. A body one hundred yards long, and tentacles two hundred yards from base to bladed tip. Its skin would be like sandpaper, covered in microscopic needles that'd inject a sleeping agent. If this Kracken managed to knock a sailor off of a ship, that sailor would find themselves knocked unconscious, and they'd quickly drown. Unlike the previous stages, this one didn't have a cap on its growth size.

The last Kracken I'd made was roughly equivalent to the Elder Kracken, and it'd take another whole two weeks of constant investment to raise my only Mature Kracken to Ancient status.

Before I settled down to do that, though, I wanted to get everything set up for the Sea Serpents.

Evolved from the same sea snake species as the last one, this species would have a similar life-stage evolutionary line. Young Sea Serpents would be about forty yards long, Mature about eighty, elders could reach a hundred and sixty, and the Ancient Sea Serpent would be, at minimum, three hundred yards long. Each stage would have thicker hides and scales, larger and more dangerous fangs and horns, and steadily reddening colourations, as if, as it grew older, this species would descend into the darkness of the oceans to hunt larger prey.

A quick modification to the existing Leviathans gave them life-stage evolutions, too. It was at this point that I considered spreading this kind of evolution to the rest of the monsters in the dungeon. It was a neat way to give my monsters a somewhat constant strength, with jumps in power as they grew older and descended deeper into the dungeon. I'd still have the species-jumping evolutions, like the lava snakes. Still, they'd require more energy to change than just increasing size and potency.

I decided that I wouldn't implement it for the Children, though. They didn't need it, nor did I want to make them have a Sims-like experience.

After I'd done all that, a couple more days having passed, I settled in to grow my Ancient Kracken and Ancient Sea Serpent, the two sea monsters growing steadily near the large manacurrent that snaked around the Eleventh. Those Crusaders were in for a nasty surprise.

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