Osamaru

  A week.

  That’s how long Garrelt had been in this cavern, wrestling with the madness that was Alpha’s design. At least, that’s what it felt like to him. Time was a strange thing here. He’d heard of time dition before, usually whispered about in connection to the great sects and mighty cns. Yet, seeing it wielded so casually by a Dungeon Core left him uneasy.

  To stretch an hour into a week? Even the Five Pilrs would balk at such a cim.

  Of course, he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that Alpha lied to him. Maybe his companions had perished days ago, their remains scattered in the forest above, while the Core maniputed him for its own ends. Would it matter? Escape wasn’t an option, not with the Kigendoro lurking outside. One thing that made those beasts so dangerous was their near omniscience within their swamps.

  Garrelt had no choice but to pray Alpha was honest with him. Otherwise, he would be stuck here for a long time. Maybe even ending up a dungeonbound, just like Bill and Hugo.

  Those two had been his anchor through this insanity. For former bandits, they weren’t half bad.

  “I won’t deny it — most of Icefinger’s crew knew what they were signing up for,” Hugo had said during one of their breaks, his voice calm yet tinged with something heavier. “But just as many of us didn’t have a choice.”

  The distant look in Hugo’s eyes was one Garrelt recognized all too well — the look of someone forced to fight for scraps in a world that never offered enough. He’d seen it in the hollow stares of valley farmers, the worn faces of Halirosa’s poor, and even in the eyes of weaker Adventurers scraping by in the Guild. For all its wealth and power, Halirosa was no different from the cns or sects that it prided itself on resisting. Resources, knowledge, opportunities — they were all hoarded by the strong, while the weak squabbled over leftovers.

  If you didn’t have the talent and strength to fight for your own opportunities, you had no choice but to fall in line with someone who did.

  Hugo was a rather calm and grounded man. He was often slow to speak, but when he did, it was always with a sense of peace, as if no matter how bad things got, he knew everything would work out in the end. Garrelt often wondered how a man like him had fallen into gang life, but Hugo wasn’t as eager to share his story as Bill. Yet Garrelt got the impression Hugo was a man who had been carrying a great, unseen weight, and now, finally, he felt free.

  Bill, in contrast, was… eccentric. His boundless energy and habit of flitting between projects left Garrelt dizzy. Yet, despite the chaos, every seemingly random task clicked into pce, like watching grains of colored sand shift into a brilliant mosaic. The man had clearly felt out of pce in the Adventurer’s Guild and likely hadn’t faired better under Icefinger’s rule. But here, in the dungeon, he seemed like a bird finally freed from its cage.

  Then there was Cude, the enigma. His role was more distant, but from what Garrelt had gathered, where Hugo acted almost like Alpha’s liaison or attendant and Bill worked on many of the dungeon’s background projects, Cude was more involved with its ‘public’ face.

  With how Hugo expined it, Cude had effectively taken over developing the dungeon’s storylines, plot and creative direction. “It’s not much different from what I did for Icefinger,” Cude had once said with a sardonic grin. “Scamming pretty little noble dies and naive young masters. Except now, people praise my work instead of trying to kill me for it.”

  The trio’s odd camaraderie had kept Garrelt sane as he worked to unravel the chaos of the Guardian’s Heart. The project had consumed his days — or what passed for them here — as he painstakingly untangled Alpha’s intricate but erratic arrays.

  Alpha’s work was a contradiction: brilliant in its precision, yet maddeningly disorganized. Each line and sigil was fwless, their geometry immacute, but their connections defied reason. Arrays overpped and tangled in ways that should have been impossible, like threads of an impossibly complex loom.

  “It’s like someone built this one piece at a time, sticking new bits on without a second thought,” Garrelt muttered, his frustration mounting. “How does this even work?!”

  Slowly, painstakingly, he brought order to the chaos, reweaving Alpha’s sprawling tapestry into something cohesive.

  Now, at st, they stood on the brink of success.

  “Rebooting the system now!” Bill called from the control console, his voice alive with barely contained excitement. Garrelt hurried behind the safety shield, a precaution born of hard-earned experience. Early attempts had resulted in… explosive surprises.

  Bill’s hand hovered over the console, waiting for Garrelt’s signal. When he nodded, Bill pressed the button.

  Thump!

  A surge of Spirit Energy radiated from the crystal sphere at the room’s center, its glow suffusing the chamber in a warm, almost-golden light. Waves of power rippled outward, crashing against the shield like ocean breakers. The bck cubes arranged in rows around the room came alive, their delicate, hair-thin sheets flickering with intricate patterns.

  “Processing Cores are stable!” Bill’s words tumbled out in an excited rush. “No cascading errors! Ha! You mad genius, Garrelt, you actually did it!”

  Garrelt couldn’t help but grin. Fixing the overheating issue in the cores had been a nightmare. Alpha had assumed they were overloading, but the truth was far stranger. The cores were simply too efficient. The principle of harmonics said that the sum would always exponentially exceed its parts. Or, as some liked to say, ‘power echoed.’ Alpha’s ‘processors’ amplified these harmonics to such a degree that they literally tore themselves apart.

  Getting them to not do that had been a test of every one of Garrelt’s skills.

  “Activate phase two,” Alpha’s voice buzzed from a Core-controlled ant beside Bill.

  Bill nodded and again pressed a button.

  The soft hum from the crystal core intensified, and the light increased by another magnitude. Almost-golden light raced down a thick metal wire attached to the core that disappeared past the barrier wall. It would soon reach Bosco’s tank, where the energy gathered by this massive spirit stone would be processed and transformed. At the same time, thousands of tiny, hair-like lines extended from the bck cubes and raced off in their own direction.

  Mixing both processed and wild Spirit Energy in a single array construct would have typically been disastrous. There was a reason ‘passive’ and ‘active’ arrays were their own discipline. Yet, once more, Alpha amazed Garrelt by making the seemingly impossible possible.

  Thump!

  Another pulse of Spirit Energy swept the room as Bosco’s tank went active. The arrays along the floor and walls of the chamber fred with energy.

  Thump thump. Thump thump.

  Like a heartbeat, the system came alive, steady and rhythmic. The core and tank pulsed every few seconds, alternating as fresh energy swept between them and through the various arrays.

  “It lives! IT LIVES!” Bill raised his arms into the air and cackled wildly for some reason.

  Garrelt shook his head at the strange man. Regardless, even he could feel his smile widen. He wouldn’t call it ‘living’ exactly, but this had been the farthest they had gotten so far without something blowing up. Turning to Alpha, Garrelt could have sworn he saw the Core-controlled ant smile.

  Rather than fry his tired brain further wondering how that worked, Garrelt asked Alpha, “How does it look?”

  Alpha was silent for a long moment before the ant turned to Garrelt and nodded. “I think that’ll do it. Most of the interface won’t come online, the software needs a total overhaul now, and some systems are starting to break down already, but it’ll get the job done. I give her about fifteen minutes before the core arrays burn out.”

  Garrelt’s grin slipped. “Only fifteen minutes? Will that be enough?”

  This time, Garrelt could hear the smirk in Alpha’s voice. “More than enough.”

  ——————————————————

  Boarsyer, Bert, and Robert stood atop the wall, gazing at the battlefield below.

  The Kigendoro was adapting with arming speed. It had been several moments since the psma nces had managed more than grazing hits on the creature. Not that it posed any real threat to the wall itself. The barrier shielding the structure was a smaller-scale version of the one protecting the TAWP, far surpassing the goblins’ handheld generators.

  The shield’s immense power consumption made it impractical for long-term use, but even a creature as formidable as the Kigendoro could spend days hammering at it without making a dent. Observing through Boarsyer’s armor, Alpha was mildly surprised the beast hadn’t retreated once it became clear the turrets weren’t budging.

  “I’m not surprised,” Bert commented when Alpha voiced his thoughts through the goblin. “Fights among Cultivators and high-tier beasts can st days, even weeks. And remember, Kigendoro are dragon-blooded — proud and stubborn by nature. Even if it’s not fully sapient, that arrogance might expin its unwillingness to flee.”

  He paused, turning to Boarsyer. “That said, we don’t have days. The longer this fight drags on, the more control it gains over its newfound power. If the Dungeon Core has a pn to end this, they’d better act soon.”

  Boarsyer’s voice was steady as she met his gaze. “It’s about to begin.”

  Further along the wall, Robert stood with arms crossed, his eyes narrowed as he watched the chaos unfold. “What’s about to begin?” His tone sharpened as he turned toward Boarsyer. “I don’t know what you goblins and the Dungeon Core are pnning, but I’m not stupid. You both have been pulling us along this entire time, haven’t you?! Don’t think Halirosa is going to stand for this. You will tell me what I want to know.”

  Boarsyer’s expression was unreadable. She turned back to the battle without a word.

  Robert’s face flushed with anger. He pointed an accusatory finger at her and started forward, but Bert stepped between them. Before either man could speak, the wall beneath them trembled. The psma turrets fell silent, slowly retracting into their housings.

  A deep rumble echoed through the air, and creatures hidden in the trees scattered, fleeing into the distance. For a moment, an eerie silence fell over the battlefield. Even the Kigendoro paused, its serpentine form tensing as the ground around the dais shifted.

  The earth crumbled away, not in jagged chunks but in smooth, precise hexagonal pilrs that descended into darkness. The Kigendoro hissed, retreating to the edge of the clearing, but stopped short of fleeing altogether.

  Again, the wall trembled, and the dais rose into the air atop a massive pilr. From their vantage point, Boarsyer and the others could see a ptform rising steadily from the depths.

  Atop the ptform…

  “What is that?” Robert leaned over the edge, squinting into the shadows. “Is that an ant?… No. No, it’s too rge to be any of the demon ants we’ve seen so far.”

  Bert frowned as the figure on the ptform drew closer, and they could see more details. “It’s definitely got ant features… but this body type…its,”

  Thick, bck, ant-like carapace armor covered a long, slender form. Not like the Kigendoro’s serpentine body, but something more feline, with six muscur legs that spoke of equal measures power and grace. Its tail was a thick, armored thing whose hammer-like tip was covered in hundreds of metallic spines — and nearly doubled the creature’s length — promised an even swifter end than the wicked talons adorning each limb.

  “… Draconic!” Robert finished the other man’s thought as the ptform finished rising and clicked into pce with a rumble.

  Robert’s wide, trembling eyes turned to Boarsyer. “What the hell is that thing?!” he repeated more frantically.

  Bert let out a deep, booming ugh, drawing startled looks from both his companions. When he finally caught his breath, he turned to Boarsyer with a knowing grin.

  “It’s the other one, isn’t it? The second drake from the gate carving — the one fighting the Mud Drake.”

  Robert’s eyes widened even more, and his gaze snapped to the creature below them.

  The Kigendoro, emboldened by the stillness of its adversary, hissed and slithered closer. The draconic ant remained motionless, as if carved from stone, until the Kigendoro raised itself high and unleashed a piercing screech.

  As the Kigendoro’s voice echoed through the cavern, the ‘dragonic’ ant creature standing between it and its prey, twitched.

  Suddenly, three pairs of thin, skeletal limbs unfurled from the ant creature’s back, spreading wide, like the grasping hands of the reaper. A crackling energy field sprang to life between each ‘finger’, transforming them into wings of shimmering light, hexagonal patterns shifting across their surface.

  In a fsh, the ant-like beast moved. Its wings shimmered with energy, and its tail struck the ground with a resounding crack. Then it roared — a sound like tearing metal and rolling thunder.

  Boarsyer turned to the men, her expression fierce.

  “That,” she said, “is the Guardian.”