Pov Dungeon Core

  It takes me nearly two weeks to complete a breakthrough. That is a long time. I would also need to expand the 74th floor, and I’m currently doing it as fast as I can. Then, another breakthrough to get to floor 75. After that, I have to expand it until finally, I can enter a breakthrough that will take me to diamond rank, which will most likely take two weeks, if not a bit more. The timing of all this is not excellent.

  With the speed of the approaching armies, they will make it here around the time I should enter another breakthrough. That would be bad because, by then, when all of them have arrived, most likely waiting outside my territory, they will all attack at once, and I would need to send out my armies—which I couldn’t do if I was advancing.

  Fortunately, my guardian Rafe can handle some of the tasks, as he does have a bit of control, but he would be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of monsters he would need to locate into different places and then command them. Our defense would suffer quite a lot. I brought up this problem with everyone, and they immediately started figuring out what we could do.

  “How hard and how long would it take to put up some fortifications that the monster armies could use to defend?” was a question asked about an hour into the discussions.

  “For basic ones, not too long, but the enemies would be able to see those fortifications easily enough and come up with countermeasures quickly. It could render those forces useless.” A statement I agreed with.

  There were positives and negatives, but with a little more refinement from people who understood warfare a lot better than me, they seemed to come up with a viable plan.

  So, quite a lot of my workforce that was working on adding the secondary defensive layer to the middle of my dungeon’s outer layer was redirected to start building fortifications further away from my dungeon, about halfway towards the edge of my territory on the surface.

  This took heavy inspiration from the ant nation’s way of defense, but against diamond ranks, normally, this would just be an annoyance. The plan was to use our own diamond ranks to counter the spells of the enemy diamond ranks so those fortifications wouldn’t be erased instantly.

  That didn’t change the fact that those fortifications would disappear quickly enough with the physical application of force from the enemy elites, and while we could counter that as well with our own, it was deemed too wasteful.

  Many counterplays were thought of, disregarded, and many more were changed to fit certain scenarios. I let them do their thing as I started to focus on other problems. My biggest was the small undead pattern. We could eliminate a large portion of the attacking forces simply by releasing it in high quantities into their midst. The problem was, then we would have to deal with the undead.

  The pattern I would be using was not the one from the undead world. That one, I was certain I could control to a degree even if I let it out. The one I made, just simply no. It was the one thing I was properly afraid of, and a lot of my defensive preparations were also meant to counter this small pattern when it was finally released.

  Yet, those defenses would not fare well against millions of undead trying to reach my core, which I was certain they would. I simply had too much life and mana radiating from me.

  Now, undead were usually quite stupid, but that unifying field—it wasn’t as simple as I first thought it was. In the undead world, the more high-ranked undead it had, the more direction it seemed to have. I think the intelligent undead affect it with their desires. While on its own, it couldn’t take over diamond ranks, it would still have the bodies of millions of platinum ranks. And, of course, it could also use the bodies of my monsters.

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  Our defenses would crumble quite fast, even with the opposing force of that golden aura produced by a different small pattern that, even now, fought quite effectively against the undead pattern in the undead world. I have modified that as well. It could easily win against the original small pattern, but it would be a fight against the new one.

  All in all, this small pattern would only be used when the situation became truly desperate. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to release the other containers around the world. We had lost a few of them over the years as they had been discovered, but there were still almost 1,000 of those containers out there, ready to be released.

  We were also certain that the approaching armies had countermeasures against small patterns, and we really didn’t want them to get a sample before the thousand other outbreaks had a chance to evolve into something unrecognizable.

  Small patterns had quite a liking for changing themselves quickly, as their lifetimes were usually short. This meant that any spell made to counter one wouldn’t work on the others, and if you had 1,000 different ones constantly changing as they continued to spread and then started changing even more, it would make it impossible to eliminate them by force.

  While eventually, we would have to start defending against the small patterns that made their way across this world, our defenses against them would been strong enough. I would have spread the small pattern that can counter the undead one throughout my territory, making sure that whenever it came near, it would be discovered, making it even easier to destroy.

  I still hate that they’re making me do this. Using this small pattern was something that I should never have to do. It was dangerous beyond all measures and should have been enough to keep anyone rational from doing stupid things. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be acting rationally, which was also kind of weird… I decided to bring this up.

  In many of the meeting rooms, there was a monster sitting in a corner. I could take control of that monster to speak to anyone there, as sometimes it was just easier when there were many attending who weren’t creatures.

  I made one of those monsters stand up, which slowly made that particular meeting room go silent. "What if they want me to release that small pattern? Could that be a possibility?"

  Immediately, I made the monster sit down as I let them discuss. I was surprised when more and more people were brought into the discussion.

  Of course, all of this was speculation, but after many hours, most of them agreed that it might be a possibility. Many of the powers were making dungeons like bunkers, expecting me to release the small pattern.

  Perhaps they thought that they could fight against it if they had a safe place to operate out of, and perhaps that’s true, but the world would still be destroyed. Yet to them, this was something expected as the higher ups had gone through a world end once before, so perhaps my threat wasn’t as good as I hoped it to be.

  Still, just the sheer suffering this decision will cause—not to mention the future implications. It would be like watching one of my worlds be destroyed in a way that would be utterly useless. Yet perhaps they think that it wouldn’t be useless. In the end, this doesn’t really matter, as I had given up on a chance at a peaceful resolution the moment those armies started to assemble.

  Speaking of the forces against me—while it was hard for me to see through rock that wasn’t in my territory, I knew that those dungeons were just a few kilometers away from my territory, just waiting to extend themselves to connect to me and send their monster armies forward. It would also be bad if they connected when I was going through a breakthrough. In fact, what if we changed that variable?

  In only a day, everything was prepared, so approximately three to four months before the surface armies even reached us, I started to extend my territory even further down. It only took me a few moments, and I was connected with about twenty diamond-ranked dungeons.

  To my surprise, as we connected, I could feel them. We didn’t use words to communicate as others species did, but they were intelligent enough, and I guess we could have done that—but the feeling was enough.

  Our instincts wanted us to tear each other apart so that only one could survive. We could fight against it now that we were strong enough, but that didn’t remove our desire. The real reason why they weren’t fighting each other was because they weren’t allowed to fight amongst themselves.

  That didn’t mean their rational minds wanted to fight, they just wanted to build and advance their own dungeons. But I also understood that they were a bit afraid of me. That I would take their place and reach the limit of this world.

  There was also some indecision I could feel from them. They were so used to taking orders that when a situation unknown to them happened, they found themselves unable to make up their minds, as they suddenly had a bit more freedom than they usually had the opportunity to experience.

  I had learned about this phenomenon. Even if I were to set them free—something I actually don’t care to do, as we dungeons don’t have the camaraderie most other species do with their own kind—they would just crave control once again, as freedom would scare them more.

  Perhaps there were some exceptions, but none of that mattered. In the end, every dungeon was an enemy to another dungeon—that was just how things were. So it didn’t take them long to start sending their forces against me.

  It was not going to be an easy time for them as everyone was now at the southern defenses, ready to take on the vanguard of the dungeon forces. Their journey upwards was going to be truly difficult, and I was going to enjoy every moment of it.