Pov Dungeon Core

  It has been nearly two and a half years since I broke the siege. Slowly, I have noticed more and more scouts. They are very careful, but my people are better. Also, what's the point of making strong defenses and the capability of attacking back if you can’t even detect your enemies? I’ve also decided to allow some of our spies to return to the world once again.

  While I don’t want them to be captured or killed, it’s their choice to make, and the large purge is now over. The Big Four have started to relax a bit, so now spies have a better chance of getting in.

  Unfortunately, spreading information that’s not approved by the Big Four is now too dangerous, as they have a handle on the entire world. Censorship is in full swing, and talking against it would get you found out way too fast for my creatures to take such a risk.

  They haven’t been gone for long, but they were already providing excellent intelligence. They are building their arms up quite fast but not fast enough. While there might be a window of opportunity for them to actually take me by force, it will be a brief window.

  The good thing is that not all of the powers seem so driven to kill me like the Pixies are. I think they believe I’ve made them look like fools with my very existence. I wish they would just get over it and stop being such bitches.

  We are also starting to get close to finishing the first layer of outer defenses. We have done a lot of modeling and extensive testing, so the kind of defenses we want should work as we expect. But in the end, the only way to find out for certain is to actually defend against a force that could have a chance of breaching them.

  It was also kind of hard to explain to the new people when they started working on this project how things should work. The thing is, regular city defenses are more of a 2D plane, but we are working more in a 3D plane.

  The ants had no problem understanding this. They have been doing combat like this for all their lives, and when their technology got good enough, they even had to contend with aerial combat on a scale unknown to this world.

  The best way we have found to explain our defenses was to think of a city fully enveloped by a dome-like wall. There were also normal cities that had multiple walls—they were actually quite famous—so that made the next part of the explanation a bit easier.

  The first layer of the outer defenses was like an inner wall, and slowly we would build layer upon layer of walls so that every one of them would need to be knocked down for the attackers to get to the next one.

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  It was more difficult to explain the modular sections. Basically, every layer had sections like sideways walls that could also defend and allow attacks, which meant that if a part of a layer was broken into, it didn’t mean the whole layer was lost.

  It was as complex as it sounded, and defending it—more specifically, positioning our forces correctly—was not as simple as just walking up to a wall and defending it. There was going to need to be a lot of training, and most likely defenders would just stick to their sections so they could learn them like the back of their hands.

  The ants had also done an excellent job making the fortresses down below, past my dungeon proper. Those were the fortresses built in pockets I have not claimed, to force attacking monsters coming from the other dungeons to go around them, while they could continue to attack the passing monsters.

  These were forts meant to slow down and weaken the attacks from other dungeons. Right now, the final trap was not yet done, but even now they would need to start fighting the outer layer before they could get in.

  Right now, I don’t know how long we could defend before they would get through the defenses of the entrance—probably not that long—but with every passing month, they would find it harder and harder to get even close to the entrance.

  It has not been the most pleasant time, but it’s still fun to work on a lot of this defensive stuff. Currently, we have not yet implemented any attacking structures, but there are already plans and enchantments being developed that would make me a quite dangerous opponent. While the aiming would still need to be done by others, I could supply a lot of the power.

  There were also talks about possibly making at least one extremely powerful version of these attack structures, but these were just talks, and no one actually knew if it was possible to do it.

  The ones talking about and taking this a bit seriously, for some reason, wanted me to have enough firepower with one attack to destroy an entire moon. I really think that’s overkill. It would also be quite slow to aim and maneuver, as I would need to move my entire dungeon, but who knows what would be possible in the future.

  Time wasn’t moving like it used to. Back in the day, I remember how fast months and years went by—it was like a snap, and it was done. Now everything seemed to be crawling extremely slowly. Yet I was making progress.

  Another breakthrough came when I finished expanding the 60th floor. It was quite a large one, with 300,000 kilometers in length, 225,000 kilometers in width, and 46,200 meters in height. It was a monster, but they would just keep getting bigger and bigger.

  This time, I once again ranked up my Ever-expanding quantity skill, getting it to rank S. Eventually, I would need this skill quite a lot, so it’s better to start early. I could just imagine how many creatures I would have when I was finally able to fill all of these floors. I had so many interesting plans, and I was quite certain that at least in a couple of them, I was going to make worlds that had no idea they were living inside a dungeon.

  It would be fun to see how they developed, and of course, with dungeon rules, I could make all kinds of different rules for those worlds. All of this just made me push harder. Many were also saying that I should probably make a skill that allowed me to create an avatar, as everyone found it quite creepy to talk to me while I was taking over creatures almost entirely to speak to them. I wasn’t really that good at it, and they always moved quite jerkily.

  There were plenty of dungeons that had avatars, but honestly, I just wasn’t feeling it, and it was actually a weakness. An avatar was directly connected to the core, but it had many weaknesses, like the single-minded creatures had, which meant I could be directly attacked, and even my core could be affected. I just don’t think I would need something like this, and the weakness it created was a good enough reason to stop others from bothering me with this nonsense.

  I was also keeping ahead of problem fixes. Every now and then, adventurers found ways to circumvent certain things that shouldn’t be circumvented, and that needed fixing. While I was focused on defenses, I still needed the civilizations and people who relied on me to function.

  That was why I also made a lot of resource nodes for the beast clan. That way, they could become self-sufficient, and when the time was right, they could join the greater dungeon community.