Pov Dungeon Core

  I didn’t actually expect them to surrender. For some reason, I thought they would fight to the very end. I often forgot that creatures who can live for a long time and are fully sapient will not usually fight to the very end like more bestial creatures do. But even they, if they can, will choose to escape. Fortunately, the prison was ready.

  It was a hotly disputed topic. Most advocated for killing our enemies, which made sense because diamond ranks were truly scary, and platinum ranks were too weak and too few in number to be anything else but a drain on our resources. Fortunately, I had nearly an endless amount of resources, so killing someone just because they did something wrong that wasn’t too bad felt wasteful in my opinion.

  Up above, there were certainly some people who were heinous enough that I wouldn’t mind if something truly horrible happened to them. But the party of five weren’t actually terrible people, they were just misguided. And eventually, their strength would be so meaningless against me that even if they tried to end me again, they could never amount to anything more than they did in their first attempt.

  The prison was an interesting project, and in all honesty, I just needed a place to put two of my strongest elementals. I had so many different elementals that it was starting to become ridiculous. In the many worlds that I have, there are certain areas dominated by different kinds of elemental forces, so to say. So while in the beginning, elementals were from the environment that dominated their area, like sand, there were now actually elementals of poison and all kinds of other aspects.

  In the air world, it was still kind of weird not to call them playrooms, but it was a good habit to call them worlds in my own mind as well, so I wouldn’t accidentally call them that while communicating with others. Well, in that world, two incredibly powerful elementals had formed that were now the closest to diamond rank, and I was certain they would reach it quite soon.

  At first, I thought that they were simply elementals of ice and fire, but no, they were elementals of cold and hot. That meant their dominion covered so much more, and they certainly had a love-hate relationship with each other. If I had left them in the air world, they would have caused an actual world war as they were gaining allies to take full control over that world.

  So I offered them another option: to become wardens of my prison. I set up two sides of the prison—one that would make the room incredibly cold inside if the occupants didn’t give their mana and another that would make it incredibly hot. Mostly, no one was close to immune to both hot and cold, so I could stick them in a prison room more in line with their weakness.

  Most of the things inside a prison room were governed by dungeon rules, like making a waterway that appeared and disappeared, bringing in fresh water and taking out anything unwanted. The dungeon rules also gave them food and a nice environment that they would enjoy if they gave every bit of their mana generation away. The temperature, the real punishment, was handled by the wardens themselves.

  I could have made it a dungeon rule, but, well, dungeon rules, I have come to learn, can be manipulated by outside forces. On the surface, there was an annoying faction of people trying to figure out and change the dungeon rules covering the labyrinth. Even if they only had the power to change them in a limited area, it was still annoying. So wardens were needed that were not me and not tied to dungeon rules.

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  Ace, Rafe, and Ismael were currently being treated. They were incredibly damaged, but the two weeks of fighting had been worth it in the end. Still, they would be out of commission for quite a while as they barely had functioning mana pathways. They were so overused, especially by Ace and Rafe, that the current medical staff recommended they not use any skills for at least two months while their bodies worked on repairing the damage.

  That was a bit unfortunate but something that was to be expected. We also anticipated the fight to come with the forces outside. With our three strongest fighters out of commission, we would not be doing any head-on attacks, but that’s why we were a fortress. Our defenses would do the delaying for us.

  But that didn’t mean we couldn’t be proactive. So I gave the order to the waiting teams to go into the labyrinth and start hunting down the platinum and diamond ranks that were lost, but not so lost that they couldn’t make it back.

  There were some who had gotten so deep into the labyrinth and were so lost that I actually thought they would never get out unless I helped them—and why would I help them?

  It had been a long while since I felt pain, so the feeling of it shocked me a little bit. They used their dungeon melters. They attacked in three spots at once, inside the labyrinth and in two different places on the outside wall.

  In the labyrinth, the team was confused. Their dungeon melter worked like it should have, cutting through the floors and walls—that was until it didn’t work. Since I knew the labyrinth was a weak point, I made sure the entrance that connected to the outside world would be the most heavily defended. So they were surprised when a wall didn’t melt. Instead, there was a shallow indentation where the melter’s beam hit, leaving behind a little bit of dust and rubble.

  I watched as one of the diamond ranks walked up to the wall and touched it and the rubble left behind. "That’s real rock, not dungeon-made. It has somehow combined real rock with dungeon stone?" he said, and his revelation sent shockwaves through the crowd behind the dungeon melter.

  They understood the implications. The same person stood up, gathered his strength, and hit the wall as strongly as possible. "A bit weaker, but not by much. This will take so much time to get through."

  Well, that was the point, I wanted to say to him, but there was no way to actually communicate. The two other attacks were going a lot better. I was actually glad that they attacked literally at the same time. Well, all three attacks happened at the same time, but their melters were still burrowing through my outer shell. It was incredibly thick, but it was just made out of dungeon stone and nothing else.

  When they reached the 20-metre mark, I saw the first crack happen. They still had about 7 metres to go, and I was, like the adventurer said, at the edge of my seat with anticipation. It was theorized about what was going to happen, but no one actually knew for certain. When they burrowed another metre, the water pressure actually started to push and cracked dungeon stone that was 6 metres thick. The amount of power was incredible.

  The first defensive layer was just dungeon stone; after that, there was a pressurized layer of water, and after that, another wall of dungeon stone. The water was under such high pressure that sometimes it started to form ice. Then it happened almost simultaneously from two locations—the dungeon stone broke apart at the weakest spot, and the pressure escaped in the most magnificent manner.

  The dungeon stone wall turned into a shrapnel cannon, destroying the two prepared assault points outside, absolutely vaporizing and obliterating anything in its path. The pressure released was so immense that it tore apart anything in front of it. The landscape was simply pushed back as easily as you push back sand with your breath.

  It also didn’t stop. The rest of the dungeon stone was incredibly resilient, but the openings slowly increased in size. The pressure was so strong that I was actually being shifted in one direction. The fact that it was even able to push me a little bit in a direction was incredible. It crushed rock and compressed dirt on that side, so immense was the release of water pressure.

  It ended sooner than I expected, but the results were beyond my wildest expectations. In the end, it only shifted my location by 7 millimetres, but that was still incredible and something I would like to further understand and research.

  The devastation, however, was something I didn’t expect, at least not to this scale. There were now two scars from the two exit points. For about 400 kilometres to either side, there was now a canyon filled entirely with water.

  I went through my memories to realize that 27 diamond ranks died, and so many more platinums. The landscape around here has now changed. Much of the Eternal city was in ruins from the shockwaves and debris flying at immense speeds. I would not be surprised if debris wasn’t still falling thousands of kilometres away.

  Well, that’s going to have some consequences.