Chapter 67 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Should I do it now or wait? That was the question I had been wondering for quite a few days now when I was interrupted by a part of me keeping an eye on the Ant nations. Was there another huge war happening? There shouldn't be, but this was a high priority.

Immediately, most of me started to focus on the reported area, and then I saw quite a large ant exploring human ruins. What? Right, I made this when Tristan really pissed me off by leaving. Didn’t actually expect an ant to find this so fast. Still, it will take them a while to figure everything out unless they have someone like Tristan who is excellent at solving language problems.

Enn was the name of the ant. For some reason, the large size, the species, and the name kind of reminded me of something. Wait, no way it could be the same ant, could it? The hero of the fallen way, the savior of millions, one of the unkillables.

Those were all the names she had gotten during the war, one of the most impressive accounts of any individual ant. Yet, there were thousands more like her, simply because of the size of the war, but that shouldn’t diminish what she had done.

Usually, ants were quite callous, especially in the early days. They would leave behind their fellow colony members while escaping, and the ones who were wounded or couldn’t keep up happily turned around to keep the enemy back for just another moment.

The same goes for ant bridges. The anchor, the first ant in an ant bridge will always get left behind. As their society kept changing and evolving, so did that aspect. Whenever possible, all were saved, yet when someone did need to be left behind, the callousness was replaced with sadness and regret.

Now, during the war, many couldn't leave behind so many of their comrades. They turned around to fight off the enemy to save as many as possible. A large portion of those died trying to save others. Sometimes they succeeded, even if they died, and they were honored. But like Enn, there were others who were able to save everyone they could and survive to fight another day.

With so many skirmishes and battles going on, many started to rack up an impressive amount of these rescues or last stands, and probably every other situation you could think of where one side fought against stupendous odds.

My memories were filled with situations like that, and while normally most of the time the overwhelming force won, I did cherish the ones where they didn’t. I think there was a reason why some of those ants were so good at this, and mainly it was because they didn't look at their fellow ants and think of them as just colony members; instead, they thought of them as family. That drive to protect the family made them do brave things that shouldn't work, but did.

She was one of those, and I was glad to have been reminded of her accomplishments. She was also quite good at languages, but she was more of the explorer type, not deciphering weird symbols carved on stone objects.

It would be interesting to keep track of her and see if she could figure things out, but even if she completes this quest, she will have to complete a lot more to uncover the true purpose of those ruins. That would be kind of fun to see, but so much time would be wasted, similar to when I would wait for Tristan. No, I have decided it's time to start pushing downwards once again.

First things first, I need to decide on a floor guardian. I could use one of the core floor bosses as one of the floor guardians. Looking over them, I found the twin mountain lions an interesting option, but even just one of them seemed to be a bit too dangerous, and them combined was downright unfair for the adventurers, at least for this level.

Still, I really liked that idea. What about if I made the next floor's floor guardian? No, that didn’t fit either; they would be more appropriate for the 20th-floor boss than the floor guardians.

If I separated them, it would be better, but still a bit too much for the 16th floor, so I moved on. I didn’t just look through my patterns but also through my floors to find an interesting thing. Like the twins, there were other creatures who banded together to fight against others.

The most common were, of course, the more intelligent species; they always liked to domesticate other creatures. But for example, there was a bear and raven who were always together. They were quite the fearsome pair.

An idea started to form, but that should be for later. It was something that made me want to keep pushing even after I made the 17th floor. My continued scouring landed me in the orc lands. The next floor needed a theme, and I kinda wanted to make it so that so many shadow guilds didn’t kill each other so much.

The main reason for their fights was the raid room access. So, making more raid rooms would probably fix the problem, but I couldn’t keep using goblins, so let's introduce a different kind of species.

Scouring the floor, I found quite a perfect specimen. It was an orc that was as powerful as the chieftains, but he simply wasn’t interested in politics; he just wanted a good fight, but unfortunately, there weren't any available on this floor any longer. One of the reasons for that was also his companion, a huge bear that could match him. They often resorted to wrestling to burn off their need for a fight. Perfect.

I made a pattern of them both and made them monsters. Monsters were a lot less alive, even if they had the fighting experience and the instincts of their more real counterparts. They were lesser. There was still a need to make them stronger as they couldn’t supply the proper danger for the 20-plus people challenge of the floor guardian.

Truly magnificent, as I didn’t even need to push the orc pattern to its limits to find the desired strength I was looking for. The bear was a bit more of a challenge, but a careful combination of physical alteration and skill selection made it possible.

Collecting the necessary mana was only a matter of a day, and if I wanted to, I could absorb some of the expensive-to-create materials and basically breakthrough in an instant. But you never know when you're going to need those mana reserves, so waiting a day wasn't really that much of a problem.

As soon as I held so much mana that I felt I was going to break, I triggered the breakthrough and felt that wonderful euphoria that came with it, but it was soon time to start working again.

Thanks to the patterns of the floor guardians already being so strong, I could give the next floor's expansion a bit more mana. Too bad that I couldn’t allocate it for skills as I would have liked to expand them more than to have an even bigger floor.

Now it was time to design the Floor Guardian room. I didn’t want it to be too big, but I still wanted there to be room to maneuver. It would be more rocky than previous floor guardian rooms, but there would also be a forested area. Yet, this time it would be quite sparse, and the vegetation would be quite dry, so those fire mages could not resist wanting to light things on fire and then find out that the monsters they are fighting are barely affected.

When adventurers walk inside, they would be able to see almost all of the room, yet no enemy would be visible. The very next moment, a huge bear would emerge from behind a rock outcropping, immediately notice them, and roar loudly until the roar is halted by a guttural voice spoken in an unknown language. The bear would act a little bit meek, and then everyone would see what was walking out from behind the bear.

This creature would be almost 7 feet tall and incredibly muscular and wide, with most of the visible skin covered in shamanic runes. He would have armor on, but it would be minimal, yet the pieces he has would look formidable.

He would then pull out a huge axe that for anyone else would be considered a two-handed axe, yet he would wield it in one hand. His eyes would indicate extreme intelligence, and with his other hand, he would throw a rock at incredible speed, and any unprepared adventurer would find it quite deadly.

The more difficult versions would have better and more numerous skills that absolutely everyone would find a nightmare to fight against. Then came the skill portion of the breakthrough, and there I put 10% into both sub-dungeons and dungeon rules, ranking them up to C and B respectively.

Then I was once again back at my core, having grown once again, boosting my basic functions even higher. I flexed my new power as I checked if anything had happened while I was gone, but nothing had.

The adventurers didn't take long to figure out that the floor guardian room was open, and after that, there was the customary gateway room and the staircase downwards. This time, however, I wasn’t going to do the room play; they will need to wait until every room was finished before they could step one foot onto the 17th floor.

I was tired of playing games with them like that, and I think they would appreciate everything being open at once a lot more. Now, however, it was time to start thinking about what the playroom should be like.