Chapter 119: Interlude 9: Recoil

Erryn had often wondered why the world's races had taken to building walls around her dungeons. Dungeons were only dangerous on the inside. It wasn't as if monsters ever left them, so what was the point? Yet since the first one went up a couple of hundred years back, they'd only grown taller and thicker.

It should have been the first sign that something was wrong. She should have searched the memories of the people who ordered them to be built, or to be strengthened, to find out why. She should have noticed. But she hadn't. She'd never read minds out of curiosity or for trivialities, and she hadn't thought the walls important. She'd heard the term dungeon break, but had never realised they were a thing that actually happened.

After the first apocalypse, those who built the ark didn't even try to maintain it. They set things going, then immediately separated themselves and left the System to its own devices. It had failed, and the world had ended once more. Erryn was determined not to make that mistake. She would keep watch, monitor both the System and the Law, and respond to situations as required. She would leave her children to their own devices, never speaking unless needed, but she would at least be there. She was aware of the dangers, that her continued oversight was exposing her to the recoil from her soul magic. She'd taken precautions. She would notice if things started going wrong.

What arrogance! The current Erryn wished she could communicate with the Erryn of a few hundred years back, just to yell at her. The first time the world was ended, the soul mage involved had been certain of his precautions too, according to the diary of an ark project member by the name of Shawadrina. Why had Erryn believed she would have any more luck? If she was to be truthful to herself, she had to admit that she hadn't. Not really, or not completely. She never intended to act as the world's protector forever. She just needed to get things running well enough that she could detach herself from the world without fearing for its safety. Yet she had never been satisfied. Never willing to step back from her position. It had never been the right time.

It still wasn't the right time. There was the mystery of the foreign souls; without understanding the cause, she had little choice but to deal with them personally. And now she had to fix the dungeons too, to undo the subversions caused by the ark project's manipulations.

"Mother? What's wrong?" asked that slime, as perceptive as ever.

"Nothing," lied Erryn.

"Liar," the slime responded accurately. "The whole dungeon is vibrating! I haven't seen you like this since the first time I snuck to the surface!"

Erryn didn't answer, lost in her own thoughts. Dungeon breaks had been happening for two hundred years already and hadn't caused casualties. Yes, it was a concern that she was suffering what seemed to be partial blackouts, one core at a time losing cohesion with her whole, but it wasn't yet dangerous. She had time. Time to solve the last problems the world was facing before withdrawing from the surface fully.

The dungeons came first. Peter had asked why she didn't simply give materials away, but Erryn didn't want her children to be dependent on her. She would give opportunities, but not free handouts. Rewards needed to be earned.

But why through fighting? She liked the idea of boss monsters, for example, a challenge that must be passed to move onto the next floor and greater rewards, but why must they be so dangerous? Delvers would fight through a floor, dealing with encounters of a specific difficulty, and then suddenly be thrown into a much more difficult battle without even the option to flee. It was... unfair.

The delvers had adapted; a new dungeon was always cleared by a powerful team who recorded each enemy, allowing later parties to enter with full knowledge of what they would need to deal with. It wasn't as if the patterns ever changed. But even that wasn't perfect. She'd built many of her dungeons in such a way that once someone set foot on a floor, they were unable to escape without beating the boss. What if they had some bad luck on the way and took some injuries, wanting to escape but being unable to?

Maybe the slime was onto something with the way she ran her own floor; challenges didn't need to be violent. Erryn took some of her ideas and expanded on them, replacing bosses with puzzles of logic, memory or skill, focusing on the dungeons where boss fights had previously been forced. Failure resulted in ejection from the dungeon, but not death. Regular monsters could stay. They weren't as unfair, and besides, they provided the bulk of the materials taken out of dungeons.

A delver died. Not to a boss, but to regular monsters. No arrogance or exceptionally bad luck was involved; it was simply a momentary lapse of concentration, resulting in a failure to evade an arrow to the head. A regular occurrence, perhaps, but this time Erryn paid attention. Not just to the death itself, but to the consequences. The anger of his teammates, mostly at themselves. The leader who blamed himself for pushing too far. The other party members for being too weak. The sadness of his wife. The children, too young to understand, asking their crying mother when daddy was coming home.

It was her fault. The name went onto the engraved golden list, the record of all the people that Erryn had killed. Once it was there, she destroyed the remainder of the plaque. It was a simple statement, to herself more than anyone else. She needed no more space, because there would be no more names to add.

She set up new magic, to capture the souls of the dead from her dungeons, to spin for them new bodies out of raw mana. No longer would anyone die in a dungeon. She linked the new magic into the System; things still needed to be fair. Failure must come with a penalty. Any individual would only be given a single chance.

Resurrection magic. If ever there was an aspect of soul magic that went against the natural order of things, that would be it. Erryn wasn't a complete fool; performing resurrection magic herself would have unacceptable consequences. Instead, she made it a property of the dungeons, managed automatically and rigidly by the cores. Then she pulled herself out of them. No longer would she run the dungeons directly. Nor would any conscious entity run them. To do so would be too dangerous.

Deciding to at least tone down the soul magic usage a little, she removed the perception filter on the dungeon core rooms and blocked them off in a more traditional manner instead. She moved her own core into the ark, keeping a link to her dungeons, both in case something unexpected happened that required her to step in and also to talk to the sapient monsters that dwelt in the great dungeon, but abandoning all direct dungeon control. They were safe spaces now. She didn't need to keep that close a watch.

"Mother!" snapped that slime. "What are you doing? And don't you dare fob me off like you have been for the past season. It's like you're only half here! Tell me what's wrong!"

"I adjusted how dungeons work. I've made them safe, but the price is that I can no longer run them directly. Don't worry, there's nothing wrong."

"Do you have so little faith in us, mother?" muttered the slime. Once again, Erryn didn't answer.

She still needed to keep watch over the world. If any more foreign souls entered, she needed to be able to act. Once that was done, this last mystery solved, then she could step back and entrust the future to her children. She set about her research, watching the flow of souls around the world, trying to understand it. When the population of the world rose, where did the additional souls come from? Why were memories stripped on death? When she'd created the initial population of the world, the souls had just kinda materialised from nowhere... If only she'd been paying more attention back then. It hadn't seemed important at the time.

Erryn settled into a routine of research, eventually giving in to the slime's constant nagging and sharing with her some of the mechanics and dangers of soul manipulation. The world spun on without her, as it always did. There were no new foreign souls. No problems cropped up with the dungeons, either deaths or dungeon breaks. But it still wasn't safe to drop her watch. Not until she could prove there would be no new foreign souls invading. What if the brothers had ended up here as a result of some sort of experiment on Earth, and someone wielding nukes would soon be stepping between the worlds, intending to take this one over? The fact that it had been two people so closely related suggested some sort of localised event on the other side.

"Erryn!" came a shout, barely encroaching on the edges of her perception. "What the hell are you doing?! Stop!"

I'm not doing anything, thought Erryn to herself. Why was someone shouting at her when she was so tired? She just wanted to sleep. But she was supposed to be the world's protector, so it wouldn't hurt to hear this shouty person out.

"Why...? What's wrong...?"

"Wake up!" came the loud voice again. "Your monsters are attacking your children!"

Erryn pondered. Of course her monsters were attacking her children; that's what they were for. They sat in dungeons, attacking anyone who went in. She was too tired for this... Ignoring the shouty person, she started to let her consciousness drift off once more.

Wait, how was she tired? She couldn't get tired; Erryn never slept! She struggled to rouse herself, trying to wake up enough to understand what was happening. The person shouting at her couldn't be in a dungeon; Erryn could no longer see into dungeons, having cut them off years earlier. There were monsters on the surface? Was this a dungeon break? There hadn't been one of those for years, ever since she automated the dungeons, cutting herself off from the corruption they were generating.

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"I... I... Why am I...?" she stammered, unable even to form coherent sentences through the fog that clouded her mind.

What was happening? Why was thinking so hard? For the first time in more than half a millennium, Erryn was afraid. She did her best to look at the person shouting at her, recognising it as Peter, one of the main objects of her recent research. But he'd been in the great dungeon only a few hours ago. Where was he now? Underground somewhere, but not in a dungeon? The Emerald Caverns? Why was he there? Had it been longer than a few hours? How long had Erryn been unconscious?

"I... Help... Help me..." she managed, despite having no idea what was wrong or what he could do to help.

Doing her best to drag herself into some semblance of coherency, Erryn looked around, and took in the monsters pouring from the dungeon. Not just a dungeon break, but a dungeon exodus. She couldn't see what was happening inside, but outside she could see monsters pouring not only through the dungeon entrance but also tunnels, directly connecting to deep dungeon floors.

Why were there tunnels? The monsters in this dungeon couldn't dig, at least not with that level of proficiency. They were dungeon work. The core must have broken in some way and built them itself? But it didn't have that capability. Or at least, it shouldn't. It needed to be destroyed, but in her current state, Erryn had no way to do it herself. She tapped into the System and created a quest, issuing it to everyone within a few kilometres radius. She didn't have the capacity to do things properly, but the title was all that was needed.

The delvers rushed into action, a squad of three infiltrating the broken dungeon. A rank five dragon was with them. Erryn kept her link to Peter, watching through his eyes, feeling through his senses, as poor as they were compared to her own. She needed to see the inside of the dungeon for herself, to understand what had happened. Were the others at risk? Was this disaster being repeated elsewhere?

What she saw alarmed her, even through her addled state of mind. Corrupted soul remnants, no different from what she'd needed to clean up centuries ago, the pollution caused by the hex bombs. Why were they here? She'd purified them all long ago! Was something making more?

They fought the final boss, the dragon destroying much of the army, but missing a few fire element monsters that had been immune to his breath. Then, to Erryn's shock and horror, Peter destroyed the remaining monsters himself, wielding soul affinity mana as a blade! She listened to his scream through his own ears as the recoil tore into his own soul, and those of his allies. How long had Peter been using soul affinity like that? He needed to stop!

"Danger... Corruption... Don't..." she managed, doing her best to warn him, hoping it was enough.

The party started looking around for the core room, but failed to find it. Of course; with her fractured consciousness, Erryn had forgotten; she'd removed the entrance! She did her best to guide Peter, glad that he understood. She beheld the core through his eyes, corrupted and rotten, dripping with darkness and death. The dragon melted it, and Erryn stuttered as parts of her broken mind pieced themselves back together as her tenuous remaining connection to the corrupted dungeon shattered. The whole area was corrupted and in need of purification. That was something she knew how to do.

She turned her prodigious mana control upon the entire mountain and converted all the ambient mana into light and life affinities. For over a minute, night was turned to day on the eastern section of the continent as the mana blazed.

It was like waking up from a dream. Erryn found herself looking out through Peter's senses, with no recollection of what had just happened. There were hints of memories everywhere, but each time she focused on one, it drifted away. What had she just been doing? There had been some sort of emergency? Some sort of corruption? They had destroyed the core? Why? And worse, why had she been unconscious?

She detached from the child and looked out over the Emerald Caverns, looking to see what had happened. Her own state was quickly forgotten as she took in the hundreds upon hundreds that lay dead, mostly dwarven civilians. Thousands more were injured. She peeked into the memories of a few survivors, watching the sight of their colleagues, family and friends being torn apart by monsters from the local dungeon. No wonder they had destroyed it... How had a dungeon core malfunctioned so badly?

The group that had destroyed the core returned to the surface, where Kranakellicium had the audacity to declare that they'd achieved victory. That, in some way, they had won. How could something that resulted in the deaths of so many be described as a success?

Still, they hadn't been dead for long. Their souls had yet to depart. Restoring them would be so easy... All Erryn had to do was will it, and their deaths could be undone. She had that power, and what was the point if she didn't use it? How could she call herself their protector if she let them die? She grasped at the souls of the dead.

And then stopped.

A fragment of memory stirred. Something she'd shouted in desperation. She didn't remember who to, but she remembered why. "Danger... Corruption... Don't..."

Something was still wrong. She felt awake, but it was obvious that she wasn't thinking clearly. She'd been about to resurrect hundreds. The recoil would have shattered her. At best, she would have died. At worst...

No, the worst had already happened. She looked through the memories of the three who had destroyed the dungeon and saw the corrupted soul remnants for what they were; broken fragments of her own soul. She looked at herself and saw the scars. Purifying the fragments had helped, but her soul was still raw and wounded, as yet unhealed. No wonder she had been insensate.

She'd automated and abandoned the dungeons, believing that to be a sufficient buffer to protect herself from the magic she'd imbued in them. It hadn't been. She'd kept that small link. The ability to step back in should it be needed. That link had been enough. She'd tried to avoid paying the price, but the price had been extracted anyway. And not only from her.

That was... unfair.

Feelings of power and arrogance gave way to something else. For all her strength, she was still so weak. For all her desire to protect the world, she was helpless. How was she supposed to protect them from herself?

She still hadn't solved the mystery of the foreign souls. She should leave the dead to their natural fate. Remove the ill-advised resurrection magic she'd installed in the dungeons and think of some other way to make them safer. Concentrate on protecting the world. Avoid soul magic completely until her own soul had healed. Wasn't her health, and the protection she offered the world, more important than the fate of a relative few? If there was something dangerous coming, who would stand against it if not her?

She looked at the dwarfs of the Emerald Cavern, so many in tears at the loss of loved ones. She remembered the children of the dead delver, asking when their father would come home. She still wouldn't claim to understand humans, but she'd seen how Peter had acted when his actions, which stood to benefit so many, had resulted in harm to a single family of catkin. She finally had some understanding of why it had hurt him so badly.

Now it was her turn.

"I'm sorry," she said to her favourite slime, pulling herself out of the dungeon completely before the slime had a chance to respond.

Still, there would be one silver lining to this. It was the perfect opportunity to finally learn to understand humans.