Chapter 28: Chapter 28. Daddy’s got a brand new sword.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, glaring into the giant cavern that had formerly housed the kobold nation. There was no door, not like before, simply a large tunnel that roughened and became less obviously the work of the shellcrawlers before it opened up into what had formerly been the kobold's home.

There was nothing there. No cave dwellings, no scrapyards, no tables… nothing but a huge, naturally-formed cavern that was considerably smaller than it had been previously. The semi-twilight that had bathed the place before was still present, but much more subdued.

Even the egress point two hundred feet away that had led to the rat tunnels, with its armored door, was gone, just a craggy expanse of dirty orange and green roughly-broken rock faces, and jagged lumps of displaced rock scattered around.

There was still a sort of forest here, but it was not organized. The breeding pools were much rougher, and the odor of the place was unpleasant, heavy humidity had grown a sheen of cave moss and fungal slimes along the tops of crags and broken rock, as well as a forest of larger mushrooms towards the center of the cavern.

It was disorganized and wild, with few of the breeds I had come to recognize from the kobold farms, and none of the oddly-lit greenery, although much of it was lit by slightly glowing phosphorescence

“The Camp was right here. You saw it. Caves in the walls. Some buildings.” I was, weirdly, feeling very bad. Not like… break out of my zone and rampage bad, but I’d been here for days, living among the kobolds. I learned from them, trying to make a temporary place for myself while I had collected my life and come to terms with my new reality. Honestly, this change was hard to take.

Rik was looking a little impatient, but Cassie just shook her head. “I think I know what happened.”

I looked at her worriedly, “Even if they destroyed everything before they left there should’ve been some signs.”

She nodded, “Yeah, but this is a dungeon. Starter areas, the places where you first come into a dungeon, are generally safe, but as you move deeper the hazards start. Dirt is a natural dungeon, non-sentient. Dungeons can spawn monsters that die within them, as long as it’s not too close to intelligent creatures, but they also have zones, where the difficulty of creatures scales differently. When intelligent creatures, like adventurers, are within a zone, the dungeon cannot alter the geography, but when those creatures leave, the areas tend to reset to whatever the dungeon originally created.”

“That’s probably why the rat tunnels kept the changes you made with traps. They were probably originally dug by the kobolds for some reason, and rats that came with them died and were respawned far enough away from them. The shellcrawler tunnels, though, were not part of that zone. You said that gatherers used to descend to dig out metals and things like that. New resources can only spawn in a dungeon’s geography when there’s no one in the zone.”

She shrugged. “Most likely the rats were added by the kobolds in order to have something that the lowest class kobolds could use to fight and grow strong, sort of a controlled training environment, and when they grew strong enough they would move into the shellcrawler tunnels… the real dungeon, to fight the stuff the dungeon itself created. You said that they all fled when they discovered that news of the dungeon would’ve already reached Sindaenaway. The swarms, or spikes, usually happen because a dungeon doesn’t have any other way to purge excess energy, or is prevented from venting it.”

She sighed. “When the last kobold left, and we stepped out of the rat tunnels, the dungeon probably purged a lot of energy, resetting the entry zone completely, absorbing any excess materials, and growing more powerful. A dungeon as old as Dirt, if it were regularly explored, should’ve become much more nubbly as it sopped up new materials, tools, weapons, armor, bodies, and all the trash that adventurers leave behind.”

She shrugged, “Dwarves know that if you close down a dungeon’s entrance, eventually the dungeon is going to break free when it builds up too much energy. Usually with hordes of chaos-spawn to bung up everything. We have records of a whole city getting crunched that way when dwarves first settled here and didn’t understand the way dungeons worked.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, “When you first settled here?”

Cassie nodded. “Yep. Dwarves, elves, and gnomes are not from here. We had to run here when our old place was destroyed. Our world was really big and kind of hard to explain, and mostly we don’t talk much about it. When they came here a long time ago, this place was nothing. Humans were the closest thing to civilization, chasing herds and living in tents while getting eaten by orcs, predator animals, and monsters. The fey were nearly total wild things, and hadn’t made Underhill kingdoms yet.”

I nodded, “How long ago was this?”

Cassie thought for a bit, “About two thousand years or so? A bit longer?”

Right. The Tunguska event, again. I sighed. “So basically all the materials here were lost, irrecoverably, including our chances of making more effective weapons to deal with the shellcrawlers.”

Cassie shrugged, “When you explore dungeons, This kind of poop happens. We have tools, and you said you had trap parts. It’s also likely that, with the dungeon chomping all of those things, some of them might spawn as loot. We are not that far from the exit, we could give it up as a lost cause?”

Rik interjected, “No. We still have the chance to get the first clear. It might’ve already instanced for another group. We have seniority, I am not leaving.” He looked very stubborn.

“Cassie, you’re a Dwarf. I had an idea of some stuff we could do, are dwarves all smiths?”

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She shook her head, “Sorry. I’m earth, not metal. I can see alterations and hazards in stone and earth and minor stone-shaping, but it takes metal-shaping to make stuff like that. If this area were volcanic, there would be some things I could make out of volcanic glass or rock, but unless your idea is something like a stone mallet I couldn’t help much.”

I nodded, “Yeah, I can do that too, due to imbuing.” I thought for a second, “I am not much of a smith either.”

Cassie brightened up, “You know, Rik’s….weapon, it’s just bronze casting, right? You were able to carve your weird knotwork in my shield, couldn’t you give his sword a point or turn it into a spear or something?”

Rik shook his head, “You are not turning my sword into a spear. How would that work anyway? We don’t have the wood for a spear shaft, or whatever.”

“True, but I could cut a chunk off the end to give it a real point, and then whittle the forward edge into a sort of stabbing shape. The problem is, Bronze swords are brittle. That’s probably why this sword is so huge because a two-handed bronze sword would have a good chance of just snapping if you hit it the wrong way.”

I looked thoughtfully at Rik, “I could probably cut it down to give you a stabbing point, and the lower quarter of the blade would be a solid piece you could grab to improve your leverage. It would be lighter, but with better leverage, as long as the guy that made it didn’t have air bubbles, I could probably strengthen it like I did Cassie’s shield.”

Rik looked a little embarrassed, “I don’t know much about swords, really. I mean, I know what a Bat’Leth is, and a Katana is cool, but I have no idea what a Flamberge is.

Nope, nope, I wanted Rik to be useful. I had seen those Klingon weapons on TV and knew enough about sword-fighting to know that they would probably be even worse than the brick on a stick he was using now.

I was trying to figure out how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t reveal my Earth knowledge. “I know a little bit about swords, and I might be able to carve something you could use with both hands, up close and far away, and still stab with it.”

He shrugged, “I couldn’t do anything except use it like a crowbar. I love the sword, but I do have a backup weapon if I have to use it.”

“You have a backup weapon?” I asked curiously.

“Yeah. My starting weapon was a [poor greatsword]” but it was kind of the same thing. Not much use in a tunnel, although it did have a point on it.”

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