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Chapter 4 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”
🕑 Added 2023-06-14 08:45:10 +0000 UTCThe first floor was about 10 metres in height, 80 metres in length, and 55 metres in width. Usually, the next floor is about 20 to 30 percent bigger, but mine was almost double. I felt so satisfied; it just felt so good to be big. Having so much territory also upped my mana regeneration, which meant I could make a lot more ants and still keep growing. This was incredibly fun.
I started by making a thick dungeon stone wall around my new territory. Then, I finally gave in as my instincts were screaming at me. I started to move my core room downwards past the first-floor territory into the second. I needed to do some maneuvering and reshuffling as I didn’t want to disturb my ant room too much. The staircase downwards was a bit longer than usual, but that’s something I couldn't do anything about.
With that done, my instincts stopped screaming at me, but I still needed to continue making rooms. The constant annoyance was troublesome enough, so I focused on making eight new rooms. At the same time, I also started to hollow out the rest of the second floor to make into another ant room. Because of that, the expansion of my second floor's normal rooms actually took a more reasonable amount of time.
It took me about eight months to finish the minimum eight rooms. They were a lot bigger than the first-floor rooms, and for this, I decided to use the fox pattern that I had. I gained the fox pattern when one of them started to quite regularly kill the first room's horned rabbit and eat the dropped piece of meat. Eventually, however, the horned rabbit got lucky with its attack and was able to stun the fox. It only took a few more hits after that before the horned rabbit won.
I did spend quite a lot of mana on making the fox pattern stronger so they would actually be a stronger opponent. This ensured the second floor would be harder than the first. When the foxes' strength felt right, they had sharper and longer claws. They could also rip through stronger defences. I started out with one and ended with three foxes in the last room. The rooms themselves were just barren caves, and so were the tunnels between them.
While I could spend time decorating them and perhaps giving my foxes places to ambush, it would just take more mana upkeep, and that would mean fewer ants, which was unacceptable. With my dungeon rooms finished and monsters deployed, I turned my attention to the second-floor ant room. I made a similar environment with a dirt floor and different kinds of plants. I even buried a few apples as I knew that their seeds were supposed to grow into trees, and I wanted to see what trees looked like.
At first, I was going to make new ant queens on the second floor, but I came up with a better idea. Using the pillars that supported the second floor, I made holes into the first floor and carved tunnels into the pillars so that the ants could go downwards. There are a few real queens now, and I would let them expand themselves. It will take a while before they head down, but I created some more apples to entice them.
With that, I once again made myself comfortable and then just observed and collected mana for the next floor. As time went by, I was able to get a few more ant species and a few larger patterns for different animals that also came to visit.
For the first floor, I now also left fresh meat so predators would also come. Two of my proudest patterns that I have gained are deer and wolf. The wolves are able to kill all the horned rabbits except for the floor guardian if they are alone two wolves or more easily handle the floor guardian.
Otherwise, it was quite enjoyable to just look at how the ants started to fight each other and how their society changed with their evolutions. There were many colonies that were killed off and new ones were established.
It was hard to remember how much time had passed, but most of my time was spent on the increasingly larger ant room. It's definitely been more than a year since I finished the second floor, but I don’t think it was more than two. It seems that if I wasn’t paying attention to the time, it could slip by without me noticing.
One thing I had to do was stop the ants from eating the leaves from the apple trees, but currently, there are only three apple trees as their upkeep is expensive. It seems that outside my dungeon, they need something called sunlight and more normal needs as well, which meant that they were expensive. Still, I wanted to see them grow and if they got too big, I could always just destroy them. The ants had also explored and colonised the entire second floor and constant battles for territory were happening.
Their tactics had evolved a lot and there were a lot more specialised ants for different situations. While they did get bigger overall, that eventually stopped when they were on average two to three times bigger than normal. If they got bigger, they would expend their energy too fast and smaller ones were able to win with fewer resources spent. That didn't mean that there weren't some special cases, but there were only a few of them that were truly big compared to the rest.
Unfortunately, a few of the species I have collected can't keep up with the rest, so they are no longer represented within the ant territories. Currently, there are only seven species that have survived and conquered enough territory to have stability. Sometimes there are even ceasefires between the different colonies and I could see that a few colonies have even started to work together, which is something completely new.
I watched with bated breath as two colonies started to work together to attack another colony's territory that was next to them. The acid bombardment was the first sign of conflict. The colony under attack prepared a counteroffensive but they were thrown into panic when they figured out that they were being attacked from two different directions by two different colonies that were coordinating.
Their long-range fighters split between two fronts and the attacking colonies' ground soldiers quickly moved in and started to attack the defences. They had defended and attacked countless times, but never had they been so outnumbered before. The enemy's strongest attackers quickly pierced the front lines and what followed was a slaughter. The fallen colonies' ants were used as fuel so both of the allied colonies could produce more ants.
This alliance was able to finish off three more colonies before others around them united and, after a magnificent battle, defeated the first alliance. The united colonies quickly fell into infighting when they tried to make their own alliances. This happened in a small corner of the second floor, but soon alliances were required if you wanted to keep your colony alive. This heralded a new age for the ants, the age of alliances.
When the age of alliance started, I had also gathered enough energy from the constant war to start my third floor. Once again, I needed to divert a large portion of my breakthrough's energy away from the floor guardian, but that just made the potential territory of my third floor even bigger. For the floor guardian, I chose a fox, just making it bigger and better overall.
With enthusiasm, I started to expand my territory to the third floor, eventually finding out that it was about 80% bigger than my second floor. I was already envisioning the hundreds of new colonies that could fit into it. Like I had been previously doing, I made the minimum amount of rooms required, which was 12.
For the monsters inside, I chose to make deer, but make them a bit smaller overall. Making their hide especially resilient and designing the antlers so they were more deadly. When that was done, the first room had one and the last had four deer. The rooms themselves were again just barren caves, and so were the tunnels between them.
Most of my time was spent on the increasingly larger ant room. When I once again finished adding the usual dirt and plants, I also added some fallen trees for variety. The ants found out about the new openings and a new age was declared, an age of exploration and expansion.
Millions of ants headed downwards to claim new land and expand, but an interesting thing happened, they didn't cut their ties with the upper colonies but instead, they were extensions of them. It seems that the ants are starting to identify themselves not just by species but their culture as well.
Conflicts on the third floor were sparse and no real wars happened, although skirmishes were still common. A few colonies lost territory on the second floor as they spent too many resources expanding on the third. It was incredibly interesting to watch. I once again made myself comfortable as I started to gather mana for the next floor while watching the happenings inside my dungeon.
Comments
Zarik0
Dungeon core story with Ants :)) And even going for Ant Civilization I just love it Poor deer and fox, they are in a bare cave for years and doing nothing as nothing happen for them :P
