Broken Core

by Overline

Chapter 2

It was a sad fact that nine out of every ten new dungeons were in some way broken. A dungeon’s flaw usually manifested as an unwillingness to interact with the world around it. Other times they would just absorb everything they could like massive black holes. Kidore had once seen a pony ripped apart before her eyes before the dungeon imploded and killed everypony but her.

This one had already been scouted out in its infancy. The report stated that the mana had just started flowing regularly, so the chances of the whole place exploding dropped drastically.

Real Null stopped a few meters before the small mountain started, and turned back toward Kidore and Subtle Point, his dark feathers rustling in the cool morning breeze. “I’ll go in first. Kidore, shield me. I’ll call if it’s safe.” He always went first.

He turned around and marched toward the cave, light glinting of his enchanted copper breastplate. Kidore concentrated on her spell, the Soul Spring on her flank giving her an instinctive ability to bring her wavering, transparent red bubble into existence. It shimmered as it closed over Real Null and hummed at a constant pitch. After a minute, he called out. “I’m not dead!”

Kidore looked to her left unable to keep from feeling relieved. With some of the stuff he did, sometimes she couldn’t help but think maybe he wanted to be. Subtle Point looked the same as she felt, permanently hardened expression temporarily softened. Then her blue eyes turned hard again and her amber wings tightened. Kidore sighed and walked inside the cave, dispelling Real Null’s shield. She didn’t have the mana or magical strength to do cast anything else while holding one. She lit up her horn with a soft pinkish glow, holding a levitation spell but not directing it at anything.

A plant twitched on the floor, green ichor leaking out of its tentacles. Real Null bent down and came up with three unmarked copper coins. He tossed them into his pack, his form almost invisible in the cave’s darkness, then noticed Kidore’s attention and pointed a wing to the other side of the cave.

A tunnel stretched endlessly through the black. She nodded. “It’s a good one.”

---

Final Dawn was frustrated. These new adventurers had been able to kill his plants and take the coins with almost no effort. He couldn’t present a proper challenge to ponies this powerful. It was hard to see past that fact and keep himself from trying something stupid, like trying to make something that could move and attack them with nothing to model it after. He knew intellectually that it was in his best interests to let them do whatever they had come here for, but letting them just roam around uncontested felt wrong, like an intense, burning itch he couldn’t scratch.

After watching them just standing there and talking as if they weren’t in a dungeon, he had the bright idea to yank all his mana out of the room. He caught a last image of them all looking around, startled, and felt a moment of happiness at the fact that he’d at least managed to surprise them. He’d caught a snatch of conversation before doing so, and now he had a name for the magical energy he manipulated.

Mana.

After a while, he tentatively probed the chamber with a bit of magic to make sure they were gone, then flooded it back up with swirling mana. They’d left things behind.

The first thing that caught his attention was the orb. It glowed with magic, and used some of its huge supply every second on some purpose he couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t until he traced it directly that Dawn realized it was emanating light. It was a magelight. That would be incredibly useful. He’d almost forgotten ponies couldn’t see well without light, and now he could use the magic sphere’s design to make areas have specific environments. He absorbed it.

The next thing he directed his attention to was an entire dead dog. It looked to have been dead for a few days at least, and Dawn couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Still, they must have left it for a reason. It was huge for a dog, almost three-fourths the size of an earth pony, and a bit bigger than the average pegasus. Well, he couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it for now, so he just absorbed it, the memory of how to remake it piece by piece ingrained into his crystalline mind.

After that were a few metals: copper, tin, nickel, iron, lead, and even some gold and iron flakes. The real prize in that department was the mithril. Dungeons were its primary manufacturers, though some skilled pegasi were known to be able to make it too before most of their Talents were lost. Dawn studied the piece he now had access to intently, tracing the swirling pieces of mana that circulated through the metal, following certain paths over and over again…

Runes. Tiny runes were etched onto the metal, imperfections in the metal he’d at first attributed to being simple wear and tear. But mithril didn’t dent so easily. He recreated the crystal magelight and made his mana dance through it, looking for the runes. His search was at first fruitless, until he reabsorbed it in frustration. In the split-second it had all been entirely infused in his mana, he’d been able to feel the way it moved, as it mistook his magic for its fuel source. He remade. If he’d still been a pony, he’d have been holding his breath. Dawn peered at the tiniest fragment of crystal he could, and fed it a piece of mana, which it instantly converted to light.

The entire thing was grown. Somehow, ponies had figured out how to create a single piece of crystal in the same of a simple series of runes that caught mana and converted it to light, then replicated it over and over. How did they do it? If he could just maintain a constant presence of mana outside, in the void, he could find where it had come from and study it…

But if he could do that, he would be able to find his body, which was the entire reason he was even trying to act like a dungeon. He wasn’t trying to just study stuff so he knew how it worked, and he didn’t need to. He could remake the magelight himself out of raw materials without caring about how ponies would do it. It was hard not to feel a bit curious, though.

He absorbed the metals and the magelight. Next was a bunch of seeds. Dawn absorbed them one by one. He would need a bigger area than the regular twisting tunnels he had to grow these if any of them were the size of trees, although he felt that if he studied the blueprints of the seeds he had in his mind, he might be able to figure out how they grew…

But no. That would take way too long. He’d already felt time slipping away during his experimentations with the runes on the mithril and the magelight. Something like that would take way too long, and he needed to get a passable dungeon up and running before anypony else decided to check on him. But if his lure didn’t work, if he was stuck here forever—Dawn didn’t flinch away from the thought like he would have just a few days ago. He was slowly changing. The realization hit him like a blow to the gut, though less intensely than it would have when he was a pony. Emotions were muted, and his motivations were changing so slowly he hadn’t even been able to detect the change until now.

He needed to stop it. Maybe he could find the parts of his crystal that stored him and change them, turning them back to normal as the gemheart warped him. A swirl of magic around his crystal brought his attention to the way it was fragmented, the tiny piece of metal each bit held that repelled his attempts to even read the runes in the crystal. And as he tried, he realized he really didn’t want to. Changing himself would be bad, far worse than cheating or being in the void.

If he did nothing, it would change him, but there wasn’t really anything he could do. Unless…

Final Dawn created a magelight in his deepest chamber, next to his gemheart. Then he created another, this one with slightly different runes. It went dark. Inoperable.

He had another moment of haranguing himself for his own stupidity as he realized that if he’d by chance tweaked the runes in the exact wrong place, it might have exploded. Then he went back to work, hollowing out another chamber next to his matter storage, and made the walls out of mithril.

Dawn couldn’t directly read his gemheart, but he knew himself, and could feel by instinct the parts of him that were him, and not the crystal. Slowly, carefully, he recreated those parts in his mithril test chamber, resulting it—

It exploded, cracking the mithril. The fractures it created almost reached his matter storage. He hadn’t tested the mithril. He’d just assumed that it would work like any other normal material, and recreated a bunch of it without realizing it was different. It had runes, runes that were the entire basis of how it worked. Without them, it was just a brighter iron.

He worked quickly. He could make his entire testing chamber out of mithril, but he’d need to change the runes. Any blacksmith who tried to work with mithril without knowing what they were doing would ruin it. The runes were directly tied to the amount and shape of the mithril they were carved into. It took several tries and a lot of energy to continually reform an amount of matter that large, and he couldn’t experiment with smaller sample because the runes were tied to the metal’s size. Mithril was the most annoying thing he’d ever tried to replicate. He had to abandon his efforts more than once after running completely out of mana to use and wait for it to regenerate.

Eventually, he did it. He had a mithril testing chamber. He spent a few days tweaking a magelight’s runes until he figured out how to make it explode, then set it off in the middle of the chamber and watched the engraved shapes light up with a bright blue light and start drawing in magic to reinforce themselves. Seeing with magic was almost better than with regular sight. He could see every rune at once, and track the path of every shard of superheated crystal as it ricocheted through the chamber. Then Dawn surveyed the mithril with a mental frown. The explosion had created a few tiny imperfections that would grow with repeated abuse, and after a long, long time—hundreds, maybe even a few thousand more repeated blasts—would crack again. But before he could repair them manually, he realized they hadn’t lost their glow and were still drawing in the ambient mana he had swirling freely through the mountain so he could see. As he watched, the tiny fractures sealed themselves, and missing bits of mithril regrew, forming directly out of magic.

Then he realized he’d spent a long time experimenting. He’d remembered to track the time, at least, thought he almost wished he hadn’t. It had been almost a month. The time spent just figuring out how to make the magelight explode added up to four days.

Well, nothing for it. He’d taken too long and spent too much time to stop now. He reformed the crystal part of himself in the mithril chamber, which again promptly exploded. Once more, this time tracing which parts triggered the—too slow. This time—he was out of mana. That was an unpleasant surprise. It took a huge amount of magic to recreate the gemheart that made him. It seemed the more complex an object, the more it took. He wasn’t going to give up now, though.

On his next attempt, he detected the fragmented runes that caused the instability.

The try after that, he added on what his best guesses to match the halves together. It still exploded.

Another guess left the entire structure inert, but at least it didn’t blow up.

Then more adventurers came.

Thankfully, he’d been about to try his next attempt in just a few days, so he had enough mana to panic properly.

---

Kidore cautiously slid into the cave, Real Null and Subtle Point already ahead of her. The newborn dungeon probably couldn’t come up with anything that could threaten them, but dungeons could be creative, and she’d been surprised more than once at what one could do with just a little time.

It was still dark in the first cave, and the plants were gone. Kidore lit her horn, then realized she wasn’t the only light source. There was a bright glow coming from the tunnel that led further into the dungeon that hadn’t been there a few seconds ago.

“It’s adapted,” Kidore observed.

Real Null nodded, not turning around to face her, and shifted his wings. They were too experienced to be caught off guard by facing each other instead of their surroundings. They’d been Surveyors too long. “I’ll go first,” he said.

“You sure?” Kidore couldn’t keep herself from asking.

The glow meant the dungeon could adapt materials it found to its own purposes, which was all they really needed to know, and all a lot of Surveyors checked for. Real Null always went above and beyond the norm, making sure everypony knew his team took their job with a serious above just the base motivation for money.

That, or he has a death wish.

The second option seemed more likely the more she traveled with him.

“Yes. What if it simply moved the original magelight?” Real Null asked, walking toward the tunnel.

Kidore hesitated, but reluctantly followed. It was possible, if unlikely. She followed her team, unable to keep a single, persistent word from echoing in her mind.

Priming.

---

Would would they think he had? Whole floors planted with the seeds they’d given him? Lights everywhere? Did they expect him to have fixed the dog and have tons of them roaming around?

Dawn moved quickly. He plopped a magelight in the tunnel adjacent to the adventurers, and fastened it onto the ceiling. Then he carved out a huge area at the end of the tunnel, leaving a circular area about fifty meters tall and two hundred across, taking up most of the middle of his small mountain. Magelights all over the ceiling, seeds all over the floors, pump them full of mana, grow grow grow…

The adventurers were getting closer. Too close. He needed to slow them down.

He turned his attention to the dead dog. Maybe he couldn’t fix it, but he might be able to make it seem like he had.

---

They’d already found the magelight in the ceiling, but Real Null had insisted on continuing. Kidore felt intangible needles beneath her fur as they padded through the tunnel. The silence was eerie.

The dark pegasus stopped, holding out a wing. “I hear something,” he whispered. Subtle Point slid through the tunnel and stood next to him, a thin layer of frost already coating her wings. Kidore threw a shield up, sealing them off from anything that might be up ahead.

Just in time. Something impacted on her shield, causing a sound that always reminded her of somepony landing on a sheet of linen stretched across a pit of spikes.

“Did anyone see—” she began, then stopped.

It was the dog they’d left, the magelight from behind casting it into sharp relief. Instead of saving the body to use as a model for when it acquired more organisms, it had turned it into a zombie. It thunked against the shield again and again, not even a whimper rising from its undead throat.

“It’s been Primed,” Real Null said. “We need to get out of here. How long can you hold that shield?”

“Maybe half an hour. I’m not in danger of running out of mana any time soon. Its muscles must have atrophied,” Kidore said, not letting any of the chill she felt in her bones seep into her voice.

Primed.

That one word was the reason newborn dungeons was so much more dangerous than the older ones. When only adventurers strong enough to qualify as Surveyors showed up at a dungeon, the dungeon could gain a skewed view of the average pony’s strength. When that happened, it was Primed. It would throw out challenges that would make the most seasoned adventurers pause, killing dozens of ponies before it realized its mistake.

---

They were retreating. The unicorn dragged the shield behind her while the dog threw itself against it over and over. Could they tell Dawn hadn’t fixed it? Were they going to leave and not come back? Maybe he needed to make it stronger. It took a lot of mana to animate it, and more to increase its strength, but they it was worth it if it meant they would return, because then he could challenge—no. He wanted to escape. To find his body. That was his only goal.

Dawn split the rest of his mana between the plants in his artificial jungle. They were growing, but slowly, and they needed a lot more mana than he had. They were missing something.

Heat.

The magelights above provided brightness comparable to the sun, but their light was cold. The atmosphere was cool and damp, and the place still felt like a cave. If he could tweak the runes… No, that would take too long. The adventurers would be gone by then. He just needed a decent tangle that looked like a jungle. He’d flesh it out later.

The adventurers were almost at the end of the tunnel. Dawn frantically observed the dog for flaws. It moved like one, its eyes were blinking, he’d even brought it back with water so its mouth would have the same consistency as a live one. Then he saw one of the adventurers open her mouth and talk to another.

Sound. His dog was completely silent, and he didn’t have a live dog to copy the bark from. If only he’d had more time…

An idea was born. Dawn acted on it as soon as it came to him.

---

Kidore left the tunnel with a sigh of relief. The dungeon hadn’t tossed anything too terrible at them, all things, considered. The undead dog would easily overpower somepony new to the deadly game of adventuring, but to experienced ponies like them, it was only a threat if it caught them unawares.

She stopped. Null and Point weren’t moving. She finally looked away from the shimmering red film stretched across the tunnel. Something was wrong. It was darker than it should be. She looked around the small circular chamber for the exit, rotating her vision across the entire room three times before it hit her.

The exit was gone. That was new.

“Carve a way out?” she suggested. Her voice was steady, but her heartbeat was quickening.

Real Null dug into his pack and pulled out four razor-sharp pieces of mithril with beaten leather straps attached. Warsaws. Originally named after the industrious earth pony who invented the first set after a pegasus asked for a certain kind of weapon, the modern form had since evolved from light copper good only for a single blow into the durable mithril triangles Kidore saw before her.

Subtle Point took two and fastened them onto her wings in quick darting movements. Null was more graceful, moving at a constant, deceptively slow-looking speed. They weren’t powerful enough to entirely shrug off the effect putting pieces of metal, no matter how small, had on their wings, but it wouldn’t really matter in caves this cramped. They were as ready as they could be. Kidore positioned herself between them, bringing the magic welling up through her body and into her horn so she could bring a shield into existence at a moment’s notice.

---

They couldn’t leave. If they just disappeared, whatever organization they reported to might be suspicious, but that would be better than confirmation that Dawn was flawed. He just needed to show them. They’d follow the tunnel back to his still-forming jungle, and...well, he would also need to figure out how to read lips to make sure they weren’t going to return with an unfavorable report. If they declared him off-limits, or sent a bunch of ponies like the first Surveyor to destroy his gemheart, he would have no chance of fulfilling his goal. Which was to get back in his pony body. Yeah.

Just after he finished a few things as a dungeon, of course. It wouldn’t take long after he found his body, and he could probably learn how to store it indefinitely.

A change in the dirt his magic was inhabiting jarred him out of his thoughts. He tried to shake his head, only to be reminded once more than he no longer had a body. It was surprisingly easy to lose track of time without one.

He turned his focus on the adventurers. A physical gasp was impossible, so he had to settle for a mental one. They were carving a way out with devices on their wings. Mithril. Dawn knew how to twist the runes to make the metal explode, but the ponies eluded his mental grip. He couldn’t touch them, or even anything too close to them. Quickly, he investigated the cause of the interference, and discovered with a faint jolt of surprise that they leaked their own mana similar to his own. The unicorn’s horn was glowing with extremely pure magic, and released slightly larger, dimmer particles in a way that reminded Dawn of the time he’d put too much matter in too small a space, and they’d flown apart.

The magic she let out was still useable, and she and the pegasi also leaked magic in a state of much greater decay. All of it contained traces of their signature. All of it interfered with his own, blocking him completely until the magical signature faded. Why? It made no sense. He had more of it. If pony magic was so antithetical to dungeon magic, why couldn’t he just obliterate it?

The questions would have to wait. They were getting closer and closer to the outside every minute he deliberated, using mithril tools to aid in their digging while he watched, helpless, knowing the dog wouldn’t stand a chance.

Unless…

The runes in the mithril were his clue. He’d spent long minutes trying to figure out a way to change or destroy them, when he finally noticed what they were doing. He’d realized they moved mana, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to him now that he could simply replicate the flow the runes directed the mana in manually. Dawn focused on the intricate flow of magic in his testing chamber and copied the arrangement in the dirt he’d collapsed on the entrance. Already, he was feeling the urge to reopen a clear path from the outside to his gemheart, but he was able to suppress it for now.

Then mithril struck magically reinforced dirt, and both went flying. The amber pegasus had half her head vaporized. The darker-colored one hadn’t been lucky enough to die immediately, and dragged himself to the red unicorn on broken, bloody legs.

Dawn moved his mana helplessly, unable to bring the ceiling down again for a second collapse. Their deaths had been completely fair. They’d broken his walls. If they wanted out, they needed to at least see the jungle. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about the unicorn. She was too red, too much like the pegasus who’d killed him and stuffed him into a rock. She needed to die.

Then he consciously thought about what had just gone through his mind.

He needed that replica of himself as soon as possible.

Well, it didn’t really matter anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop the unicorn from leaving. He’d failed. He’d been stupid. He should have prepared something before testing, should have realized they’d be coming back, should have just let them go instead of trying to trap them, should have let them tunnel out instead of accidentally killing two ponies, should have…

She left, leaping through the hole and drifting through the air, burning large amounts of magic as she did so.

Dawn turned his attention back to the bodies. They were just...laying there, and he felt nothing. He should feel disgusted, or at least some pity, but he couldn’t. Eventually, their signature disappeared from the ambient mana and he could—woah. There was a huge amount of mana in them, many times what he currently had. They both had a plethora of interesting items in their bags, but Dawn was really interested in the bodies themselves.

There was a lot he could do with pegasus talents.

But first he would have to survive the inevitable retribution.