Broken Core

by Overline

Chapter 3

They were going to kill him. The glowing gemheart at the end of his cave system would be smashed. He could almost feel the pieces of crystal flying through the air, his magic unraveling and mind dissolving…

Dawn reigned in his panic. He could still feel that, at least. Slight comfort.

Calmer, now. They were going to try to kill him. He’d heard enough about dungeons to know that none of them had ever blocked off an exit. With enough preparation, he could stop them from destroying him. There would be no time for delicate research, for tinkering with the inner workings of magic. He needed something rough, sloppy, and fast, yet still powerful enough to beat back a ton of experienced adventurers.

That can’t be fair, right? he thought to himself. A bunch of adventurers, able to sweep away anything he set in their path with ease, who would have no problem smashing a newborn dungeon. No feeling of outrage rose. He knew why. It would be payback. A bunch of extremely powerful ponies trying to kill him would have been enough to allow him to hide his gemheart in the normal course of things, he knew. But the pegasi that were still cooling on the floor of his cave hadn’t even had a chance. They’d been trying to escape, and had died through no fault of their own.

The idiotic instinct that things had to be fair, that they had to be balanced, wouldn’t leave him. If he’d instead been lenient on the adventurers, the balance would’ve swung back to him and he could’ve just hidden himself. And that was why most dungeons had a top floor that was super easy to defeat. Why hadn’t he realized…

He was going in circles.It was time to stop wallowing and start doing.

First order of business: the bodies. They would have items that he could absorb, and hopefully some that were simple enough that Dawn could incorporate them into his defenses without having to study them for weeks to understand.

He concentrated on the magic he had swirling around, and focused on the pegasus that was so dark he was almost black. Dawn enveloped the corpse’s mana, which still hadn’t dissolved and had surprisingly still been preserving its host even after death. It would take too long to tease out the strings of mana within the pegasus that allowed him to control his magic, but Dawn was still able to compare a small section to the feeling of the elemental bolts of magic he’d once thrown and still couldn’t properly deconstruct. It took some time, but he eventually teased meaning from the magic.

Fire.

It was a more complete base than the single bolt he’d launched. Where that was like a cannon on a ship, the magic he sensed in the pegasus was more like the ship itself, complete with captain and sailors to do all the minute adjustments. If Dawn had enough time to deconstruct this, he could branch off to more flame-magic that this pegasus hadn’t learned on something almost like instinct.

Unfortunately, he might not have that kind of time. He needed to get defenses up as fast as possible. Dawn absorbed the dark pegasus’s magic and felt his store of mana triple. His gemheart physically enlarged from the gain as it ate into the magic, something he hadn’t known they could do. He turned to the amber pegasus and did the same thing. This one had built up ice magic. It looked like they’d had complementary talents.

He ignored the broken mithril triangles. It was a shame that the damage they’d done had shredded their wings. It would take probably a day to trace delicate nerve, tissue, and bone, then reconstruct them. But he set that aside, for now. Their saddlebags were of more immediate importance.

Again, he started with the darker one first. He had a small bottle of enchanted liquid that Dawn’s magic detected was red in color. Most likely a healing potion. They could be incredibly useful. If only he had more time, then an army wouldn’t be a problem. He could make his own army with—with mithril scales, maybe, making them virtually unstoppable. Along with the ability to use even simple fire or ice magic, and—Dawn had to wrench his attention away from the potions before they drew him into an intense cycle of experimentation, and it was all he could do to absorb them without spewing them back out to see how their healing worked in intricate detail.

Next was a collection of crystal orbs small enough that a pegasus could comfortably scoop them out of a pouch with a wing and toss them without paying too much attention. They were completely dark, even when Dawn pushed a bit of magic into one. They weren’t meant for lighting, and the runes that were built into their crystalline structures were too simple for that to be the case. A few of the runes were the same: probably the ones that drew in mana, but other than that the orbs had only a single simple repeating rune.

Dawn absorbed them and created one at the top of his mithril testing chamber to test his suspicions. He studied it closely as it accelerated toward the ground, until it smash—

A roiling cloud of mana erupted from the broken orb, and if Dawn had still had them, its blue color would’ve been visible even to his naked eyes. The crystal was promptly blown into smithereens, which were in turn blown into fragments of sand, which themselves dissolved into tiny particles of dust, and the entire testing chamber went up in flames.

Maybe he’d pumped a bit too much mana into it. He’d wanted to see every stage of the explosion, so he’d overloaded the thing by roughly a hundred times the amount it would otherwise have stopped pulling in mana at.

Well. That was neat, and he wouldn’t have to reconstruct all the other runes he’d included in the modified magelight if he wanted to make more, but the real prize of this gem was that he didn’t have to detonate it manually. While he had to cause the explosion himself by actively channeling the magic in his modified magelight, all he had to do with these was fill them up and have something else throw them. Granted, that second part might take a bit of time to figure out. Maybe more than he had. Something he could do immediately was embed them in the walls to stop any attempts at digging a way out. Then again, he didn’t need to. He could just make the mana flow similar to mithril again for the same effect. Out of ideas for immediate usefulness, Dawn tossed them to the back of his mind.

Next was food. The dark pegasus had a lot of the packed and dried grasses and traveling herbs, enough to feed an earth pony for a week. Dawn missed food. He dissolved its matter and put it into his storage cave under the mountain, committing its structure to memory even though it would be pretty much useless to recreate. He could feed anything he made directly with mana. But it seemed he could still feel nostalgia, and he had a pretty much unlimited mem—

He pulled the emergency brakes on his train of thought, carefully studied the section of tracks it’d been moving over, and restarted it at a snail’s pace.

If he had an unlimited memory…

Another inch.

And he could absorb, change, and recreate anything…

The train followed a bend in the tracks and accelerated.

Why hadn’t another, larger dungeon taken over the world by now? Were ponies stopping it? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t do anything with the mana that was touching a pony’s own aura except move it and maybe pick up some information, but that wouldn’t stop a sufficiently powerful dungeon. It could just create a bunch of its own creatures and overwhelm the ponies that way. Even after only a quick overview of pony magic, Dawn knew it worked extremely inefficiently. They had so much mana gathered over their lives, and so much of it wasn’t even necessary. Whole sections were just...junk. Any dungeon would win, with enough time. The only things stopping it were the instincts. The unnatural fear of going outside, of hiding the heartstone. The unstoppable desire for balance. Maybe even the inability to use mana to directly interact with ponies…

No natural creature felt that way.

The train dipped under a bridge, followed a tangent.

Pegasi were adventurers. Almost none of them were content to settle down in a town. They wanted action. A few who felt comfortable breaking the stereotype confided that they wished they could have a break from such an active lifestyle, but that they felt nothing they did would matter. Earth ponies with the right training could feed entire villages single-hoofedly, create gemstones that would store massive amounts of magic, make a thin layer of shale sturdy enough to use as a shield. Unicorn apprentices with their own dedicated training could use the shale to build that castle, could manipulate the atmosphere and change the weather for miles, enchant one of the earth pony’s gemstones to work as a shield against said weather. Against that, a pegasus would likely feel pretty useless. They had their own weather-manipulation talents that worked on a much finer level, but there’d have to be an entire team with dedicated training to match a single unicorn.

Dawn had had a pegasus device, an ancient wonder from the old days said to have been created when pegasi had their own unique discipline similar to earth ponies or unicorns. The glass globe with its swirling blue energy had been able to convert minute amounts of lead into pure gold. Then it had broken, and the one pony who was able to fix such things had refused, not believing he’d be able to pay her back. He hadn’t dared to tell her what it did for fear that she’d simply take it, so he’d taken the path to the nearest dungeon in search of something he could take to buy her services.

He was getting off track. The point was that the pegasi of old were supposed to be able to imbue objects with intelligence. Everything he knew pointed toward dungeons being constructs, not because he had evidence for it, but because nothing made sense otherwise.

A red pegasus, pressing something small and hard against his forehead.

The memory seemed flat without the extra senses magic provided to go along with it, but Dawn could still remember every moment in cold, precise detail. She’d bound him to a dungeon, taking his soul before it could go Beyond and sticking it to the gemheart. Why?

Dungeons had restrictions. They were built for a purpose, probably something to do with the feeling Dawn had that things must be balanced. Combining a dungeon’s purpose with a pony’s instincts meant… What? Did she want to change how dungeons worked? Why not make changes to the gemheart directly instead of putting a pony’s unpredictable soul inside of it?

He didn’t know, and after a few more minutes thinking in circles, he decided to save the entire issue for later. His first order of business was still to survive.

That was all the dark pegasus had. Dawn dissolved his body and saddlebags, then went over to the amber one. She had another bottle with mana-infused liquid as well. Dawn dissolved the slightly-different feeling health potion and went on to the next thing. There was also some food similar to what the other pegasus was carrying, Two rusted iron bracers with mana coiled up inside of them, a phoenix egg with runes carved onto its shell Dawn couldn’t yet understand, and an eyepiece with its own store of mana. Like everything else he didn’t have time to pick apart and study, they would probably all be extremely useful if he had more time.

So what could he do? Dawn could still use the pegasi’s magic systems without taking the time to understand them. He used a huge portion of his magic to recreate the dark pegasus’s mana network in the air. The huge amount of mana made it look like a ghost, and even an earth pony would be able to see it hanging in the air. It reminded Dawn of a windigo, the ice-spirits that haunted areas of conflict and buried entire countries under snowstorms. He fed the thing some mana and gave it instructions to shoot a fireball. It did so, then silently whinnied. Dawn froze in his inspection, startled, then carefully peeled away his contact with the construct. It didn’t freeze or collapse into pure mana, but instead pawed at invisible ground and flew through the ceiling, then stopped there and curled up and held still as if sleeping.

That was...interesting. It looked like more than just a pony’s magic was connected to their magic system; so were their instincts. It didn’t looked to have any trace of the mind that had once controlled it.

Dawn tentatively brought it under his direct control again. It looked like it’d be effective against any invading adventurers, but he’d need to see exactly how effective before spending such a huge chunk of mana on it. It flew down to his mithril testing chamber under his command, then stopped right at the edge of the mithril and refused his command to go further. Dawn hadn’t known his constructs could do that, but he supposed he’d kept enough of its former instincts intact that it retained some semblance of its former autonomy. Anyway, he could take even more direct control of it and simply force it to enter the chamber. It wouldn’t be able to resist that. But first he wanted to see why it refused.

It looped around the chamber with no problem, but wouldn’t go inside. Dawn directed it to go back into one of his tunnels, and it did so with no problem, so it wasn’t that it liked to be inside rocks and didn’t want to touch air anymore. It was like the mithril…

Sometimes Dawn wished he still had a head so he could bang it against something. Here was yet another example of stupidity. It didn’t want to touch the mithril. Dawn made it touch a hoof to the surface of it, and mana immediately started streaming out of the ghostly creature. It threw back its head and opened its mouth as if screaming in pain, and Dawn hurriedly made it withdraw. It was...fainter. The mana it held was still evenly distributed, but almost an entire fifth of it had been leached away in less than a second of contact with the enchanted metal.

The mithril glowed a slightly brighter blue with the extra mana, slowly converting the excess energy to light. Dawn extracted it and thoughtfully returned it all to the ghostly pony, restoring it to its previous state of brightness, then directed it to return to the entrance cave and throw another fireball somewhere. It left a scorch mark on the floor.

So it could affect physical objects, and most likely ponies, but only with magic. Dawn idly directed it to set itself on fire, and its mana started to drain at a steady rate. That meant it could attack anypony he wanted it to, and unless they had mithril it would be untouchable. He sent it a command to dip through the floor and come back up, and observed as the stone was scorched and blackened while the dirt in direct contact with the ghostly manifestation turned to ash, then made it stop using its magic. He refilled its mana and disentangled himself from it, leaving it to its own devices. It promptly flew back to the previous spot it had been at before he’d taken control and curled up once again. It looked like it was absorbing ambient mana not under Dawn’s control from the area. It didn’t seem to have a limit on how much it could contain at once.

He was definitely going to use the windigo-like creatures in his defenses. First, though, he recreated a few of the magic-infused objects he’d absorbed. He needed to know what its weaknesses were.

---

Pretty much anything with runes, it turned out. The magelight grew bright enough to rival the sun with all the magic it took in, the orbs with the unstable runes leached mana until they exploded, the iron bands sucked in mana without any outward effects, the phoenix egg glowed and was probably about to hatch until Dawn absorbed it (he didn’t want to hatch the enchanted bird unless he knew what the enchantments were), and shadows sprang up and spiraled around the edges of the monocle. Dawn also tested the healing potion, just as a control, and surprisingly it leached magic as well. Did ponies figure out how to carve runes into liquid? It needed further study, but he was under the curse of a time crunch, and so couldn’t investigate and had to ignore the burning desire of curiosity, which he was sure was stronger than when he’d been a pony and was probably part of being a dungeon.

Satisfied with the effectiveness of his inadvertent creation, Dawn brought up his memory of the other pegasus, resulting in another ghostly blue phantom floating in a cave. It swooped around a bit, then flew through the ceiling and curled up next to the older mana construct which, interestingly enough, had already gathered a significant amount of mana seemingly from nowhere. Did it somehow take it from the rock? Was there mana Dawn just couldn’t see? More questions that would have to wait.

Dawn wanted to test its abilities with ice, but refrained. They’d probably be similar to the fire ones. Still, he’d created a windigo, or at least a decent approximation of one. A ghostly creature of frost that could only be fought with runic weapons.

He’d created two highly effective defenders, but he still needed more. He couldn’t ignore the uncomfortably small amount of mana he had left. All the magic he’d absorbed from the two pegasi’s deaths was now stored in their...mana ghosts? It was about ninety percent of all the mana he had access to.

If only the unicorn had been caught in the blast. The ability to make shields anywhere would be extremely useful, and a mana-thing with levitation might be able to snatch things from adventurers without even touching them.

He needed a name for their species, if he could call it that. Windigos wouldn’t work, as they obviously weren’t vengeful spirits of the north. Mana constructs was too general. Shades implied they still had their souls with them. After a few moments of consideration, Dawn settled on just calling them phantoms.

He let them stay curled up in solid rock and began the preparations for the rest of his defenses. The dog he kept in the first chamber. He could use it to gauge the relative strength of any adventurers by how quickly they destroyed it. He’d leave it without sound, as that was something else that would take study to figure out. He could probably detect it by the way it passed through his magic and learn to replicate it through trial and error… Anyway. The dog. It took more mana than he liked to maintain its other realistic aspects, so he dropped those too. It no longer moved anything like a natural animal, instead using its limbs in the manner that would most quickly get it to its destination. Its eyes didn’t move, always staring straight ahead with a glazed look. The water eventually evaporated from its system. If Dawn was still a pony, he’d probably be terrified of it. As it was, he looked it over with clinical disinterest. It would do.

The makeshift jungle was still growing.

He’d converted the floor to a soft, peaty dirt that would sink underhoof and grew firmer the deeper it went as a base for his jungle. If enough ponies walked on it, the ground would eventually compress and lose the sucking feeling he wanted it to have, but that was a long-term problem that he’d have to ignore for now. The adventurers hadn’t given him any grass seeds, so the trees and vines and bushes grew on bare soil. Dawn could extend a bit of mana he had infused in the mountain and surrounding area and grab a sample to reconstruct for his jungle, but aesthetics were unnecessary, and besides, it would take more mana to keep grass alive without a heat source. He still needed to figure out a way to get the magelights to output more heat, or convert mana to heat directly. Right now, despite the bright lights on the ceiling, the atmosphere made it abundantly clear that everything was underground.

That was fine. Mana was a powerful source of energy, so much so that even the fraction he had compared to one of the adventurers was more than enough to keep an entangled quasi-forest two hundred meters in diameter thriving. Dawn tweaked the quickly-growing plants, causing them to shift and move until he was satisfied he had a thicket that even the most agile pony would have to hack away to pass through. It wasn’t until he finished that he consciously noticed what he’d done to the lighting. The trees stretched almost to the top of the cavern’s fifty-meter tall expanse, casting everything below in a mild shadow, which deepened under smaller trees, and turned menacing when the light filtered through vines and tall shrubs. The area ponies would have to go through would necessitate an external light source.

It wasn’t enough. Dawn could and would use the fire and ice phantoms—on second thought, maybe just the ice one—to attack invisibly from within the tangle of underground forest, but he needed to have more to rely on than just them. What if they brought some sort of device with runes that drew in the phantom's mana from the distance? They would be completely useless. He couldn’t use more animated dogs—apart from the mana issue, there was also the fact that the extremely dense growth would hinder them just as much as ponies, with their almost-equivalent size and damaged systems that Dawn didn’t have the time to figure out how to fix.

The tentacle plant the first adventurer had given him might work, but any competent adventurer would easily kill it, and Dawn couldn’t grow it too large as it wouldn’t be fast enough to pose a threat, and without his magic directly supporting it the tentacle plants would die under their own weight at a certain size. But maybe he could incorporate their ability to move into the other plants.

He still remembered the twisting mana that flowed through its seed when it was growing. It would take time to figure it out, but he didn’t think it would take too long, and it would make his forest much deadlier.

Dawn plopped a vine down into his testing chamber and clumsily added the bits of structured mana he thought relevant to it. It died shortly after, and didn’t make a single twitch. He mentally sighed and formed another vine, conscious of a clock with an unknown deadline ticking down as he worked. This time he added the entirety of the magic that gone into growing the tentacle plant. It went into stasis, every biological function freezing as if time had stopped. That effect could be an interesting trap, but Dawn doubted he’d figure out a way to apply it to an unwilling adventurer before they came. He made another vine and melted the previous one into the slush of material he had in his storage chamber. The stuff was extremely dense and was slowly sinking down through the earth. He’d worry about making mithril walls for that if he beat back the adventurers. He re-added the magic to the new vine, except a strand he thought was probably unnecessary. It failed as well. He went through several more iterations before he found the specific formation of mana necessary to animate the vine. This would all be so much simpler if he could read what each twist and pulse of mana meant.

Dawn forced the combination of mana onto every vine in his jungle, and some of the other plants. They died.

After some more rounds of intense experimentation, hasty correction, and reapplication, he had it working for some of the shrubbery, allowing the bushes to flail their branches around in a vaguely intelligent manner.

He would have to find the right formation for every single plant he wanted to enchant. A fierce determination to do it no matter the amount of time it would take almost overcame him, but he stopped himself. His efforts wouldn’t be as effective as he’d thought, and had taken too much time already, but continuing would only exacerbate the problem. He had huge vines that would seek out any ponies—or animals; almost anything that moved, really—and wrap around them. The spell included hollow thorns that drank the blood of anything they pierced. If they caught anypony, they would die a horrible, drawn-out death that would take hours to end, unable to even cry out. Dawn would’ve been horrified at the prospect of causing that kind of death as a pony, but now the thought only caused a mental shrug. That was the price of being careless enough to be caught.

Still, it gave him pause. He needed to make a backup of himself before it was too late, if he could, though he knew his reasons were different than before. Before, when he’d still been mostly a pony. Now he judged himself more than half dungeon, and unafraid of whatever the end result might be. A backup to compare with would be a good idea in any case, as it would satisfy his inflamed, insatiable curiosity.

He’d do it after another one or two finishing touches to his defenses. Something so deadly even that first adventurer wouldn’t be able to easily brush it aside.

He conjured up a modified vine to his testing chamber, and caused it to form with the mana gathering symbol from the magebomb. It moved, and the fibrous material that made up its length flexed and changed, breaking the symbol. Dawn abandoned his efforts and broke it apart. This would require some thought.

Anything that could move or grow would disrupt any runes on them. If the runes were too small to for movement or growth to affect them, they wouldn’t be able to channel enough mana to do anything. Maybe he could create a sort of shell it formed and shed periodically? No, the shell would have to flex with the vine. A temporary one on the tip? One that it would form and shed after using? That idea had promise, but it would take way too long. He’d have to figure out how to manipulate its genetics to form a shell in the first place, find out how to make the shell appear with runes built into it that wouldn’t be deformed, and all that was without considering where it would get the minerals or nutrients to make it. Sure, there was iron in blood—Dawn couldn’t directly affect ponies with mana, but he could read them, and he’d figured out what made up a pony’s blood before he’d even had the luxury of two dead ponies he could do experiment with however wished. Anyway, there was iron and other minerals in blood, but that would mean a vine would only form its shell after first killing a pony. Or Dawn could give it whatever it needed directly, but…

He was overthinking this way too much. The only reason he could see for such an inability to see the obvious was that dungeons just thought that way. He upgraded the attempt to make a backup his mind free from the dungeon’s influence from ‘idle pursuit of curiosity’ to ‘necessary to not accidentally die of blindness from obvious solutions.’ All he needed to do was form the shells directly around the vines. It looked like dungeons thought in long-term solutions to problems, not short-term ones that would be the quickest to get things done.

Dawn formed the magebomb runes on a shell and put it around another vine. It worked, but it would take a direct blow to the shell to crack it and cause an explosion. Dawn took some time testing the durability of certain materials, making sure they wouldn’t crack if the vine was going to be able to simply snatch a pony and secret it away, and also so it would probably break if the vine faced heavy resistance. Then he put the new additions on every vine in the underground jungle.

He then focused on the testing chamber and redoubled his efforts to duplicate his personality. He’d gotten far enough that his attempts didn’t always result in explosions or inert chunks of crystal, but the other result was a stone that, when he connected with it, spewed meaningless gibberish.

A single scout probed his defenses, lightly scoring his dog’s snout before retreating.

Dawn ignored the intruder, though it was difficult. It wasn’t an invasion, not yet. He still had some time. In his desperate accelerated attempts to recreate his personality without the dungeon functions or restrictions, he accidentally did the opposite, forming a cold mechanical dungeon that immediately started sucking in mana and dragging mana around itself to scan the surrounding area.

Dawn instinctively pushed the full force of his mana against the other dungeon before he knew what he was doing, even the parts he’d had swirling around as his eyes and ears. He couldn’t shift the mana he had infusing the solid rock and dirt of the mountain so easily, but that didn’t stop him drawing on his phantoms. They’d almost disintegrated before Dawn stopped himself from inadvertently dismantling them. Then the other dungeon was gone, and the mithril walls bore the blacked scorch marks of their contest. Dawn hurriedly returned the phantoms their mana before trying again, this time especially mindful of which parts he was cutting and which he was preserving.

Then the swirling mana he’d replaced into the air interacted with a pony coming through the entrance. Dawn’s latest attempt gibbered at him, and he reabsorbed it before turning his attention to the adventurers. Another entered, and then another. Before long, there were fifteen standing across from his dog, which would have been growling if it was still alive.

It was time.

Comments

[CoxitD]

moar pls :D

[Herrzog]

I think the OC tag and the Dark tag would apply.