Dungeon Robotics (Book 4): Cascade Read online

  Dungeon Robotics

  Book 4 Cascade

  Matthew Peed

  Copyright © 2020 Matthew Peed

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First publishing, March 2020.

  Matthew Peed

  Iteration 64

  P.O. Box 481

  Dover, TN, 37058

  https://www.Patreon.com/DungeonRobotics

  https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21700/dungeon-robotics

  About the Author

  Matthew Peed is a single father who works hard to provide for his daughter and also for his loyal readers. He has read or devoured millions of pages of novels, web fiction, and any other media that he can get his hands on. He started this project in order to shape something with his own mind that he could leave for his daughter to read.

  Dedication

  To all the people who have helped me along way: Thank you! Here we are six books in the series. Without yours and everyone else’s support I’m not sure I would have gotten this far. I plan to continue expanding this world as far and as wide as possible, and I hope everyone stays with me every step of the way.

  Something witty and offencive

  Jens Jensen

  Reviv3pls

  Phill barr

  Spellman – RiahWeston

  Kwynirith

  BrauBaer

  Contents

  Dungeon Robotics

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Afterword

  Chapter 1

  Regan

  It’d been three weeks since we’d dealt with the hordes. I’d made a lot less headway into the Deadlands than I would have liked. The severity of the mana corruption increased the farther the automata got from my base. I was in the middle of designing an emitter that would put out a bubble-like aura to cover a decent area, but the mana drain was quite high, so I was fine-tuning it to bring the drain down.

  As I stood on the ramparts of the wall overlooking the undead forest, Jarvis teleported next to me. His form has changed a bit from the amount of combat and mana usage. His head had changed to a more normal-looking human head, where instead of one large eye that took up most of his face, there were now two. His extended eyes, which would have reminded people of a beholder on Earth due to the tubes that connected them to his head, had changed into floating drones that circled him, each with access to different elements.

  “Sir, we have reached ten kilometers. The new antennae are working on cleansing and clearing the unholy mana from the forest, but there is resistance to the process,” Jarvis said as he looked over the forest. He put off a gentleman vibe the way he stood stick straight with his arms behind his back.

  “I know, something is actively resisting me. I can sense the . . . awareness behind it,” I said with a frown. The presence had really made itself known after I’d extended my aura to the five-kilometer mark. It was the first time I’d ever felt something push back, after all.

  “What would you like to do?”

  An explosion occurred a few kilometers into the forest, which was a common sound these days. A single person was able to slip through as Ren did. But for a force like mine to make headway into the north, we had to overcome tremendous resistance for every meter we took. All kinds of monsters blocked our way, but mostly ghouls and zombies.

  The research team had made some decent headway in researching the undead. The goblins got better at their work as they grew more accustomed to the technology in the labs. They even found a way to boost their immunity to the ambient mana from some of the information they gained from the ghouls. Apparently, being undead was a type of curse.

  The more I learned about these race-level magics and curses, the more worried I became about these higher-level beings and the Celestials. I needed to think up countermeasures before I encountered them rather than after. From what I’d learned about mana, I knew they would have amounts I hadn’t even seen before. So it would have been hard to outlast them like I had the necromancers.

  They would most likely have magics that would be on another level, given the fact that they were able to reach the fifth tier. From what I understand, that meant they understood their element enough to nearly fuse with it. Ezal was a good example of what I would be dealing with if I had to fight a Celestial. From the few records I’d gotten from the people in town, one of the myths about reaching tier five was that you became one with your element.

  I wasn’t just twirling my thumbs. With the undead as the focus, I was making headway on several techniques that I felt would give anything a hard time. Most of it was still in testing or required large amounts of mana to create. Just more things on the list that would need some tweaking before they became a viable means of offense or defense.

  I pulled myself from my thoughts, then turned to Jarvis. “I think it’s time we launched it,” I said with a smile. I’d been trying to find a good time to try out this experiment for a while. This felt like it to me.

  “Understood, sir.”

  Jarvis bowed his head, and I teleported us over to the side of the fort nearest the mountains. A platform reminiscent to the rocket launchpads back on Earth lay there, with fumes from liquid nitrogen cooling the rocket that was prepared and ready to go.

  Sitting at the top of the rocket was another mithril-coated shelled core. I didn’t know what to expect in a universe with monsters, so it wouldn’t have surprised me if there’d been some sort of space tentacle monster out there. The mithril-alloy coating would make sure it was protected. Once I established a geocentric orbit, then I could worry more about defenses that might need to be prepared.

  It was far easier to build an escape-velocity vehicle when I could build a seamless structure, as well as use magic for some of the systems. I was able to use some magic scripts to create barriers and cooling for the outer layer. With the way it was constructed, the vehicle would actually be able to leave the planet and return as long as it didn’t run out of mana.

  Seeing the vessel made me recall Earth’s attempts to get to space. Earth was close to having a space elevator thanks to the work of a man named Elon from a few decades before my time. But, thanks to me, that had never come to fruition. Not much reason to go to space when high-energy positron lasers turned the vessel into scrap metal.

  I knew the stage launch of space vehicles from the satellites that my company sent into orbit. The problem was that I’d usually outsourced that part of the equation to other companies back on Earth. I was basically working from scratch here. I was just throwing everything on it that I could think about with the hope that I covered all my bases. I basically wanted a fortress in space when I was done.

  We moved over to the command center near
the launchpad. “Sir, mana batteries are done charging,” Jarvis reported as he examined the screens in front of him.

  “Thank you, begin countdown!” I said with some excitement.

  “Ten!” Jarvis began.

  The rocket began to glow from the intermix of technology and magic working together to ready the vehicle for takeoff. Four large rockets around the bottom started to release smoke. I was already pumping liquid nitrogen and water into the site, as I wasn’t sure how much sound this thing would actually put off. Ice coated a good ten meters around the launch site.

  “Nine!”

  Several automata and goblins sat around me in the command center at various stations, checking and double-checking the systems. They were on high alert, as I didn’t want anything to go wrong. It might have been bad for their hearts, but they would only have to work at this high-tension level for this first launch.

  “Eight! . . . Seven! . . . Six! . . .”

  The rocket started to shake as the engines were primed. I turned my eyes from the screens to the rocket outside the window. It had a sleek design with a silverish coloring from the materials that went into it. Built as a large tower structure, I planned for it to be the heart of the new station when it reached space.

  Thanks to Louella, I’d gained quite a bit of materials that helped with higher-level technology. Just the experiments that my current workers were doing would take a few weeks to finish. If I could have focused on it myself, it might have sped the process up. But with the recent invasion, I had too many distractions to fully devote my attention to it.

  “Five! . . . Four! . . . Three! . . . Two! . . .”

  The magic around the launchpad and the vehicle activated with a bright flash. Mana surged from all three cores, while the fourth, the Steel Spire core, only gave a trickle. All the runes activated as the engines flared.

  “ONE!” Jarvis yelled.

  I slammed my hand down on the big red button in the center of the console. The rockets fired with one of the most beautiful flames I’d ever seen. The water managed to suppress the sound considerably, but the roar could still be heard for kilometers. There was almost too much power as the launchpad and the surrounding ground cracked from the crater that formed.

  With a boom, the rocket shot into the sky. I connected to the cameras on the outside of the ship. My uplink to it was also in the green for now. As it left my aura a few kilometers in the air, the resistance I was feeling from the undead forest struck with force. Launching next to the mountains allowed me to use their aura to collide with the presence, which allowed the rocket to slip through the proverbial cracks during the clash.

  The rocket quickly gained speed and was soon going near Mach 40. The escape velocity of Earth was twenty-eight kilometers per second, but this planet was much larger than Earth, thus I went ahead and boosted the velocity as much as I could. The cameras were shaking from the vibrations, but the rocket was holding steady as some of the scripts turned the kinetic energy into mana for the batteries. The rocket only continued to gain speed and quickly reached thirty-five kilometers per second and was still climbing.

  This would have been so much easier if I could have just teleported into space, but I was missing some type of variable for the magic to function properly. I’d tried it with a few devices in a few experiments, but they were all subsequently ripped apart by something as they crossed a sort of barrier around the planet. I was thinking that in the atmosphere there was another layer like the stratosphere but made out of mana that prevented something like teleporting from the planet. Possibly, an ancient Celestial or god had placed it there to protect the mortals, but it was all assumptions.

  The rocket quickly gained altitude, and the wind drag was reduced as it passed the heavier layers. When one of the cameras hit something and was then covered in red for a few seconds, I guessed it had pulverized some type of monster bird that happened to get in its way. The heat on the outside of the ship reduced as it started to leave the atmosphere.

  Finally, the rocket reached low planetary orbit. As I’d suspected, it was nearly double that of Earth. The boosters died and the rocket slowed as the gravity of the planet started to assert itself on the vessel. When it was at the three-thousand-kilometer mark, I activated the ship’s second phase.

  The metal started to shift and get rearranged. Two wings emerged, with multidirectional hydrogen thrusters at the end of each so that the ship could move in any direction. It shifted its direction so that it would be in high planetary orbit over the northern lands. I planned on starting the station there in case something happened when I activated the core. If for some reason it exploded, I wanted the debris to land on the enemy and not regular mortals.

  The vessel reached its destination, or at least that’s where the spells and calculations I’d made put the craft. Back on the planet, I let my body fade into mana, as I wasn’t sure what would happen. I mentally cracked my knuckles, then began to allow my aura to leave the core. The craft was almost stationary when compared to a satellite, but it was technically moving just a bit until it froze as if it had gotten stuck in concrete. Then I felt it start to move again, but it was locked into place over that spot on the planet. I felt a surge of mana as the aura expanded in the form of a bubble.

  I nearly got a head rush from the mana, as it felt completely different from what I absorb on the planet. Compared to any of the mana I’d absorbed before, this felt . . . purer. I looked past the rush of mana to analyze the situation. I was absorbing all the emissions that would normally be bombarding the planet in this area. I made an active effort to allow sunlight through my aura; otherwise, it would have been nearly pitch-black under it.

  The space core quickly broke through to the second tier, and it hadn’t even been ten minutes. Thankfully, I was able to just barely push the core. Any more and I could tell the core might fracture. I set up the core to take the mana and transfer it back to my main core. I could break through to tier three if possible. I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a requirement once I gained that amount of mana.

  I left the original structure of the vehicle alone and started to expand the form into a proper station. I wasn’t sure if people would be living there or not, but I did have the goblins that could potentially end up there one day. I went ahead and made it where they could live in the station without problem. Long-term, there were a lot of magics I wanted to test up there.

  As I have certain abilities as a dungeon core, I was able to cheat a bit. I expanded from the original structure to create a central tower. Around halfway down I expanded the surface out in a disk shape, much like the city I’d created in the north, and went ahead and created as many of the buildings as I considered necessary for my people to survive while living on it.

  Just to be safe, I covered all my bases by adding greenhouses and recycling systems for any inhabitants that I might move to the station in the future. While I was quite busy on this planet, apparently I could live a very long time and might consider taking a journey into space someday. I would have to figure out how to free my dungeon core for this permanent orbit going on, but like I said, plenty of time to work on that.

  To complete the station, I added a tower emitter every forty-five degrees around the circle. It would emit a barrier that would serve as an atmosphere for the inhabitants. At its low setting, it could be maintained indefinitely by just absorbing the sunlight, but if it went into defensive mode, then it had a battery life of roughly twenty-four hours, depending on the attacks it was sustaining.

  As I was putting the finishing touches on the station, I felt someone call for me from my main dungeon. In the forests on the tenth floor, a pair stood with their entire bodies covered, except the man, who exposed his face, knowing I would be able to see it. I grinned conspiratorially as I went to see what they wanted.

  Chapter 2

  Louella

  “Crime is at an all-time low, but morale is also down.”

  That was the final line in a report sent
over from Ezal. The obelisks that Regan had created had indeed found quite a few necromancers, but we couldn’t be sure that we’d gotten them all, for obvious reasons. Regular crime was down, as the report said, but without an outlet for the more . . . dirty types of people, these people were just sitting around the town. Usually at the bottom of a bottle of mead.

  We were trying to think up ways to get them up and moving, but it was hard to turn a thief to honest labor. The gnomes had basically set up their own foreign embassy, but Izora was reporting everything to me. Not that they could hide anything from Regan. Last I’d heard he had claimed the entire valley in his aura. Though, thinking of Regan, I felt he’d been a bit distracted as of late.

  At least the town was still growing at a staggering rate. People were literally streaming into the valley from both countries. We implemented several laws to keep discrimination down, as more than one bar fight was between citizens of Lecazar and Thonaca going at it over stupid reasons. The last census that Ezal had sent over placed the head count at nearly seventeen thousand people. The town was about to reach a point where an inspector would come from the capital to make sure everything was in order and reclassify the town as needed.

  The Construction and Building Guilds were working around the clock to fulfill everyone’s requests. At least they were always hiring for labor. The town had felt crowded to me before, but now it was even harder to make it around town. The biggest problem was that everywhere I needed to frequent due to my position, nearly everyone else had to go as well. The rural sections were nearly as bad as the market and central streets. I was glad the valley in which the town was in was able to house so many people and buildings. According to Thrad, the Construction Guild’s master, we would be able to build a city that would rival the capitals. With Regan there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we surpassed them. He wasn’t too big on the word, limits.

  It was only a matter of time before the nobles tried to bully their way into the town. I’d already received several requests for manors and whatnot to be built for them. To each I sent back a nice little note that basically said piss off in polite speak. I could be a little ruder to Lecazar nobles, but for the Thonacan ones, I needed to word it a bit nicer. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with a political issue.