Dungeon Robotics (Book 7): Collapse Read online

  Dungeon Robotics

  Book 7

  Collapse

  Matthew Peed

  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.

  Feel free to reach out to him.

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  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, December 2020.

  Matthew Peed

  Sprocketed Ink Publishing

  P.O. Box 481

  Dover, TN 37058

  https://www.Patreon.com/DungeonRobotics

  Dedication

  To all the people who have helped me along way: Thank you! Here we are seven 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

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Regan

  Chapter 2

  Louella

  Chapter 3

  Regan

  Chapter 4

  Oparens Wanderer

  Chapter 5

  Louella

  Chapter 6

  Regan

  Chapter 7

  Oparens

  Chapter 8

  Louella

  Chapter 9

  Regan

  Chapter 10

  Louella

  Chapter 11

  Regan

  Chapter 12

  Louella

  Chapter 13

  Alara

  Chapter 14

  Regan

  Chapter 15

  Louella

  Chapter 16

  Regan

  Chapter 17

  Louella

  Chapter 18

  Alara

  Chapter 19

  Louella

  Chapter 20

  Yo’ei Meng

  Chapter 21

  Regan

  Chapter 22

  Regan

  Chapter 23

  Louella

  Chapter 24

  Regan

  Chapter 25

  Alara

  Chapter 26

  Rens Wanderer

  Chapter 27

  Louella

  Chapter 28

  Regan

  Chapter 29

  Louella

  Chapter 30

  Alara

  Chapter 31

  Regan

  Chapter 32

  Louella

  Chapter 33

  Alara

  Chapter 34

  Rens Wanderer

  Chapter 35

  Regan

  Chapter 36

  Louella

  Chapter 37

  Regan

  Chapter 38

  Ezal

  Chapter 39

  Puppet

  Chapter 40

  Yuno

  Rens Wanderer

  Afterword

  Chapter 1

  Regan

  I looked at the new tower built at the center of the city of Tearfalls that was steadily sending mana into my core. There were easily another four hundred thousand people here that were sending nearly twice that number in mana to my cores. I didn’t hide this fact while I was building the structure and even gained quite a few new followers in the process. Of course, they’d never seen anything quite like this.

  With the situation in the east handled for the moment, I decided to focus on the moon. I didn’t like the idea of something that could so easily repel one of my ships sitting up there. Plus, it’d been nearly a month since the Ly’call had joined me at the station. I needed to handle that situation as well.

  I had a few plans I was working to implement, but I would need to make sure everything was prepared before I did anything. Space is dangerous no matter what universe you’re in. I imagine a universe with monsters and magic would be even more so. I needed to make sure Louella and my other assets on the surface were able to handle me being gone for a few days. With Louella being the biggest pin keeping the mortals in a semblance of normalcy after all that had happened, she would be top on my list.

  She was doing a good job with organizing the survivors she found. While a large section of the east had been devastated, the southern part was largely intact. It would be interesting to see how that would go. From the information I had, the main Church of Lelune was located in the Port of Hope. They would have a better time fighting the undead than the other cities farther north and would be less inclined to accept her aid.

  With Prince Charles handing over Lecazar to Louella, we managed to avoid a lot of bloodshed. When I got a report on the situation from Puppet and the other children, it said they were mostly in favor of the prince. Azra didn’t like him, but that was more a personal issue, from what I gathered. I felt he would make a good regent for the area once Louella reclaimed the Lecazar Empire.

  I would, of course, be keeping an eye on the prince, as would Louella no doubt. She wasn’t naïve enough to trust someone just from their words. Having your country destroyed tends to allow a person to reshuffle their priorities but being born into royalty was something people generally struggled to relinquish. Earth was full of examples. Even if Prince Charles did state that he had known about this happening for a long time now, it could just be nice words during this time of hardship.

  “Regan!” I heard my name just as something slammed into my back. When I looked around, Alara was clinging to me. The dungeon core had wormed her way into my metal heart—not that I had tried to keep her out. I had just stopped caring if it was magically induced or natural.

  “Alara, what is it?” I asked, worried about her. She was still recovering and would sometimes have rather . . . intense mood swings. My main concern right now was her speech. She was still struggling to talk even after nearly a month. I remembered stories of people refusing to talk for the rest of their lives and was thankful she wasn’t that bad off.

  “Missed you,” she said, rubbing her face into my back. How she could enjoy rubbing her face into my metal body I couldn’t understand.

  “I was only gone a few hours,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Too long.”

  I laughed as I grabbed her waist and pulled her onto my shoulders. Compared to my current avatar of close to four meters tall, her form, only one hundred fifty-two centimeters, was severely dwarfed. Being a dungeon core avatar though, she was probably capable of tossing my body several hundred meters if she tried.

  “What do you want to do? I have a few hours before anything needs my attention.”

  We were currently on the station, the location of all my more advanced magic tech that allowed me to more efficiently control the five subcores I currently operated. If I’d tried to do it manually, I would have missed many of the nonthreatening things that happened in my aura.

  “I want . . . to build . . .
something!” she said, kicking her feet excitedly.

  “Sure. That sounds like fun. Do you have enough mana to spare?”

  She was still recovering her dungeon from nearly a century of tainted unholy mana. It was a long and grueling process that required as much mana as it brought in from the cleansing. I had forces in her dungeon that were killing the risen undead. But with over eighty floors to deal with, it took a while.

  “I’ve been . . . saving! Want to . . . make child . . . with you,” she said.

  I glanced up at her and saw she was blushing. I smiled in reply. That was one of the most fascinating things about her. She would alternate so quickly from childlike to adult it could make one’s head spin.

  “That sounds like fun.” I spanned my fingers, and a golden portal opened that led to her core room. This would normally be very rude or downright lead to a war between cores. Ignea had explained it to me when Lena had started freaking out once. However, as I had technically conquered Alara’s core, I was allowed to do so. Plus, I don’t think she truly minded.

  “Master Regan, Mother!” Lena called as she flew over to us.

  With Alara always with me, the fairy tended to watch over her dungeon in the meantime. That’s not to say Alara was lazy. Dungeon cores don’t sleep, but due to the massive about of cleansing she constantly needed to do, she needed to separate her mind from her dungeon for periods of time. The best way to do that was by sleeping near my core.

  Alara held her arms out, and Lena flew into them. She hugged the fairy with a smile.

  “Everything good down here?” I asked the little fairy.

  “Yes, Master Regan. We managed to reclaim floor seventy-nine today. Mother just needs to repopulate it with her children, and it will be good as new,” Lena replied, giving me a salute.

  “Lena, I’ve told you just to call me Regan,” I said with a chuckle at the little creature’s actions.

  “I know.” She glanced at Alara. “But I’ll stick to Master Regan.” She took off to a little alcove that was inside a tree.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked, glancing at Alara.

  “Nothing,” she said with a pout.

  I decided to let it drop for now, on account of her looking stupidly cute when she made that face. I’d already accepted the fact that she was probably going to get me killed by her cuteness one of these days.

  We took a walk through the floors to check their progress. While she could alter them once she had full control of them, her creatures were of nature persuasion. That meant they had to grow the old-fashioned way. While normally she would have likely fueled their growth with mana, at the present she didn’t have the mana to spare.

  She had ninety-four floors, with her core being on the ninety-fifth. The first ten before her core, she’d returned to a forest that encompassed the entire ten floors. Creatures ran around, making a natural ecosystem inside the floors. Treants, bears, deer that could tear a man apart, nature spirits, and much more.

  It looked like even though she had been a prisoner and was forced to create the undead for nearly a century, she hadn’t forgotten her roots—no pun intended. In fact, some of the creatures in there would have given my minions of the same tier a good run for their money.

  “So, what do you want to create?” I asked once we reached an empty glade on our walk.

  “I don’t . . . care as . . . long as . . . we can do . . . it together,” she replied, wrapping her arms around my head.

  I chuckled. “Alright. How about a sort of caretaker for your forests?”

  “Treant?” she asked, confused.

  “Er . . . similar but different. Smaller, more able to interact with the mortal races.” On Earth, there were stories of creatures that would protect the forest alongside the treants and nymphs. They were man-shaped and man-sized but considerably more powerful. Some called them druids, others forest golems. I couldn’t think of a way to convey all that in words, so I pulled her head down and placed my forehead against hers.

  I accessed the memories and ideas, much like a file, and sent them to her mind. I couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t been in our avatar bodies. You needed a physical medium to understand the information. The magic in this world was very intuitive as well. Just take the books in the library, for example. There was no way I knew all that from Earth perfectly. But using magic, I could recreate the information for a mana cost. I had wondered at the entity behind it all, then remember Creation and decided to just roll with it.

  “Beautiful,” Alara said.

  I nodded. The legends and stories from Earth always included a massive forest with these beings. By using this method, she was quite literally shown the memories. Which meant she saw forests that were as large as a continent. It was one of the sad points from Earth. There had been few forests left when I was born. Even with my drones, Earth was close to tipping past the point of no return.

  “Understand?”

  She nodded slowly before she hopped off my shoulder. She stood and raised her arms wide. A magic circle, much like the one that forms when I use the dungeon magic gifted to me by some “other” being, formed. I saw it start to flicker and knew she wouldn’t have enough mana to create something of this complexity.

  I stepped forward, shrinking my form in the process, then kneeled next to her. Placing my hand on her back, I began transferring mana to her. After all, she’d wanted to create something together. If my mana was put into the magic, then it would have features I was partial to. I did make sure not to overpower her mana.

  With a crack, the summoning was finished. Alara and I stepped back to take in the creation. A tall being that seemed to be made partially from metal and partially from wood stood at over three meters. It had long limbs and arms that nearly touched the ground. While it looked powerful, I would say it had a docile feeling to it.

  Alara gave a cry of happiness, then ran forward, jumping up and down as she circled it several times. I smiled at her cuteness. I didn’t want to get in the middle of the excited dungeon core and her new creation, so I stood back and watched.

  “He is beautiful!” Alara cried. I blinked when her speech wasn’t halted like it’d been for weeks now.

  “Anything that you make would be beautiful.”

  “Thank you, Mother, for giving me life,” the creature said, bending down to kneel in front of her. He held out a hand to her, and a flower grew from the moss covering him. He offered it to her, and she took it gently.

  “And quite intelligent too,” I said with a grin.

  He looked over to me, then asked, “Would you prefer I call you Father or Master Regan?”

  I blinked but before I could reply, Alara answered for me. “You will call him Father!”

  “Yes, that does seem appropriate,” I added, trying not to laugh.

  “Then, Mother, Father, I shall attend to the garden,” he said before he turned and started to walk away. As he stepped, there was a surge of nature mana into the surrounding plants that helped them grow for a few minutes. A tree rose by almost a meter just from the time he was standing there.

  “Now I know why they never stopped moving in the stories,” I said, following him with my eyes. If he stopped, he would likely be trapped by the plants that grew around him. I suddenly felt something hit me in the chest and went from standing to lying on the ground.

  “Thank you!” Alara said, rubbing her face against my shoulder.

  “It was fun. I won’t have much time to spare you in the future weeks, so I want to spend some time beforehand,” I said honestly. I reached up and smoothed out her hair. It was like silk in my hand, and I had to resist the urge to play with it.

  Alara grabbed my hand and held it against her cheek, repeating, “Thank you . . .”

  I got into a sitting position while I shifted her onto my lap. She cuddled in closer. I knew she had lived even longer than I had with both my lives combined, but she appeared so fragile that I felt I needed to protect her from the world. I just enjoyed the mo
ment, with her in my arms.

  Chapter 2

  Louella

  I cracked my neck as I looked over the latest reports. I’d finally broken down and let my assistant take over some of the paperwork. The city was just getting too large for me to handle it all on my own. While most of the major decisions were still being made by me, many of the more tedious decisions I had left to her.

  With the traffic between Tearfalls and Vaihdetta, we’d had to add mages to channel mana into the storage stone for the portals. It recharged automatically, but unfortunately; it wasn’t fast enough. That was only one of the many changes we’d had to make in the last few days to accommodate the growing queendom.

  Many people had volunteered to join the army or city guard, which allowed Ezal more people to work with. It was a blessing, as the security of the city was getting close to tipping. Anymore and I would have asked Regan for some of his soldiers. He’d already upped the power of his obelisks, but there were just so many people.

  “How many does that make?” I asked, laying down the report.

  “As of this morning, two hundred thirty-five. All sent to Lord Regan’s . . . correctional facility,” one of the assistants replied.

  I wasn’t in my office anymore, but in a nearly hall-sized room that had several dozen people all working. Around me were the senior members of this little group I’d put together. It was just inefficient to work in an office, as people walked in and out constantly. I did have ways to make this a private space if need be.

  “I wish there was more we could do, but there are few checks we can make on board the airships,” Major James’s image said from one of the pads on my desk. It was a miniature image that let me talk to the man without delay. Another gift from Regan.

  “I understand, Major. Everyone goes through processing here. Don’t worry about trying to catch the rats while dealing with so many people. Keep up the good work,” I said with what I hoped was an understanding smile. It was hard to interrogate people when your main mission was rescuing them. There would be no end to it if they had to question every person they brought on board.

  “Understood, Your Highness. Then we are currently ten hours from the first southern city. They shouldn’t have seen any undead yet.”