Cara

“Cheer up, laddie, we won! ‘Iddn’t we?” Brick, Cara’s bonded brownie companion, said while he chuckled and licked his lips. He was sitting on top of a worn-down building inside the troglodyte warren, the same place where Cara’s core was encrusted into the roof. Both had watched the mercenary army fight their way through the dungeon, unable to stop them without the element of surprise.

“I know, Brick. I’ve just got a lot on my mind and a lot to do; I’m feeling a little drained. You’re right though, we should be celebrating. Please gather the trogs and have them harvest a few of the more potent mushrooms for a feast. I’m sure they will want to eat the humans too, just make sure they don’t touch the women.” Cara knew that Brick was trying to take her mind off her next task, but there was no use. It was something that had to be done, and it would be better to get started sooner rather than later.

From the start, Cara had used her troglodytes to herd the men into a pitfall that led to the fifth floor while capturing all the women possible. The capturing of the females was what had Cara feeling grimmer than the victor of a life and death battle should feel. She knew it was a necessary evil, and it would even improve an entire race, but she couldn’t find it in herself to feel good about what she was doing.

Since becoming a dungeon, Cara had made many sacrifices when it came to her morals and ethics, doing only what was best for herself and her survival. She’d slain humans to protect her core, killed countless other creatures inside or around her domain in order to learn their mana structures, and even accidently enslaved an entire near-sapient race. Today, she’d not only murdered nearly one hundred men, but she’d even captured women and enlisted Manning to do the same. Captured women in order to submit them to a fate worse than death.

At times like this, Cara wished she’d lost her memories and could just be a regular dungeon like Manning. At least that way the guilt weighing down on her soul wouldn’t be so crushing and despairing. Dungeon instincts didn’t feel bad about murder and enslavement, they just accepted it and moved on with their lives, if you could call being a thoughtless murder machine a life. The only things keeping her together were the approval of Brick, Manning, and Ash for her plan, and the fact that it was for the good of her followers.

Manning might have a following of sapients on the surface now, thanks to the crazed elf, but she already had countless lives that depended on her and worshipped her as a god, the troglodytes. A while ago, she’d spoken with a promising warrior of her boors, a self-identified woman named Nala. At the time, Cara had only spoken to her because of her unnatural prowess with the spear and willingness to teach the future Fobs (Floor one bosses) the way of the spear. It was a skill that Cara had not harvested from the humans, so she wanted to know where Nala had picked it up from.

After speaking with Nala, and later talking with Brick about her, she learned that the troglodyte was just a natural when it came to the spear. Brick had even told her that Nala had self-taught herself the common tongue from listening to the other troglodytes around her. The woman had been spawned from the first litter of troglodytes born of a dungeon boar, a boar she’d traded from Manning, and was unnaturally intelligent and gifted. Unfortunately, Nala was born a eunuch, a not uncommon condition with the troglodytes, and was ostracized by the rest of the warren.

Before Cara had enslaved their entire race, the troglodytes would kill any offspring that looked too different from them or was born a eunuch. The first was murdered upon birth, and the latter, so long as they looked correct besides the lack of manhood, were kept and raised as breeding stock. In their poor little minds, they thought that they were keeping their gene pool pure, but they were only crippling their race even more.

As a dungeon, Cara could decipher a little bit more about the genetic makeup than most when a creature died within her confines. When she’d first enslaved them, Cara had had no idea what the creatures were so she called then troglodytes because of their living conditions. After generations of death and birth, she now knew that the troglodytes were a genetic clusterfuck of numerous sapient and non-sapient races.

The dungeon-dwelling creatures were primarily a mix of goblin, kobold, and gnollish, but also had human, deer, rabbit (somehow), and countless amounts of minute strains of genetic material from other creatures. Somewhere along the way, they’d mutated to become a parasitic entity that could not reproduce on their own but, because of their versatility, they could rear their offspring inside of most races.

Anyways, after she’d established herself as their ruler Cara had stopped them from murdering their own offspring as well as prevented them from impregnating the eunuchs non-consensually. From that she’d gotten an offshoot of muscular boar-type troglodytes, and an influx of eunuchs like Nala. She didn’t think much of it before her first conversation with Nala, but afterwards she realized a lot of things.

Nala had asked Cara for one thing, and one thing alone. She told Cara that she felt she was a woman, trapped within the disgusting membrane of a troglodyte, and wanted a woman’s body. She didn’t care if it was the body she was born in, or if she needed to die and return her soul to the collective, which is what the troglodytes called Cara’s ability to store and respawn souls, to be born into a new body.

Cara, of course, accepted her request and started pondering upon it. In an ideal world, she wanted to modify Nala’s current body. The troglodyte had said she didn’t mind swapping races, but Cara did not want her more ostracized than she already was. She started watching the pregnancies of the boar herd and observing birthrates in order to get a better idea of how the troglodytes seed germinated in the first place. She then made a shocking discovery.

Nearly fifty percent of the troglodytes born were born as eunuchs, genderless creatures. Of those, four in five would be born with traits from their host, or mother. From this, Cara pieced together that Nala really was a woman trapped in a genderless body. At some point in time, the parasitic race of troglodytes hadn’t lost their abilities to birth females, but their females had just lost their reproductive systems. With a majority of the women being born with “deformities”, it was likely that the troglodytes had accidently systematically erased their own females upon birth, thus developing a dependency on the females of other races for reproduction.

Although Cara was a dungeon and nearly a god within her own domain, she did not have the ability to reverse an unknown and countless number of years’ worth of deformities and selective breeding. She could only start breeding the females back into the race, to start from scratch and fix the race. She had enslaved the troglodytic race on accident but kept them that way afterwards because of their barbaric tendencies. She justified it to herself because they only got themselves murdered or murdered each other otherwise. Now, however, she had a goal. She wanted to fix their race and cause them to rise to the level of sapience.

She tried to fix them through selective breeding with the boars but, no matter what she tried, the boars were just too genetically different from the troglodyte’s base genetics. Five generations in, the only thing the troglodytes inherited was thicker skin, fur, and horns. Their internal organs seemed to be hard coded into their genetics, preventing them from relapsing into simple beasts. She gave it a lot of thought and came up with a theory that made her sick to her stomach.

Their genetics had evolved to the point of near sapience, starting from an unknown point, and refused to degenerate back to the level of a beast. For changes to their internal organ structure, Cara would need to provide them breeding stock that was of a higher quality than what they already had. She needed sapients.

She put it off for a long time, researching and experimenting any other way she could. At that point she decided she’d rather just respawn Nala in the body of a different sapient race as soon as she got the chance. Murder was something she had to accept as a dungeon, but the systematic imprisonment and experimentation upon other sapient races was too far for her. Or so she thought.

When Manning had let her know about the invading force while they raided the town, she decided it was maybe time to pull the trigger. If someone was evil enough to burn down a settlement, capture and enslave women (according to what Manning said he saw), and murder countless innocent citizens based upon their race or greed, they deserved what they had coming to them. Or, they at least were as close as it was going to get. Nobody deserves what Cara needed to do to them, but this scum was as close to it as it was going to get.

Cara watched the troglodyte riders return from the surface with netted and restrained women in tow. They’d realized quickly that the women were all mages, a slightly unexpected risk but nice benefit, so their mouths were now sealed and their hands were constrained to prevent movement. Without anti-magic artifacts, it was the best Cara could do to seal their magic. After she broke and claimed them, a process she assumed would take a long time, she would systematically drain their mana pools and begin the breeding process.

Cara shuddered and rediverted her attention again. She’d confirmed that the prison transfer was going smoothly and wanted to give it no more thought. The rest of the surviving troglodytes were feasting on human flesh, as she’d assumed, they would, as they danced and celebrated their successful defense of their home. They prayed to Cara and offered their thanks for her protection It was ironic, because the majority of them did not know that it was her fault the invaders were in the dungeon in the first place.

Weapons and armor were stacked off to one side, ready to be salvaged and recycled, and other belongings like satchels and bags were in a separate pile. Cara stressed the advancement of craftsmen within her troglodytes, insisting that she would no longer build gear for them and that they would have to smith or salvage their own weapons from now on.

This was a multi-purposed approached. The first purpose was to cause the troglodytes to grow and evolve their critical thinking abilities as well as develop skills. She hoped this would slowly expand their mental capacity and help them make the final leap into a fully sapient-, even if they were still considered monster, race. Just improving their genetics wouldn’t push them past that boundary, their society and insight/scholarship needed to reach a certain point and maintain itself for generations. It was the difference between primates and humans after all.

The second reason was a decision made based upon the reaction of the adventuring party that evaluated her dungeon. Back then, she’d crafted a spear for her boss based upon her knowledge of weapon craft and other spears from her previous life. With her ability to grow the spear and refine it, she’d made a weapon whose metal purity and structural stability far exceeded what most sapient smiths could make. If every troglodyte were armed with those, the kingdom would lock her dungeon down to farm them ceaselessly. It would be torture.

Thus, the troglodytes began collecting gear and crafting their own spears. Several lives were lost when learning the art of the bellows and smelting, several more injured themselves carving their own spears from ironwood that Manning provided, and several more just chose to fight unarmed. This windfall of weapons and gear should be able to inspire some of the troglodyte craftsmen and arm a few elites. Combined with the weapon techniques Cara expected to learn and impart after refining the memories of dead humans, she would be able to increase her dungeons fighting strength by leaps and bounds. Once she finished helping the troglodyte race evolve, she would figure out how to regain her own body. Dungeons were immortal, a goal she’d had since she was a child, but she missed having her own flesh and blood. Even if it was just an avatar, Cara made it her goal.