Ranger

There was something off about this forest. Although he couldn’t put his finger on it, 30 years as a senior Ranger told him that something was wrong. He could get over the boons that the forest seemed to offer the nearby town. Hardwood trees standing alone in the center of a grove, waiting to be chopped down? Sure. Seemingly innocuous crop areas where food stock seemed to grow at a pace almost visible to the eye? Whatever.

Hell, the Ranger could even get over the fact that the path he travelled seemed to change every single time he entered, regardless of where he entered from, while the exit was always the same area.

What he couldn’t get over, however, was how damn reasonable and unreasonable the forest seemed to be. Forests, magical or not, should not be capable of sapience so young in their life. As far as the historical records showed, there was nothing but plains and scruffy bushes in this location 5 years ago, the last time a scout passed through the area. Yet, it was obvious there was some sort of intelligence there. If you followed the forest’s invisible rule set, everything was fine. But step off its path even once, and a never-ending hoard of critters would start trying to rush you down.

While he was on the subject, why was every animal there some sort of modified variation of a hedgehog, boar, or squirrel? He couldn’t see a single one of the base creatures anywhere, just the weirdly violent mutants. Even if the forests’ adapted species were better suited to the environment, the ranger would expect to see at least one squirrel or hedgehog edging out an existence. Those pests could live in almost any environment, say less of a thriving magical forest, you could find colonies of them in most cityscapes. And that was with humans actively hunting them!

Added to that fact that there weren’t any predators in the forest that he’d run into yet, he was convinced the forest was hiding something. Prey animals like squirrels leaping from trees to attack him just weren’t natural, especially when they seemed to leave alone those that traveled the paths that appeared before them rather than branching out like the Ranger did. His most recent trip into the forest had lasted for days on end, even as he actively tried to find his way out. As if they knew their little critters couldn’t best him, and decided to try and starve him out instead.

It was obvious that there was another force behind this, encroaching upon human lands once again. Sure, the forest was cleverly posted up over the river and therefore out of the kingdom’s boundaries, but he was smarter than that.

He’d been a ranger now for over 20 years.

He’d seen everything, and he knew what this was.

After getting back to the building that the Mayor had so kindly allocated to the Rangers, a brand new and somehow still seemingly rundown barracks-looking building, the Ranger started writing up his report.

Labeled ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Urgent’ upon the first envelope, which was then wrapped once more and innocuous labeled to be mailed to his grandmother, for operational security reasons obviously, the letter contained his few weeks worth of discovery, theory, and research. His grandmother would know not to open the inner letter and would bring it where it needed to be. The right eyes needed to read through this letter and start preparing.

The Ranger had discovered an Elven Forward Operating Base, grown outside of the agreed upon borders. The War was back on.

- - -

Manning

Once again, he found himself envious of Cara’s dungeon dwellers. Not only were they mostly sapient and capable of wielding tools, but they were even built almost the same as humans. They’d be of great use to his current project, as well as be able to hold a good conversation.

Manning had hit a sort of invisible barrier when expanding his influence to the south. It felt a lot like the town to his north, as if there were a large gathering of bodies blocking his ability to expand. Any scouts he sent in that direction were subsequently killed and any seeds they managed to drop on the way down would be uprooted. He’d even borrowed a few troglodytes from Cara to check it out, but whatever was out there had evaded all notice from tree line observation or killed the few troglodytes willing to brave the fields.

He could probably convince a cult member to go check, but if the troglodytes had been killed or captured, he didn’t think a few farmers would fare any better. At this point, Manning was just about convinced his forest was as large as it was going to get, surface area wise, and had started to experiment with spacial warping. It was something that Ash had told him most dungeons were capable of, and he already had a head start on the progress thanks to the ability he’d learned from the first elf who died within his borders.

The ability he was referring to was the one that let him change where the forest trails led to at a whim, so long as it was out of sight of any uncontrolled being in the area. He’d even started practicing and refining that ability on unwitting subjects, such as the forester that liked to break off the path and explore his lands from time to time. Manning had spent almost 5 days turning the man in circles, something that proved very difficult as the man seemed to have extensive practice orienteering in forests. Of course, that just made for good practice.

Still, Manning couldn’t devote all of his time to messing with the man and had to eventually let him go. Spacial warping wasn’t the same as Spacial expansion, which is what he needed to learn, even if it was closely related. Even as he practiced and researched the knowledge, something that was supposed to be instinctually known to most dungeon cores, he realized there were fairly heavy restrictions on the ability.

Any amount of space he wanted to expand, to make more than it was, needed clearly defined borders. He couldn’t just select a patch of trees and try to make it larger than it was. In proper dungeons, they could just separate the floor with a staircase or a room with a door, and they could enlarge that area through magical means. That was even easier because the solid rock served as a defined border and thus reduced the mana cost.

Oh yeah, he hadn’t mentioned the cost. Turns out that trying to make an acre of land contain two acres of land in the same area cost an extremely exorbitant amount of mana. Both as cost and upkeep. A room in a dungeon wouldn’t be that difficult to expand, but there was an exponential and limitless cost to doing such magic. Certain self-imposed limitations could be created to make the area cheaper, of course. For example, if they kept the ceilings only 8 feet high or so, the room would almost half the price as a room with 10-foot-high ceilings.

That was Manning’s current experiment. How does he create barriers within an open-sky area filled with trees? For the time being, he was starting small and attempting to create very deep burrows for his hedgehogs to live within. It was basically the same thing that normal dungeons did, considering the burrows were just a series of tunnels dug beneath the forest floor, but it helped to start small with these types of things.

He had several ideas he wanted to try to implement in the forest proper to create barriers, but until he could succeed at the basics, he didn’t want to go crazy or overboard. For now, he only had the help of Ash, whose mother had taught her basic things like this. He’d tried asking Cara, but as it turns out, she had absolutely no idea what he was talking at and was having an even harder time trying to teach herself.

Their running theory was that the more memories and skills you retained from your pre-core life, the more difficult it was to tap into dungeon core instincts. This was why, they thought, modification of the core was so much easier for Manning when they woke up originally. That, or Cara was unnaturally bad at being a dungeon core, something she refused to even consider.

Internally sighing at his straying thoughts, as was the only way he could sigh with no lungs, Manning refocused on his task. Once again, he ordered the evacuation of the burrow and watched as the little furry beasts skittered out of the various entrances they’d dug. He’d found that areas were easier to modify without the creatures in them even though they all belonged to him. He supposed that made sense, as stretching the space would otherwise try to stretch them as well. He wasn’t really creating matter so much as spreading it out. The magic behind it all was mind boggling and were he not a dungeon core now, with all of its associated magic senses and affinities, he didn’t think he’d be capable of even understanding it at all.

Stretching and pulling mentally as he dumped in all the mana he’d managed to accumulate for the task over his past 5 day break, Manning could feel his control over the area shrink as ‘new’ land appeared. The burrow managed to increase its size by about 30 percent when viewed from the inside. From the outside, which most people wouldn't be able to see considering the outside of the burrow was just layers of rock and dirt, the size of the burrow only increased by 6 percent. This was already a great improvement upon the 10:8 ratio he’d started off with even only a few weeks before.

Although a 10:2 ratio was nowhere near perfect, it would still improve his surface area substantially when he started applying it to his forest. Ideally, he’d get the ratio closer to a 1 percent external expansion, or even less, but for now he felt nothing but pleasure at his success. Mentally, he felt a new party of people entering his borders. Two humans, a dwarf, and one of the blue elves he’d seen among the original settlers. Come to think of it, he even recognized the dwarf as that one who kept sneaking off the path to steal his fire fruits. Mentally, he pinged Ash to let her know they had visitors, as she loved spying upon anyone in the forest, and went back to his task.