It was strangely distressing to watch my kobold leave the dungeon and venture into the world above. One moment they were safe within my walls, surrounded by the dungeon that made up my body, where I could watch over them, and then the next they were out of reach. Once outside all I could do was observe them from a distance, peering out through the tiny entrance as if it were a gateway into another world.

For a bit my monster just seemed to sit there, tail thumping rhythmically on the ground as they looked about, and then finally they stood and walked out of my sight.

Anything could happen to them out there, and I would never know. If they were hurt, or captured, or even worse than that, killed… I could be left sitting here waiting for them. They might never come back, and I would be none the wiser about what had happened.

I needed to do something to occupy myself, and with my monster outside collecting material, there was really only one thing I could do: expand.

I had noticed as my creature moved about the dungeon that things were still a bit tighter than I really wanted them to be. Though I had made the hallway tall enough for my kobold, it was still barely wider than they were. Not only would that make things difficult for my creature when it came to moving about, but it would also make things pretty awkward when I eventually made more monsters. The tunnels would be too narrow for more than one to move at a time, and that just didn’t seem right.

If I wanted to work my way up to a Myconid Spore, then I needed to become even larger than I currently was.

I decided to start my efforts with the room my core currently occupied, lowering the floor within so that it would be level with the tunnel. Due to the slope of the ground and the thick roots of the trees above I had been forced to build things at different angles and heights, and I had already seen how it affected my kobold. It looked downright awkward for the poor thing to have to climb up and jump down when they moved from place to place, and while that kind of thing might act as a deterrent to the badgers, I wanted to make things more convenient for my monsters. The door would be enough to keep the badgers at bay when it was in place, so I didn’t need to worry about making my tunnels awkward for them.

Before I began, however, I finally used [Appraisal] on the actual dirt around me to see what the difference was.

[Clay] Lvl: ???

Status: Immobile

HP: ???/???

MP: ???/???

Def: ???

[Appraisal] was back to being useless, it seemed. The information I was getting back from the dirt was nothing but nonsense, with only two real points of interest. If I had eyes like my kobold did, I would have been rolling them due to how ridiculous [Appraisal] was being.

Of course the clay is immobile. It's not alive. If it got up and started moving around then it wouldn’t be dirt. Hey, didn’t we already have this conversation about rocks, [Appraisal]? Why are you still doing this? At least your new ability to tell me information isn’t as worthless as your stat sheets are. What’s the difference between regular dirt and clay, anyway?

Clay. A form of natural soil with very fine particulates, containing clay minerals. When wet it’s very easy to shape and mold, and when dry it becomes brittle and crumbly. When baked at certain temperatures it becomes ceramic.

I decided to ignore the part where [Appraisal] basically told me that clay was made up of clay, which is what I was sure its level one version would have responded with, and decided to focus on the far more interesting things it had told me.

The stuff the walls were made up of in this area of the dungeon could become something else if I baked it? I wasn’t exactly sure what baking something entailed, but maybe my kobold might know. That could be an interesting next step for the two of us after we finished installing the door. Actually, what even was a ceramic? I might as well find out before I closed out [Appraisal] and got to work.

Ceramic. A hard, brittle, and heat-resistant material made from baking a non-metallic material, such as clay, at high temperatures. Ceramics are also resistant to corrosion.

The explanation was a bit wordier, and while I had learned a couple of things, it seemed as if [Appraisal] hadn’t moved too much further beyond its earlier stages of telling me the same information but in reverse. Clay was made of clay and became ceramic when baked, and ceramics were just baked pieces of clay. Everything else had just been little pieces of bonus facts on top of that base.

Now that my curiosity had been satisfied, I finally decided to put [Room Building] to work on lowering the floor. It would go a lot faster than trying to use [Tunneling] to burrow out the space, plus it seemed as if [Room Building] used up slightly less MP. The only problem came with the fact I would eat everything all in one go so if there was anything in the soil that could make feel awful again I wouldn’t know until it was too late.

I focused [Room Building] onto the floor of the room, imagining what I wanted to happen, and then activated the skill. It worked exactly as it had before, with my tendrils all snapping out at once to plunge down into the clay, where they then wrapped around the amount I had decided to eat. All at once I was devouring that entire mass of dirt, instantly expanding my MP limit and size, while mana was consumed in the process.

The clay was wet and chilly, just a bit sticky, but it was no different than regular dirt when it came to being eaten. My MP didn’t seem to raise when I swallowed down simple earth, with it being the living things inside of it that gave me my mana. The clay, it seemed, had been much too thick for anything to live inside of it, though I did find something else despite that.

The rich flavour of whatever was so dense with mana from before filled me, a deliciousness so exquisite and perfect that it made me instantly forget any of the pain that it brought me before. For a moment I simply savoured that sweet taste and how filling it was, and then the panic struck.

Even though I wasn’t left feeling as if I might split open and eat in reverse the way I had before, I remembered the previous incident and instantly used [Appraisal] on myself to see if anything horrific had happened that I didn’t immediately notice.

Nameless [Dungeon Core] Lvl: 1

Title: None

Size: 351.58444

Points: 44

HP: 10/10

MP: 57/433

Mobs:

Kobolds: 1/2

Skills:

[Mana Absorption] [Devour] [Tunneling] lvl.1 [Appraisal] lvl.2 [Room Building] lvl.1

My MP was a bit higher than when I had started, but I was nowhere near in danger of eating myself sick again. Whatever it was that tasted so amazing seemed to be a rich source of mana and points, but this time around it hadn’t been nearly enough. While I longed to feel full I was also relieved to know that I had managed to dodge a repeat of the earlier incident. If it had happened to me again I wasn’t sure what I would do. With the sheer amount of mana storage I now had at my disposal the dungeon would expand at rapid levels if it ever filled up to the top.

If I sat perfectly still and didn’t use so much as a single point of mana then it would take me nearly a day and a half to top myself off with mana. I didn’t like the idea of that at all. I was the kind of Dungeon Core that liked to always be doing something, after all, so it just felt wrong to wait around and do nothing. Plus, now that I had my kobold, I should be able to refill MP even faster. After the door was finished they would be able to bring me plenty of things to eat, at least until the badgers woke up.

For now it didn’t seem as if Mama and Papa Badger were in any danger of waking. Despite the construction that had begun on the dungeon and the creation of my kobold it was still morning, and it hadn’t been very long overall since they had gone to sleep. I didn’t know how long badgers slept, but I was probably safe for at least a couple more hours. That should be time enough to finish the door if I was lucky, and after that I could just watch the badgers to see whether things would be safe for my kobold to venture out again or not.

Speaking of them… I couldn’t help but notice that I still had the one beside the kobold listing on my [Appraisal] sheet. That had to mean that my monster was still safe, right? Surely the number would go back down if they died, right? I needed to hold onto that bit of hope as tightly as I could.

My creature would come back to me, safe and sound. For now I needed to keep myself busy with what I could do.

I had a good chunk of MP thanks to whatever it was I had eaten, and so I took a moment to measure the current length of the tunnel. By my best guess of how much mana it generally consumed, it would take me sixty MP to double the width of the passage in order to make it so that more than one kobold could move around at one time.

I, very obviously, didn’t have sixty MP in my stores. I was sitting below that, and I very much didn’t want to go and risk passing out. What would happen if my kobold came back to the dungeon while I was passed out? They were smarter than I had assumed they were when I first saw them, circling around the small room in search of me, but I still didn’t feel confident that they would handle the situation very well.

Even though there was no one around to hear it, I projected the same heavy huff of annoyance that I had heard the badgers make before. As much as I hated it, as much as I would rather be doing absolutely anything else, it seemed like doing nothing at all was exactly what I needed to do for now. Hopefully my monster would be back soon, and when they arrived there might be something I could eat that would raise my MP enough for me to do what I wanted.

The narrow tunnels just didn’t feel right somehow. They needed to be at least twice their current width, if not five times as wide. I wasn’t sure why, but it just felt right somehow. An instinct that was like an itch within my core. It was strange that I was feeling that way now… Before I had been content being small, but it was almost as if, now that I knew how small I really was, that had changed. Was this just another thing that was wrong with me, or was this completely normal?

Inner Voice, do you know anything about this? If so, could you please tell me?

Dungeons exist to lure in creatures and feed off of them.

I hadn’t thought that it would respond this time, but it actually did. While its response didn’t seem to be a direct answer, the not-me generally didn’t say anything that wasn’t related to the question that I asked.

For once in my short life I decided to actually give something a bit of thought, rather than get angry that things hadn’t been spelled out for me. I had been asking why I suddenly wanted to make myself so much larger, and Inner Voice had replied that dungeons lured creatures in to eat them. If I followed that logic then it seemed as if I were meant to lure in things bigger than the badgers.

Did things as big as the Myconid Spores exist outside of the dungeon? Trees must be pretty large, but they also didn’t seem like they were something I could lure inside, since they weren’t creatures. At least… I didn’t think they were. Plants did seem to be alive, so I could be wrong. For some reason I had thought that my monsters would be bigger than anything else that existed out there, but it was possible I was wrong. Actually, me being wrong was the most likely thing. I didn’t know anything, after all, so the chances of me being right about something like that were infinitesimally small.

There was a tickling sensation against the dungeon entrance and I instantly dropped that train of thought to turn my full focus to the hole that led to the outside.

There was the tip of a burnt orange snout that faded to mottled green, and then that quickly became the full head of my kobold as they began to squirm into the dungeon. In their thin arms they were carrying several new things, mostly what looked to be thicker roots and a bunch of chunky brown worms that were far longer than the ones I had stumbled across so far.

“Welcome back! It looks like things were pretty successful!”

My kobold flashed their teeth in a wide grin, using their legs to push themselves along the floor of the tunnel, sliding on their belly. It looked painful, their soft chin bumping into the dirt, but the way they wiggled their tail and crawled made it seem as if they were having no difficulties at all.

Thanks to the slope from the entrance down to where things led to my part of the dungeon, my monster was able to move with a surprising amount of speed, at which point they tumbled down the drop, rolling so that they landed on their rump with a heavy plopping sound. Appearing immensely proud of themselves they set the bundle of things down, looking up to the ceiling. “Was the Core the missing me?” they asked, tail twitching.

It felt like a trap somehow. Those sparkling yellow eyes and that toothy grin seemed to spell disaster if I answered honestly, and yet I found myself too charmed by them to do anything but.

“Very much. I’ve been worried the whole time that you might have gotten hurt somehow.”

My monster let out a soft squeak, putting their hands against their cheeks as they laughed quietly. Their tail thumped against the ground, and I found myself confused by the reaction. Judging by the grin I had thought my kobold might be pleased to find I was worried, but there was something about their movements that suggested they were embarrassed more than happy.

Before I could ask about their reaction they began speaking, high voice almost shy as they directed their words more to the dirt than to anything else. “Then we are being the two peas in the pod. I was much the worried for the Core, too. Anything could be the happening to it without me to be the protecting it.”

The words made me feel warm. So that was why they had seemed embarrassed. They had found out that while they had been fretting for no reason I had also been doing the same. I had no idea what peas were, or what a pod was, but I found that I had to agree with them.

“I guess we are two peas in a pod. I lowered the floor of the room though, so I’m even higher up now. That should make me plenty safe now, right?”

My kobold tipped their head and was quiet for a moment before nodding. “Yes, that should be the plenty being for the now… Though… If the Core was really the worrying about me…” My creature made an odd noise, a soft sort of chirping noise in their throat, as their voice faded away. My curiosity had been piqued, and I couldn’t resist.

“Yes? Is there something I can do to keep you safe while you’re gone?”

My monster looked up to the ceiling of the tunnel, nodding their head slowly as they made that noise again. “Yes. If I were the having the name, then if something were to being the hurting me, even if I did the dying, I would be the safe,” it explained, each word carefully chosen as if explaining a very serious subject matter.

“If I name you… You’ll be safe even if you die?”

Though that didn’t seem right to me, it looked like that had been exactly what my kobold had meant given their immediate reaction. They nodded their head quickly now, the end of their tail twitching as they grinned, apparently pleased that I had understood. “That is being the correct! With the name, I could be the brought back.”

That was interesting, and I certainly didn’t want to lose them. They were my monster, and my very first monster at that. If they were to die then I would have to spend my resources to make another one, and what if the next one didn’t understand me as well as they did? Besides… They seemed to really want to protect me, and they were far too cute for me to resist. There was really only one answer.

“Okay, I’ll come up with a name for you, but in exchange you need to give me a name too, okay? It’s not fair if you have a name and I don’t.”

My kobold slapped their hands over the end of their snout, barely muffling a squealing sound of what seemed to be pure joy. They kicked their feet against the ground with excitement, tail swishing side to side, and whatever hold they had over me was completely cemented then and there. They were my monster, my precious monster. I was wrapped right around their finger. I would do anything to see that level of joy from them again.

“I will be the coming up with the great name for the Core, yes?” they asked, struggling to keep their voice quiet as they got to their feet. “We can be the exchanging them when the door is being the finished, yes?”

“That should give me time to come up with a good name for you, so… Yes. Yes, that works. Just… Try to be careful out there?”

My creature’s eyes seemed to gleam and shine, despite the darkness of the dungeon, and they lifted their scuffed up looking chin as they flashed an open-mouthed grin towards the ceiling. “Do not be the worrying too much. A kobold alone will always be the running if they are in the danger, especially if being the alive is of most importance,” they said, chest puffed with confidence. “For you I will be the sure to be the coming back and the staying safe. The Core is being very much like the kobolds in not being meant to being the alone.”

I felt a wave of relief go through me. So, they would run if they couldn’t win a fight. That was good, it meant I didn’t need to worry too much, though the rest of what they said…

“Kobolds and Dungeon Cores aren’t meant to be alone?”

My monster stopped their movement, hands braced on the edges of the hole as they prepared to climb up and leave the dungeon once more. Their tail swished softly, their head tilting as they seemed to consider what they wanted to say. They weren’t silent for too long before they finally let out a puffing breath, speaking, “I will be doing the explaining of the things when I am the back, yes? While I am the making the door. We are not the knowing how long the badgers will be the sleeping.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, even if I wanted to. There seemed to be something important that my kobold knew, and to find out that I needed to wait to hear it? It made me want to beg them to stay longer, to hurry up and tell me now, rather than force me to wait. I had felt the reverence that they held for me when they had moved my core earlier, however, and so I was reluctant to sour their image of me by throwing a fit.

I could wait. It couldn’t be that long, right?

“Hurry back then.”

My kobold released a squeaking wheeze, though it was quiet enough that the badgers didn’t so much as stir at the sound. They nodded their head and lifted themselves up and into the higher tunnel. “I will. Do not be the moving until I am the back, yes? I am having the many things to be the telling you, so the Core will be wanting to have the MP stored up.”

Something they had to say needed my mana somehow? I wasn’t above sixty yet so it wasn’t as if I had plans to use what I had any time soon, but all the same I agreed to those terms.

I watched as my monster wiggled their way out of the dungeon and back into the light of the sun, letting out a little grumble beneath their breath as they did so. It seemed like the sunlight bothered them, though not as much as it bothered me. I kept my attention on the exit until they were gone from sight.

Right. I had until the door was finished to come up with a name for them, and I wasn’t sure how good I would be at naming things. I only hoped they would be better at names than I would probably end up being. I had a track record of being dumb, after all, and naming something seemed like it would take someone with a lot more smarts than I had.