Hindsight’s Dagger

Chapter 10

When the second half of the tutorial started, I reviewed my resources. Combining the freebies from prior sections and the current one, they increased significantly. My usable mana was shockingly low.

"Agony, is this right?" I asked. My inside bits, whatever they might be, twisted into knots. I only had fifty mana to work with.

"The prompts will explain, but yeah. The last time was to get familiar with the interface. This time it's simulating day cycles you'll actually experience," Agony explained.

"Cores come in different grades. You're using the lowest one, an F grade. Your mana pool will refresh daily this time. The raid timing is unpredictable, so be careful," Agony advised.

I took a look at my setup and found it was unresponsive. Checking the tutorial prompts, I discovered I had to plant my core before I could begin construction. That was another new issue, and I hesitated to put it down somewhere random.

"Something wrong?" Agony asked.

"I'm debating where to put the core. I mean, I can move it later, so it doesn't matter, but it's part of an objective. I feel like there's more to it," I explained. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't have been an objective. Despite how bare-bones the tutorial was in certain ways, none of the content was fluff or busywork.

"Anywhere's fine. You get a fixed set of starting tiles in here. When placing your actual core, it will matter. It can bury itself but placing it in a cave or tunnel is better. You get all of the tiles between the core and entrance for free," Agony explained. I nodded and went back to reading. It was a few minutes before I realized that what he said wasn't covered in any of the prompts. I looked at him, and he grinned at me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

"It's relevant to the tutorial even if it's not covered," he said. I appreciated the tip and gave him a careful head pat in thanks. He smirked, pleased with it and himself afterward.

Back to work! I placed my free tiles first; I didn't have enough to make anything spectacular, but a maze began to take shape. If the party got lost, that would be nice. If they didn't, it wouldn't matter.

I was aiming to make them walk as much as possible in the fewest square feet. According to their descriptions, many of the tiles gave off high heat. In some cases, they were hot enough to inflict a severe status ailment.

Hero parties would have countermeasures at their disposal, magical or otherwise. I didn't expect any less, but I didn't give up on this more insidious form of harm.

Magic spells, equipment, and special abilities had limits. The idea was to increase the exposure long enough to push past them. If I did it right, the hero's wouldn't be able to counter it with a single method.

They'd have to stack preventatives to deal with the brutal environmental conditions. That would eat up equipment slots and other resources for pure survival. It would cut into their ability to counter other aspects of the dungeon or amplify their abilities.

It was a good return on investment for the cost. It was also a cruel method, but I didn't have the luxury of kindness. As the defending party, I should have had a steep advantage. Instead, the terrain rules took most of it away from me.

There was also the issue of the heroes being purpose-built for taking on my challenges. They had to be to reach the dungeon because of its location in a lava field. That felt unfair, but I shook off the thought, smelling bullshit on it.

Thinking like that would get my core kicked in. I had to plan like I was always going to be up against top-tier, mission-specific opponents. Doing otherwise was arrogant and would leave me vulnerable.

In the first section, I'd had prompts to guide me by the hand the whole way. This time I got through them in a few minutes, and then I was on my own. Agony, likewise, wasn't chatty this time. He would still help if I ran into a problem and asked, but that was all.

It didn't take long for me to exhaust my daily mana. Once I did, I spent the remaining time in the short day cycle playing with the layout until I got bored of it. There were only so many ways I could tweak it before I ran out of juice.

With some free time on my hands, I decided to do a little more reading on my species. Most of the information was still opaque to me, but I did learn a few things. Like how I moved was accomplished a similar process to the one from when I was flesh and blood.

My body had its own kind of muscle memory, which was nice. I didn't even want to imagine how much of a pain in the ass it would have been to micromanage my form like it was a WASD body game.

I could learn to change it through practice. I wiggled my tail in a way even most invertebrates wouldn't be able to manage easily. The substance of my being, Z14, didn't have sensible properties.

If I wasn't thinking about my form, I kept a consistent shape. If I concentrated, I could flatten or stretch myself in nauseating ways. With a thought, the nails on my fingers elongated and thickened into claws. The moment my attention wavered, they disappeared. I stretched my tail then tried splitting it into legs with some temporary success.

The limits of my ability to transform seemed to be imagination and focus. Neat.

"Hey, can you make shapes with your tail?" Agony asked. I had no idea but gave it a try. I could manage soft ones but no straight lines.

"How about you?" I asked once I ran out of ideas.

"No, mine isn't bendy buuuut..." Agony made a dramatic gesture then took off. Flying fast, his tail seemed to leave a trail of light like a sparkler. Impressed, I clapped after he got done spelling his name.

Wanting to do a little better than a misshapen heart, I got back to testing my own limits. While I was playing around with my malleable substance, the day finally ended. A pleasant reminder tone let me know mana refresh had occurred. The short day cycle began anew and was more of the same.

I found myself running out of weird tricks to do with my body to keep myself entertained on the third day.

It was a little frustrating to play hurry up and wait, but I felt like I'd get used to it. At least I did until the fourth short day.

That was when I started to feel something odd, a vague but persistent feeling of dread. It wasn't strong enough to trace it back to a source. Instead, it lingered. Haunting my thoughts and causing me to feel dissatisfied with everything.

I studied the map unhappily. The lackluster tutorial supplies weren't the best, but that wasn't important. Like in chess, you had a fixed set to work with and rules to abide by; you won because of strategy.

All too quickly, I burned through my mana supply. Once again, I spent my remaining time before refresh staring at or moving tiles. Free, but not productive. I was fussing because I couldn't figure out what was bothering me.

"Something about the basic structure is making me nervous," I said. I didn't expect a reply but saying things aloud helped me think sometimes.

"Yeah, you'd be having a panic attack if you were linked to the core," Agony agreed. I looked at him in surprise as an alert sounded to announce that the hero party was inbound.

Well, that explained why he'd turned chatty. It didn't count as helping if he told me when it was too late to be helpful. I felt an irritating mixture of amusement and annoyance when he grinned at me.

Agony hovered next to the shared view screen. With a few deft movements, he changed the view to show the core room in detail. The design was simple but still thematically appropriate to keep costs down.

I'd constructed a massive murderous version of the game "the floor is lava." A winding path led from the entrance to the island where the core was. The path wasn't solid but made up of a combination of fixed stone pylons and floating stones.

The floating stones would start to sink after a few moments, so you had to move fast. The fixed pylons were a darker color contrary to my wishes, but it wasn't completely obvious. Despite that, the obstacle set off a build state alarm. To appease the build alarm, I added small islands at intervals to be used as fighting platforms.

The core was on one at the very back of the room. To make myself feel a bit better, I'd placed the largest fire elemental I could afford as a guardian for it.

The elemental in question was similar to Agony in some ways. The main difference besides its size was the blockier build and inability to fly. I was caught off guard when it turned out to be a bit on the dim side.

They didn't speak but could follow simple instructions without an issue. Getting my desires across in that format had taken a couple tries. Frustrated, I'd wanted to ask Agony if this was normal for elementals of that size or a thing with this one particular one.

I kept it to myself instead. I felt like that conversation was a great way to get myself in trouble. Agony had been good to me. I didn't want to risk saying something insensitive or insulting by accident.

I needed to keep my head in the game, not worry about things I couldn't do anything about now. The real question would be if the heroes' heat resistance was up to the job. It was something we'd both have to wait to find out about.

Still, I couldn't help but look for flaws. Agony had changed the view for a reason, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong despite the clue. It was beyond frustrating, but I hadn't noticed the problem in the build phase. That I wouldn't suddenly get it now wasn't strange.

"An average archer could land a couple of mana reinforced arrows and do damage. A good one could crack a weak core like this on their own," Agony explained. He was pointing at a section that hadn't looked special in map view.

"Felicity…" I muttered as I looked over the design. Snipers weren't something I'd considered when I was building it. I'd been trying to save some mana and left many original elements in place this time.

The result was ledges and alternate entrances to the boss room around the periphery of the room. Most of which were convenient sniping points. I hadn't noticed them in the 2D view and could only kick myself now.

"No worries, this isn't supposed to be too realistic. You might not get as high a score, but that's all," Agony said in a comforting tone that did nothing for me.

On cue, the heroes came to challenge my dungeon. A vibration coursed through me without warning. I shivered as something like a river of acid ran down my spine. Acid of the etching variety, not the fun one.

I knew in my pseudo flesh it was a premonition of death.