Felicia looked upon her kingdom. The hexagon she was trapped in consisted of under a dozen square kilometres of mice and plants. A week had passed since she and Agren had started their mana generating project. The results had been pretty promising, she reminisced with a hidden smile. Luckily for both of them, Agren had made all of his initial mice female. This led to a few extremely exhausted but extremely satisfied male mice and a population explosion a few days later. Felicia could have sworn the gestation period of most small mammals was at least a few weeks, but she wasn’t about to complain about the suspiciously fast breeding cycles. The overpopulation of rodents had caused a lot of infighting and thus a large number of lethalities, allowing Agren to absorb their bodies the moment they succumbed.

Felicia did regret their choice of mana generation animal a bit though. She didn’t really have a fear of mice per se. She did have a fear of roiling masses of mice, she found out. She was sitting on top of the hut in the middle of the clearing, using the flat roof as temporary living quarters. The stereotype of the screaming housewife stuck on top of a chair while a rodent had the run of the kitchen was not one she was keen on propagating, but she did find the cliche had a kernel of truth. Seeing a roiling mass of starving rodents a few meters away, knowing that falling into the mass of small critters would result in a pristine skeleton mere hours later was enough of a motivation to stay away from the small mana generators.

At least, she noted with a wry and grim form of satisfaction, the green badger that had thought her arm a nice snack was no longer of this world. It - along with all other non-mice life forms present in this small prison - had succumbed to the mice tide that sprung from the female’s yesterday. Agren had to work overtime as food producer, the little beasties consuming all the trees, plants and other beasts as fast as he could produce them.

“So…”

“Yeah. I can understand what you're feeling, I guess.” Felicia took inventory. She felt an odd mix of contentment, panic and happiness. The past week had been extremely odd, but she had managed to carve a weird form of order into her immediate environment. She laid back on the pile of cotton Agren made for her, trying to catch the last rays of the sinking sun.

“Ah no, that is where you are wrong. I don't really feel any of those emotions you humans keep succumbing to. I just want to warn you that this might take a while. I’m not sure how much time my previous periods of growth took, but I think they last a while.”

Suddenly, the thin walkway formed from rock leading to the stone chute that allowed her to enter her small home didn’t seem too comforting anymore. “Estimate a time frame for me, please.” The uncertainty in Agren’s oddly perfect voice must have shaken her on a deep level. She would never have framed the question like that otherwise.

“Days, weeks, I don’t know. My memory of those times are very fuzzy. Probably not longer than half a year, I think …”

Looking down at the violent waves of grey fur below, she reached for the stone around her neck. “Are you sure you shou-” She stopped talking the moment she felt Agren freeze. The thumb-sized diamond had felt alive until then. She hadn’t consciously noticed it before, to be honest, but him suddenly freezing clued her into the fact that she had been sensing some form of movement from the stone. That suddenly stopped. Now her throat felt oddly empty, lifeless, and cold at the same time.

She stood up, suddenly a lot more aware of the fact that the small roof she was sunbathing on didn’t have a railing. Neither did the thirty-centimetre wide walkway leading to the vertical emergency-style staircase leading into her domicile. She hesitatingly and carefully balanced her way to the stone chute, moving down the vertical ladder with wooden precision. She kept wanting to feel at her throat, the sheer absence of life in front of her neck disconcerting. She didn’t sleep well that night.

She had kept worrying about Agren for hours. Her plan of freeing animals - allowing them to live their life and generate mana for the stone in her choker - had been a massive success. The core had grudgingly praised her for the idea. He hadn’t thanked her though. He had described the feeling he had as he freed his materialised critters from his control like pulling ones own nails. Like sawing off one's own limbs. They had had many discussions, weighing temporary feelings against lasting results. Agren still hadn’t made up his mind. The fact that he had been gathering mana at over a hundred times his ordinary rate wasn’t enough for him to forget the discomfort, a clear indicator that it must have felt terrible for him indeed.

And she still didn’t feel the need to eat. This was the main factor for her restless sleeplessness, she admitted as she observed the morning rays bounce into her studio apartment. Her main source of illumination - the glass tube sticking up through an entire tree and scattering the early rays of the sun through her living space - told her that morning had come after a sleepless night. She stumbled from her bed and crawled up the ladder, once again ignoring the sheer absence of hunger in her stomach. She felt like she could eat, sure, but the ravenous famine that should be wrecking her entire being after a week of not eating was conspicuous in its absence.

She froze when she reached the top of the enclosed ladder.

She had predicted where the mice experiment would go towards by the time all the females were pregnant, the second day of the entire project. She had forced Agren to make her an elevated and mice-proof network of walkways, starting at an emergency-style enclosed ladder emerging from her private home. This had resulted in a narrow network of walkways, connecting her home to the central hut. Along with a few other places of interest.

The entire hexagonal enclosure was unrecognisable by now. Even more so than yesterday. Every single scrap of plant life had been scoured clean. Only mice covered the ground. Only mice and a ragged group of dirty people. Felicia heard them when she was halfway up the ladder. The mice had been making a large number of annoying sounds, so she didn't really react when she heard the crunching of bone and beating of flesh. She did take notice when she saw the grey-furred horde rush into and be beaten back from the hut in the middle of the barren piece of land.

Four men, two women and a child stood their ground against the grey front. She had crawled along the stone walkways, praising Agren for his construction prowess while avoiding looking at the roiling mass off mice below. It took her ten minutes to count the humans inside the small hut as she laid atop it, somehow terrified at the very thought of making contact with the group. She then spent long minutes listening to their voices. She had laid herself on top of the small hut by then, not moving a muscle while playing the role of a silent stalker to perfection.

“I still think it’s weird. Why is the stone missing?”

“Why are we surrounded by mice? Why did we get teleported off-schedule? Don’t ask stupid questions, this is as non-standard as it gets.”

“At least we can report that the dungeon farms are unsupervised. Or a minimum patrol interval of a day.”

“Is that data worth our lives?”

“Yes.”

“I disagree.”

“Noted. You knew what you signed up for, soldier.”

“Yes, ma’am. At least my fiancee will get the widow’s fee.”

“Atta boy. That’s the spirit.”

“Did we really need to take him along though?”

“For the hundredth time, I might look like a kid, I’m actually fifty.”

“Still doesn’t sit well with me though.”

“That’s fine. Paternal or maternal sympathy was a long shot, anyway.”

These kinds of cryptic conversations happened a lot. It was driving Felicia mad. Every time she thought she had gathered enough conversational data to make a solid conclusion, someone said something innocuous that threw half her theories out the window. The people she was spying upon just didn't make any sense. She had looked over the edge to see what they were doing. The group had been keeping the hoard of grey mice at bay with extreme professionalism. Each time a new wave of the critters tried to enter the small building, it was repelled by swift punches, kicks and sweeps. Each rodent than managed to get past the initial defence was smashed into paste by the other occupants of the small hut.

Felicia estimated that two hours had passed like this. The mice outside had proceeded to eat all the foliage and food available, increasingly focussing their attention on the humans inside the stone hut. Every single scrap of vegetable and plant was gone by the time the sun was scorching the small wasteland from its highest point.

Then Felicia’s necklace shattered. She would later recall this moment as instantaneous. The moment it happened was far from instantaneous, however. First, her chocker groaned. The finely materialised mass of iron and silver alloy shook for a few seconds. Felicia was still too caught up in trying to decipher the commentary of the group below to really take notice. One of her failings - one of her many failings, her subordinates would have exclaimed - is that she would pour all her attention into a single purpose. This single-minded focus prevented her from reacting in time when the stone inside the choker swelled in size, bursting free from the crude and improvised setting it was held in.

Felicia failed to react at all when Agren burst free form her throat, bruising her trachea in the process. Felicia was occupied with trying to breathe when the growing diamond bounced away from her, falling to the ground with an anticlimactic landing.

“You really shouldn’t. I mean, why doubt stuff like that when we’re in so deep?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Like a snapping and a wheezing sound.”

“Stop changing the subject. Why should we doubt that we will get the promised rewards when so close to death?”

“Yeah man, no way we are getting out of here. We are dungeon food, one way or the other.”

“Shut up! They don’t know we know th-”

An ominous silence hung in the air. Where the dying screams of mice was interspersed with the grinding sounds of humans smashing said dying mice was filling the air seconds before, now silence hung.

“Wow, what’s this?”

“NO! DON’T TOUCH THA-”

All sound was ended as a loud series of cracks rung. The sound was oddly dry, yet very wet indeed. It was like a combination of a snapping branch and creaking ice, all mushed into a single horrifying noise. Felicia laid on top of the hut for hours. She was sure of what happened, after all. She had seen Agren bounce off the edge after the improvised setting in the crook of her neck exploded. She had theorised what would happen before any of it occurred.

Her first theory had been the correct one. She had thought through the entire thing in a completely logical manner. The humans - or prisoners, as she now knew - below would touch Agren, after which they would die. Then the mice would eat them. Then the mice would die from starvation. Then Agren would wake and she could order him to regrow all the plant life again. He then would be able to absorb all the corpses. All of the human and mice corpses.

Her mind had then spun fanciful alternate tales. Stories in which she would emerge the hero. Fantasies in which she would save the people below, keep them from death and lead them into victory. Felicia did think that that would be a lot of work, though.

Two paths had lain in front of her. One would have consisted out of a lot of effort, social interactions and manipulations, along with a lot of management type work. The other path consisted out of waiting until things fixed themselves.

Felicia chose the easy route. She laid there as the first theory she came up with came to fruition. She laid frozen in the morning sun as multiple people died, giving in to the past she had thought she had outgrown. She didn’t lift a single finger as she heard the horrifying mass of mice chew through their corpses. She still laid there, not moving a muscle, until Agren came back to life three days later.