Titan of Steel [Nuclear Fantasy][Dungeon Core][Original]

[I Just Write]

I had already decided that my current situation was intolerable the moment I had figured out what was going on. In my current state, I was entirely at the mercy of the world and its inhabitants, with negligible ability to control what happened to me. This is because I had somehow been transformed into a room and hallway embedded into a hillside, with a blue orb on a pedestal in said room that I instinctively understood was now me.

The instant I realized this, a menu screen popped up in my vision. It read as follows.

As a new Dungeon, you can choose one type of Minion to start with without spending resources to develop them. Please be aware that you cannot change your starting minion, and that it will have a significant impact on your theming.

-Goblin
Intelligence: Dubious
Strength: Low
Speed: Fast
Utility: Low
Autonomy: High
Cost To Summon: Low

Your standard fantasy fodder, Goblins are small green humanoids with a vicious streak a mile wide. They have little to recommend them, aside from the fact that they can be fielded extremely cheaply and can fend for themselves in harsh environments. This means that Goblins can spend up to six hours outside your dungeon before going feral, meaning that they can forage resources for you effectively.

-Giant Spider

Intelligence: Smart Animal
Strength: Low
Speed: Fast
Utility: Moderate
Autonomy: Moderate
Cost To Summon: Moderate

Spiders are members of the arachnid family characterized by near-universal venomous bites and the ability to spin webs out of extremely strong silk. This particular species has been enlarged to the size of a large dog, allowing it to fight on a somewhat even footing with intruders. A Giant Spider that spends more than three hours outside your dungeon will immediately go feral and stop responding to commands.

-Skeleton
Intelligence: Cunning
Strength: Moderate
Speed: Moderate
Utility: Low
Autonomy: Nil
Cost To Summon: Low

An animated pile of bones held together by magic, Skeletons can be quite effective combatants given their low summoning cost. They are clever enough for the occasional bit of creative problem solving, and about as strong as a normal human. That said, they will immediately collapse into inert bones if they ever leave your zone of influence.

-Clockwork
Intelligence: Cunning
Strength: High
Speed: Slow
Utility: High
Autonomy: Low
Cost To Summon: High

Mechanical constructs using mana for power and control systems, Clockworks are intricate creations which require a large expenditure of mana to summon. That said, their physical power is unmatched among starting minions, and they are easily customized to perform a large number of utility tasks when not defending you. Clockworks can optionally be fitted with an on-board mana battery which can sustain remote operations for an hour before shutting down, but a clockwork deactivated in this manner can easily be restarted if more mana is provided.

It only took me a few moments to make my decision. According to this strange interface, I was a Dungeon, meaning that if I did nothing I stood to be continually ransacked by adventurers in search of loot or XP at best. This was not a fate I would allow, meaning that I needed a way to move under my own power. If I wanted to become independently mobile, I would need to build my own means of movement, which would require immense motors, control systems, and other machinery.

Clockworks for my starting minion had the potential to get me the vast majority of what I would require in order to pull this off, as they by definition would contain motors, sensors, materials, and control systems that would work under the local laws of reality. Thus, I made my decision.

Notice!: 1* Basic Clockwork summoned!
Current Mana: 5/20 (1 Room + 1 Corridor)
Mana Regeneration: 10/day (Core)
Upkeep: 1 (Minions)
Net Mana: 9/day

Feature Unlocked: Clockwork Customization

Directly next to my core, a humanoid machine took form. I estimated that it was 1.7 meters tall, and it was covered in shining brass panels, save for the occasional gear partially extruded from a joint.

Next, I needed some additional security. The immediate possibility that came to mind was sealing off the entrance, but some part of me immediately rebelled at the idea; no matter how much I wanted to seal myself off from the world and simply build without interference, that option was closed to me. Well then, if I couldn't simply hide, could I make a door? Another twinge of pain, and I changed my line of thought to "could I make an extremely durable minion keep guard in the entrance?" This option, thankfully, seemed to be easily available.

With what I wanted in mind, I asked aloud to no-one in particular "Now how do I get at the Clockwork Customization interface?"

Designer Interface: initializing

I really missed the ability to grin. Engineering munchkinry, here I come!


It was roughly an hour later when I had the door working to my satisfaction; as it turned out, the cost to summon a Clockwork wasn't based entirely on size, but also on how many different things you wanted it to do. Fortunately for me, there were only three different functions for my door extremely tough minion. The first was an extremely heavy-duty lock made out of steel I had painstakingly adjusted the alloy composition for. The second was an eight-digit combination keypad which would only allow the door to unlock when the correct combination was input, and last was a linear motor which allowed the door to automatically open and close itself when it needed to.

Compared to the immense complexity and versatility in even my Basic Clockwork, this door was simplicity itself, and that meant it could be cheap, even when the layer of armored steel was almost half a meter thick.

Clockwork Blue Print Saved: Armored Combination Lock Door

Still, I had three mana left over from that, which meant I could come up with a few more adjustments. First order of business was the corridor leading to my Core. At the moment, it was a literal straight shot. Anyone who opened the door could easily open fire on my core, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I quickly queried my interface "How much does it cost to remodel a corridor?"

Basic Construction Costs
-New Corridor: 2 mana per 20 meters
-Adjust corridor: 1 mana per corridor
-Finish walls/Floor: Increases mana capacity by 1 (2 mana per 20 meters)
-New Room: 5 mana per 100 m2
-Move/adjust Room: 2 mana
-Finish walls/floor: Increases mana capacity by 2 (5 mana per room)

I tried to nod and achieved precisely jack squat doing so, before I adjusted the hallway into a vague S shape, removing the clear line of fire from the door. This left me with 2 mana left, which I decided to put towards some significantly more lethal defenses in case someone managed to either hack the lock or bash down my armored door. Another couple hours of tinkering later, and I had a rudimentary machine gun turret aimed down the longest straight part of my twisting hallway, ready to lay down a hail of lead on anyone who entered.

Notification: There is someone at the entrance of the Dungeon.

Dreading what this could possibly lead to, I shifted my perspective to just outside my entrance, interested in evaluating if the person outside was a threat.

 

[I Just Write]

Seth, generally speaking, didn't care for much aside from his sheep out here on the plains. He didn't have much of a choice, strictly speaking; when a whole tenth of your flock got eaten by the tax collectors each year, everything except keeping enough sheep alive to make sure you and your family didn't starve generally fell by the wayside. Things like buying produce, tending the house, and stuff not directly related to tending the flock tended to fall to Seth's wife and boys. After all, tending the flock sometimes resulted in Seth being away from home for days at a time, so it's not like he could be relied on to keep the house in good condition.

It could be quite reasonably said that Seth and his family were struggling, but then was there anyone who wasn't, what with the bastard currently on the throne? After a few moments, Seth figured that the tax collectors might be doing a bit better if they skimmed off the top, but on the other hand if they got caught doing that...

Never before had Seth ever felt pity for a tax collector.

It was as he was musing on this subject that Seth spotted a large gray object towards the far edge of his flock. Seth was immediately suspicious of this; he knew every inch of the plains his sheep grazed on, and there weren't any large boulders on that hill before now. Determined to prevent any damage to his flock aside from the government-mandated part, the shepherd jaunted over to the object, a feeling going down the back of his neck like he'd been shuffling around in wool socks during winter.

Soon, Seth came close enough to the object to realize that it was actually an utterly massive metal door embedded into the hillside, the feeling of charge in the air only intensifying as Seth got closer. It was then that Seth remembered his grandma's stories about Dungeons, and the troubles and boons one could bring. He also remembered what his grandma had told him to do if he ever found one.

Cautiously, the shepherd removed one of the shining purple beads from his side-bag that his grandma had managed to secretly pass down to him, placed it at the door, and began to silently herd his flock away from the entrance to the Dungeon. After all, while Dungeons may contain wealth, to claim it was to risk one's life. Seth's family couldn't afford anything remotely resembling risk under any circumstances. Not to mention that the tax collector would probably take anything he pulled out of a Dungeon anyway.

Thus, Seth had to make a choice; did he tell no-one about the Dungeon and potentially run afoul of the Drake Guard, or did he inform the Guard, possibly angering the Dungeon enough to send monsters to kill him while he slept? Either way, Seth didn't like his choices.

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With the vague awareness I had of the world outside my dungeon, I watched as the shepherd quietly shooed his flock of sheep away from my heavily armored door. The bead that he had left on my doorstep before departing however, was definitely something that caught my interest. Cautiously, I commanded the door to open, before I sent my Basic Clockwork to collect the item. The instant the bead crossed my threshold, a notification popped up, informing me of what I had just received.

Item Profile: Purple Mana Bead: Made by an experienced spell caster, this is a compressed bead of solid mana that can be tapped as necessary, but cannot be recharged. This bead in particular contains 50 mana.

If I'd had a jaw, it would have been hanging open slightly. With a mere twenty mana I had gone from a room and a hallway to a moderately well-defended location. With fifty mana, I had the potential to well and truly expand my horizons. Still, the fact was that this was a finite resource; if my ultimate goal to become mobile were to be realized, I would need some way to re-invest this windfall into a greatly increased mana output.

Needing some more information about possible avenues, I queried my interface "What are possible ways to gain mana?"

Gaining Mana: Mana can be gained in several ways.
-Fully conscious souls generate mana if the underpinnings of consciousness aren't propped up by magic; this is how your Core produces mana.
-Unattended organic material in your dungeon can be decomposed into usable mana.
-Particularly energetic reactions can be harnessed to produce mana, if properly contained.

The instant I read 'energetic reactions' my mind immediately leapt straight past all forms of chemical power generation, and went straight to nuclear power. After all, why bother with volatile and difficult to contain fluorides when you could go straight to good old Uranium?

Still, I'd never actually built a nuclear reactor in real life before, which meant that I would need to do some significant trial and error. Courtesy of the gift I'd received, I could afford to do that, quickly digging a new room to test my reactor prototypes in, slapping an armored door on it marked with appropriate warnings, and getting to work. Now, from what I remembered a good isotope of Uranium for fission had 233 nucleides, but I didn't actually know how many of those were protons and how many were neutrons, or even if this world's physics would allow such shenanigans at all.

Nothing for it, I began counting my way up the periodic table to try and make myself a nuclear reactor. As I did so, I made a mental note to do something nice for that shepherd; he had almost certainly saved me almost a week of progress by giving me this bead, and I wanted to get myself mobile as soon as I possibly could.

 

[Remass]

I remember seeing this on SV. Do you plan to do a revision as you post this version, or is it just a reposting of the old story?

 

[I Just Write]

Just a repost.

 

[I Just Write]

After two hours of tinkering with various atomic nuclei, I eventually threw my metaphorical hands up in the air and tossed the idea of physical plausibility out completely. While I had hit upon the correct number of protons to make Uranium 233 almost immediately, juggling control rods, neutron moderators, and other such things turned out to be more trouble than I really wanted to deal with. It was a distinctly possible avenue that I might explore again later, but I had quickly hit upon a much more mechanically simple option for power generation.

Courtesy of the materials designer that I had access to as part of Clockwork Customization, I could in fact put together atomic nuclei with a completely arbitrary number of protons and neutrons, including configurations so unstable that they would fly apart into their component nucleides nigh instantly. In this case, I opted for an 'atom' composed of one thousand protons and precisely zero neutrons; pretty much the instant I conjured one of those things it would fly apart into a huge number of loose Hydrogen atoms. Summoning these so-called atoms into a large vat of water with a high content of dissolved Oxygen resulted in both said water getting very hot very quickly, the loose Hydrogen nuclei reacting with the dissolved Oxygen to form more water and neutralize the exhaust's acidity, and an utterly obscene amount of gamma rays going every which way.

This copious amount of steam was then easily shoved through a turbine to generate power, while one of the standard 'mana motors' from my clockwork design interface could be hooked up to act as a generator to convert this rotational kinetic energy into mana I could use. Yes, the design required the continuous conjuration of significant amounts of matter besides the fuel in order to keep the reactor properly cooled. It also produced easily visible exhaust in the form of a massive plume of steam, as constantly conjuring water inside the reactor without venting any would lead to it self-destructing from the pressure buildup. However, even with all of these factors taken into account, my 'proton pile' reactor was still mana-positive when it was running, with my first fully functioning prototype giving me ten mana per hour.

Blueprint Saved: Mark 1 Proton Pile Mana reactor

Thus, my cover was now completely blown if it wasn't already, as I was venting a massive plume of steam into the air over my present location. In exchange, my mana income had just increased by over twenty fold.

Immediately, I began to dig downwards with the aim of reinforcing my position against the interference that would doubtlessly be coming. The second floor almost immediately found itself playing host to a dozen of my current reactor design with the radiation shielding omitted; my constructs could be easily made immune to radiation, and I had precisely zero qualms if adventurers coming to ransack me ate a lethal dose of radiation to the everywhere.

Still, even with a fully functioning reactor design, the fact was that I was nowhere near the level of power output I would be needing to become independently mobile. I'd run the numbers on a massively scaled up Basic Clockwork sufficient to hold a moderately large dungeon inside its head and torso, and with all the compensators needed to deal with the frame's immense weight I'd be expending around 60,000 Mana per day just for basic movement. Needless to say, my current reactor design would be needing some serious overhauls.

Thus, now that I was pulling in a significant mana output, my next priorities were fortifications and intelligence gathering. The former would largely be based on an utterly absurd amount of guns and radioactive hazards, but the latter would be based on something quite straightforward. Namely, I was building Unmanned Aerial Vehicles equipped with camera turrets to survey the land beneath them, shoving a heavily miniaturized Proton Pile in the back for both power generation and thrust, and launching them into the skies to survey the region. The fact that it would be spewing gamma rays everywhere when in flight was fairly irrelevant; it would be flying high enough that nobody on the ground would really be affected, and anyone who tried to get into melee combat with that thing deserved what they got.

Anyway, I was already beginning on the construction of my main hull for when I would finally become independently mobile. Over the course of a day I managed to get the basic form of the head and torso completed thanks to the plentiful mana provided by my current seven Proton Pile reactors, and I fully expected my construction progress to only increase in speed the further along I got. Still, I was far from in the clear, even with the additional layers of defense I had put around my core.

I had just set up another pair of Proton Piles in the 'shoulders' so I could tinker with turbine and generator optimizations when I got the first intelligence report back from my aerial observer. What I learned wasn't exactly pretty, seeing as there was what looked like a small army marching straight towards my location.

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Seth the shepherd and his wife had a very sensible arrangement when it came to money, and the spending thereof when alcohol was involved; seeing as the former was in perpetual short supply, and the latter could easily be exchanged for all of the former if one wasn't careful. Namely, only one of the household's adults could go out drinking at any given time, and that the one who stayed home would decide how much money the one going to the pub could bring with them. After his close call with the dungeon and the day it took him to prod his flock home, Seth had called for a turn at the pub tonight. Djain had then made some critical financial calculations before sending him off with exactly enough money for three mugs of beer, but no more.

Thus, after a half hour walk to cross the distance between his house and the pub, Seth set himself down on one of the bar stools and ordered. Then, someone who the hapless shepherd had hoped never to see again entered the pub. Seth didn't need to look up to see that it was Karyll Scaleridge, the second in command for the local branch of the Drake Guard. Also known as the Supreme Leader's personal band of heavily armed thugs. The simple feeling of menace she constantly exuded was more than enough to inform anyone in the vicinity exactly who they were dealing with.

As the bulky woman slammed the door shut hard enough to rattle the pub's foundation, she growled out "Alright you hicks! One of our scouts spotted what looks like smoke rising from the hills just outside town, and we're going to go investigate. That said, the others in the Drake Guard have raised the point that whoever's there might be hostile, and it'd be good to have some meat shields to hide behind. Guess who got lucky?"

There was a brief pause before Karyll grinned evilly (as if she needed the help), and added "That's right, it's you guys! Now get moving and I might not kill you where you stand!"

An hour later, Seth and almost a hundred of his fellow townsfolk found themselves being marched towards their presumed death at the point of the Drake Guard's enchanted weapons, only Seth noticing that they were being marched almost directly towards the Dungeon he had stumbled across a couple days ago. Silently, and to no god in particular as long as they weren't the Supreme Leader, Seth uttered a prayer that the Dungeon would recognize him and spare his life.

 

[I Just Write]

The incoming group was still a few miles out when my surveillance drone spotted them. Given that they were moving at a normal walking pace, I estimated that I had roughly two hours before they would arrive and cause me trouble. Still, I figured that it would probably be a good idea to get a better idea of what I was dealing with, regarding who was coming. With that in mind, I ordered my drone to fly lower for a better view, but not so low that it would needlessly irradiate those it was surveying.

Almost immediately, the improved resolution from my drone informed me of several crucial facts. First and foremost, what I had thought was one group was actually two. There were roughly one hundred and twenty people coming my way, but only twenty of them were armed. At first I thought that the unarmed group might be some sort of auxiliary for hauling loot back, but then I saw that the armed group was very conspicuously pointing their weapons at the unarmed group.

At this point, I made an irrational decision; while it would be safest to simply exterminate all possible threats, it was also a path I did not want to go down under any circumstances. Instead, I swore to myself that I would spare as many of the hostages as I could. Now, it was simply a question of strategy. I had the greatest leeway to work with on my first floor since there weren't any under construction parts of my future body there, so I immediately set about turning it into my primary filter, where I would hopefully be able to sort out the hostages from the hostage takers. On this floor, there would be no forced radiation exposure, and nor would I truly go all-out. In addition, I added a movie theater/presentation room behind hidden doors, with speed-optimized clockworks to grab the unarmed individuals and pull them to safety. After all, I would need a place to put these people until things blew over, and being able to explain what was going on would be a major benefit.

That said, I would definitely be filling the floor with heavily armed minions in order to hold the incoming force at bay as long as possible. Furthermore, any mercy I extended would be strictly limited to the first floor. No matter how much I wanted to protect the innocent, I also had my own safety to ensure.

Anyway, defensive measures with a more distinctly lethal bent included finalizations to the design of the construct I referred to as the 'Clockwork Knight'. Primarily melee-focused in comparison to my Armed Clockworks and Machine gun Turrets, each Clockwork Knight was a hulking monstrosity of Vanadium Steel designed to almost completely obstruct passage through my corridors. For combat gear I'd included both an incredibly durable combat shield, and a chainsword, leveraging the immense strength that Clockworks could bring to bear. I'd also mounted a modified Proton Pile in the chest, built less for power generation, and more for firing a diffuse blast of superheated radioactive plasma into the faces of anyone who happened to be directly in front of them.

I also made a point of installing several incredibly lethal traps; some were simple brute force in the form of rotary saws that could be rapidly extended out of the wall in a few corridors. Others were somewhat less so, such as the collection of Uranium rods I'd installed in the wall in the second floor's main 'kill zone' corridor, allowing said corridor to be absolutely bathed in deadly radiation at a moment's notice. Further modifications in this direction included deliberate modifications to the second floor Proton Piles so that they would release even more gamma rays into the corridor. It's about this time when I received a notification from my interface.

Dungeon Themes: As Dungeons mature, they often develop a distinct individual style, commonly known as a Theme. Themed Dungeons have access to more advanced features, such as Bosses, more advanced Minions, and specialized room effects. These effects are tailored to the Dungeon in question's Theme.

Your current Theme is: Atomic Clockwork

Minion Group Unlocked: Gremlins
Intelligence: Cunning
Strength: low
Speed: Moderate
Utility: Very High
Autonomy: Moderate
Cost To Summon: High

Small Fey creatures with a knack for machinery, Gremlins aren't all that useful in a direct fight, but that's not the point. Instead, Gremlins make for excellent support units, as they are capable of rapidly repairing or upgrading Clockworks, or even fielding their own constructs with no additional cost on your end. Gremlins can leave the dungeon, but will go feral after a number of hours depending on type.

Minion Group Unlocked: Mutants
Intelligence: Low
Strength: High
Speed: High
Utility: Low
Autonomy: Nonexistent
Cost To Summon: High

Warped by exposure to radiation or other corruptive effects, the mind of a mutant is irreparably damaged on a deep level, leaving them only capable of direct and savage combat. Fortunately for them, their twisted bodies excel at this, as they have immense strength, speed, and odd morphological anomalies that can trip up opponents. Further, Mutants are healed by exposure to further radiation or corruptive effects, instead of being harmed. Any mutant that leaves the dungeon will immediately go feral, embarking on a bloodthirsty rampage without any form of direction or control.[/spoiler]

Bosses Unlocked!

I temporarily ignored the possibilities offered by Gremlins and Mutants for the time being. Instead, I immediately homed in on that 'Boss' option and queried my Interface what it was capable of.

Bosses: Final guardians at the end of each floor, Bosses pack a lot of additional power for their cost. The Boss tag can be added onto any Minion, vastly reducing their summoning cost and increasing their lethality, with the caveat that the Boss tag can only be applied to one Minion per floor.

That knowledge acquired, I immediately set about slapping together a suitably lethal Boss for my first floor. I didn't have loads of time to min-max this one, so I would need to hurry.

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While still fearing for his life, Seth's experience of said fear grew far less acute the closer he got to the Dungeon. While at first it had been a blazing terror, now it was more a feeling of resigned inevitability. Still, eventually, Karyll made her way to the Dungeon with her unwilling entourage in tow. For a brief moment, the sight of the massive steel door embedded into the hillside gave Seth the vague hope that Karyll would give up finding her way inside and would let them all go home.

This hope was immediately dashed when the armored woman noted "Now, this is obviously the entrance to a Dungeon, meaning that we'll be needing to break in and plunder that bugger for all it's worth. I don't much care to try and figure out the lock, sooo..."

And with that, Karyll pulled out her sword, plunging it into the bartender who not too long ago had been serving Seth a mug of beer. There was a distinct feeling of unease, before the bartender crumbled to ash and Karyll's long bastard sword lit up with brilliant green flames. Then, with a positively vile grin and an incantation of "Soulburner", Commander Scaleridge carved her blade right through the door, rapidly kicking the hewn off segments of armor steel inside as she cut off new sections.

There was a brief pause, before the murderous woman said "Well, go on. You'll probably live slightly longer if you go in there than if we have to spear you here and now, so you might as well all go in."

With that, Seth's shoulders sagged, and he began marching into the dungeon, hoping that at the very least his ordeal would be over quickly. Turning the corner, Seth found himself face to face with a hulking metallic figure blocking the corridor. Then, surprisingly, one of the steel wall panels opened up and the machine spoke saying "Quickly, go through there if you want to live."

Seth did as told without hesitation, rapidly dashing down the secret corridor towards what he dearly hoped was safety. Behind him. he could hear what sounded an awful lot like people being messily slaughtered, but the continued pounding of feet in the corridor behind him allowed him some hope that wasn't the case. Then, Seth came out into what looked a lot like a theater from one of the very few plays he had ever attended, a mechanical voice calling for him to find a seat.

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In the end, I managed to shuffle about forty of the hostages through my secret corridor to safety before the hostage takers entered. As soon as that happened, simply allowing the villagers to dash through to safety rapidly ceased to be an option, unless I wanted to give the game away. Thus, I switched to having each panel very briefly fly open just long enough for one of my clockworks to seize a hostage and pull them through before closing, which managed to get a few more through.

Then the ones behind this whole assault came into combat against my first Clockwork Knight, and everything went to shit.

 

[I Just Write]

My first Clockwork Knight managed to hold for all of two minutes against the armed members of the group, primarily because their leader spent 75% of that time side-tracked by other endeavors. To be more specific, she spotted the armored door leading to my first prototype reactor and called out to the others in her group "You guys handle Mr. Metal over there, I'm going to check this room for loot!"

Another of the hostages met their end at the tip of the woman's blade then, and she quickly demolished the armored door leading to the reactor chamber. The instant she entered, I cranked the reactor as hot as it could stand. The limits of the turbines meant it probably wouldn't generate much more power, but I was all for giving this murderous woman a lethal dose of radiation.

At the exact same time, my Clockwork Knight managed to take down three of the other murder-hobos using its Proton Pile blaster, filling the corridor directly in front of it with what basically amounted to a highly radioactive steam explosion. This knocked another two off-balance, which the machine capitalized on with its chainsword. This, sadly, didn't last, as one of the enemy troopers got the bright idea to stick their spear right in the Proton Pile outlet, frying the delicate conjuration runes with a crackle of electricity.

As the soldiers died, I felt significant surges of mana. By my estimates, each of them was giving me on the order of twenty to thirty mana. For a brief moment I could see how that woman's evil soul-sucking sword could be so powerful, before firmly shutting down that line of thought. Proton Piles provided me with plenty of Mana, and I rather disliked the idea of feeding off sapient life. I might not be human anymore, but I still refused to cross that particular line; it felt far too much like cannibalism.

Anyway, after my Clockwork Knight fired its Proton Pile the first time, everything went downhill for that particular machine. The chainsword was deadly if it managed to score a hit, but at the moment that was turning out to be a big 'if', as the experienced troopers quickly began to knock the construct off-balance and start doing serious damage to it. Then that positively evil woman concluded that no, there wasn't any loot in the room with my prototype reactor, and shredded what was left of my Clockwork Knight in seconds.

This allowed the remaining hostiles to round the corner to the second part of my entry corridor, where they immediately ran afoul of both my first machine gun turret and an Armed Clockwork. With that, a fusillade of bullets began flying down the corridor, tearing down another two of the soldiers. That woman, though, was simply casually waltzing through the bullets, her wounds healing almost instantly as she devoured the souls of her comrades as they fell.

This advance also brought the enemy troops into the part of the corridor that my circular saws could cover, and cover they did, the blades bursting out of the wall to decapitate several of them. Still, in the end, both that positively evil woman and three of her troops made it to the end of the corridor where they swiftly demolished both my machine gun turret and the Armed Clockwork, before coming face to face with another armored door. I didn't bother with letting that woman demolish it, instead opening it right as my first floor boss lined up a shot with its cannon.

With a resounding BANG, the cannon fired straight at the evil, evil woman. Almost immediately her head was reduced to red paste, then just as quickly reformed, as I felt much of the leftover death energy in the air be consumed. Then my hulking metal monstrosity strode forwards as it fired at one of the less powerful troopers, splattering them all over the wall as it extended its four arms, each tipped with a deadly circular saw.

In the end, my machine fell, but now that woman was alone, save for the terrified civilians who I had managed to mostly shuffle through the secret corridor to safety with only a dozen or so casualties. The woman went downstairs now, casually demolishing both the Armed Clockwork and the machine gun turret I had waiting at the start of the second floor before slicing through yet another armored door and entering the corridor where I'd installed my Uranium trap. The wall panel concealing the radiation source fell, and as the control rods retracted the entire corridor lit up with the deadly blue glow of Cerenkov Radiation.

Simultaneously, the Armed Clockworks at the end of the corridor opened fire, the hail of bullets either bouncing off the woman's armor, or achieving little as her wounds healed almost instantly. She had just reached the end of the corridor and demolished the obstructions there when suddenly she sagged and began to retch, her reserves of stolen life energy apparently running dry. She still managed to enter the corridor with my primary reactor bank, but after nearly getting pasted by the machine gun turret on the opposite end, she apparently decided to retreat, her progress growing slower and more unsteady the further she progressed through the radiation trap as energetic reaction products wreaked havoc on her internal organs..

I decided not to take any chances regarding this, dispatching some of my Armed Clockworks from my under-construction hull to pursue her. As it turned out, I needn't have bothered, as she collapsed while she was approaching the stairs back to the first floor, the massive dose of radiation she had received apparently proving too much for her to handle. I didn't take any chances regardless; as soon as my Armed Clockworks caught up to the woman, they put her out of her misery.

Now, all I needed to do was repair the damage, and explain to the terrified civilians what had happened.

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Seth had been cowering in the hidden room for a few minutes when the sound of explosions and death ceased, along with most of the others who had been unofficially conscripted by Karyll and her contingent of the Drake Guard. Still, the pair of metal monsters waiting in the room had everyone distinctly on-edge, as they didn't know whether the Dungeon they were in would let them go, or simply kill them all like it had apparently done to the Drake Guard.

Then the wall all the chairs were facing lit up with a simplistic representation of a face, and a metallic, twanging voice rang out through the room, saying "Testing, one two three, testing. Ah, apparently this is working correctly. I had been worried about that. Anyway, if any of you have questions I will answer to the best of my ability, though I hope you will all return the favor."

Seth didn't quite know what possessed him to stand up and ask "What has become of Karyll Scaleridge of the Drake Guard? She was the one in charge of this mess."

Suddenly, the screen shifted to show what Seth guessed was a map of the Dungeon, and the metallic voice answered "She and the rest of the armed individuals are dead. One member of the group managed to make it to the second floor before her supply of stolen life ran out and she died from-" and then the voice said a word Seth did not know, but he at least understood the important bit. Namely that Karyll was dead, and as soon as the Supreme Leader found out, he would almost certainly assume the county was in rebellion and kill everyone there.

 

[I Just Write]

The questions and answers between myself and those I had saved from the Drake Guard continued for about an hour, with the townsfolk gradually filtering out after I had cleaned the corridor outside of what little residual radioactivity the Clockwork Knight had produced by firing its Proton Pile.

What I learned of the situation outside my dungeon only strengthened my resolve to achieve mobility as soon as I possibly could. The country of Regno, as it turned out, was under the control of an absolutely brutal dictatorship that brought to mind all the worst aspects of North Korea and an extortion-heavy mafia racket. Of the incredibly heavy taxes that were being levied, not a single coin's worth went towards projects that would make people's lives better as far as I could tell.

Further, absolutely anyone looking for new knowledge that could possibly be used against the regime was publicly executed in an incredibly brutal fashion, after having their vocal chords ripped out so they couldn't scream their forbidden knowledge to anyone as they died. Law enforcement meanwhile completely ignored crimes against average people, instead solely concerning themselves with discovering and destroying threats to the regime. War meanwhile was constant, as the Supreme Leader constantly fought with rivals who were just as bad for territory and taxation rights.

All of this would have been enough to make me want to forcibly bring this mess to a crashing halt on its own, but then there was the regime's policy on Dungeons. Namely that a contingent of the Drake Guard was to be stationed outside, and completely smash and plunder a dungeon every twelve hours to prevent them from becoming a threat and to send more treasure to the Supreme Leader's hoard. With that knowledge, my course of action was cemented.

Immediately, I began digging deeper and constructing more of my torso. One of the more important decisions I made during this period was that I would be housing my primary power plant in a 'backpack' unit partially embedded into my main hull. While it wouldn't be anywhere near the full output I would need in order to attain independent mobility, I had still taken the opportunity to stuff the 'backpack' with Proton Piles, which would speed my construction further.

The fact of the matter was that I needed better reactors, but I also couldn't afford to take my attention away from engineering my body further. Then I remembered that now I had minions other than Clockworks to work with, minions that were explicitly stated to be good with machinery. With all of two minutes work, I quickly adjusted the space in my right shoulder to contain a laboratory for tinkering with reactors, and splurged the remaining mana I'd gotten off the Drake Guard to summon ten Basic Gremlins.

Basic Gremlin: Gremlins that are just barely starting down the path of tinkering, Basic Gremlins have a lot of potential but are not yet truly proficient with most technical tasks. That said, they learn very quickly. Basic Gremlins can leave the dungeon for one hour before going feral.

As it turned out, Basic Gremlins looked an awful lot like the popular conception of fairies, which is to say tiny humanoids with insectile wings. There were some differences however; for one, Gremlin ears were large and triangular, jutting out from the sides of their heads. Second, they apparently either had very sensitive eyes or something, because every single Gremlin was wearing a pair of large steel-rimmed tinted goggles so dark that I was incredulous that they could see anything at all through them. Other equipment was greatly varied, but I also noticed that each Gremlin was equipped with both a Geiger Counter and a very conspicuous radiation dosimeter. Apparently my theme had something of an impact.

As soon as I was done gawking at my first ever biological minions, I ordered them "There is a Proton Pile reactor in the other part of your lab, behind the radiation bulkhead. I want you to do your absolute best to improve on its maximum mana output per unit of volume, as I will need performance at least twenty times what it currently offers in order for what I have planned. As long as you follow proper radiation safety protocols, you have free reign."

As one, my squad of Gremlins saluted and replied "Yes sir, we will do our level best!" and got to work. Simultaneously, a notification popped up.

Room Specialization
Do you want to designate this room as an Engineering Lab?
Cost: 40 mana
Effects:
-Gremlin XP gain increased
-Allows Gremlins to conjure tools for usage without expending mana
-Components for experimental systems cost 10% of normal for conjuration, but cannot leave the Engineering Lab
-May allocate a specific mana budget to the Lab for its autonomous use

I had mana to burn, so I immediately hit 'yes' and allocated twenty mana per hour. With the vastly reduced costs associated with working in a Lab, that should allow the research team to go wild with their ideas.

Anyway, I had more construction that I would be needing to undertake in order to achieve my goals, so I got right to it. Next on the agenda, I needed more stuff between my core and the outside world. After all, that 'little' intrusion from the Drake Guard came far too close for comfort. As I dug, I cheerfully noted that my large number of floors meant I would be able to deploy a much larger proportion of floor bosses than normal.

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Honestly, Seth was amazed that he was still alive considering that he had just been conscripted by the Drake Guard and forced to enter what was apparently one of the deadliest Dungeons he'd ever heard of. Then again, the one close to home was the only Dungeon he'd ever seen firsthand, so it wasn't like he had much to compare against.

Still, one thing was very definitely on Seth's mind. Namely that he needed to tell his family what had happened, and they needed to move as soon as possible if they wanted to avoid the Supreme Leader's retribution. Fortunately for Seth, he knew exactly how to get home from here, and without needing to keep his sheep on track he would be able to make the trip a lot faster than he had previously.

A couple hours later, Seth arrived at the house he lived in with his family, knocking on the door as he said "Djain, it's me Seth."

The door swung open, as Djain looked Seth up and down, before asking "Seth, what happened? It's almost morning now, and you didn't head out all that long after sunset."

Seth replied honestly, saying "Karyll Scaleridge showed up and dragged me off to a dungeon that popped up along with about a hundred other people. Fortunately the dungeon noticed what was going on and managed to keep most of us safe, but Karyll and her entire contingent of Drake Guard are dead."

At this, Djain almost fell backwards, before she said "That means that the Supreme Leader will be coming here to end us all, won't it? What will we do?"

Seth frowned, before saying "It's a long shot, but I think we might need to go to the dungeon for help. I think we'll be needing that jar of beads my grandmother left to me as something to bargain with. Anyway, I'll get the flock ready to move if you wake the boys, and we should be ready to head out in not too long. But first, I need something to eat, seeing as I've been up all night and haven't eaten."

 

[I Just Write]

It had barely been two hours since I conjured my crew of Gremlins when I received a veritable barrage of notifications simultaneously.

2* Basic Gremlin has evolved into Gremlin Nuclear Physicist
4* Basic Gremlin has evolved into Gremlin Engineer
3* Basic Gremlin has evolved into Gremlin Radiation Worker
1* Basic Gremlin has evolved into Gremlin Health and Safety Officer

Gremlin Nuclear Physicist: A Gremlin who has turned their attention from hands-on engineering to the underlying sciences behind the operation of nuclear reactors, Gremlin Nuclear Physicists can help other Gremlins see possibilities on nuclear projects they might have otherwise missed, hastening progress. A Gremlin Nuclear Physicist can leave the dungeon for 90 minutes before going feral.

Gremlin Engineer: A Gremlin who has developed significant prowess at designing new machinery, Gremlin Engineers can work on R&D projects when you're occupied with other things. They are also adept at performing repairs on existing machinery, but it's really not their specialty. Gremlin Engineers can spend 2 hours outside the dungeon before going feral.

Gremlin Radiation Worker: A subset of Gremlin Technician specialized in radioactive systems, Gremlin Radiation Workers are equipped with both a hazmat suit granting heavy radiation resistance and an encyclopedic knowledge of radiation safety protocols. Gremlin Radiation Workers can spend one hour outside the dungeon before going feral.

Gremlin Health and Safety Officer: When working with dangerous systems, it pays to have someone to double-check that proper safety protocols are being followed, and shut things down if they're going out of control. That is the job of the Gremlin Health and Safety Officer, who significantly reduces the probability of deadly workplace accidents with projects to which they are assigned. Gremlin Health and Safety Officers can spend 90 minutes outside the dungeon before going feral.

Notification: The Engineering Lab has completed a blueprint: Version 2 Proton Pile Reactor

Notification: There are guests at the entrance!

Quickly, I decided that I would be prioritizing what the Gremlins had to say over the individuals at the entrance, switching my perspective to the Engineering Lab in what would soon be my right shoulder. Immediately, I told my research team "Good job on leveling up and your work on the reactors so far. Now, would you mind summarizing what you've actually done?"

One of the Gremlin Engineers turned to look at my... perspective was a good enough term, before saying "Well, we haven't quite gotten it to the level you specified, but we've managed a pretty good interim step with about three times the effective output. See, we noticed that most of the mana cost associated from running a Proton Pile was from conjuring new coolant, so we-"

I interrupted my subordinate, saying "Thank you. I very much appreciate the explanation, but right now I need to check on something happening at the door. It would be appreciated if you would write down the technical details for my later consumption."

With that, I switched my perspective to the entrance, to see who it was that I would be needing to deal with. To my surprise, it was actually Seth, the shepherd who had both given me that mana bead and wound up being forced to visit me during the incident with Karyll Scaleridge. There were a few people accompanying him, along with his sheep and a couple dogs, meaning that he had probably brought his family.

Quietly, I directed my first Basic Clockwork to the entrance, while also opening the doors leading from the exterior to my first floor safe room. My machine then spoke to the incoming batch of townsfolk, saying "Hello, Seth. I take it that this is your family?"

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"Hello, Seth. I take it that this is your family?"

As the dungeon's minion spoke, Seth nodded, saying "Yes. Dungeon, meet Djain, Samuel, and Adam."

There was a brief pause, before the metallic being replied "Nice to meet all of you. Anyway, there must be some reason why you came to speak with me, so you might as well get right to the point."

The shepherd nodded once more, before he said "Now that Karyll is dead, the Supreme Leader will almost certainly think that the county is in open rebellion. As soon as he hears of this, he will be coming here to kill everyone who could possibly be a threat to him, and I want to get my family out of here before that happens."

There was another brief pause, before Seth added "I can even pay you." and revealed the small jar of shining purple beads he was carrying with him.

The Dungeon seemed vaguely stunned for a few seconds, before he asked "Seth, were you by any chance aware that every single one of those beads is made out of pure compressed mana?"

The shepherd shrugged, saying "After you mentioned last night that you probably wouldn't have been ready for Karyll without it I figured you had some use for them, but I hadn't quite known what, I'll admit."

With that, the Dungeon's minion nodded, saying "You can wait in the safe room while I come up with something. A good chunk of my attention will be focused on other tasks, but rest assured that I will do my level best to make sure you can get out of here safely."

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In the basement of the Supreme Leader's palace, a mannequin began to write. This was no ordinary mannequin, quite obviously, instead being a form of sympathetic magic based on the ancient practice of making a voodoo doll of someone. Instead of the mannequin having an effect on its original however, now the original was having an effect on the mannequin, causing it to mirror their movements as they sent a report back to the capitol. The movement of the mannequin tugged on a string, which then caused a bell to ring in the supervisor's office.

The supervisor walked through the corridors to the writing desk, arriving just in time to see the report from Gyrten County completed and stamped shut with the official wax seal. Picking up the report, the man took it back to his office, before walking up the stairs directly into the Grand Throne Room. After all, the Supreme Leader took a very dim view on anyone possibly being able to smuggle messages out from the official communications system.

The Grand Throne Room was by far the largest building in the entire kingdom to anyone's knowledge. Dwarfing any cathedral anyone had ever even heard of, the massive structure was held up almost entirely by magic, for the simple reason that none of the mundane architects thought the job was possible. They had been promptly executed for their refusal. The Grand Throne itself was similarly massive, such that a hundred men could stand shoulder to shoulder on it and still have room to spare. The official occupant of said Grand Throne, on the other hand, found it only barely large enough to be comfortable.

As soon as the supervisor of the message system made it into the throne room, he turned and bowed to the Supreme Leader, before he said "Your magnificent greatness, I come bearing a message from the Drake Guard in Gyrten County!"

Sunlight from the impossibly large stained glass windows glittered off the Supreme Leader's cobalt blue scales as they leaned down and ordered him "Very well then, read it!" the heat from their dormant flame radiating throughout the room as they did so.

The supervisor nodded, before popping the wax seal on the report and reading "A cloud of smoke appeared on the horizon near the town of Cleft. Deputy Karyll Scaleridge took a contingent of Drake Guard to investigate, accompanied by a levee of peasant conscripts. Several hours later, the peasants returned with no sign of Karyll or her Drake Guard contingent. Subsequent interrogations of several of the returning peasants indicated that they had been brought to a Dungeon, which had killed the Drake Guard but had secretly hidden the peasants in a concealed room."

With that, the man looked up at the massive Grand Dragon ruling the country of Regno, as he asked "Should I compose a response, sir?"

 

[I Just Write]

Aside from the brief diversion of attention to throw together a mobile home for Seth's family with enough towing capacity to move his entire flock of sheep in trailers, and adding some last-ditch defenses around my core just in case, almost the entirety of my attention was focused on getting my chassis ready to move as soon as I could.

As it turns out, the 'placeholder' reactors that my Gremlins came up with were actually a dirt-simple modification of my original Proton Piles; the only functional difference had to do with the coolant flow. In my original design, the coolant was simply expelled as soon as it had gone through the turbine, wasting the majority of the mana that went into conjuring it. In the Gremlin-built design however, the coolant was sent through a magitech cooling system that I had a hard time making sense of, before being fed back into the reaction chamber. The practical upshot of this is that it almost completely eliminated the mana expense for conjuring coolant, meaning each reactor would produce 28 usable mana per hour instead of 10. As a side effect, the visible plume of steam was almost eliminated, which should help improve stealth a bit.

With these new reactors, I was able to very rapidly put the finishing touches on my chassis and motor systems once I upgraded all the ones I would actually be keeping. With my new frame, that left only two jobs to do before I could finally get moving. First and most obviously, I would be needing even more potent reactors in order to get myself moving, but second came the fact that I was still almost completely buried in the terrain, and I would need some sort of mechanism to get myself out of the ground. My gremlins could keep working on the reactors for me, but right now I was the only one able to excavate the terrain fast enough to get that part of my escape plan ready.

Thus, I set about excavating the terrain around my chassis and converting it into an utterly massive elevator, which would be able to lift my immensely heavy frame to the surface when it was completed. I was about halfway done with this when my UAV detected another incoming signature, but this time it wasn't a group of people approaching on foot. No, instead it was an utterly massive blue dragon wearing an imposingly spiky crown flying directly towards my location at almost half the speed of sound.

Fortunately for me, the dragon was still nearly three hours away when I spotted it, but that was still pushing the envelope far closer than I was willing to deal with. Internally, I had already reserved the jar of mana beads Seth gave me for emergencies, but considering that the damn things had almost 5,000 mana tied up in them and the current situation with the incoming Dragon, I figured that this qualified.

Almost instantly, I was able to finish excavating my hull with a flash of expended mana, quickly kludging together an elevator system with no regard for optimization. All told, this was about a thousand mana down the drain, considering how hellaciously inefficient I was being, in favor of expedience. Once this was done, I immediately informed my Gremlins "The timetable has been moved up; we have hostiles inbound within three hours. I don't care anymore what sort of compromises or trade offs you have to make to get those improved reactors working to the necessary power level, just get that design finished ASAP!"

My crew of Gremlins in the Engineering Lab replied immediately "Yes sir! We will do our absolute best, sir!"

With my Gremlins on that task, I turned my attention to cramming some extra hardware into my frame. My original plan had been to get myself mobile and sneak out of the country before I could get in any serious fights, but it was now clear that was wishful thinking. So, in the remaining time before that dragon would be arriving, I set about equipping myself with additional equipment both to speed my escape, and to give myself a means to shoot back.

The mobility equipment was fairly straightforward; I basically took a generation 1 Proton Pile, cranked up the levels of coolant and fuel being conjured until the reaction chamber could only barely contain it, and routed the massive amount of steam through a rocket nozzle instead of a turbine. I quickly mounted these thrusters to both the undersides of my massive steel feet and the palms of my hands, which I calculated would give me a maximum aerial acceleration of 1.6 times local gravity.

Next was weaponry; this was similarly dirt simple, as I took the machine guns I used on my Armed Clockworks, scaled them way up, exchanged the chemical propellant for steam heated by a Proton Pile reaction, and mounted them to my forearms.

I wasn't satisfied by this arrangement at all, but this tinkering had only cost me an hour of precious, precious time. That done, I immediately stuck my nose into what my Gremlins were doing on the reactor front, and pulled up their plans for what they were doing, hoping against hope that I would be able to possibly finish ahead of them.

Looking at the plans, I was actually rather impressed by the Gremlins' ingenuity; it looked like they had ditched the idea of a physical reaction chamber cooled by water, in favor of drastically ramping up the level of Protonium being conjured and containing the hyper-energetic plasma with intense magnetic fields; this plasma was then fed through what basically amounted to an inverted linear motor, which captured the kinetic energy of the rapidly moving Hydrogen plasma as it traveled through the containment field, and converted it directly into mana with truly amazing efficiency. Admittedly this required an exhaust port once more to dump the superheated plasma once it was done doing its job, but I could work with that.

That said, there were several issues with the magnetic containment field leaking, along with the generator melting down for various reasons. Instead of trying to solve these problems the smart way, I simply threw more mana at the problem, directly infusing into components to arbitrarily adjust physical properties, and replacing the magnetic containment field with one that was made out of crystallized magic. I winced slightly as the mana cost per reactor skyrocketed to nearly a thousand from these changes, but I immediately set about replacing my current reactors with the new setup, calming slightly as my mana income skyrocketed. Still, by the time I had all the reactors replaced, I had only five hundred mana worth of beads left as a buffer for future emergencies, and the dragon was only ten minutes out from reaching the site where I currently resided.

With my preparations completed as well as I could arrange, I sent the command to the opening system on my 'hangar', feeling a distinct feeling of discomfort as my first two floors were forcibly disconnected from my humanoid frame. I didn't bother with waiting for the elevator to reach the surface, instead activating my thrusters immediately with the goal of getting myself the hell out of here as quickly as I could.

Quickly, I ascended, flinging myself in a random direction across the sky courtesy of having very poor control of my aerial movements, but I didn't dare land or the dragon would catch up to me. By my estimates, I'd reached around two kilometers of altitude by the time the dragon fired their first shot my way, a lance of nuclear fire streaking across the sky from their mouth and only barely missing.

Without much hope of scoring a hit, I pointed my forearms in the general direction of the dragon and opened fire with the massive autocannons I had mounted to them, sending shells screaming across the sky at several times the speed of sound. Not a single one of my shots managed to connect as far as I could tell, but the dragon's return fire certainly struck true, as their next blast nailed me right in the leg, demolishing most of my ability to exert any control whatsoever over my trajectory.

After several hectic minutes of performing frantic midair repairs as I continued to thrust, I finally managed to restore what little control over my trajectory my leg offered me. Then I realized that I was now flying over what looked a lot like a dusty wasteland, devoid of even the hardy lifeforms that might be expected to grow in a desert. Immediately afterwards, I realized that the ground was approaching quite rapidly indeed. This, I decided moments before impact, was going to suck.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------​

As he gazed after the accursed flying Titan, Supreme Leader Corenzite hissed in annoyance. If their wild uncontrolled flight had taken them in literally any other direction, then he would have been able to easily track the Titan to their crash site and deal with them before they had a chance to truly become a threat. However, that Titan had instead been on a course directly toward the Dead Wastes, where anything alive would be sucked dry of life in mere minutes, Grand Dragons included.

Privately, Corenzite mused if this was a category that Titans were actually part of, before deciding to default to the pessimistic answer and assume that they would probably have to deal with that Titan later, after they had time to build themselves up into some immensely powerful form and come trudging out of the Dead Wastes on their own sweet time. Either that, or the immense amounts of mana that Titan was producing would be enough to wake up whatever was in the center of the Dead Wastes, and then everyone would be fucked.

Still, as Supreme Leader Corenzite turned back towards their capitol, they had to admit that this was a situation which they really had no ability to influence. There was nothing that more annoyed a Grand Dragon than having no ability to influence a situation.

 

[I Just Write]

The crash was, in a word, brutal. Faceplanting into solid ground at several hundred miles per hour would have been bad enough on its own, but it was even worse when the impact had the momentum of nearly a quarter million tons of steel behind it. Of my pre-existing Titan chassis, everything from the middle of the torso up was completely obliterated, the legs snapped off what little remained of my torso and tumbled off into the distance, and all my currently running reactors were knocked out of commission instantly, along with almost all of my minions. It was sheer dumb luck that I had my core in the most intact section of my chassis (namely the lower torso, directly above the waist joint), and even then, the piece of hull I was in would be best described as wreckage.

It was, in a way, a lot like being reduced to a starting dungeon all over again. Still, now I had significantly more to work with in terms of blueprints, meaning that I would only need to wait on the power output being available to re-build, and this time I would be doing things right. My stored mana reserves were almost entirely gone at this point, except for the small stash of beads I still had to work with. However, Mark 2 Proton Piles were still really cheap in the grand scheme of things, and that meant that my remaining 20 loose mana was plenty to work with to conjure one up.

With that first reactor, re-building started in earnest. The first time I got myself mobile, it had taken a bit more than half a week to do the job. This time, I would be taking a bit of extra time to equip myself with proper weapons and get decently good at using them before I needed to use them. Yes, this was a major setback, but I'd built myself up to a Titan once before, and I could do it again. This time, I budgeted about two weeks to get myself going; yes this risked the dragon coming to finish me off, but it had already been demonstrated that doing a rush job with getting myself built wouldn't help me all that much.

Given that I would want to be making several new pieces of hardware to mount to my Version 2 chassis, I figured that it made sense to conjure up some Gremlins to work on projects for me. I spent the mana to conjure up a Basic Gremlin... only to be let down almost immediately, as I felt the life being sucked right out of my minion in a way that reminded me quite distinctly of that crazy woman with the sword. Just to quickly check if my other minions would be affected, I also called up a Mutant and a Basic Clockwork; the Mutant died quickly, but my mechanical minion was fine.

I decided two things then and there. First, as long as I was here I would be sticking entirely to mechanical minions, so that I wouldn't be feeding whatever asshole was draining life even more power. Second, I would be killing them before I departed; I had a pretty good idea now why this region was completely devoid of life, and whatever being thought this was a good way to gain power deserved a nuclear piledriver to the everywhere.

With my next goal set, I began well and truly building my new Titan chassis.

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It had been a week since Seth had received the strange self-propelled carriage-house from that bizarre metal dungeon. In that time, he and his family had managed to cover a distance that Seth had previously considered beyond the reach of any human to travel in such a short time. Very quickly, he and his family had decided that the course of action least likely to see them snatched by the Drake Guard and subjected to a horrible death would be to keep their conveyance out of sight of any significant towns, and disguise it as a relatively normal house once they had gotten a few counties away from their starting point.

This process had taken significantly less time than Seth had ever anticipated, and he was about to take his sheep out for their first grazing in this new location, when suddenly a white wall panel Seth had thought was decorative until now lit up with projected light, showing a simple drawing of a face. A mechanical voice then spoke, saying "Hello Seth, sorry for not calling you sooner, but I was a bit preoccupied with rebuilding myself. Anyway, I'm just calling to let you know that I am both in acceptable physical condition, and that I am no longer in the location where we first met."

As Dungeons were typically immobile, Seth couldn't help but ask "You moved? How?"

With that, the face on the screen was quickly replaced with an extremely detailed engineering diagram showing a humanoid figure with what looked to be a very much compacted Dungeon inside of it. The Dungeon elaborated "Ever since I first became a Dungeon, it has been my goal to achieve independent mobility. I did this by basically building a vastly up-scaled version of my clockwork minions, with my Dungeon interior inside. Anyway, I managed to get ready to move about the same time that gigantic dragon showed up, and I wound up crashing in a place which you shouldn't visit in the near future if you value your life."

Seth nodded along, before saying "We've moved too; I'm actually amazed at how fast this carriage you gave us is." Seth wasn't quite sure what nagging bit of curiosity caused him to ask "Curiously, why shouldn't I come visit? I mean, unless you landed in the Dead Wastes, a visit shouldn't be life-threatening in and of itself." but ask he did.

The projected face returned to the screen, and the Dungeon replied "If by the Dead Wastes you mean a broken landscape where anything living is sucked dry of life almost instantly, then yes, that's exactly where I landed. You wouldn't happen to have any idea what caused this, would you?"

This is when Djain decided to speak up, saying "I wasn't there, but I remember the stories my grand-dad told from when it happened. He said that when the Dead Wastes first formed, people in the towns in the middle of the place knew something was wrong and ran for it. He said that he saw a massive walking thing made from bones and gore from the back of the carriage, sucking the land around it dry of life."

There was a brief moment of silence, before the Dungeon replied "Thank you for that piece of information, and I think I figured out what happened now. One of the biggest issues I had towards getting myself mobile was the absolutely staggering amount of mana required. I managed to get it by making machinery that could generate Mana, but other methods are theoretically possible, including the consumption of life force."

Pieces of the puzzle clicked together in Seth's and Djain's minds, and they replied, as one "You mean that the Dead Wastes might be the fault of a Dungeon who wanted to get up and go somewhere else?"

 

[I Just Write]

Two weeks after I first crashed in the Dead Wastes, I was finally ready to move again. My new chassis retained many, many features from the Mk 1 Titan, but this time I had designed it from the ground up with direct combat in mind. To this end, I had integrated several new weapons directly into my chassis, or designed them as modular equipment that I could directly wield with the fully functional hands I included.

By far, the biggest breakthrough I made had to be the Proton Beams; solid slug weaponry had demonstrated that it was horrendously inaccurate over the ranges I might be fighting at, and there were two ways to deal with that. The first was to use guided projectiles like missiles, and the second was to use a shot that could travel much, much faster. The weapon I designed to meet this criteria was ultimately based on my third-generation Proton Piles, conjuring a decent sized chunk of Protonium inside a crystalized mana containment field which would ultimately direct the sheer nuclear fury associated with firing into C-fractional blast of plasma. I built three for my new chassis; two were retractable arm mounts meant for medium-range engagements, and the last was an absolutely massive rifle designed to brace against my chassis, kept attached by a carbon nanotube sling when not in use.

Still, Proton Beams on their own were far from the only weapons I equipped. There was also a significant chance that I would need to get into melee combat, and I would also benefit greatly from having indirect fire as a capability. Therefore, I also fitted my rifle with a viciously sharp bayonet, made sure I had a pair of backup knives with sheathes on my hips, and mounted a missile cell to my chassis' left shoulder. The missiles were equipped with dial-a-yield Protonium Warheads, meaning that the amount of boom they delivered could easily be adjusted to be appropriate for the situation.

As for defenses, I had learned firsthand just how deadly some of the things I might encounter here were, so I made a point of developing a new, significantly stronger alloy that I could use to assemble my chassis out of. Ultimately, what I hit upon was yet another variety of Vanadium Chromium Steel, but with several differences; namely that I had re-arranged the alloy's Carbon content into nanotubes for vastly increased tensile strength. Then I had saturated the alloy with mana until it couldn't take any more, amplifying its strength and toughness to frankly ridiculous levels. I also made a point of boosting the material's internal speed of sound, granting better resilience to hypervelocity impactors. Yes, my new alloy was horrendously expensive in terms of mana, but at they same time I had an utterly stupid amount of mana to spend, courtesy of all the cheap reactors I slapped down in my first few days here.

I also refused to take any chances whatsoever when it came to potentially being boarded by high-level adventurers. This is why I placed my entrance in my chassis' head, forcing anyone who wanted to enter to basically climb a rapidly moving skyscraper without any good handholds or footholds. I also turned my interior into an absolute death course, featuring legions of greatly upgraded clockworks, radioactive deathtraps of several descriptions, several other types of deathtrap, and a ventilation system that allowed me to selectively flood individual compartments with a mix of literally every toxic gas I could come up with that wasn't liable to explode. Superheated Cyanide derivatives were a particular favorite here, and I made sure to include them in all my defenses that worked by blasting someone with Proton Pile coolant. Admittedly the defenses were concentrated on my first and last few floors, but I needed to make some sacrifices for specialized rooms like foundries, Engineering Labs (for when I could summon Gremlins again), and other potential upgrades.

For a bit of additional decoration, I took the time to paint a large radioactivity warning symbol on my chassis' chest. I highly doubted anyone here would know what it meant unless I told them, but I felt it was a good way to distinguish myself at the very least.

With all my preparations complete, I finally bit the bullet and got up to move, walking unsteadily towards the center of the Dead Wastes as I got the hang of having feet again. As I did this, I reviewed the intelligence reports my surveillance UAVs had sent me about the stricken Titan of Bone. My target was lying on its face in a pitiful heap, reduced to siphoning off the occasional scrap of mana from whatever lifeforms occasionally blundered into its area of effect. It was the only reason I had been unmolested thus far while I rebuilt, and it was also responsible for reducing an entire region to uninhabitable wasteland. I would be putting this monster down now, so that the Dead Wastes could once more flourish with life.

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It was a somewhat common rumor that Dwarves were descended from escaped Dungeon monsters, given their tendency to live far beneath the earth's surface in fortress-cities defended by horrific deathtraps and legions of experienced tunnel fighters. Their advanced machinery and total control over the terrain made most invasions by outsiders effectively pointless, and they were typically dug in deep enough that even the sheer destructive fury of Dragonfire posed no practical threat to a Dwarven settlement. You couldn't even starve the bastards out, seeing as they had somehow figured out ways to make their own sunlight for crops down there.

This posed a distinct problem for Supreme Leader Corenzite, as he found himself needing some Dwarf experts on very short notice to provide consultation on a certain Titan-shaped problem, and one of the main reasons that Dwarves lived underground in the first place was to keep from having to deal with dragons. Sure, it was on occasion done to pay the Dwarves enough to get them to send someone, but they tended to ask for ridiculous concessions like letting their experts go home after their contracts expired, and if you refused they were liable to fill the entire underground near your hoard with explosives and destroy the whole lot.

No, Corenzite decided, paying the Dwarves was not going to work, and it wasn't like he could fit his properly massive frame into the miniscule tunnels that Dwarves inhabited. He couldn't even send in the Drake Guard, or they would all be massacred by defenses that he was told made most Dungeons look like children's toys. Reluctantly, Supreme Leader Corenzite decided that he had no other option but to employ trickery. With great consternation, he called for both the Mage Academy's head of the transmutation department, and his most elite and disciplined unit of Drake Guard.

Even if this plan was quite straightforward, the Grand Dragon still found themselves fuming that not all problems could be solved by simply taking what you wanted through force.

 

[I Just Write]

It took about an hour for me to reach the spot where the stricken Titan of Bone lay, my long legs allowing me to easily stride over almost all the terrain obstacles in my way once I got the hang of walking again. The dead landscape I passed through was... disheartening. Here and there, I could see signs of where there clearly had been something alive, such as a withered tree, or the skeletal structure of a long-dead animal, but as expected I didn't find a single currently living organism. Even after I destroyed the necromantic field, I predicted that it would quite possibly take decades to centuries for this place to truly recover.

As I stepped over the final ridge between myself and the life-sucking horror at the center of the Dead Wastes, I found myself gazing upon their emaciated, gruesome form. Where I had built my chassis with a sleek metallic hull, the abomination before me looked more like a partially disassembled corpse, completely lacking in skin in favor of an exposed skeletal structure with what seemed to be partially decomposed muscles anchored to it. Meanwhile, the monstrosity's chest cavity was far from a hollow ribcage, instead being filled with gory, rotting organs connected in a nonsensical manner.

I wasn't too worried as I readied my massive Proton Beam Rifle to fry this monster once and for all, seeing as all the math regarding this fallen Titan's mana flow indicated that it didn't have the power necessary to move. Still, as I pointed the massive weapon down at this creature and got ready to hose them down with nuclear fire, an unexpected message appeared in my interface, reading

Message From Titan of Bone: I have a request to make, fellow Titan.

Somewhat astonished, I found myself replying

Sending Message: If you want mercy, you won't be getting that. You will die by my hand, stealer of countless lives.

Message From Titan of Bone: That wasn't the request I wished to make; it is within the rights of the strong to do as they wish to the weak, and though it pains me to admit it, I rendered myself weak in my attempts to become strong. I simply have a request about the nature of the death you inflict.

Sending Message: What would that request be?

Message From Titan of Bone: We are Titans, but we are also Dungeons. I simply wish to be slain in the manner befitting a Dungeon, with monsters rampaging through my corridors and smashing my core. Dying by externally applied brute force is more befitting of a Grand Dragon.

For several moments, I pondered the other Dungeon's request. There was a not completely negligible possibility that this was some kind of trick to scrape together enough mana to get moving again, but on the other hand this could provide invaluable experience at commanding my minions in hostile territory.

Sending Message: I will grant your request. You still need to die so that this region can live once more, but it will at least be a death befitting a dungeon.

With that, I opened the entrance on my forehead, and began discharging my new flight-equipped Clockworks. Simultaneously, I knelt down as I drew my left knife, and with a single plunging stab I opened up the Titan of Bone's corridors for my minions to invade.

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Urist McSmith was, not to put too fine a point on it, scared out of her mind. That tended to be the case when you were unexpectedly snatched from your home, were bound, gagged, and blindfolded, and were then taken on a long, uncomfortable journey against your will. This was only amplified by the fact that Urist's home was in fact nearly half a mile below ground, in one of the most fortified locations the world had to offer; namely, a dwarf citadel.

The woman was just beginning to lose track of time since she had been abducted, when she was unceremoniously dumped butt-first onto a solid stone floor, and her gag and blindfold were removed. Urist looked up, and up, and up. Finally, their gaze met the truly enormous visage of a towering blue dragon, sunlight from the massive stained glass windows reflecting off their scales with a metallic sheen.

The dragon in question did not look happy in the slightest, as it said "Dwarf, I require the knowledge of your ilk when it comes to the best way to destroy machines. There is a new Titan on the loose, and it is a Titan of Steel, with many features indicating that their theme is mechanical in nature. As such, you will immediately set about devising a plan to slay that Titan, or I will devour you on the spot, is that clear?"

Urist was shocked into silence for several moments, which the dragon seemed to take as encouragement to begin reaching down towards her with those absolutely massive talons. They didn't get very far before Urist shouted "I'll do it, I'll do it! I'll need a better description of the Titan in question, but..."

Suddenly, the dragon shouted "ENOUGH! I accept your volunteering of your services. Guards, show this woman to her office please."

With that, the gag and blindfold were reapplied, and Urist felt herself being dragged away to who knows where, dreading what would come next.

 

[I Just Write]

During my execution of the Titan of Bone, there were five main types of Clockwork minion which I deployed, all of which had rather unimaginative names, and a variety of capabilities.

Minions

Clockwork Soldier
-Minion Type: Clockwork
-Base Form: Humanoid
-Strength: 0.25 MN sustained force
-Speed: 0.85* peak human agility
-Weaponry: Automatic Rifle, Automatic Pistols, Hand Grenades, Grenade Launcher, Bayonet
-Armor: 1.2 centimeters Mana Enhanced Nanosteel

A basic humanoid Clockwork with upgraded armor and a vastly improved motor system, Clockwork Soldiers are mostly ranged fighters, making use of both hypervelocity ballistics and copious amounts of explosives. To prevent hostiles from simply picking up one of their machine guns and going to town with the armor-piercing bullets they fire, the weapons for a Clockwork Soldier are fired using the operating Clockwork's IFF transponder, rather than a physical trigger. If a Clockwork Soldier winds up in melee combat, they will attempt to use their impressive physical strength to grab or pin their opponent, before breaking them.

Clockwork Angel
-Minion Type: Clockwork
-Base Form: Humanoid (Winged)
-Strength: 0.1 MN sustained force
-Speed: 4* peak human agility
-Weaponry: Automatic Rifle, Automatic Pistols, Hand Grenades, Grenade Launcher, Bayonet
-Armor: 5 mm Mana Enhanced Alumina CNT Alloy
-Features: Armored Wings, Flight

Resembling a Clockwork Soldier with the addition of a pair of wings and slightly bulkier leg sections, the Clockwork Angel is built for rapid flanking and harrassment, making use of a pair of thrusters in its feet to provide the thrust needed for flight. They use the same weapons as Clockwork Soldiers, but their melee combat subroutines are quite different, emphasizing fast, brutal strikes while also using their wings to block attacks.

Armed Clockwork V2.4
-Minion Type: Clockwork
-Base Form: Humanoid
-Strength: 2 MN sustained force
-Speed: 0.65* peak human agility
-Weaponry: Dual 20mm autocannons (integrated), Plasma Dump (integrated), Rotary Claws (Integrated)
-Armor: 5 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel backed by 2 cm Mana Enhanced CNT

Standing tall at 2.1 meters, Armed Clockworks are absolutely brutal combatants, able to send upwards of 40 high explosive shells downrange every single second. They also have several nasty surprises in case someone gets close, including a chest-mounted Proton Pile behind a cosmetic turbine, able to easily blast the corridor in front of them with superheated reactor coolant salted with extremely radioactive Sodium-24. Further, their grasping claws are sharpened, and are able to freely rotate at 40,000 RPM, acting as an extremely deadly close combat weapon, especially when coupled with the raw physical strength exhibited by the rest of the machine's motor system.

Clockwork Knight V 3.1
-Minion Type: Clockwork
-Base Form: Humanoid
-Strength: 8 MN sustained force
-Speed: 1.97* peak human agility
-Weaponry: Heavy Radsword, Combat Shield, Proton Beam Rifle, Plasma Dump (Integrated), Retractable 20mm Autocannon (Integrated)
-Armor: 8 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel backed by 3 cm Mana Enhanced Silica Aerogel and 4 cm Mana Enhanced CNT.

Standing at an imposing height of 2.6 meters, Clockwork Knights cut an imposing profile courtesy of the deadly weaponry they wield. They share the autocannons and chest-mounted Proton Pile of Armed Clockworks, but these are not intended to be primary armaments. Instead, the main weapons which a Clockwork Knight makes use of are a Proton Beam rifle and a massive superdense sword built with the ability to conjure a thin line of Protonium along the cutting edge of the blade, allowing them to slice through almost anything while also frying them with plasma and heavy ionizing radiation. Further, the motor system for a Clockwork Knight is extremely over-engineered allowing them to do such things as casually flip heavy armored vehicles into the air, so long as they are properly braced.

Proton Tank
-Minion Type: Clockwork
-Base Form: Vehicular
-Strength: 1.2 MN sustained force
-Speed: 110 MPH cruise (ground level), 240 MPH (aerial)
-Weaponry: Proton Beam Cannon (Integrated), Protonium Missile Pods (Integrated), Omnidirectional Plasma Dump (Integrated)
-Armor: 20 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel, 8 cm Mana Enhanced Silica Aerogel, 6 cm Mana Enhanced CNT
-Features: Flight

Far more mechanically simple than any of the humanoid Clockworks, Proton Tanks are effectively a heavily armored box with treads on the bottom and a weapons turret on the top. That said, they also have a set of Protonium-powered steam thrusters all along their hull which they can use for aerial maneuvering; these same thrusters can be seriously overclocked if need be, blasting anyone close to the tank with superheated plasma.

Entirely unsurprisingly, the first Clockworks to enter the Titan of Bone's fleshy corridors were my Clockwork Angels, for the simple reason that they were faster than the rest. These machines provided critical information from within the downed Titan's corridors, revealing that while it didn't have the power it needed to get up and move, it certainly had the power required to run a fully functioning Dungeon in its interior, with Minions and Traps galore.

That said, I found the defenses they had to muster highly underwhelming. The mana-enhanced materials I had made my mechanical minions out of were, to put it quite bluntly, excessively durable by almost any metric, meaning that all the crushing sphincters, geysers of corrosive gore, and sword-swinging skeletons that this necromantic Titan could throw at my creations were lucky if they even managed to inflict cosmetic damage on one of my machines.

My machines meanwhile, had a far easier time dealing with the opponent's skeletal minions, even if there was the occasional minor hiccup. As an example, bullets commonly wound up completely whipping straight through a skeleton and missing every single bone, or a skeleton would keep moving after taking damage that would have flat-out mission killed a Clockwork that was dismembered in a similar manner. Still, the Titan of Bone's minions were still quite vulnerable to the nuclear blow torch known as a Proton Beam, or simply being grabbed in melee and ripped to shreds.

After a few minutes of this drudgery, I figured I might as well ask the Titan of Bone about this, sending them a message.

Sending Message: I really have to ask why your minions suck so hard; if you had a Titan-level mana budget, shouldn't you have been able to design some crazily overpowered minions to make use of it?

The response I received wasn't quite what I had been expecting, but it made sense.

Message From Titan of Bone: I wish! Minions don't work that way; you can't just design them, they have to be unlocked by having a basic minion find various evolution conditions.

Sending Message: Huh, that's not how Clockworks work; I just design mechanical components, assemble them into a completed system, and there we go, new minion.

Message of Bone: Bah! Clockworks aren't proper minions! They have more in common with traps, save that they are self-propelled and have some level of autonomous decision-making capacity.

I resisted the urge to shrug, as that would send the next wave of Clockworks from my head-mounted entrance tumbling to embarrassing collisions with the ground, and instead focused on co-ordinating my army of clockwork minions as I continued to smash my way through the Titan of Bone's interior. It only took a few minutes longer for one of my Clockwork Knights to reach the Titan of Bone's core chamber, its massive radsword easily cleaving through the sphincter which made a poor substitute for even my first model of armored door.

As the Clockwork Knight raised its radsword over the glowing ruby core of the Titan of Bone, I sent one last message to the dying Titan.

Sending Message: Farewell, Titan of Bone. I draw no pleasure from this, but your death is a necessity in order to restore this region to life.

With that, the radsword came crashing down through the Titan of Bone's core, and with a blast of suddenly released mana, a Titan was slain. From my perspective outside the Titan of Bone, I could easily see their rotting organs suddenly cease in their convulsions. At the same time the oppressive aura of the Dead Wastes faltered, and with a final distinctive lurch, collapsed.

I quickly tested this by calling up a Basic Gremlin, and when they didn't almost immediately keel over, I burned the mana necessary to bring somewhere just north of 4,000 Gremlins into being; of these, 3,000 were Basic Gremlins, with the rest being my currently extant Gremlin Specialties, weighted heavily towards Health and Safety Officers. After all, the machinery I would want them to develop had the potential to be quite dangerous.

With my crew of budding mad scientists ready to go, I only needed a project to apply them to. Nothing came to mind immediately, so I simply told my Gremlins "You have free reign to undertake whatever engineering or science projects you think will be of use to me. You have Torso Bays one through twenty-three to customize as you see fit."

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Most people think Dwarves are immune to claustrophobia, due largely to the cramped tunnels they call home. Under normal circumstances, this would be an accurate assumption, but Urist's circumstances were far from normal. In the last day and a half, she had been kidnapped and enslaved by a Grand Dragon, and the dark, cramped office she was being forced to work in was not helping!

Even more stress-inducing was the disparity between Urist's career skills as a psychologist and the job she had been assigned, namely concocting a plan to bring down a Titan based on extremely sparse information. In fact, before this whole mess, Urist hadn't even believed Titans were real, simply being made up stories by those who longed for an end to the tyranny of the Grand Dragons. After all, there was a certain evocative flair to the idea of a massive construct rising out of the ground, harnessing immensely powerful forces to finally strike down the Grand Dragons.

Now, Urist was looking at what she was assured was an accurate drawing of a real, physical Titan, made of finely worked metal with jets of flame shooting from its back. And Urist had to somehow come up with a plan to kill it, or else the Grand Dragon would kill her. Urist held no illusions about what would come afterwards; she would never be released, forced to work on one project after another until she expired from one cause or another. It had been proven time and time again; Grand Dragons never let go of anything they felt they'd claimed unless they were physically forced to. And by default, a Grand Dragon viewed themselves as laying claim to all that existed.

Urist looked back at the drawing of the Titan laying on her desk. Grand Dragons may be innately programmed to be ruthless dictators, but she had no data to go off of whatsoever regarding Titans. It was a risky gamble either way, but if the Titan were to win, then Urist might possibly have a chance to go home. That done, Urist began poring over every possible detail she could glean from the drawing of the Titan, and began considering how she would do this. She needed to figure out the worst possible way to go about fighting her potential savior, but then she would need to present it to her captor in a manner that would be accepted as legitimate good advice.

For the first time since being abducted, the dwarven woman smiled. It wasn't a big smile, or a particularly hopeful one, but it was at least present. As she smiled, Urist thought to herself that she might finally have a part of this whole ordeal that her psychology skills could be useful for.

 

[I Just Write]

After the Titan of Bone's destruction at the hands of my mechanical minions, the next thing on my agenda was to make my final preparations to deal with the brutal dictator oppressing the country I had appeared in once and for all. That said, I was distinctly worried about that dragon showing up again, and I wanted to take some extra precautions to ensure my own safety if things did not go as planned. With the need to reach a point of relative safety in mind, I quickly updated the plans for the Protonium rockets I used for thrust, ensured I had full three-dimensional RCS and enough linear acceleration to beat the local gravity, and boosted myself into orbit.

The way I said that made it sound a lot more straightforward than it actually was, all things considered. First off, I had done basically none of the math regarding required orbital velocity, and my only previous experience with flying a Titan ended in a crash that damn near killed me. Still, I knew on a gut level from countless hours spent playing Kerbal Space Program what was required to reach space, and I had every intention of following through, especially since I had effectively infinite delta v. It took a few hours of constantly adjusting my orbit, but I soon managed to reach a stable almost circular orbit about 1,200 kilometers above the planet's surface, according to the radar altimeter I had my Gremlins working on while I tweaked my trajectory. By my estimates, I was smack dab in the middle of a radiation belt, but I didn't give a shit since both my core and my Gremlins were properly shielded.

Once I was in orbit, I immediately began assembling a massive space station connected to my current Titan chassis, featuring rotating habitat cylinders kilometers across that could support tens of millions of Gremlins, more reactors than I could ever possibly need, and a winding deathtrap of a microgravity murder-maze surrounding my newly relocated core a cubic kilometer in volume, my instincts to maximize the amount of lethal traps between myself and death coming to the forefront.

Then, came the problem of adjusting my Titan chassis such that I could deploy it groundside separately from my space station body. Without my Dungeon interior providing internal support to the Titan's chassis, I needed to make several adjustments to convert it into a single massive Clockwork construct, able to significantly exceed previous performance benchmarks by replacing what had been effectively non-performing volume with major upgrades to the Titan's motor system, power plant, and onboard fabrication. That last one was especially critical, since I wanted that machine to be capable of self-repairing in the field, and I wouldn't be able to directly repair it using my Dungeon interface.

I still had my original surveillance UAV informing me of the location of Regno's capitol, the home of the murderous dictator who had caused his people so much torment. With target co-ordinates locked, I quickly deployed a constellation of thousands of spy satellites in order to gather any further information on the possible location of the dragon who had been the cause of my previous crash. I quickly discovered the colossal dragon on a return trajectory towards the city I was currently surveying.

Having decided my course of action, I quickly un-docked the Titan from my space station body, and sent it on a return trajectory, set to land directly in front of the Dragon's flight path in about twenty minutes. I kind of wished I had an appropriate heavy metal track to play for what was about to come next, seeing as it simply wouldn't be a proper mecha vs dragon fight without a rocking sound track.

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Supreme Leader Corenzite was flying back to his capitol after a border skirmish with one of his rival Grand Dragons, wondering when that damned Titan would show up again, when without warning a massive fireball streaked across the sky directly overhead. Slowly, the incoming object slowed, and the flames mostly petered off to reveal an utterly massive metallic figure, standing in the air atop two pillars of flame jetting out of their feet.

The Grand Dragon almost immediately recognized this abominable construct as the Titan it had been unable to crush two weeks prior, but as he feared it had already made significant alterations to its design, as Titans were infamous for doing. The Titan was distinctly wider now, with a large yellow symbol of some sort emblazoned on its chest, and it was equipped with what could only be even more implements of murder. It had even apparently managed to get the hang of flying.

Corenzite did not waste any time beginning the fight, opening up with a blast of dragonfire even as he charged closer to the Titan, with the primary goal being to engage in melee combat. The Titan meanwhile simply allowed the shot to harmlessly spray over its chest armor, even as it fired three small projectiles from its shoulder directly towards Corenzite.

The Dragon disregarded such puny shots, being incredibly dubious that they would present a threat to one such as them. They were immediately corrected, as the projectiles erupted with blasts of dragonfire, scorching Corenzite's hide with tremendous explosive force. The barrage did not let up then, the Titan drawing its swords and firing twin streaks of artificial dragonfire directly at Corenzite.

The Grand Dragon was infuriated by this development; in the annals of history, ever since the Grand Dragons rose to ascendancy, never before had any being besides a Grand Dragon laid claim to dragonfire. With one final charge, Corenzite closed the distance to melee combat with the Titan, clawing and biting at the massive construct even as they felt one of those massive knives punch right through their left wing.

Then the Titan grabbed hard, and with a mighty heave the grappling pair of Titan and Dragon tipped end over end and began hurtling towards the ground. Spiraling through the air, Corenzite grabbed hard onto their opponent, and with a cleverly stuck out wing, they managed to put themselves on top of the pile just in time for the two of them to slam into the ground.

Supreme Leader Corenzite wasted no time, blasting a continuous stream of dragonfire onto the joint between the Titan's chest and hips even as the Titan tightened its grip further, clearly attempting to crush the life out of the wounded dragon. With what little freedom of movement he still possessed, Corenzite managed to get one of their forelimbs free, and they slammed their wickedly sharp talons directly into the joint for the Titan's right shoulder.

At this time, both parties received several severe injuries simultaneously; in the case of the Titan, the focused stream of Dragonfire finished burning through its spine, immobilizing the construct from the waist down even as its right arm was rendered useless. Corenzite, meanwhile, felt a massive crunch as part of their lower ribcage caved in.

Still, the Dragon's back was strong, and with one of the Titan's arms useless Corenzite was able to struggle out of the grapple. The Dragon flipped the Titan over on its front, and prepared to deliver the final blow, when suddenly the massive construct exploded in the biggest blast of dragonfire Corenzite had ever been exposed to.

When the dust cleared, the Supreme Leader was heavily injured, with a hide sufficiently charred that their skeleton showed in a few places, a partially collapsed ribcage, his dominant claw and left wing nearly severed, but still the Grand Dragon lived. With a mighty heave, Corenzite roared their defiance to the heavens, as if to say that they would never be conquered by something so mere as a Titan.

Hundreds of miles above, a certain Dungeon core was extremely glad it had thought to handle this fight by remote control, and was already taking notes on what would be required to finish the job.

 

[I Just Write]

On The Species of Dragons, On The Nature of Adventurers, The Dungeon Life Cycle

From the works of the acclaimed Dwarven scholar A. Jertren. Banned in all countries ruled by a Grand Dragon.

On The Species of Dragons
The world plays host to countless species of reptilian monsters with incendiary abilites, many of which are commonly referred to as dragons by the uninformed. In all but very few cases, this is in fact an incorrect classification, as detailed taxonomic studies have determined that this planet is only home to three species of true Dragons.

Draconis Minor: Lesser Dragons
The only non-sapient species of true Dragon, Lesser Dragons are about the same size as a large bovine, and roughly as smart. As with all Dragons, the Lesser variety is capable of both flight and fire-breathing, though they lack much proficiency at either. That said, Lesser Dragons are the fastest to reproduce, which often sees them hunted by those who want to get at their aluminum skeleton. Given this factor, the fact that Lesser Dragon is fairly delicious, and the possible uses for a tamed Lesser Dragon as a beast of burden or aerial mount, there have been several attempts to domesticate them, most of which have been unsuccessful as of the time of this writing.

Lesser Dragons on average require around 20 kilograms of food daily, of which a significant quantity must be Bauxite; how they extract the aluminum from those rocks in a metabolically efficient manner is currently not known to science.

Draconis Draconis: Common Dragons
As the name implies, Common Dragons are a rather prevalent species of dragon, such that it is not terribly uncommon for a town to have one or two of them living nearby. Common Dragons are both sapient and capable of speech, meaning that there is a significant demographic of Common Dragons that attempt to make a living in humanoid societies.

Physiologically, Common Dragons are roughly the size of a small elephant, with the six-limbed body plan common to Dragons of all sorts; four legs, two wings. Additionally, unlike Lesser Dragons, the Common Dragon has the ability to flame from both its mouth and hindquarters; in the former case, the flame is a means of attack, while in the latter case the flame is used to provide thrust, allowing Common Dragons to fly much faster than they would otherwise be able to.

The diet of a Common Dragon is both rather large, and significantly different from that of a typical humanoid; on average, a Common Dragon needs to consume around eighty kilograms of material each day to stay in good health; of these eighty kilograms, thirty kilograms are various refined metals, which Common Dragons require in order to ensure their skeletons and scales grow properly, along with various metabolic functions. Of the rest of their diet, Common Dragons need to consume large quantities of fat, in order to acquire the calories they need to fuel themselves, especially if they want to flame or fly.

Note: The flames which Lesser and Common Dragons produce are NOT true dragonfire; they are relatively simple combustion reactions, the principles behind which are well understood.

Draconis Grandiose: Grand Dragons
By far the largest species of Dragon ever encountered, Grand Dragons are absolutely massive beings commonly massing up to two hundred thousand tons, and with a wingspan stretching for hundreds of meters. One would think that a creature this utterly massive would require an utterly massive food supply, but this is surprisingly not the case; in fact, Grand Dragons have never been observed to eat, which indicates that one or more of their organs likely violates the Perpetual Mana Prevention Principle.

This observation is upheld by the deadly ability Grand Dragons are known for, namely Dragonfire. Though the composition of the reagents which produce these flames is not known to science, the effects of Dragonfire are well-known. Whole surface-dweller cities can and have been obliterated in mere minutes by an irate Grand Dragon, as Dragonfire not only burns at millions of degrees, but also imparts a large amount of raw kinetic energy to anything it hits.

Psychologically, Grand Dragons exhibit a uniformity of behavioral traits which is unique among sapient species; for any other sapient you could find a range of ideologies, beliefs, and other such things. Not so among Grand Dragons; each and every specimen so far examined exhibits extreme megalomania, paranoia, kleptomania, and a near total lack of empathy. This leads most Grand Dragons to attempt to take over a territory to rule over, followed by installing themselves as an almost always oppressive dictator. Given the unfortunate power which Grand Dragons possess, they are more often than not successful in such an endeavor.

NOTE: Given the extreme uniformity of Grand Dragon psychological traits, and their implausible levels of physiological difference from the closely related Common Dragon, it has been suggested that Grand Dragons were created artificially for some purpose or other. This theory does not enjoy much support among the scientific community, but was included for completeness.

On The Nature of Adventurers
The common term for those who pursue a life of monster-hunting and dungeon-delving, Adventurers perform a crucial service ensuring the safety of sapient societies. That said, experienced adventurers often display a variety of traits that none of their species could attain through simple training; this can include amplified physical attributes, an ability to rapidly cast spells that puts their peers to shame, or in extreme cases developing new appendages that their species doesn't have by default. One of the more common examples of that last possibility is human adventurers developing a pair of feathered wings and the ability to fly.

The question, therefore, is how do adventurers develop such bizarre capabilities? To find the answer, one merely needs to take a look at the typical lifestyle of an Adventurer, which involves spending large amounts of time in close proximity to high levels of ambient mana, either from the monsters they fight, or the dungeons they invade. This being the cause of adventurers developing their anomalous traits has been experimentally verified by researchers at the University of Spelopolis using a geothermal mana generator.

Adventurers who have been queried about how they grow in power as they gain experience have indicated that they have partial control over how they grow in response to ambient mana exposure, but that the precise form the manifestations take often depends on the source of mana get the most exposure to early in their career. Being a bit more precise, the themes of dungeon that the adventurer spends their first six months of adventuring in tend to imprint upon the adventurer, which both opens new avenues for them to explore, and closes others to them.

As an example, if an adventurer got their start in a dungeon featuring large quantities of incorporeal undead, they would likely gain access to various necromantic abilities and possibly the ability to become incorporeal. But by the same measure, they would lose access to other possibilities, such as the inspired tinkering ability that those who got their start in Clockwork dungeons often develop.

The Dungeon Life Cycle
Commonly reviled by people for sending monsters to do various nefarious deeds, Dungeons are chronically misunderstood beings. When people think of a Dungeon, they often think of the corridors filled with monsters, traps and treasure. This is inaccurate; the Dungeon itself is merely the core which resides somewhere inside said structure, and the structure itself can be more accurately thought of as a shell that the Dungeon constructs for its own defense or other goals. Worth noting is that a Dungeon cannot move outside of its own structure under any circumstances, but they are quite capable of moving their structure if they meet the requirements.

Broadly, Dungeons proceed through several stages of life as they mature. These stages shall be listed and elaborated on below.

Stage 1: Planting and Germination
Somewhat similarly to plants, Dungeons grow from seeds; Dungeon seeds are commonly mistaken for small gemstones by most who see them, seeing as they are crystalline in nature and come in any of dozens of colors. While any given Dungeon Seed only has a one-in-one-hundred chance to be fertile, the fact of the matter is that this is still plenty for Dungeons to reliably reproduce.

When a fertile Dungeon Seed is left unattended on a flat surface, it will slowly sink through said surface over the course of several days, eventually reaching a depth of twenty meters relative to where it started. Over the next three to five years the seed will gradually add mass to become a full-sized Dungeon, while also autonomously excavating a rudimentary Structure. Once the Dungeon excavates its initial entrance, it is said to have germinated, and experiences its first moments of consciousness.

Stage 2: The Juvenile Phase
A newly germinated Dungeon is a rather unimpressive sight, simply consisting of a roughly excavated corridor and room with the Dungeon inside. Within a few minutes though, some changes can be expected as the Dungeon will expend its stored reserve of mana to both spawn its first minion and make a few minor alterations to its layout. The appearance of the first minion is generally a good indicator of what a Dungeon's theme later in life might be, but surprises are still possible. In particular, it is possible for an adventuring party who happens upon such a young Dungeon to force the themes they have been imprinted with on the Dungeon simply by entering the Structure.

Dungeon behavior during this phase is usually focused on a frantic race to accumulate more mana, which often leads to the Dungeon's first minion being sent on scavenging missions to acquire organic material for decomposition. It is quite possible for a Dungeon's first minions to go feral during this period if they spend too long outside the Dungeon's immediate area of influence, which can be devastating for a new Dungeon on multiple fronts.

Once a Dungeon acquires a cohesive theme, they are no longer considered juvenile; this usually takes a few weeks to a few months, but has been known to happen in much shorter lengths of time if a Dungeon receives a large windfall of mana.

Stage 3: Maturity
Once a Dungeon has a cohesive theme, they will usually start creating incentives for Adventurers to come, such as treasures to loot, or truly beautiful sightseeing spots; this is speculated to be an instinctive behavior due to how near-universal it is. Very rarely will someone ever encounter a Dungeon who builds their Structure with the goal of exterminating every single intruder. In fact, it has been observed that Dungeons who go for too long without visitors will often experience symptoms similar to clinical depression.

The reason for this behavior ties back into the Dungeon reproductive cycle; namely Dungeon Seeds. If one inspects the treasures they recover from a dungeon, they will often find that they have several small gems studded on them in various locations. These gems are in fact Dungeon Seeds, and will drop off the treasure some time later if they are fertile, causing a new Dungeon to begin germinating.

A mature Dungeon should continue developing its structure indefinitely as it ages, growing more and more massive and complex.

Stage 4: Old Age
Firstly, Dungeons do in fact have a limited lifespan even without being killed. Detailed records show that the longest a Dungeon has ever lived for is roughly 310 years, but the average life expectancy barring violence is closer to 230 years. That said, the signs of a Dungeon's final, terminal decline often don't set in until around twenty years before the Dungeon passes away.

Symptoms of a Dungeon reaching the end of its life include losing control over minions, difficulties replacing losses among both minions and treasure, the Dungeon's structure being in noticeably poor repair, an inability to construct new rooms, total infertility, and cognitive decay. These issues start out extremely minor at first, but they get worse at an exponential rate as a Dungeon's end grows near.

When a Dungeon finally dies, its structure doesn't disappear, simply staying in place as it decays normally. Furthermore, the Dungeon's extent minions all immediately become feral, often wandering out into the wilderness and causing all sorts of problems to surrounding settlements. This usually prompts bands of adventurers to invade the deceased Dungeon's structure, either to carry off what loot they can, or in a misguided attempt at revenge upon a being that is already dead and gone.

Stage X: Titan
Worth noting is that not all Dungeons follow the above progression through life exactly. A small minority instead take it upon themselves to build their structure into a mobile form; the vast majority of these fail to achieve Titan-hood due to an insufficient mana supply. That said, Dungeons that happen upon a means of acquiring truly vast quantities of mana are quite capable of building themselves into a Titan any time they choose to. Aside from being mobile and having enough combat capabilities to rival a Grand Dragon, Titans are identical to normal Dungeons in every physiological sense.

 

[I Just Write]

Far from the recent site of Corenzite's battle with the remote controlled Titan of Steel, an adventuring party was waiting in a clearing for their mage to finish getting things ready to start their mission. As Sterne, the aforementioned mage, carefully inscribed a teleportation circle on the ground, he remarked "Well, I've got the teleportation ritual pretty much ready to go; we'll just need to wait for the Celestial Palace to arc over us on its trajectory, and we'll be able to explore what has to be the biggest Dungeon on record."

Nearby, the party's fighter Janise was carefully preening the angelic wings she had developed a few years ago, making sure that she would still have her mobility advantage when the party eventually invaded the Dungeon in the sky that they had dubbed Celestial Palace. As the redheaded woman looked up from taking care of her feathers, she asked "Not that I'm doubting your expertise Sterne, but would you mind explaining why it is we need to wait?"

To this, Sterne replied "Basically, the Celestial Palace is circling the world about a dozen or so times daily. While we probably could teleport there right now, the mana cost would be ruinous, since teleporting only works in straight lines and the more physical matter you try to travel through the more mana you need."

Janise shrugged and said "Makes sense to me. Either way, the extra prep time is nice, seeing as I still need to check over my armor and warhammer."

She wasn't the only one to speak up, as Jared, the group's Assassin mused "Well, since we probably have some time before we start our upcoming Dungeon Delve, I'm actually interested in what we might encounter, since it will almost certainly have a major impact on what sort of threats I need to dispose of."

At this, Sterne shrugged, before saying "According to the Dungeon Ping spell, the Dungeon's theme is something called Atomic Clockwork. Now, if it's like most Clockwork dungeons that means lots of Clockworks and Traps, but I will admit that I don't really know what the Atomic component means. I have tried doing some further scrying to figure out what it might mean, but so far no luck."

It was then that the gray, somewhat cylindrical form of the Celestial Palace swung over the horizon, and Sterne remarked "Well, that's our cue to get ready. The teleport should drop us in the safest area of the Dungeon, but we can still expect to be confronted by the Dungeon's hazards almost immediately, seeing as we probably won't be coming in the regular entrance."

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Atop the ramparts of a castle on the opposite side of the world from Corenzite's domain, a gold-scaled Grand Dragon was briefing her minions on their mission. Of the eight experienced and powerful adventurers before her, all of them had been carefully vetted for their loyalty before even being informed that there was going to be a mission at all.

She began, saying "As I am sure you have noticed, there is now some sort of massive construction circling the world. I do not particularly care who built it or why, but I do know that anything so far above the sky presents a massive threat. Your mission is to board that structure, before either capturing it for my own use, or destroying it."

The group of heavily armored adventurers knew better than to openly question their dictator of course, but the question of how they would destroy such a structure still hung heavily in the air. Fortunately, they were answered when the Grand Dragon proffered a small crystal bottle, filled with a firey golden glow.

The Grand Dragon Samathin then noted "That bottle contains nothing less than liquefied dragonfire, more than sufficient to obliterate the structure. When the cork is removed, the containment seal will remain for ten minutes, before the dragonfire is released. Further, the teleportation amulets you are being issued have sufficient stored mana to transport you twice; the first teleport will send you to the structure, and the second teleport will return you to the medical ward in this castle."

There was a brief pause before the Grand Dragon finished, saying "If you are critically injured, overwhelmed, or unable to complete the mission for any reason, I expect for you to return. After being aboard that structure, you will be too valuable as intelligence assets to risk losing. Now go, and deal with this situation for me."

With that, the adventurers saluted, readying the latest in clockwork weaponry and deadly magic as they prepared to begin their mission.

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It had barely been a day since I had put the finishing touches on my space station; the construction of my next Titan chassis was well underway, and the dividends from having millions of Gremlins working to advance my tech were already starting to show. Sadly, I seemed to have reached the limits of my materials as far as power generation went, but some peripheral additions to the way my reactors recycled their Protonium fuel and handled cooling allowed me to sneak in a few more percentage points of efficiency.

One of the crews of Gremlins had just drawn my attention to their work on a social messaging system based on the processors and transmitters I used to control my Clockworks, when-WARNING!: Intruders have teleported into the Dungeon!

Immediately, my perspective flipped to the group of adventurers who had teleported in; there were two men and a woman present in the habitat cylinder near one of my millions of Gremlin laboratories, in one of the 'square' areas I had intended for any Gremlins currently on break. Much to my surprise, the woman had a pair of white feathered wings protruding from her shoulders, which left me more than a little confused about just how many sapient species actually existed on this planet.

I didn't fool around with any form of subtlety whatsoever; the whole reason I'd built this space station in the first place was to not have any visitors to worry about, but apparently this place still had plenty of surprises on that front. Thus, to express my displeasure, I first diverted a Clockwork Knight, backed up by a small army of my other Clockworks.

I had intended for the Clockwork Knight to act as a negotiator to start off with, politely asking the intruders to leave, or at least to explain themselves. That, to be completely blunt, is not what happened. Instead, the woman called out enthusiastically "Found the first monster!" before flying forwards and smashing a massive dent in the machine's chest armor with her warhammer.

With that, I ordered the Clockwork Knight to fire its Plasma Pulse, blasting the region directly in front of it with superheated reactor coolant and highly radioactive Sodium 24. Contrary to the expected results, namely a roasted Adventurer, a golden force-field sparkled into being around the angelic woman, before she smiled and smashed the head right off my mechanical minion, dodging upwards before the incoming horde of Clockworks had much of a chance to riddle her with bullets.

Speaking of which, the robed individual who I speculated to be the group's wizard was easily deflecting the fusilade of gunfire my Clockworks were sending his way, shielding himself and the other guy... Wait, where'd the other guy go? WHERE DID THE THIRD ADVENTURER GO!?

WARNING!: Intruders have teleported into the Dungeon!

With resignation, I grabbed one of my Gremlins, plunked them in an impromptu control room, and told them "You're in charge of dealing with this trio of intruders! All methods are cleared for use that won't breach the habitat cylinder!"

I barely paid attention to them long enough to hear the "Yes, Sir!" before I turned my attention to the other group, composed of eight individuals in identical full plate armor, each of them carrying what looked an awful lot like an assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher in addition to whatever other gear they had on them. With a rapid exchange of hand signals, the group of what could only be the local equivalent of special forces troopers marched forwards, right into the patrol route for one of my Proton Tanks.

The tank opened fire on the group of soldiers, and one of them was knocked backwards by the blast of c-fractional plasma before the rest scattered into cover. I noticed the downed individual getting back up and pressing one of the runes on their armor before jumping back into the fray. This is about when a glowing red projectile blasted out of cover and impacted directly on the Proton Tank, slagging its Proton Beam cannon and crushing the main processor as it exploded.

As the Proton Tank was mission-killed, one of the soldiers darted forwards and attached a small tag to it, before the wrecked machine vanished, doubtless being teleported to somewhere else. I quickly dispatched a battalion of more Clockworks to deal with this batch of intruders, considering what I might need to do about the captured Proton Tank-WARNING!: Intruders have teleported into the Dungeon!

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

 

[I Just Write]

The situation aboard my space station was very, very rapidly deteriorating. Very rarely was there a thirty second period in which another adventuring party didn't teleport aboard. With each such adventurer aboard the station, massive sections of the habitat cylinder became effectively unusable, preventing me from spawning any new minions in the sections they were fighting through.

As a direct result, I was very rapidly losing ground, for lack of a better term. The only saving grace was that none of the adventurers had yet appeared in the murder-maze surrounding my core, but that wasn't much comfort to my Gremlins, who were currently running for their lives to the designated evacuation bunkers. I needed to do something about this whole mess, and I needed to do it now.

Thus, I applied the brakes for my habitat cylinder, bringing it to a grinding halt and throwing everyone inside into microgravity. At the same time, I began churning out as many Clockwork Angels and Proton Tanks as I could from the murder-maze, and deployed them straight into the habitat cylinder, making use of those model's abilities for three-dimensional navigation.

The effect was almost immediate, as the lower-level adventuring parties either desperately hurried to teleport groundside, or found themselves helplessly floating in the air as they were picked off by heavy weapons fire. There were some notable exceptions of course, such as that first adventuring party who had teleported in. The angelic woman was gleefully darting around the hab and smashing Clockworks, the wizard had his own magic propulsion bullshit, and I still had no clue where the third guy was, so I presumed he was doing OK.

The group of special-forces troops were doing significantly less well, but still were holding their own. It seemed they had quickly figured out that they should use their guns to thrust back towards the 'ground'. Once out of the line of fire, they hid beneath a balcony for a few moments before teleporting away.

Turning my attention back to the environmental conditions inside the habitat cylinder, I very rapidly noted that all the heavy weapons fire taking place was quickly raising the ambient temperature to the point where it would swiftly become uninhabitable. Another double-check revealed that pretty much every Gremlin had made it to their assigned bunkers already, so I wasn't too worried about that being an issue. I personally pegged the point of uninhabitability to the first adventuring party, as all three of them grouped up again before teleporting out.

Gradually, over the next few minutes the number of adventuring parties warping in trickled off to zero, and I spun up the habitat cylinder again.

I was just about to start cooling down the environmental controls when one of my Clockwork Soldiers found a bottle full of a glowing orange substance beneath the balcony where the spec-ops team warped out. I immediately moved my 'dungeon view' over to the bottle in order to inspect it more closely, almost instantly recognizing that it was filled with a Protonium analogue, somehow kept in near-stasis by some form of enchantment on the bottle. I didn't have time to investigate the enchantment itself before it failed, and the Protonium in the bottle did as Protonium does, violently flying apart in a storm of nuclear fury.

The effect on the habitat cylinder was immediate and total; in a vacuum a nuclear blast is just a giant flashbulb ablating surfaces, but the inside of my station was not a vacuum environment. Instead, what I got was a superheated pressure wave rapidly propagating throughout the inside of my habitat cylinder, blasting it apart into thousands of fragments. Several of these fragments were rapidly embedded into the massive block that was my defensive maze, imparting nearly 120 meters per second of velocity in a fraction of a second. The framework I had constructed to hold my core was admirably built to hold me in place during this process, meaning that I wasn't smashed against the walls of my core chamber.

That said, now I had several other problems to deal with. Namely, I was on an uncontrolled trajectory likely to re-enter the planet's atmosphere soon, all my maneuvering thrusters were down, my main reactor wing had snapped off from structural stresses, and I had about fifty hull breaches. It was quite clear to me now, that orbit was not the place of safety I had originally thought it would be.

Quietly, I built myself a small escape pod with my remaining mana reserves. I made absolutely sure to include all the essentials this time; a small fission fragment reactor, agile thrusters for trajectory control, and a sturdy heat shield to handle re-entry. As I ejected from the wreckage of my space station, I put myself on a re-entry trajectory that would land me in the ocean just off the coast of Regno. There, I could rebuild in relative secrecy.

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(a few hours later)

Chief Reactor Technician Shart was not having a good day. Admittedly it was their so far only day, but Shart was fairly comfortable with declaring it as being bad regardless. First, the reactor wing of the station had broken off, and the rest of the station had either been obliterated or put on a collision course with the planet. Then, there was the matter that they couldn't hear the Dungeon anymore, leaving them wandering aimlessly without the guiding entity that had previously directed them to various tasks.

However, in the dim red of the emergency lighting, Shart could clearly see her fellow Gremlins mulling around looking to her for guidance; after all, they still existed, and none of them particularly wanted to die. After a few moments mentally adjusting to the idea of issuing orders without having an objective assigned by the Dungeon, she called out "Alright crew! If we're going to get out of this mess alive, we need power, maneuvering and astrogation online!

Gesturing at a rough third of the small crowd, Shart said "You are Team A! Your job is to get at least one reactor online; I don't care if you have to canibalize parts from literally every reactor just to piece together a working generator, get to it!"

"Team B is in charge of getting a fabber working! If we want to go anywhere we'll need thrusters, and we'll need to install those thrusters in vacuum! Both of these require ways to fabricate equipment, including EVA suits and maneuvering packs!"

Lastly, the Chief Gremlin put in "Team C! You're in charge of restoring communications with the rest of the intact sections of the station! The more Gremlins we get working on this the faster we can resolve this crisis!"

With one voice, the crowd of Gremlins called out "Aye Aye, Captain!" and immediately set about their assigned tasks.

In the meantime, the newly designated Captain Shart considered where they would go once they had working propulsion and astrogation. One thing was for certain, she didn't want to be on the surface where the nuclear doom-dragons lived, and staying in orbit was just a recipe for more adventurers teleporting aboard and killing everyone. After a brief consideration, Shart ultimately decided that the best place to land would probably be on the moon's far side; nothing lived there, and it wasn't easily visible from the planet's surface. It would be a perfect place for the newly free Gremlins to build up a power-base.

 

[I Just Write]

Excerpts From the Titanomicon, Tome Of Dungeon Themes, Basic Daemonology

Excerpts from the writings of the globe-trotting Adventurer Sherry Rosotz

List of Current Titans (3rd Edition)
Though the uninformed often doubt their existence, most Adventurers will have at least one encounter with a Titan, or a Dungeon attempting to become a Titan in their lives. As such, for those of us who travel the dangerous wilderness slaying monsters and honing our skills in Dungeons, the existence of Titans is a concrete reality. As such, I have taken to compiling notes about all currently known Titans, as well as some whose existence is as yet only rumor. I shall start with the confirmed Titans first, before moving on to unsubstantiated reports.

Confirmed Titan: Storm Titan
Age: 195 years
Dungeon Theme: Thunderous Castle
Mana Source: Persistent Supercell Thunderstorm

The Storm Titan is one of the older Titans around, period, and is beginning to show the signs of old age that often plague Dungeons approaching their 200th year. They exist on the aptly named Stormy Isle, one of the largest surface territories known to be free of Grand Dragons. The reason for the absence of said Dragons is because if they even approach the island, the Storm Titan shreds their wings with extreme weather conditions before moving in for the kill in close combat. For this purpose, the Storm Titan is known to use a chassis greatly resembling a massive stone bear with a castle built on top.

Sadly, in order to move the Storm Titan needs to be constantly struck by lightning from the storm they command, meaning they cannot practically cross the oceans surrounding their island. Even crossing on the surface of the waves would be impractical, due to the chaotic wind currents and waves produced by the storm that they draw power from.

The Storm Titan is known to be trying to groom one of the Dungeons on his island into a successor, so as to keep it free of Grand Dragons once they pass.

Confirmed Titan: Titan of Wood
Age: 89 years
Dungeon Theme: Mystic Forest
Mana Source: Tree Of Life

The Titan of Wood is one of the only Titans known who willingly allows Adventurers to board and visit them. This is admittedly a tendency strictly limited to the uppermost levels, but it is a distinctly noteworthy one. Notably, instead of building their power source, the Titan of Wood was gifted a Tree Of Life sapling by a sympathetic adventuring party, which may explain their significantly less antagonistic relationship.

The Titan of Wood prefers a quadrupedal chassis that many have compared to a turtle-centaur with a massive tree growing out of their back. That said, if the tree is ever broken, the Titan of Wood will need to grow a new one all over again. This puts a major damper on this particular Titan's combat capabilities.

Confirmed Titan: Titan of Smoke
Age: 121 years
Dungeon Theme: Burning Clockwork
Mana Source: Combustion Heat Engine

The Titan of Smoke is one of the smaller Titans on record, and for good reason. In order to power itself, the Titan of Smoke has turned to nonmagical fire as a primary energy source. This both limits its primary roaming area to forested areas with an ample supply of fuel, and limits its practical maximum size based on the amount of fuel it needs to consume daily. This also limits it to non-legged means of transportation due to the need to be close to the ground for fuel harvesting, as such the Titan of Smoke makes use of a wheeled suspension.

In combat against similar-scale threats, the Titan of Smoke makes use of a heavy battery of rifled cannon firing high explosive shells.

Confirmed Titan: Aether Titan
Age: 41 years
Dungeon Theme: Aetherial Crystal
Mana Source: Planar Rift to Realm of Souls

Often considered to be the most colorful Titan, the Aether Titan is a jagged mass of crystals greatly resembling stained glass. Even on the exterior, the bright light of the Titan's power source can be clearly seen shining through, with multi-colored light scattering all over the general area they occupy.

Worth noting is that this is one of only two Titans to never be boarded by Adventurers; the backwash from the planar rift disrupts teleportation attempts, the Titan never lands, making it impossible for anyone who can't also fly to reach it, and an intense disintegration force field around the entrance blocks any Adventurers from coming aboard.

Confirmed Titan: Titan of Bone
Age: at least 80 years
Dungeon Theme: Necrosis (Subtype Unknown)
Mana Source: Long-Range Wide Area Life-Siphon

The Titan of Bone is quite possibly one of the most dangerous Titans on record, simply due to the means it uses to power itself. Anywhere within a radius of around two hundred miles of this Titan is vulnerable to the Titan of Bone's life drain ability, with the region they are currently in the center of being commonly known as the Dead Wastes. Fortunately, the life drain field draws such an immense amount of mana in its own right that it quickly ran out of life force to drain, and wound up helplessly stricken in the middle of a massive radius of inhospitable wasteland.

This is the other Titan that has never been boarded by Adventurers, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious.

Rumored Titan: Titan of Steel
Age: <1 year
Dungeon Theme: Not entirely known, but probably a modified form of Clockwork
Mana Source: Unknown, no external components required

Unsubstantiated reports of this Titan have trickled in from southern Regno; confirmation has been greatly frustrated by the fact that according to all reports, the Titan of Steel is not only capable of flight, but began flying as soon as it could, directly towards the Dead Wastes. All reports are, however, quite clear that the Titan of Steel was making use of a humanoid chassis profile.

NOTE: The Titan of Steel's existence has since been confirmed by several dozen adventuring parties during their boarding of its exo-atmospheric chassis; their theme is Atomic Clockwork, which apparently involves throwing around bona fide Dragonfire, along with sheer brute force and plenty of invisible damaging hazards. Presumably, their source of Mana is also artificial Dragonfire.

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List Of Dungeon Themes (14th edition)
For the benefit of new adventurers, it is often useful to explain the types of Dungeon one is likely to come across. Most mature Dungeons have some sort of cohesive theme which informs a canny observer what sorts of threats and monsters can be found inside. Generally speaking, themes come in two parts; first there is the base, which defines the basic architecture of the Dungeon along with some of the general types of monsters one is likely to encounter. Then, there are one or more modifiers, which add on some special twist. There are five currently known accepted 'base' themes, listed below.

Castle
Often what people think of when they hear 'Dungeon', Castle dungeons are easily distinguished by the stonework surfaces studded with the occasional light source that make up most of their structure. As far as threats go, Castle dungeons have a bit of everything, but don't really specialize overmuch; you can find skilled humanoid guards, ravenous monsters, absurd deathtraps, and utterly bizarre magic effects all throughout one of these Dungeons.

As Castle Dungeons are such generalists, it is often hard to come up with a skill set perfectly designed to counter them; on the other hand, they cannot excel in any one field to the same degree as the other Dungeon types, which means that the threats inside are a bit less dangerous overall.

Clockwork
One of the biggest dead giveaways for a Clockwork Dungeon is how everything is made of metal. Seriously, no other Dungeon type makes literally everything out of metal. Clockwork Dungeons are also one of the only places one can find the eponymous Clockworks, mechanical constructs powered by Mana (NOTE: Clockworks may very rarely also be found in Castle Dungeons).

When it comes to the threats found inside a Clockwork Dungeon, they can usually be summarized as brute force, with the occasional difficult puzzle. That said, while the Dungeon's traps are brute force, they are also omnipresent; all exposed surfaces should be considered trapped until proven otherwise.

Crystal
Usually, the most obvious sign of being in a Crystal Dungeon is the crystals everywhere, though it is not unknown for significant parts of the structure to be ordinary stonework. In any case, it is not unusual for Crystal Dungeons to have relatively humanoid inhabitants, though they often sport truly bizarre magical abilities.

The main hazards inside of a Crystal Dungeon actually have more to do with its layout and architecture than they necessarily do conventional traps or monsters. It is not uncommon to encounter annoying things like four-dimensional mirror mazes or other, even weirder architectural features. That said, the monsters and traps are certainly present, and they often have bizarre abilities of their own, so don't think a good sense of direction will be enough to get you through one on your own.

Forest/Nature
Nature Dungeons are a bit odd, as it's easily possible to mistakenly think you're outdoors while inside one. Terrain features can include rivers, lakes, large stands of trees, deserts, and many other biomes. Very often, the insides of Nature Dungeons have breathtaking scenery that means they are often visited by Adventurers who just want to relax.

As far as hazards go, there aren't too many traps inside of Nature Dungeons, but you should avoid taste-testing any of the flora or fungi without making sure you have some serious poison resistance. On the other hand, Nature Dungeons have some of the most ridiculously dangerous biological monsters yet encountered. Many an adventurer has entered an ill-tempered Nature Dungeon and come out severely mauled, if they were lucky enough to come out at all.

Necrosis
If the walls seem to be made out of exposed gory tissue, or there are bones used as significant structural components, chances are you're in a Necrosis dungeon. Generally speaking, Necrosis Dungeons are filled to the brim with undead of all sorts, and they have several much more insidious hazards meaning that all but the most experienced of Adventurers are strongly discouraged from entering. To be more specific, they are more than happy to both infect Adventuring parties with lethal and contagious diseases that can devastate the surrounding region, or if they feel peckish for Mana they will rip your soul straight out of your body and devour it.

Given the extreme threat presented by Necrosis dungeons, even without them going down the route of the Titan of Bone, they should be immediately reported to the Global Adventurers' Union for termination.

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Basic Daemonology
I have only one word of advice for anyone who wants to go down the route of a Daemon summoner. That word is DON'T. It doesn't matter what purposes you intend to summon a Daemon for; they will stall and offer excuses not to do anything even remotely benevolent for an indefinite length of time, and during that time their mere presence will slowly twist you into a being just as corrupt and malevolent as the Daemon themselves. So far, the only observed defenses against this corruption involve being typed with antithetical thematics (in which case you would never want to summon a Daemon in the first place), killing the Daemon immediately before it has a chance to corrupt you, or outright not having a soul whatsoever.

As such, no directions for carrying out a Daemon summoning will be provided in this text. Below, some of the more common varieties of Daemon you might have the misfortune of meeting on an adventure are listed, along with the most effective ways of killing them.

Scourges
By far the smallest of Daemons, Scourges are around four inches tall, fly using small wings attached to their backside, and are incredibly ill-tempered. They don't have much in the way of magical or combat prowess save for a mildly venomous bite, meaning that they aren't too much of a threat. That said, if encountered in large numbers, it is advised to use wide-area fire or poison effects, as it can be hard to noticeably deplete a swarm with normal weapons.

Deceivers
By far one of the most paranoia-inducing types of Daemon, Deceivers are around human size and shape, and have an illusion ability that allows them to impersonate people they encounter. They use this to frame innocents for heinous crimes, avoid liability for their own misdeeds, and leave unfortunate mortals impregnated with Daemonspawn. The children resulting from this are fortunately not Daemons themselves, but they will need to spend their formative years in a mana-rich environment themed with something antithetical to Daemonic presence to avoid growing up to become Daemons. Regardless, they will still grow horns, batlike wings, and a barbed tail as they mature.
(NOTES: Proven antithetical thematic elements include Holy, Benevolence, and Nature)

Fortunately, since a Deceiver's disguise is purely an illusion effect, they can be detected with anything that can penetrate illusions. Aside from physical capabilities capable of matching a low-mid level Adventurer, Deceivers have no other defenses, meaning they go down relatively easily.

Carilists
The 'Basic Footsoldier Daemon' as far as such things go, Carilists are fairly straightforward as far as their abilities go. They carry some manner of nasty melee weapon from which they are able to cast fire and lightning, they are fairly resistant to most forms of damage, and they are fairly smart tacticians. If at all possible, you want to take a Carilist down hard and fast; in the event of a prolonged melee engagement, treat a Carilist as a mid-level adventurer specialized in melee combat.

 

[I Just Write]

Re-entering the planet's atmosphere went about as smoothly as could be hoped for, really. The ceramic heat shield mounted to the front of my escape pod handled the shock-heating admirably, superheated plasma sliding smoothly off the front of my current conveyance. Thanks again to a long time playing Kerbal Space Program, I had aimed for a fairly shallow re-entry trajectory, resulting in a fairly gentle deceleration as I streaked through the upper atmosphere. Seeing as I was coming down on the night side, I idly wondered how many people mistook me for a shooting star and wished on me.

Either way, my aerobraking maneuver was successful, and I quickly took active control of my descent again, diving through the cloud cover. Still, as I descended, the optical sensors mounted to the front of my pod began picking up... rainbows? A bit more brief examination indicated that no, this was more accurately described as rainbow-colored light. Soon, I burst through the bottom of the cloud cover, revealing what looked like a jagged cathedral of multi-colored stained glass, just floating in the air, a glowing point of light in their foundation.

I will admit I was fairly curious what this was all about, so I deployed my parachute well ahead of schedule. Remembering what I did to speak to the Titan of Bone, I sent the mass a message asking

Titan of Steel: Greetings! You wouldn't happen to be a fellow Titan, would you?

Aether Titan: Well yes, I am. I would say that 'fellow' might be stretching it a bit much, seeing as you're rather small to lay claim to that title.

Titan of Steel: Hey, I just got my chassis exploded by an enchanted bottle full of what I'd say was probably Dragonfire. To make a long story short, I thought building in orbit would keep Adventurers from raiding me. I was wrong; all it did was attract the attention of every party powerful enough to teleport to me.

Aether Titan: Wait, that was you!? What power source were you even using that could work away from the planet anyway? Even my planar rift requires fairly significant proximity to large concentrations of life to give me any useful amounts of power, and I'm less tethered to my power source than most Titans.

Titan of Steel: To be completely blunt, I'm using incredibly violent reactions powered by the conjuration of elements that should not be, and release incredible amounts of energy as they instantly destroy themselves. I prefer calling it nuclear power since it involves atomic nuclei, but as far as I can tell it's more commonly known as Dragonfire.

Aether Titan: Oh. That would explain it. So, was there anything else you wanted to talk about, or did you just drop by to meet me as you plummeted towards the sea?

Titan of Steel: I'll be completely honest; I didn't know you were here when I picked my de-orbit trajectory. Anyway, since I don't particularly feel like cutting my parachute until I actually splash down in a few minutes, we may as well talk. On that note, you mentioned getting your power from some kind of planar rift; mind telling me a bit more about that?

Aether Titan: Sure, I suppose. I've got a gash in reality leading directly to the collective unconscious of pretty much everything on the planet with a brain, a ridiculous amount of mana flows out of said rift, and I use it to power my chassis. Anyway, since we seem to be taking turns at asking questions, how long did it take you to get yourself mobile?

Titan of Steel: The first time, or on average? I'd wager I get my chassis trashed more often than the average Titan.

Aether Titan: The first time, I guess; that usually takes the longest, since new Dungeons usually have no idea how to go about procuring a suitable power source.

Titan of Steel: To be honest, it took me about a week to go from waking up as a brand new Dungeon to building my first Chassis to the point of being able to travel. Admittedly I promptly crashed the thing in the Dead Wastes since I had no idea how to fly the thing, but the point still stands. It's been about a month and a half since then.

Aether Titan: I call bullshit! No Dungeon is that knowledgeable about engineering and mana dynamics at such a young age! By all rights you should be a barely cognizant newborn! Seriously, it took me around twelve years to prepare for take-off, and I'm one of the faster Dungeons to reach Titan status on record.

Titan of Steel: Well, I'll happily tell you the truth, though I doubt you'll believe it. While I've only been a Dungeon for about two months right now, my mental age is a lot closer to twenty years, most of which was spent as a human in an alternate world where nuclear reactions were common knowledge, and there was no such thing as Dragons, or Dungeons, or any of this other bizarre stuff that I have no idea how to deal with and keeps trying to kill me! I just went to sleep one night and woke up as a Dungeon Core, and it's been one disaster after another since then! The only notable achievement of mine that will actually stick was killing the Titan of Bone, and they were literally a helpless target with no ability to actually harm me!

There was a long pause before I received a reply.

Aether Titan: Huh, never thought I'd get to meet another reincarnate. Admittedly my past life was native to this world rather than wherever you came from, but I understand at least part of what you're getting at.

Titan of Steel: Sorry for shouting at you; I really needed to vent, and doing it to Minions doesn't really work since they're kind of a part of me. Wait, what did you say about reincarnating?

Aether Titan: Don't worry, I understand that feeling. And people getting reincarnated as Dungeons is a known thing that happens around here, though it's extremely rare. Anyway, you look to be getting a bit close to the sea there; do you want to keep in touch, or shall this be it for now?

Titan of Steel: I would really like that; I've been keeping in touch with a Shepherd named Seth who helped me get going the first time, but he doesn't really get the whole Dungeon thing, you know?

Aether Titan: Yeah, I really do; meeting up with my past life family was awkward until we eventually called the whole thing off. Oh, good job taking out the Titan of Bone by the way; basically all of us Titans wanted a crack at him once we learned what he'd done, but none of us had a power source that could keep us going inside the Dead Wastes long enough to finish the job. Thank you for that.

With that, a glowing blue object flew out of the Aether Titan's jagged crystalline chassis towards my pod. I opened the door to admit the fragment of crystal, closing it just as I touched the waves. With that, I sent the ignition command to my parachute, and the nitrocellulose fibers I'd woven into it reduced the canopy to so much ash, erasing most evidence of its presence. The next step was simply making a beeline for the seafloor, before digging myself a new facility where I could prepare my next chassis. Diving through the water went fairly quickly, and I made it about 500 meters down before I thudded gently on the bottom.

Very quickly I hollowed out a room and got ready to move out of the pod I had descended in, setting up reactors and other such things that I would require in order to successfully launch. That said, I intended to stay here a fair bit longer than would strictly be required; before I tried doing anything else, I wanted some kind of anti-teleport mechanism, and I had an idea for getting some on-the-ground intelligence that I wanted to put through its paces.

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Honestly, landing on the moon had proven easy compared to what the free Gremlins were having to deal with after arriving, as far as Shart was concerned. First on the list of issues was securing a supply of food, water, and breathable air; with fixed conjuration devices and the output of the several dozen reactors that had been repaired, the last two were easy, but food was proving a bit of an issue. After some trial and error, nutrition bricks that technically fulfilled all of a Gremlin's dietary requirements had been developed, but there was a growing consensus among many that if they had to eat those things for the rest of their life, they'd walk out the airlock without a suit.

Then there were the construction issues; without free-form conjuration being an option, everything needed to be built the hard way. Admittedly manpower wasn't too much of an issue thanks to plenty of Construction Clockworks, but it was still proving annoyingly time-consuming to get a significant habitat space set up. Said habitat space was still depressingly barren, seeing as it still wasn't easily doable to conjure organic matter.

On that note, many had come to the conclusion that they didn't want their new civilization to sputter and die as its founders reached their maximum life expectancy, and had taken to making sure there would be a next generation of Gremlins to succeed their starting population of around a hundred thousand. This had involved quite a lot of rather messy experimentation at first, but now the biggest question related to that topic was how to deal with the upcoming wave of children. It was still completely unknown to everyone involved just how long the resulting pregnancies would take, along with how long childhood would last, and the best way to educate young Gremlins.

Yes, it had been three months of toil and hardship for the new Gremlin Lunar Republic, but as the newly elected President Shart looked over a bill from the council suggesting acquiring farmable crops and livestock from the planet below, she couldn't help but think that it would all be worth it in the end. Thus, with a stroke of her pen, she authorized the launching of spaceplanes loaded with Clockwork Soldiers to surreptitiously acquire suitable stocks of both seeds and livestock.

 

[I Just Write]

Corenzite's wounds had not yet healed fully since their battle with that Titan. How could they possibly do so in such a short time, considering that the Supreme Leader had come far closer to death than ever before? As such, even three months later he could not muster the strength to fly on his only barely healed wings, and he still suffered from a limp. Making it even worse is that apparently the explosion that ended the fight had permanently damaged one of his more important organs, meaning that he was now incapable of using his Dragonfire without injuring himself. And without Dragonfire, could Corenzite even call himself a Grand Dragon?

Thus, the blue-scaled Dragon had thrown up a wall of bluster in an attempt to keep his rivals away, stating that if any were to intrude upon his territory, he would destroy his enemy's treasure horde, the gravest possible threat it was possible to level against a Grand Dragon. For some time this had worked in preventing raids, but now one of Corenzite's rivals had called his bluff, a red-scaled upstart from the north going by the name of Ophey.

Thus, the blue Grand Dragon trudged their way out of their capital to intercept Ophey, dreading the encounter that was about to occur; fights between Grand Dragons generally went until one party decided to disengage and flee, but if they were incapable of fleeing then battles almost always ended in the deaths of one or more of the Dragons involved. In his present state, Corenzite would find escape nearly impossible, and his lingering disabilities already had him at a massive disadvantage. Indeed, the only reason why Corenzite hadn't tried to slink off and find somewhere to hide is because Regno had a distinct absence of rough terrain or suitably large caves, leaving him with very few options in that category.

Thus, the red dragon bore down on the blue Supreme Leader of Regno, the old king's injuries dooming him just as effectively as if the Titan had made the finishing blow. The resulting battle was short, brutal, and there were no illusions on either side that both parties would survive. Almost instantly, Ophey determined Corenzite's inability to breathe Dragonfire or fly, before taking ruthless advantage of both infirmities by simply blasting Corenzite repeatedly from the air until he eventually keeled over.

In the immediate aftermath, Emperor Ophey dropped Corenzite's severed head on his former palace, proclaiming his dominion over Regno, and that any dissenters would soon face the wrath of a Grand Dragon. He still hadn't finished consolidating his power base when he spotted a mass of steel on the horizon, approaching at speeds faster than even the greatest of Grand Dragons could manage in level flight.

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Over the couple months I spent buried on the bottom of the seafloor, the truly vast number of Gremlins I put to the task of figuring out a way to block teleportation made only two notable advances. The first was a general purpose Blink device that I could fit to my Clockworks, allowing them short-range tactical teleportation. That immediately went right in the next model of all my main-series Clockworks; I had a feeling they'd need it.

The second advance of note was something I found myself grudgingly tolerating as a form of teleportation defense, being a floor tile that would redirect nearby inbound teleport attempts to itself, allowing me to guarantee that unwelcome visitors beaming aboard would arrive in extremely undesirable conditions. Admittedly said tile had no form of IFF, meaning it would jam my own teleports as well, but I considered that an acceptable trade-off.

Experiments regarding using a pair of the 'attractor' tiles to telefrag someone into pieces simply resulted in the victim arriving unharmed at whatever tile was closer to their destination. Further, it had been demonstrated in testing that the more mana was put into the teleport, the easier a time it had not getting re-directed; at the levels of mana inherently used in teleporting to an orbital structure, they just flat out would not be effective at keeping a space station secure. Providing the tile with more mana wouldn't have helped, as part of the way they functioned was by pumping all the ambient mana out of the arrival zone.

The other major project I had the Gremlins working on was some way to finally be able to make serious use of Mutants outside my structure without them immediately going into full crush-kill-destroy mode. Almost immediately I had figured that the most reliable option would be to simply de-brain them and integrate a Clockwork's processor core for decision-making, but doing so had been proving surprisingly difficult to get right, with the peripheral nervous system simply refusing to synch up properly. Gradually, over the course of the project more and more components of the final Cyborg had been made Clockwork, until eventually the end product reminded me of a Terminator more than anything else; a cosmetic tissue layer concealing a robotic endoskeleton.

This conveniently let me fit my newest creations with a lot of the gadgetry I would normally only be able to cram in a Clockwork, including the new Blink device, some concealed automatic weapons, and a toggleable radiation source that would both regenerate the mutant's squishy parts, and allow for easy elimination of most assassination targets.

With much cosmetic surgery courtesy of my Gremlins, and a quick burst of radiation to make the Mutant tissue regenerate the surgical scars, I was ready to send my infiltrators into the world.

With my infiltrators on their way, I finally turned my attention to what I would be building for my next Chassis. This time, I wouldn't be wasting effort on excessively complex humanoid mechanisms; instead I would be building for raw, brutal combat effectiveness, focusing on firepower and mobility. Thus, the hull profile I ultimately selected would best be described as a flying battleship; I had briefly considered cosplaying as a Bolo, but in the predicament I found myself in, I needed all-angle weapons coverage and enough mobility to stay well out of melee range with the stupidly powerful dragons I'd be going up against.

The most notable property of the hull, aside from being almost as excessively durable as my last humanoid chassis, was that I'd used some additional Mana to reduce its effective mass, leaving it neutrally buoyant in air at around 2 kilometers altitude. This low effective mass combined nicely with the horrendously overpowered engines I had mounted to the ship for both forwards thrust and turning, meaning that if absolutely necessary, I could get 100 gees of acceleration. Of course, this would have been immediately fatal to any unfortunate Gremlins who happened to be aboard, necessitating water-filled suspension tanks with breathing gear, which could protect biologicals from utterly absurd gee forces.

Weaponry was also upgraded to a degree that some would consider rather excessive. First, I had a main battery of twenty four Pulsed Proton Cannons, with each bolt delivering a terajoule of energy to the target and each gun firing once per second. For a secondary broadside, I had several kinetic weapons that conjured projectiles moving at 50 km/s; I called them Relative Conjuration guns. Then there were the 32 missile tubes I was mounting, firing missiles equipped with Nuclear Shaped Charges, which I considered a secondary weapon system for no reason other than collateral damage. Point Defense meanwhile was handled by dozens of smaller Relative Conjuration Guns. I didn't bother with any melee weapons; if this chassis wound up in close combat I had severely messed up.

Some other miscellaneous systems that bore mentioning included an escape pod, an experimental defensive force field, and an emergency mana storage system that worked using a cubic meter block of the same compressed mana material as composed those Beads that Seth had given me some time ago. I really hoped I didn't need any of them, but better to have and not need than need and not have.

As I underwent my final launch preparations, the twenty thousand or so Gremlins who had been working on my latest round of engineering projects climbed into their suspension tanks, ready for the extreme accelerations I would be pulling in my fight against the draconic dictator oppressing the people of Regno. The chats I'd had with the Aether Titan had been quite informative in that regard, and it was quite clear to me now that Grand Dragons as a species were simply too dangerous and megalomaniacal to be allowed to live.

Thus, when my sensors informed me that the Grand Dragon over Regno's capital was red rather than blue, my resolve regarding my course of action didn't falter for a millisecond. Instead, I simply ordered my fire control computer to give me a firing solution for every single weapon my chassis was equipped with, while also adjusting the criteria slightly to herd the Dragon away from the city they were currently flying over.

 

[I Just Write]

Monster Profile: Clockwork Knight

An excerpt from the writings of the veteran Dungeon-delver Janise Cher

A monster found in the now-defunct orbital Dungeon known as the Celestial Palace (also referred to as the Titan of Steel), Clockwork Knights are quite formidable opponents for any adventurer who should be faced with one, seeing as they have incredibly high base capabilities along with extremely lethal weaponry.

First are the basic capabilities; Clockwork Knights have quite bluntly excessive amounts of physical strength, decently good speed, and an extreme amount of physical durability for a monster their size. In my fights with them, I had to sink significant chunks of my mana reserve into each hit just to dent their armor, and whenever they managed to get a hit in, my protection field nearly collapsed. If I hadn't thought to bring along a few Mana Beads to recharge myself, I would not have survived my third encounter with these constructs.

As for weaponry aside from sheer physical performance, Clockwork Knights have a mixture of integrated weapons and handheld items. In the integrated category, they first have a pair of rapid-fire guns mounted to their arms; these are pretty standard for a Clockwork Dungeon, but have a higher muzzle velocity than normal. The other major integrated weapon they have is that turbine in their chest, through which they can fire a massive explosive blast. Said blast also delivers a nasty damage-over-time effect that can stick to its victims, the general nearby area, and the Clockwork Knight itself for nearly a week; I was dependent on mana beads for a significant time afterwards to keep my Protection Field up, or I would have surely died.

Carried weapons fit into the general categories of sword, shield, and rifle. The sword is long, heavy, and has a much broader blade and thicker handle than many swords; it is just as excessively durable as the Clockwork Knight itself, but that isn't its only nasty trick; when activated, the sword is capable of sheathing itself in Dragonfire, and I mean the real stuff that can melt cities into slag if enough is used at once. There is no visible activation switch, but after prodding the sword with my mana for a few hours I was able to get it to turn on.

WARNING: Just because Dragonfire isn't touching you doesn't mean it can't hurt you! It also emits an invisible light that can lethally poison you with minimal exposure; fortunately, regenerative magic can save you if applied in time.

The rifle is another Dragonfire weapon, firing either bolts or continuous streams of Dragonfire at extreme velocity, depending on the setting. These shots are more than capable of penetrating almost any defense an Adventurer can carry, short of temporarily boosting their durability with the mana contents of an entire Blue Bead at minimum. Getting it to work was much the same as the sword; the internal mechanisms have to be prodded with mana just right in order for the weapon to activate.

Compared to this, the shield is almost boring, for the most part just being a single massive slab of whatever absurdly durable materials the Clockwork Knight is made from. All but the strongest adventurers will find it too heavy to wield properly, but if you can you will find few shields superior to it. It also has the additional feature of self-repairing when supplied with Mana, but the levels of mana required are so absurdly massive that a normal adventurer would be hard-pressed to fix a significant gash in the shield with even a week's worth of exertion.

Monster parts that can be harvested from a Clockwork Knight are fairly typical for Clockworks, being large quantities of refined metal, several dozen motors and other mechanical components that Tinkers tend to find useful. That said, the Clockworks from the Celestial Palace have two fairly notable properties that stand out. First, the material they are made from is absurdly durable and nearly impossible to work; it was quite clearly conjured in place, since there wouldn't be many practical ways to forge it. If you can get the parts out, they are therefore likely to last in projects for an extremely long time without replacement.

Second are the parts my party started referring to as the 'Dragonfire Cores', for lack of a better name. These parts are near-perpetual mana generators that make use of conjured Dragonfire to violate the Perpetual Mana Prevention Principle. As such, they can provide easy re-charging for any adventuring party that acquires them, and a near-perpetual power source for Tinker projects. A Clockwork Knight contains two Dragonfire Cores, and seems able to operate at full capacity with only one core functioning.

Thus, Clockwork Knights (if you can find them) will prove an extremely hazardous challenge for all but the most experienced adventuring parties, but taking them down is extremely rewarding.

 

[I Just Write]

Chapter 18
The first indication that the Red Dragon had of my intentions was when I turned broadside and unloaded a full salvo of twenty-four Pulsed Proton Bolts into their left wing, my targeting computers enabling near-perfect placement of the c-fractional plasma shots, delivering a total kinetic energy roughly equivalent to six kilotons of TNT. Even the excessively durable scales of a Grand Dragon were hard-pressed to withstand such a pounding, and the plasma shots shredded the joint keeping the lifting surface attached.

Obviously, this caused the Dragon to immediately lose control of their flight path, tumbling out of control to faceplant in a field just outside the city walls of Regno Prima. This presented a minor issue, as with that proximity to the city I could not fire my main battery without causing unacceptable damage to the citizens of the place. On the other hand, I had my secondary weapons to make use of; swiftly, my Relative Conjuration broadside clicked into place for its firing solution.

I was indeed almost about to fire when the Red Dragon momentarily recovered, opening fire with the Grand Dragon's take on Proton Beam weaponry. The mana field I had surrounding my chassis held up to the blast admirably, but I didn't want to take any chances with how fast it was being worn down. Therefore, I slammed my thrusters to maximum acceleration, quickly dodging out of the beam.

WARNING!: Adventurers have teleported into the dungeon!

Briefly, I split my focus to the attractor panel in my forehull, even as I ordered my Relative Conjuration guns to fire. It looked like I had a group of about thirty heavily-armed individuals aboard, all wearing a distinctly familiar model of armor. Drake Guard.

Outside my hull, the first salvo of RC gun shots slammed home, shattering bones and punching large holes in the Grand Dragon's hide, though the dragon' skull and forward ribcage were apparently tough enough to bounce the shots. Seriously, who even designed these creatures!?

Internally, the situation was significantly more dire; the radiation trap in the teleport receiver room had fired for all of a few seconds before the boarding party had disabled it, applying healing magic before they continued on into a corridor. A corridor which I had coincidentally ordered obstructed by about eight Clockwork Knights. The casualties quickly began to mount among both my constructs and the adventuring party, as radswords removed limbs, various weapons put dents in Clockworks, and the corridor quickly became caked with a thick layer of deadly Sodium 24.

The situation with the Dragon outside meanwhile quickly resolved itself, as a Relative Conjuration shot went right down their throat in between bouts of nuclear firebreathing, punching a massive hole out the back of their neck in the process, and probably severing the spine since the Red Dragon stopped moving and keeled over.

This only left the contingent of Drake Guard, who were still going strong despite the quite bluntly excessive amount of radiation they were being exposed to, and had almost made it to the end of the corridor where they were currently held up. Admittedly they'd lost six members, but still. Fortunately, there wasn't anything too important in the room they were about to enter, but I would rather end this sooner instead of later.

Therefore, I pumped out all the oxygen present in that room, and replaced it with a mix of Hydrogen Cyanide and Hydrogen Sulphide. As the Drake Guard eventually bashed down my excessively reinforced door, I commented over the intercom "You know, both the blue dragon and the red dragon are dead now. If you surrender I'll let you live."

The first few to enter the room went down from the deadly cocktail of poison gas, before the rest quickly put up air bubble spells. One of them replied, saying "You lie! The country of Regno will ALWAYS be ruled by a Grand Dragon, for no other being can claim the life of one such as them!"

In response, I projected the footage of my final deadly shot against the Red Dragon against the wall, and noted "That image is not faked. It was pulled directly from my memories; I killed the Red Dragon myself, and if I'm not mistaken then the object he dropped when I shot his wing off was the severed head of the Blue Dragon who used to be here."

The Drake Guard continued on their attempt to reach my core and end me, unheeding of the advice I had offered; they lined up at one of the other armored doors, and began bashing away at it. Fine, if they wanted to be that way, I'd stop playing around. In the room opposite to the one the Drake Guard were attempting to enter, a Proton Tank was diverted. The door clicked open, and my war machine fired an unfocused continuous blast of nuclear death into the room, rated at around fifty gigawatts. When the Proton Tank stopped, the only sign that the Drake Guard had ever been here were carbon silhouettes on the opposite wall.

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The long stint in her... cage for lack of a better term had not been kind to Urist McSmith. She hadn't been informed of anything whatsoever, and aside from the person assigned to feeding the potentially useful prisoners, it seemed that basically everyone had forgotten about the dwarf in the tower. As far as Urist could tell, a few hours ago there had been several extremely loud booming sounds, including the roar of a Grand Dragon, but she didn't dare hope that the Titan had come to her rescue.

Still, something unusual was definitely going on; she heard the footsteps of the person charged with feeding her approaching, but there was a second set of footsteps following them. A set of footsteps that sounded distinctly metallic.

There was some muffled conversation outside, before the door swung open. Not the small hatch that food was shoved through either, the big main door that hadn't opened since the day Urist was put in here. The man with the food tray entered, accompanied by a light gray automaton with a rifle slung over its shoulder. Unbidden, the machine spoke, saying "You're free to go; the hallway has been painted with arrows leading to the exit, though you can take your time if there's anything you wish to do in here before you depart."

Afterwards, Urist would swear that she had not impulsively hugged the cold, unyielding metal, merely that she had jumped in surprise, happened to collide with the automaton, and held on tight as she could. That didn't make the return hug any less well-received, if a bit lumpy.

It was the man with the food tray who spoke up and interrupted the moment, saying "Not that this isn't touching and all, but there's still about fifty prisoners who need to be freed today, and only so much time to do it in."

A bit embarrassedly, Urist released the automaton, grabbed her food tray, and headed for the hallway. As she passed through the doorway though, she couldn't help but ask "Curiously, why am I being released today all of a sudden?"

The automaton answered simply "Because there will never again be a Grand Dragon ruling this country." before continuing on to the next cell.

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The newcomer to the town of Rofe was strange; they just showed up one day, with no apparent history of any sort. They weren't seeming to do much of anything, aside from collect gossip, hang out in the tavern, and generally just be around. They had proceeded to set up a machinery store and were indeed selling small devices of varying usefulness to anyone who came by, but they never seemed to require any actual time to make their devices, and there were none of the tools in their shop that a Tinker might normally be expected to have.

For Sherry Rosotz, everything about this situation screamed that this was a Deceiver, but other things didn't fit. First, the behavior pattern made no sense for a Daemon of any sort; they just sort of existed and did what they did without hurting anyone. Sure, there was that one idiot who tried to pummel the newcomer in a bar fight and got decked, but they started it.

However, the final nails in the coffin of the Daemon hypothesis were revealed by Sherry's sensory magic. First and foremost, her anti-illusion Eyes of Truth spell showed a being that still looked human, while a Deceiver would have been easily found out by such a method. The other major piece of evidence was the theme-ping spell, revealing that the oddity had a thematic type of Atomic Clockwork. No Daemonic components whatsoever.

As she looked through her previous writings to find where the theme Atomic Clockwork might have come up, Sherry's gaze happened upon her latest issue of the Titanomicon. It took her mere minutes to recollect that the theme had apparently only so far been used by the Titan of Steel. From there, it was a simple matter of deciding on a course of action.

The next day, Sherry went to the mystery man's store, and as soon as the other customers had left, she said bluntly "I know you probably aren't actually human. That said, you haven't yet hurt anyone, so I just want to know what you actually are, and what your intentions are for this town."

The newcomer tensed and relaxed, before they noted "This might take a while, but you are indeed correct about the fact that I am non-human."

It took several minutes for Sherry to tease the whole story out of the newcomer, revealing that he was a Dungeon minion working for the Titan of Steel, that he was in fact a Clockwork hybridized with an organic minion, and even the fact that the Titan of Steel did in fact run on Dragonfire.

Still, when she was done, Sherry couldn't help but ask "Curiously, would you be able to get me in contact with the Titan of Steel? I think that a text describing things from a Titan's point of view would be a great addition to the next edition of the Titanomicon, and I generally do like talking to interesting people."

 

[I Just Write]

After my killing of the Red Dragon, I had an extremely short time window in which I could continue my current offensive without the Grand Dragons realizing something was up and moving back towards my liberated areas. Fortunately for me, my network of surveillance satellites from the ill-conceived Space Station project was still intact, which rather handily informed me of the locations of the nearly 130,000 Grand Dragons who continued to bicker over the planet.

As such, I dropped four shuttles full of Clockworks from my hangars on Regno's capitol, and set them the task of freeing political prisoners and taking over the machinery of state as effectively as they could. With that, I activated my main engines and rocketed off towards my next target, a young gold-scaled Grand Dragon who seemed to have done an even worse job of running their country than the Blue Dragon! At least the Blue Dragon had assembled some moderately functional state institutions, but this particular Dragon was just a thug.

Said Grand Dragon was over sparsely populated countryside when I found them, so I didn't bother with collateral damage mitigation in the slightest; instead of blowing a wing off to try and control their trajectory as they fell, I just shot them in the face with energy equal to a few kilotons of TNT, caving in their skull and killing them instantly. With that, it was off to the next target, a purple-scaled Tyrant who I was absolutely sure had no sort of heroic destiny whatsoever.

As I flew, I also took the opportunity to launch a salvo of around twenty missiles at another Grand Dragon some distance away from my current main target; my guided munitions had an extremely long range, and satellite target data had revealed that a certain Green Wyrm was sufficiently far from any sort of civilization that I didn't think smashing them with a couple megatons would hurt anyone else.

Thus, flying in a concentric pattern around Regno, I quickly managed to take out around thirty Grand Dragons with surprise attacks overwhelming their defenses quickly enough for an instant kill. During this little blitzkrieg of mine, I was boarded five times, most often disposing of the boarders by spinning into some insane maneuver and letting gee-forces do my dirty work for me. In one case the group of Adventurers managed to abscond immediately after mugging a couple Clockwork Knights for their weapons, as I didn't react fast enough to keep them from escaping.

That said, after clearing out a region nearly 300 miles wide I began retreating back to Regno. I had no illusions that I would be able to take on the entire world all in one go, for a few major reasons. In order to clear out room for my development of the country, I had been flying in a concentric pattern; this meant that the further out I got, the longer it would be before I got back to a given angle relative to Regno, meaning there would be more and more time for news to propagate to the still surviving Grand Dragons. This was especially the case as the effective velocity of news was likely boosted to a significant degree by magic; after all, I had real-time global communications, so it wasn't much of a stretch for there to be other methods of magical messaging.

Quickly, I fell back to a radius of about one hundred and fifty miles around Regno Prima, and began hurriedly constructing defensive emplacements for Anti-Grand-Dragon use; this pretty much amounted to a copy of one of my main turrets, a battery of Relative Conjuration Autocannons for defense, enough reactor capacity for running everything including self-repair, and an armored casing that could stand up to Dragonfire for plenty long enough to finish the job. Each such emplacement except the ones directly on the coast had line of sight to two other emplacements, meaning that they could give each other supporting fire if needed. I had just put the finishing touches on the last one by sunset on the day of my offensive, before flying back to Regno to actually get down to the business of nation-building.

As I returned, I made a resolution to myself; there would be elections for the government in six months, those elections would be as fair and democratic as I could manage, and I would be making damn sure no would-be authoritarians would be using this as an opportunity to grab power.
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On the opposite side of the planet, Grand Dragon Samathin was subduing an upstart, intending to add them to her Draconic Empire as a subordinate. Normally, this would be a risky endeavor, since most Grand Dragons were fairly evenly matched when it came to combat capabilities. Samathin was not most Grand Dragons, being one of the only members of her species who was also an accomplished spellcaster. Samathin intended to keep it that way; if any other Grand Dragons learned to cast like she did, her empire would surely disintegrate, and so would she, in all likelihood.

Today, Samathin's newest subject-to-be was a black-scaled Grand Dragon by the name of Rost. As she closed in on Rost's capital, the feel of the Mana easily informed her when her opponent noticed her presence. Samathin was of course ready for Rost's retaliation, as the black-scaled dragon launched themselves into the air from the arena where they had been resting, blasting Dragonfire at the intruder the instant they had Line Of Sight.

Samathin simply grinned savagely as the spell circle lit up in front of her, capturing the stream of Dragonfire and using it to pull her opponent in like it were a rope. Roth quickly cut off the stream, but the damage to his flight control was already done, sending Roth tumbling downwards. Samathin ruthlessly capitalized on this, as a dozen carefully focused streams of Dragonfire lanced out from her spell circle, shearing away the membranes of Roth's wings. It would heal in about a month or so, but until then Roth's mobility would be seriously impaired.

Thus, the black-scaled Dragon tumbled uncontrollably to earth, only barely managing to lift his head out of the dirt when he felt the weight of the gold-scaled Samathin press onto his back. The gold-scaled mage quickly retrieved an object from her harness with one claw, while the other slammed Roth's head back into the ground. There was a click as Samathin placed the specially-prepared collar around Roth's neck, and informed him "The collar around your neck contains a sealed vial of Dragonfire more than sufficient to blow your head clean off. If you attempt to remove it, it will kill you. If you disobey me, it will kill you. I hope you understand."

Reluctantly, sounding defeated, Roth answered "What is your command, mistress?"

Samathin grinned a vicious grin exposing all of her extremely sharp teeth, saying "Well first, I really don't trust you not to try removing that collar sometime, so I'll be needing to give you a kill switch that's a bit harder to remove. Given that, I am ordering you to swallow this device."

 

[I Just Write]

From time to time, everyone has fantasized about how they would run the world if they took it over, and I was no exception. However, very few people also were able to predict all the problems that came with having to run even a small fraction of said world. Sadly, I wasn't much of an exception here either.

The instant I got back to the city where I had killed the Blue Dragon, I immediately burrowed myself into the ground. Despite the sheer mobility and firepower afforded by my battleship chassis, the fact was that I would be needing way more power generation than it could provide if I wanted to build enough infrastructure to hold together an entire freaking country!

Mostly, I let the facility-building run on autopilot while I focused on churning out VTOL transports stuffed with Clockwork Knights and my Infiltrator Cyborgs, though with the way I was about to be using them they wouldn't be infiltrating so much as providing a face that didn't immediately send the locals running in terror. Within thirty minutes, the flying machines were launching from the massive sunken hangar in the ground by the hundreds, with one shuttle landing at each town that I found.

There was one major reason that I was doing all this so quickly, and that was because I needed on the ground information about the territory I had just de-dragoned as quickly as I could possibly get it. I wanted to get the people here to the point that they could beat every single Grand Dragon that came at them into a pulp even without my help, and that meant I needed to proliferate my tech-base as hard as I possibly could. In order to do that, I would need to know where I was even going to be starting.

The information that was coming back was extremely disheartening, and I should really take it piece by piece if I wanted a good shot at explaining it correctly.

Let's start with the realm formerly ruled by the Blue Dragon; in a lot of ways, this place was one of the better off locations. There was a coherent national identity between all the various towns, an official system of communication (if heavily slanted towards propaganda), a semi-functional educational system able to turn out a good number of Mages, and very few bandits or monsters running free to torment the innocent. On the other hand, the educational system did everything in its power to stifle innovation on pain of death, the law enforcement was the Drake Guard, only the highest tier of society had access to healthcare (by which I mean healing magic), and sanitation was a joke.

There were about eight other areas like that where the Grand Dragons had taken an unusually intense interest in building a power-structure around themselves, but for the most part the Dragons had been content to simply pummel anyone who looked like they were building up a power base and take anything they wanted by force. In places like these, conditions were even worse. Large cities were non-existent aside from the Dragon's dens, all manner of scum and villainy roamed the countryside, and individual villages often viewed themselves as having zero common interest with their neighbors. On the other hand, it was only in these places that I was able to find Adventurer Towns, populated by monster-hunters and magic users of all stripes.

Much to my shame, it was only after getting a pretty good picture of how things were going for the humanoid species out there that I thought to check on the other Dungeons around these parts, recalling the Drake Guard's policy of repeated and thorough plundering.

Oh, the Dungeons in the places where the Grand Dragons really didn't give a shit about statecraft were doing rather well for themselves, if rather confused when some of my Clockworks showed up to give them the news and ask them how things had been going. It was the Dungeons in Regno that really infuriated me.

The first sign that anything was off was that the Drake Guard had universally vacated their bases outside every single Dungeon, but things simply got worse from there. Time after time, my creations marched through shattered corridors littered with th corpses of slain Dungeon inhabitants, every single item of value having long since been carted off. Stone walls and floors had been smashed and entire family units of Goblins and Fae had been put to the sword, leaving only a grim tableau of devastation. However, it wasn't until I thought to check why none of the Dungeons had talked to me that I discovered the depths of the atrocity that had just been committed.

Deep at the bottom of every single Dungeon, where a living, personable core once rested on a pedestal, there were only fragments. All across Regno, the Drake Guard had smashed right through the savaged defenses of the Dungeons they had spent years torturing to extract powerful artifacts and magic, and slain the being bringing the structure to life. Only once did my Clockworks encounter a Drake Guard contingent while they were still inside their victim's halls; I left a single survivor to interrogate, before checking to see if I had been too late here as well. I had.

How in the world are you even supposed to react when you find out that not only has a genocide just been committed against your own species, but also that you didn't even notice it happening until it was too late to stop it? Silently, I gave the member of the Drake Guard I was interrogating a carefully measured dose of gas-form Sodium-24; they wouldn't notice anything until long after I was done interrogating them, but neither would they be in the world much longer to keep spreading misery.

Once that unpleasantness was done and I had turned the man loose to die an agonizing death in a few days, I pretty much broke down at the enormity of what I could have prevented if I had just changed the order I had done things in. Quickly, I delegated temporary command and construction authority to my twenty highest-ranked Gremlins, ordering them to set about installing proper sanitation, travel and communication infrastructure immediately. That done, I retreated into myself to grieve. I really needed some time to process what had just happened, or I was likely to do something extremely counterproductive like set my Clockwork Knights to interrogate the entire population for Drake Guard loyalties.
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Clockwork Knight #0824971 was operating severely outside their originally designed mission parameters. Said parameters normally amounted to excessively lethal combat in which it was perfectly acceptable to reduce everything in sight to so much radioactive slag. Instead, #0824971 was acting as a visible bringer of good news and security to the people of a moderately large town near a river, a task where nuclear-powered plasma weapons were most emphatically not acceptable to use.

Currently, the human-like mediator platforms were meeting with the town's council of aldermen in the combination church and meeting-house that dominated the center of the town. #0824971 and the other Clockwork Knights had meanwhile needed to stay outside, after one of their number had crashed through the floor and into the basement due to the sheer weight of the metal making up their bodies. They had of course offered to repair the damage after hauling said Clockwork Knight out of the basement, but the whole incident was largely being glossed over by everyone involved.

Still, this left several bulky and imposing combat automatons standing in plain view of everyone in the town, most of whom looked really quite fearful regarding the whole thing. Given what these people had previously been subjected to, #0824971 figured it made sense. Their only frame of reference for what a government did was thugs backed up by a nuclear-powered dragon. The fact that the town's Drake Guard contingent had promptly been forced to either disband or be arrested for a later investigation into their actions likely hadn't made a very good impression either.

It was after an hour of general tension regarding the whole affair that events began to really occur. A woman was walking by with a small child in tow, carefully averting her gaze and gripping the young girl's hand tightly in order to keep them from escaping. The blonde-haired child in question had no such fears, calling out "Mommy I wanna go look at the shiny people!" the instant she saw #0824971 and their fellow Clockwork Knights.

#0824971 watched impassively as a brief tug of war ensued between the two, the child trying to slip out of her mother's grasp, and said mother desperately attempting to hold her child back. Ultimately, the child won and ran straight towards Clockwork Knight #0824971, her mother following desperately behind.

For the briefest of moments, the automaton measured the threat level presented by the child in order to determine an appropriate response. It took only a second in order for #0824971 to prepare the appropriate countermeasure to ensure their safety, even as the unknown child closed to within arm's reach with the extremely lethal combat automaton. The resulting encounter was over as swiftly as it began, as #0824971 offered the child an apple and asked "What is your name, little one?" crouching down as they did so.

The child snatched the fruit out of the Clockwork Knight's hand almost instantly, answering "My name's Emerald! What's yours?" before she swiftly set about demolishing the delicious fruit she had been given.

Clockwork Knight #0824971 pondered this for a few moments. They had a designation, yes, which kept them from being confused with other Clockwork Knights, but that was different from a name. A name implied identity and individuality, concepts that were quite foreign to Clockwork Knight #0824971. Eventually, the automaton answered "I was not provided with a name."

Emerald looked up from the fruit she had mostly consumed by now, before saying "Your dad must have forgotten something then." She didn't get to finish what she was about to say, as that was the exact instant Emerald's mother caught up to her, and hauled her away.

For the next several minutes, #0824971 found their thoughts persistently looping back around to that brief encounter with Emerald, and the idea of names as a signifier of personal identity. It was this persistent line of thought that lead the Clockwork Knight in question to make their first ever decision not dictated by the ethical framework they were imprinted with, the directives from the Command Network, or even the necessities of combat. With great solemnity, #0824971 sent a message into the Command Net that would have repercussions they hadn't even considered.

Clockwork Knight #0824971: I am requesting a name and cosmetic alterations to facilitate an individual identity.