Getting to his feet was easy, though he noted with embarrassment that his already ragged clothing was even more full of holes and also coated in his sticky amber blood. Crossing his arms self-consciously over his chest to hide what the remaining ribcage armor didn’t, he approached Rheagan. “I don’t suppose you know any tailor magic?” he asked awkwardly.
Rheagan quirked an eyebrow, “I’m sorry but I do not, in fact.” he shrugged apologetically, but then continued, “You’re very odd for a dryad, at least based on what I know of your kind. I was given to understand that dryads eschew clothing entirely when they can, or use plants as clothing when they must interact with… civilizations.” he said in a carefully diplomatic tone.
Xander’s cheeks burned even more, and he nearly squeaked, “No clothes? I could never go around naked! I’m not even a girl, I’m just stuck in this stupid body…” he protested, though trailed off towards the end as he thought that maybe he shouldn’t reveal that he had just sort of woken up in this world. Before Rheagan could reply, he rushed on. “Plants for clothes though? Hmm… I suppose I could do that, though it might be kind of awkward since they can get chatty if I’m ordering them around.”
For his part, the swordsman was also now sporting a bit of a blush and waved his hands in denial, “Errr, no no no, I wasn’t saying you should go around without clothes, only that other dryads hate them! So yes, if you can make your own that would be good, very good, yes…”. They both stared awkwardly at each other until Rheagan cleared his throat. “Ahem, ah, perhaps now would be a good time to loot the Den Mother?”
“Oh yes, jolly good time…” Xander said hastily, then winced.
Xander was mildly surprised that the body of the wolf hadn’t entirely gone up in flames, but both the monster and the attacks used to fell it were magical in nature, so there was probably some interaction there that he didn’t know about. Rheagan moved confidently up to the slain boss and laid a hand on its snout briefly before moving away quickly as an enormous plume of noxious rainbow fart gas began to waft up from the melting corpse. It was clearly taking a while for the huge boss to melt, so Xander took the time to see about turning plants into clothing.
The only leafy plants around were the brambles that made up the walls of the dungeon, so he walked over to the nearest one and examined it, trying to figure out how he would use them for coverage since he didn’t want to add too much weight. There were also the problems of needing to take off his current clothing before ‘dressing’, and the matter of the thorns. The latter shouldn’t be that much of a problem, but he had seen way too many movies to believe that just telling the others not to look would have anything but the opposite of the intended effect.
Shrugging, Xander headed to where they had entered the bosses lair. “I’ll be back in a minute, just gonna try the plant based clothes thing around the corner here…” he told them a bit awkwardly. Sibil actually smiled a bit knowingly at him, while Rheagan just waved him off, seemingly hypnotized by the wafting smoke like a neanderthal watching a bonfire. Ignaris continued to ignore them all in his usual sullen silence.
Once he got around the corner and out of sight, a wave of relief flooded through him. The past day and change had gotten entirely out of hand, and his social battery had been redlining for most of it. There was too much going on, too many new people, and of course all the near-death experiences. A heavy mental fatigue washed over him and he carefully leaned against one of the walls for a moment. After a bit, he realized that he couldn’t sense any presence from the thorny brambles, and closed his eyes to try to feel the core of his power like he had before.
The mental image swam up before him again, and he was surprised by how much larger it felt now. The multi-colored ball of liquid swirled as ever, though there were gaps in places, making it appear hollow. Peering closer, he could see a swirling blue vortex in the center that greedily sucked at the ambient haze of mana in this mental space. It took him a moment to realize that this must be his new Dungeon Maintenance ability.
What he didn’t see, however, was the tangle of faint lines that should have been present and linking him to the walls all around.
Focusing entirely on his core, he let all thoughts of the world outside drop away and directed his attention on the magic that flowed there. Magic as a reality was a new concept, but the possibilities magic represented as a concept was anything but. It wasn’t something that should be tied down and constrained to neat little spells, it was a force that should be able do anything that the user could imagine. Books, movies, TV shows, and games had shown him the infinite possibilities that magic should represent. There were rules here in this world, and a system that governed how things like magic worked. He didn’t even want to break the rules, just bend them a little.
Observing the flow of the glowing magic sphere, he was suddenly struck by the beauty of his magic. Almost all of his attention had been on fighting and doing everything in his power to survive, but the artist in him came back to the fore as he watched the swirls of tan, green, dark brown, and blue at the center. It wasn’t exactly the color palette he would have chosen, but then neither was the body that he was inhabiting. Still, there was something hypnotic and elegant about the way tendrils of color spun from the surface like mini solar flares seeking to escape the embrace of the core, only to fall back and be folded into it without muddying their individuality. He could have stared for ages, but roused himself from his trance and focused on the feelings.
He could reach out and grasp the nascent spells, and did so now with a green tendril of his Nurture Vegetation spell, feeling as mana started to flow towards it, his will connecting power to the potentiality of the spell. He let every sense he had examine the process, and could feel the pre-determined form start to take shape. This wasn’t what he wanted though, so with a thought he ended the spell, and felt its energy diffuse back into him. Next, he pulled on the Dungeon Maintenance feature, and could feel several weak tugs back in the direction of the slain bramble wolves. The vortex swirled and pulled, as if hungry and eager to absorb the slain beasts. They were beyond its reach at the moment, but not by much.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Xander’s mind whirled. Augustus had said that dungeons were supposedly magical constructs that were more caused by excess energy leaking from… something. He couldn’t remember all of what the asshat had been telling him, but the gist he took away was that adventurers slaying beasts and looting the bodies helped stabilize the dungeons. Dungeon Maintenance therefore converted that energy into his own mana, just like Reclamation returned the mana of the dead back to Gaellus. A grin spread across his face as he had an idea. It was all in the names. Gaellus wanted that energy back, and Xander’s class seemed like it was trying to make him some sort of conduit to do just that.
“I have a bond with my oak, and some oak leaves could make some pretty adequate clothing if I had enough of them,” he reasoned out loud to himself, “So then all I need to do is reclaim some energy from this place and channel it into my bond. I had the option to basically teleport back to the oak, so even though I didn’t take that option, there still has to be the possibility there. If I can connect to the dungeon and siphon enough power I bet I can strengthen that bond and get what I need. Anything extra I can just feed back to the world.”
It sounded reasonable, and there didn’t appear to be any harm in trying. Either the System just wouldn’t let it work, or he would finally get some decent ‘clothes’. It was time to see if he could change the damned rules. He focused on picturing what he wanted first, then the steps he would go through to get it. It would probably be best if he could grow an oak tree here, then he could use Control to make the leaves into clothes. He would siphon magic from the Dungeon, which was kind of his job after all, right? And then push that energy into his bond, his spells, and shunt the rest back into the world.
Concentrating on his core and his bond to the oak, he started to reach out mentally for everything he would need. The oak’s presence felt warm and welcoming, like a hug from his father, though also physically distant. The magic felt cool and reacted to his intentions, starting to draw mana from his own pool, but he tried to lock that down and pull on Reclamation and Dungeon Maintenance. Turbulence rippled through his mental image of the sphere, the magic not finding the appropriate framework or the usual power sources. Everything felt close, but also wrong. Gritting his teeth and sharpening his will, he tried again and again.
Each time he tugged on Dungeon Maintenance, it recoiled when there was no ‘valid’ target in range, but each time he gripped it with his willpower and attempted to force it to lock on to the ambient mana he knew was all around him, picturing the walls in his mind over and over until ghostly images of them started to form in his mental landscape. The oak was responding now through their link with some confusion, but he tried to reassure it and send a strong feeling of
After what felt like dozens or even hundreds of attempts, there was the sensation of something snapping, and the back and forth tug of war ended abruptly in his favor. Previously hazy hedge walls blazed into sharp focus, along with a web of light reaching down into the ground and towards what he could only describe as a blazing chasm of magic. The density of the mana was so overwhelmingly potent that he tried to squeeze his eyes shut against the blinding power reflexively, but this was a mental landscape and his physical eyes were already closed.
Xander immediately had the suspicion that there was way more power here than he needed, but he was so close now that he just couldn’t go back. Dungeon Maintenance now greedily sucked in mana from the dungeon itself, and his mana pool filled rapidly. He pushed that mana back out into several of his nature related spells and abilities, trying to selectively fuse his ability to make plants mobile and his ability to make them grow and use them both across his Oaken Bond to bring a portion of his tree here. As he had suspected, what he was trying to accomplish required an insane amount of mana, every point he pushed towards his efforts seeming to empty into a bottomless void.
Mana continued to fill his pool, even more rapidly than he could dump it into his bond, and he started to notice that his core was beginning to react oddly. The sphere of liquid pulsed and expanded, sending additional jets of spell energy curling out from it and now beginning to roil in a way that muddied the colors instead of leaving them distinct like they had always been before. A chill settled into him, though not only from concern, but rather also coming from the very mana itself. Deciding to take himself out of the loop, he connected Dungeon Maintenance’s output directly to Oaken Bond, but found himself unable to withdraw from the role of conduit as the flow of mana ramped steadily up.
The problem with this was that when he tried to pull back and end the spells, nothing happened. Mana continued to course through him, chilling him further and further with every passing moment until it began to hurt. Enacting his fallback plan, he started dumping mana back into the world around him using Reclamation, but to his growing horror this only managed to increase the flow. The whole patchwork mess of spells and mana was fused into a self-sustaining reaction, and the whole dungeon seemed to shudder as mana was drawn from it and dumped into Xander’s unstable creation.
Warning: Unstable interactions detected. Catastrophic failures of the Bramble Den Dungeon, the entity Alexander Petrov, and the entity Ma’ha’Zhanaeus the Caretaker are imminent. System instability caused by unforeseen interactions between Dryad racial abilities and the unique class Reclamation mage. Both direct and collateral damage is deemed unacceptable Attempting to rectify.
Xander was significantly more than ‘concerned’ by the appearance and subject of the system message, and by the growing chill.
Correction failed, leyline node interaction exceeds available local resources. Attempting to ameliorate instead.
The chill by now felt like liquid nitrogen coursing through his veins, and he was pretty sure that he was screaming. All he had wanted was some damned clothes… this shouldn’t be happening. His thoughts were starting to get fragmentary under the duress of agony.
Amelioration requires input from a local agent. Authorization and intercession of the Dungeon Lord is necessary to draw on the leyline and provide necessary resources to override the unstable spell matrix. You meet the (reduced) minimum requirements to ascend to Dungeon Lord. Become the Dungeon Lord for this location and grant requisite approvals?
He could no longer envision anything clearly, his mind slowed by the continuing icy flow of mana. Xander’s core was a blurred chaos of colorful spikes, and pain beyond comprehension filled every cell. The system windows were the only things he could still barely comprehend as his consciousness wavered in and out. It was exceedingly difficult to think, even as the last system disk pulsed at him insistently. He might have still drifted away if a gentle but unyielding presence hadn’t enveloped his mind.A scent of earth and oak wafted across his senses along with the presence’s words, comforting and reassuring him.
Rallying the tattered remains of his intent, he gave every last bit of it to the task at hand, forcing away the numbing cold for a few moments.he vowed to himself and the system, With that declaration, another burst of power surged through him, and he finally lost the battle to stay awake.