“What? Oh, don’t be a big scaly baby! So you’ve got no resistance to magic yet, so what?” the pixie snickered as she hopped up from the hatch behind me.
“I’m not doing any more floors, ever again!” I snapped.
“Look at the hoard, Bob. See how big and shiny it is?” she said seductively. She knew which buttons to push.
“Why didn’t this thing work?” I flicked one of the tassels on my ascot with my tail, which had curled up to lie along my side.
“It doesn’t protect you from magic. Just stops you being a miserly bastard and trying to eat things uncontrollably,” she said in a reasonable voice. She sat down cross-legged just in front of my snout and patted the end of my nose. “Does the gwumpy dwagon want it wubbing better?”
“Piss off short arse.” I snorted, blowing her hair back, and moved my head away.
“Grumpy dragon needs a Halitosis-be-gone potion, that’s for sure.” I turned back and glared at her. She raised her hands in surrender. “Just check the dungeon status?”
Dungeon Status:
Unnamed Dungeon.
Level: 1
Floors: 5 (Residential) (Agricultural) (Industrial) (TBCx2)
Rooms: 6
Sprite level: 1
Minions: 7/30
Hoard: 7354 gold
It was a nice total. My hoard felt comfier than it had before. Like I’d added a mattress topper to it. A really expensive one.
The third floor had been populated by these yellow blob things that kept waving at me as I ate their buddies. It was weird. The boss had been a giant version that tried to smother me with a big red heart plushie. I finished that floor depressed, but we found some good loot, including some half-decent weapons and armour for our future guards, and a decent boost to my treasury.
The fourth floor had seemed nice when I first saw it. A massive underground lagoon, palm trees swaying in a breeze that I couldn’t explain, and all of it lit by a gentle glow from above. Of course, true to form, the system had to spoil it, and the monsters had been swarms of flying piranha-like fish that repeatedly mobbed me until Kat guided me to the boss. This twenty-foot-wide pink octopus recited passages of Heigel, in the original German, while it tried to swat me out of the air.
But the fifth and final floor had been by far the worst.
“What kind of defence mechanism is that anyway?” I grumbled as I found another spine buried on the inside of my cheek. I was going to be finding them between my fangs for days, I was sure of it.
“You know, on Earth, the first bunny to spot a hawk will stand up tall and thump a back leg so all the other bunnies can scarper? That bunny usually ends up getting eaten, but it’s good for the herd, or gaggle, or whatever the collective noun for rabbits is. The Thimblewinks just do that, but on magic steroids.” Kat chuckled.
Cute little balls of delicious fluff. A dull brown, with two big dark eyes on one end and a short tail at the other, they hopped along on three short legs and grazed happily on the grass that had covered the dungeon floor.
When the first one spotted me, it spun like a skunk and raised its tail. It farted. There isn’t a nicer way to put it. Kat had explained on the way back that it was some magical pheromone bullshit, but I completely lost control. I was on that delicious little bastard in half a second, and as I was swallowing it whole, I discovered the final part of its suicidal group-defense mechanism. The barbed spines had sprung out of its back and embedded themselves in my mouth and throat. The rest of the flock had just stared at me expectantly.
When I failed to keel over and choke to death, the spines were painful but hardly dangerous to a dragon; I was scaly inside and out. Then the next one would repeat the process. My ascot of self-control was useless against this ass-magic, and the stupid bastards just kept farting at me sequentially and being eaten.
It had taken me four goddamn hours to get most of the spines out of my mouth. Kat had cackled that I looked like I was puking up a porcupine when I finished the last one off. There hadn’t been a boss. I’d had to kill every one of the hundreds of Thimblewinks on the floor to get the completion reward and take control. And because of their fart-magic, I couldn’t just kill them and move on, as soon as they got scared, they passed gas at me, and I was unable to stop myself from eating them. Having only just regained some measure of self-control over my draconic impulses, it was embarrassing to have it stripped away again so easily. Naturally, Kat laughed her tiny ass off throughout the whole debacle, further souring my mood.
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Despite the horror of unstoppably eating the cutest little fluff-balls I’d ever seen, it had, in fact, been quite profitable not only in terms of loot and Coins but also in biomass.
Biomass stored:
234 KG
Biomass required for evolution: 50 KG.
Evolve: Y/N?
I settled down, shuffling deeper into my hoard and grimaced as I plucked another bloody spine from my lip. I clicked the Y and waited for the screen to update.
Rolling for evolution choices…
Please select from the following six options:
- Bifurcated Tail
- Possum Pouch
- Prehensile Eyebrows
- Golden Grill
- Gecko Tail
- Viscounts Bastard
“Well, they’re actually all pretty good this time,” Kat said thoughtfully, sitting on the stool I’d allowed her to make by piling up six of my precious coins in a neat stack. She stroked her chin.
“Prehensile eyebrows are ‘pretty good’?” I asked skeptically.
“Sure, if you want to start crafting, you need something that can do fine work. Your claws are great for ripping things apart and digging into stone, not so much for assembling arcane circuitry. Six is out for now. If you take a noble title, you’ll start attracting hunters much too soon.” I raised an eyebrow at the word ‘hunters’. She snorted.
“Oh, you’re fine for now, Bob,” she continued. “Another few months and the first ones will probably show up. Amateur outfits, most likely at the start. Opportunists looking for a chance to break into the big leagues by taking a baby dragon-head home to a lord. We should be plenty secure before the pro dragon-hunters pay you any attention.”
“But I’m not going to hurt anyone!” I muttered as the realisation I would be considered fair game to every asshole with a magic sword in this world sank in.
“Tell that to Tex’s oxen!” Kat chuckled. “You’re a dragon, Bob. Suck it up. One is a solid option in terms of combat potential, and so is five. The Gecko tail mutation lets you detach your tail, and it will wiggle about as bait for a few minutes while you bravely run away. The Golden Grill is probably the most useless; you just get shiny metal teeth. Hmm. I honestly think possum pouch is your best choice here.”
“Why?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the tiny sprite.
“It’s a pocket dimension you can store stuff in. You can’t put living things in there but it’ll make getting the loot,” she waved a hand at the pile that was steadily growing in one corner of my aerie as the Janglebonks ferried my items up from the cleared floors, “down to Tex in a few days a hell of a lot easier.”
“That… that’s a good point.” I clicked it and felt a strange sensation in my stomach. Thus far I’d eaten bunny rabbits, two oxen, and a shit load of dungeon spawned monsters, more or less whole, fur and teeth and everything. None of that had given my digestion any pause at all, but suddenly I had a tummy ache. Another horrific thought occurred to me.
“Uh, Kat,” I curled around my stomach, adopting a draconic version of the foetal position, “When I take a dump, what’s going to happen?” Lots of stuff had gone in, but nothing had come out of me since I’d been in this body. The little minx just smirked at me.
“Right now, I’d be more concerned about the portal to a pocket universe that’s opening along your torso, mate. That’s gonna feel rough!” she cackled happily, and I resolved to run through the pain levels associated with each evolution in more detail in the future.
An hour later I had discovered that dragons couldn’t sweat or piss themselves from pain. I glared at Kat as I experimentally put coins in and took them back out of my stomach’s new extension. I just had to hold them up to a fine slit that had appeared across my tummy-scales and will them in. Pulling them out was as simple as thinking it, and they would come tumbling out in front of me.
“Is this a weak point in my armour?” I asked Kat, pointing to the hair-fine crack that ran around my front.
“Nah. You’ll be fine.” Her shrug and general attitude did not reassure me.
There was a knock from the hatch, and Kat got up to touch the metal ring that opened it. One of the Dwelvers stuck his head up and squinted about before spitting to the side, narrowly missing Kat with his gob of mucus and climbing up into the lair.
“Got something yer’ll wanna see,” he sniffed and scratched at his backside. I couldn’t help but notice his eyes rarely left my hoard, and I suppressed a growl with the help of my ascot.
“Just spit out, man!” I snapped, and this time Kat had to dive aside to avoid the minion’s spittle. Poor choice of words, but I didn’t feel much sympathy for the now-irate sprite after she had sat and made unsympathetic noises as I rolled about in agony for an hour.
“Dwelvers aren’t men, lord,” he muttered. I couldn’t tell which one of the pair this was; they were both equally disgusting to look at. “Grumbat marked a patch of rock, and well, I found this.” He reached into a knapsack I hadn’t noticed under his ragged cloak and pulled out a lump of rock. He showed it to Kat, who started doing a little tap dance in excitement. I think this was the first time I’d seen her genuinely happy that hadn’t involved me suffering in some way.
“What is it?” I moved over and peered down at the unassuming lump of stone. It was grey, roughly cut; he must have used a pick to knock it loose from the cave walls in the mountain below the dungeon, and as far as I could tell, utterly unremarkable. It sparkled a tiny bit in some places, that was all.
“That my scaly, but ignorant, friend is the fucking motherlode!” Kat cackled happily. “You see that hoard? That’s nothing! We’re going to fill this entire room with gold! You won’t be sleeping on your hoard, you’ll be bloody swimming through it!” I liked the sound of this.
“But it’s just a rock?” Klaptap snorted and made to spit, but I used hunter's gaze on him, my eyes flaring brightly, and he froze in place.
“Bob, this is Arkendrite. I’m sure of it. Even if it’s just a tiny vein, we’re going to be filthy rich!”
“What’s it used for?” I tapped the side of the rock with a claw, and it skittered away. I pressed a claw down hard on it, a claw that could dig into normal stone effortlessly, and nothing happened. It was tough.
“Lots of things but mostly it’s for making war-golems! We’re going into the arms trade in style!” Kat laughed happily. Well, I already had a gun runner in my pocket. I would have to see what Tex could get for the stuff.
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