Dungeon Status:

Floors 1

Heart 200(10)/200 Kills 0 Toxin 10

Minions 5/10

Situational Quest: Empty the nearby city. Good luck! (⁠*⁠˘⁠︶⁠˘⁠*⁠)⁠.⁠｡⁠.⁠:⁠*⁠♡

Choose First Toxin type:

1. Fungal 2. Viral 3. Bacterial 4. Venom 5. Organic 6. Metallic 7. Necrotic

"Huh. I guess I know at least one of what my local Rot dungeon chose. I can't help but wonder if a certain someone is adding extra items to my list…" Travis mused on the toxins while his skeletons worked to obscure his entrance. A plan had been forming in his mind, and now he moved to act on it—and selected bacterial.

Toxin at 20. Add floor?

"Sure. Okay, this is faster than my normal dungeon." As he worked, Travis sent skeletons into the next floor to begin building more Burial Pits and Toxin Breweries. It was then he felt the first sense of curiosity manifest in his headspace. "Right. Bookkeeper said you'd be watching me to take notes. Hi there, I'm going to show you how to destroy a city fast!" The curiosity turned to excitement.

His minion count, he noticed, had gone up to fifteen. More skeletons, more Toxin. It was a simple feedback loop. Toxin could be spent adding floors. Floors gave more skeletons. More skeletons let him build more Toxin Breweries.

Dungeon Status:

Floors 7

Heart 9800(733)/9800 Kills 0 Toxin 733

Minions 40/40

Situational Quest: Empty the nearby city. Good luck! (⁠*⁠˘⁠︶⁠˘⁠*⁠)⁠.⁠｡⁠.⁠:⁠*⁠♡

In three days Travis had scaled the dungeon up quickly. He wasn't planning to upgrade to powerful units or huge spells. He let the Toxin counter build up to a thousand and got a pair of notifications almost at the same time.

Toxin at 980. Add floor?

Refine Toxin Further:

1. Venom 2. Organic 3. Metallic 4. Necrotic

He knew from experience (the first time he'd answered either question) that only the Toxin choice was free. "Organic." The choice locked in and the notification faded. "And of course I want another floor. Fill it with Toxin Breweries."

The skeletons, he'd noticed from the eyes of the plague rats, were looking rather green and slimy. When a rat climbed up and into the rib cage of one, Travis could see there was a sort of green gel that was sticking to them.

Finding the skeleton with the most bacterial buildup on it, Travis sent it on a special mission. "Sorry, buddy, but you probably aren't going to be coming back from this." It had been a relief that he'd found the skeletons completely devoid of any sign of personhood. For all he could tell, they were simply an excellent robot.

Travis still felt bad about sending one alone to the city, but if he had Ludmiller handy, he definitely would have had her do it. "You need to find water near the city—water that isn't moving. Walk into it and wait there for a day, then try to attack the city walls. Oh, and take a rat with you. Uh, rat? Can you get into the city and bite as many other rats as you can? Really get some infections going." He almost relented when the little creature looked at his heart and saluted.

The rats, Travis had noticed, had their own particularly slimy look to them. He watched through the rat's vision as the skeleton left his dungeon and entered a cloud-covered night. It surprised him that he could see it marching out of the riverside entrance to his dungeon and up into a copse of trees. From there, the skeleton seemed to intuitively know where it was going and marched out of the trees into open fields.

Feeling on edge with each step his minion took, Travis tried to distract himself with the workings of his dungeon—which amounted to building more Toxin Breweries and looking for upgrades to them.

The city, when it came into sight, had little in the way of physical defenses. There was a wooden palisade around it, and some people seemed to stand on platforms on that. What he'd hoped was evident—the palisade was surrounded by a ring of water. "I almost feel bad for them. I hope most of the people left, because this will get ugly fast."

Trying to will the skeleton to crawl, Travis found he couldn't direct them at range. Nonetheless, no one noticed the dark and dirty shape in the night as it found the edge of the moat and slipped in, walking underneath the surface while the rat instead paddled to the other side.

While the little rat searched out nests of its more natural kin in the city, and spread its gifts to them, Travis kept pushing the advancement of the Rot dungeon as fast as possible. By the time the sun had come out, toured the sky, and set again, he'd gained another two floors and was ready for his next upgrade.

Refine Toxin Further:

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1. Venom 2. Metallic 3. Necrotic

"Necrotic, of course. Can't have an undead plague that isn't both plague and undead." Travis examined his dungeon info and winced at his Toxin description:

Fast-multiplying bacteria that produces toxins that impair mental and physical response times. Those who succumb to it rise as undead.

He nodded to that and let things ferment for a while, building out his dungeon in the hope of getting potency upgrades eventually.

Dungeon Status:

Floors 13

Heart 33,800(2333)/33,800 Kills 0 Toxin 2333

Minions 67/70

Situational Quest: Empty the nearby city. Good luck! (⁠*⁠˘⁠︶⁠˘⁠*⁠)⁠.⁠｡⁠.⁠:⁠*⁠♡

Situational Quest: Kill 20 more people in the nearby city before the end of the next day!

Travis winced at that. He'd killed someone in the city. There was no making peace this time, but that had never been his aim here. When the quest indicator ticked down to nineteen, he shivered mentally. A bacterial infection shouldn't spread as fast or kill this quickly, but Travis remembered the descriptions from Fife and Astrid of the fungal rot that the goblins had used.

It shouldn't have surprised him when his Minions count went up by two more. That was, after all, part of the point of his Toxin combo.

Waiting for nightfall, Travis called up thirty of his skeletons to the top floor. Loading them up with plague rats, he sent them off toward the city. The rat he'd sent off to the city was, he could see, doing well. It was presently leading a small army of its fellows into the city's grain stores. It was a sound plan by the little guy, and Travis liked that he'd taken the initiative. "Shame it won't see any real effect until after I'm done here. At least his friends get a lot of food."

By the time the group of skeletons and rats had reached the city, Travis had already replaced the rats and was waiting for the skeletons to die so he could replace those too. In this one aspect, the city had an effective defense. Most of the rats jumped off the skeletons before they reached the one section where there was no water. While the skeletons threw themselves at the city's guardians, the rats swam across the moat to slip into the city or bit at the guards to provide moral support to the skeletons—at least, Travis liked to think that.

Through the rats' eyes, Travis could see a shift in coloration of several guards. He watched as the color bloomed and spread around their bodies during the fight, and by the time the rats were scurrying off to flee certain death, various had turned a very bright shade of green/black to his perception.

It took two hours for his kill counter to tick down again, but it did so by seven in a rapid sequence. Then another four dropped, and soon it was down to only five remaining. Then, despite the killed all being recreated as undead—his minion count dropped to what he had in his dungeon.

The suddenness of the loss shouldn't have surprised him. It meant there was someone in the city capable of purging a lot of undead at the same time. "Well, so much for the undead plague. Okay, more skeletons head in, more rats, and I want you rats to seek out the one who uses the big magic like that, okay?"

Fifty filthy little faces nodded to him and climbed up into their skeleton mounts. In all it left him with just twenty skeletons left, but they were one thing he had limitless numbers of—over time. Besides, at the rate he was going, there would be more plague rats in the city soon than there were people.

"And some of you find the city wells to swim in! Holes filled with water inside the city. Just do your best lil guys." Another horde of rats and skeletons gone, and him left replenishing the numbers of the first lot he'd sent. Two more deaths in the meantime left him reassured that the undead-culling hadn't cured his little plague.

Dungeon Status:

Floors 15

Heart 45,000(13,336)/45,000 Kills 0 Toxin 13,336

Minions 82/80

Situational Quest: Empty the nearby city. Good luck! (⁠*⁠˘⁠︶⁠˘⁠*⁠)⁠.⁠｡⁠.⁠:⁠*⁠♡ Situational Quest: Kill 1 more people in the nearby city before the end of the next day!

Travis had stopped adding new floors. He could have, several times over, but right now he wanted to build his Toxin up. Then the last person of his quest died.

Quest Complete! Your undead have gained resistance to magical shattering!

"Okay, Bookkeeper, bug report and a suggestion." Before Travis could say anything else, a message popped up.

I'm all ears! ฅ⁠(⁠^⁠◕⁠ᴥ⁠◕⁠^⁠)⁠ฅ

"The situational quest I finished. It had one person to go but still said 'Kill one more people'. And the reward for it seems too good to be true, given I just had someone doing that to my skeletons."

Oh! I can fix the first one. The second is right. The quest system tailors things to your recent experiences. People aren't meant to use the same trick over and over. (⁠￣⁠▽⁠￣⁠*⁠)ゞ

"Huh. I never noticed that. I guess it takes a few play-throughs to get a better feel for the meta, huh?" Travis resisted the urge to ask her about what was going on in the city. Partly because this was meant to be a test, but also because he didn't want to know. What his plague rats showed was more than enough, anyway, but even that didn't show him all the effects of the Toxin. "So, uh, where am I exactly? They don't seem to be using their city at all, and haven't even gotten a stone wall up."

It's hard to say. The kingdom you're in came from this part of the world originally. They aren't as used to dungeons and monsters. They build walls against wolves, bears, and sometimes brigands. Their priests and healers are familiar with mundane plagues and disease, but what you're using is far beyond what most of them know or can stop. (⁠￣⁠ヘ⁠￣⁠)

Mulling the slew of new information over, Travis asked, "So they're slower, you're saying, at catching up to what dungeons and cities have to offer? Is that part of why you don't like them?"

(⁠≖⁠､⁠≖⁠╬⁠) No. I don't like them. They were mean to my friends and now they're mean to my cities. I could understand them being mean to dungeons, but cities too? (⁠｡⁠╯⁠︵⁠╰⁠｡⁠)⁠

It wasn't the first time since becoming a dungeon that Travis had wanted to hug someone, but at least he'd be able to do something about Bookkeeper. "Then I'll teach them they should fear dungeons and love cities."

Bookkeeper rolled backwards into a pile of plush dungeon monsters, giggling and kicking her feet. It took her a full hour of non-subjective time to recover and let the joy fade enough she could fix some code. Opening up her own insides, so to speak, she made the changes required to correct the grammatical error, then pulled them back inside so they would become part of her code.

It was a relief to fix bugs. She'd never had dungeons submit them before. Sitting up a little straighter, she began to make the bug reporting system when she realized a way to get plenty of bug reports. "Why didn't I think of that before?" She added a reward system for reporting bugs.

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