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The Dungeon, Uncharted Island, Kalenic Sea

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The ship took another hour to go from a sail on the horizon to a full, three-masted galleon rapidly approaching my little volcanic paradise.

I directed Gull to spy on them. Unfortunately, the sailors didn't speak a lick of English, nor was it any language I recognized. It was more melodic and flowing than most languages from earth.

The captain, now referred to as Captain, was evident, a man with a large-brimmed and feathered hat. He had a rapier at his hip, with a pair of pistols holstered at his chest. He looked athletic and acted somewhat boisterous, ordering his men to furl the sails and slow their approach. A reedy man with a quill and paper looked like he was taking notes over a map.

A map would be nice.

I might try to steal that at some point.

The ship wasn't very well armed, seemingly with only a light complement of cannons. Despite that and the lack of ammunition it implied, the galleon sat heavily in the water. So... Cargo?

A passing trader, thrown off course by the storm? Probably.

The ship circled the island once, with the captain pointing out my cave and the blue glow sneaking out from the passage within. While it wasn't as bright as it could have been, a definite ghostly blue-green glow lit the darkened opening. They anchored off a bay on the other side of the island before two longboats filled with sailors came ashore. They spent the next day exploring the island, documenting the wildlife and mapping the place.

On the second day, a shore party of six armed sailors and the captain approached me. They entered the arching cave cautiously, keeping an eye on the water and walls. When they reached the passage, Captain turned to face his crew. He looked to be gearing up for a speech.

"My loyal crew, I would like to make something clear before entering. You are volunteers, and this is potentially a Dungeon. We all know how dangerous Dungeons can be, and we have no idea how long this one has been here. I cannot guarantee your survival past this point. If you wish to return to the ship, I will not hold it against you."

Whatever the man said, the rest of the sailors shifted in place for a second, but none spoke. Captain continued.

"Thank you, friends. I remind you to be cautious and take no unnecessary risks. It will likely have monsters guarding it, and we are not Guilders. If the monsters prove too dangerous, we will retreat with what knowledge we have gained. Ready? Let's go."

Captain ducked through the short passage first, immediately followed by a man with a pair of hammers, a man with a mace, two men with scimitars, a man with a crossbow, and a man with twin daggers.

The man with twin hammers was well-built, nearly a head taller than the rest and half again as wide. When I say hammers, I mean brick-sized hunks of forged steel attached to foot-long handles. Those things would likely crack my Crab's shells, but I couldn't be sure if it would shatter them. You are hereby dubbed; Eddy.

The man with the mace was only slightly smaller than Eddy and shared his, uh, dashing features; a squashed nose and permeant frown. You are now named Ed.

The swordsmen looked almost identical, but for which hand they held their scimitars. Unlike Captain and Eddy's vaguely European appearance, the Twins were Middle-Eastern, dark-skinned and clad in what you would expect a Middle-Eastern pirate to wear. Lefty and Righty, welcome to my dungeon!

The Bowman was lithe and carried his crossbow with sharp-eyed vigilance. This man also had a heck of a schnoz on him. Prominent, regal, almost Roman. Thus, you are Roman, the Bowman.

The rogue was the final member of their apparently mageless party (A mistake, to be sure). He looked shifty. What? He was skulking, eyes darting here and there, and he made barely any noise on the sand. Shifty it is, for him.

After entering, the first thing most did was gaze in awe at the mana-star. Ed and Eddy immediately started... arguing?

"What the heck is that?" "It's a mana-light, dumbass" "I know that! But aren't mana-lights... smaller? And not as blindingly bright?" "Yeah, they are."

"Cut the chatter, you two." The captain cut in. "Keep your eyes peeled for anything that could be a monster. Lane, Keep an eye on the water."

Rowan turned to face the water at his last word, obviously watching for sneak attacks.

I attempted to get a tendril of mana near Captain to test what would happen, but I found it tricky. My control of the mana within the room was a little tenuous, even more so the closer to the men it was. I lost even that at some point, and the mana just diffused into a cloud. The mana near the men slowly drifted towards them, being passively absorbed. Once it passed their skin, my aspected mana suddenly wasn't mine. Urgh. Damn. Something about humans disrupted my control. No wonder Cores needed monsters to protect them if they couldn't use mana to defend themselves. I called my Crabs to action.

And thus, the game was afoot.

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The Dungeon, Uncharted Island, Kalenic Sea

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Captain Eli Hart was worried.

The huge mana-light in the cavern confirmed they were in a dungeon; it was in no way natural, especially with the hand-like carvings 'holding' the light between them. The dungeon knew what hands were like, which meant someone had been here before them. There was only one problem with that theory.

All signs pointed to an uninhabited island, utterly untouched by human hands. So how did it know what hands were? Eli soon found he didn't have time to ponder that particular mystery. From the passage on the other side of the cavern, he could hear a lot of rhythmic thunk sounds. The sound of something heavy slamming into the sand.

"Be ready! Monsters from the passage ahead!" he called out. "Kurt, Kale, to the front." The mace and hammer-using brothers passed him, raising their heavy weapons.

"Rahim, Jahim; take the flanks," He ordered. The Hilian scimitar-wielders nodded and moved into position.

"Garth, watch our backs. Lane, keep watching that water. We don't want to get surrounded." The two nodded, keeping an eye on the cavern behind them.

It was then that the monsters emerged.

The first bright orange and segmented leg struck the sand, sparking in the teal light. Then the rest of the monster followed. It was a crab. An enormous crab. Walking sideways, as their kind were want to do, a Crab the size of a fully-grown Deepwood Wolf entered the cavern from the small passage and turned to face them. Like most mana-mutants, it was horrifying.

The shell on its top was rough and spiked in waves, from the front to back. Its pincers were enormous and bulbous, spiked in places much like Kale's maces. Two more almost exactly like it followed, spreading out to surround the passageway. That's what threw the captain a bit. Dungeons created mana-mutants to defend themselves, but the monsters they produced were never so... uniform. Just another thing that made Hart worried.

Then a fourth emerged. Though it was just as big as the others, this one had no spikes on its shell. No, this one's shell was shaped more like plate armor. Its claws were also modified. The right claw was large and circular but seemed flatter than its brethren, almost like a shield. Its left claw was thin, the actual pincer visible. Each side of the pincer was sharpened down to a blade, with the tips pointed and looking wickedly sharp.

There was a few seconds of silence as the groups eyed each other, looking for weaknesses. It was the Crabs who moved first.

With a screeching war cry, the middle crab rushed Kurt. It raised one claw for an apparent sideways swipe, prompting Kurt to swing his hammers in the other direction. In a mighty crash, the mace-claw met hammers in mid-air and was pushed back by the metal weapons. The monster's left claw came off worse: a star-burst of cracks radiating from the impact point.

But that was only one of its claws.

In an unexpected move, the crab's second claw used the momentum of the clash to swing out with surprising speed against the side of Kurt's knee. He roared in pain as the knee bent sideways in a way the knee was not designed to. Kale cried out in rage at his brother's injury and brought his mace down on the crab, only to be blocked by a claw.

"Garth! Let's get Kurt out of there!" Eli called, prompting the shifty man to rush in with him to pull the giant of a man back. Thankfully, Kale was a little smarter than his brother and kept the crab's attention without injury, even as Jahim and Rahim engaged their own crabs.

Unable to counter the pure strength of the crab's mace-like pincers, the men nimbly dodged the wild swings. Almost as one, the twins swung their scimitars down on the joint of a segmented leg. Both swords passed through cleanly, and the two crabs were suddenly down a leg each. They screeched in pain and pulled back, keeping their claws close. A second attempt at a leg skittered off armored claws, abruptly in the way.

Now meters back from the fighting, Kurt was passed a glass flask filled with a red liquid. Good. Healing potions were expensive, but lives were more so. Garth, who had pulled the potion from his pouch, took back the empty flask. Within seconds and with a painful sounding snap, the knee was put to rights. Re-energized by the potion, Kurt pushed himself off the sand, wincing as he put weight on the leg.

"Good enough to fight?" Hart asked the man. Kurt nodded and, with a growl, rushed in to take his revenge.

Suddenly, the stalemate was broken.

Having kept the crab's attention, Kale smirked with a vicious glee as twin hammers came down on the monster's shell. The first hammer to hit cracked the shell, and the second shattered it, plowing right through to the soft flesh beneath. The crab faltered, then crashed into the sand, dead.

Kurt let out a victorious laugh, raising his hammers to the roof. "Take that, you bastard!"

Kale joined his brother's cry of victory.

With a war cry of its own, the fourth crab leaped forwards over its fellow monster's corpse, Its sword claw already swinging. Before he could react, Kale's head was cut clean off, landing heavily on the sand in the suddenly silent cavern.

"Pull back!" Hart shouted. The twins disengaged and retreated, moving backward to keep the monsters in view.

Kurt did not. The man went into a berserk rage, yelling and lashing out at his brother's killer. The shield-claw of the crab deflected his hammers, and with almost contemptuous ease, the sword-claw stabbed him through the chest.

As the man was thrown to the side by the smarter-than-normal monster, and the sound of more monsters emerged from the passage beyond, Hart made his decision. "To the Exit! Quickly!" The five remaining men turned and ran from the monsters who had slain their crewmates. With a rush of water, four more monsters emerged from the water to their left. Lane aimed his crossbow and fired. The bolt flew truly and struck the knight-like crab at the base of its left eye. That crab fell down dead, though the shallowness of the pond meant it was still half out of the water.

Garth was the first human to reach the exit.

The first human.

What he had previously thought to be a rock reached out from next to the door and, with a surprisingly sharp pincer, cut straight through the strap of his satchel. As he jerked away from the revealed monster, it grabbed the bag and pulled it from the man's shoulder. "Hey! Give that back!" He shouted angrily. His expression didn't last long, the flush of his cheeks paling as blood fled his face. The man abandoned his satchel to the monster and escaped through the open gap without hesitation.

A glance behind explained that well enough. What had to be more than thirty of the monsters, all of them one of two fighter-types seen, had either emerged from the water or from deeper into the dungeon.

When Leon reached the exit, the rock-like crab had skittered away, its stolen goods in claw. Another rock had also stood up, waving its pincers menacingly for such a (relatively) small crab monster.

Hart reached the exit next, though he waved through the swordsmen before rushing through himself.

Even once out in the sunlight, they didn't stop running. It wasn't till they made it back to their ship that they finally relaxed, warily eyeing the ocean waves like a crab's pincer would suddenly reach out and pull them out of their dingy.

"That could have gone better." Garth, the coward, commented sardonically to glares from the rest of the men. That man was going to get himself killed one day.

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The Dungeon, Uncharted Island, Kalenic Sea

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And thus, my Crabs showed remarkable... comradery. Honestly, I had thought them replaceable minions to break the tide on, but they performed incredibly well. The Brawler's armor held up as well as could be expected. Blunt impacts would always be a weakness, much like the vulnerable joints.

The knight who had claimed two lives stood over its kills and gestured grandly, snapping its claws. The others joined in, making a sound, not unlike humans clapping in sync. Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack!

The Crab Knight had reacted quite strongly to its subordinate's death, showing a level of connection I didn't expect from the monsters. Then again, they have been training and patrolling together for more than a week now. I need more data. Either way, something exciting had happened during the fight.

The 'claim' the men had to their mana when they died was removed. Seemingly because he was their killer, about half had been absorbed by the Knight. The other half drifted up into the air above their bodies, where it joined the river of mana that was constantly rushing towards me. Within a few minutes, the mana reached my gem. Where mana typically joined the accretion disk orbiting me, I ensured that Ed and Eddy's mana came right to my gem.

And then I knew.

Fragments of memories, half-remembered sayings, and lessons. It helped to have the mana from both of them since their memories corroborated or filled in gaps left by the other. Eddy, who I now knew was named Kurt, was indeed brothers with Ed- named Kale. Kurt and Kale led a tough life in a city I couldn't find the name of. Their father died at sea, and their mother died of sickness in their teens. They spent a few years on the streets until Captain Hart found them in a fighting ring and offered them employment on his merchant ship as guards. They'd been doing it for a year or two now but didn't remember much about the places they'd been. These two were a bit thick, weren't they?

As a bonus, I could now understand some of their language. Some. I could understand some words, but much remained a mystery to me.

There was no period of disorientation. There was no consciousness in the mana. I had the memories, but it was like watching a film. I knew the knowledge, but I hadn't experienced it. Before I directed my attention to Gull, I released a wave of mana with healing intent at the two injured Brawlers. Over the next few minutes, new legs grew from the stumps.

I left the crabs to their victory celebration.

I had a post-Dungeon meeting to spy on.

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© Max Porteous, 2021