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Dungeon System: The Thousand Realms
Owner: Knox Light
Level: 2 (350/400)
Mana: 850/850
DP: 100 (Dungeon Points)
Protectors: 6
Intruders: 1
Abilities: Mana manipulation, Vassal creation, Dungeon shaping, Weaken willpower
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Draco watched the last wall go up on the third cabin and felt something quiet and warm settle in his chest.
It wasn't pride, exactly. Or maybe it was — just a version of it that had never had a name before. The village was growing. His people were building.
The pond caught the light at the far end and turned it gold, and around it the kobalts sat together eating lunch, laughing at something one of the workers had said, their voices carrying soft and easy through the stone.
He stood there a moment longer than he needed to. Above it all, Knox watched.
He'd been turning an idea over for the past hour — something that had come to him while observing the DP balance and the slow cost of populating each new level. The store worked, but it was expensive. There was a simpler way.
Live animals, he thought. Brought in from outside and slaughtered in the dungeon. Then I can recreate them freely with mana instead of burning points on each one.
It was efficient. It was practical. It required someone he trusted completely.
He let his voice settle through the floor, low and resonant.
"Draco."
Draco straightened immediately.
"My child — I need you to go on a hunt. Live animals, brought back here and killed inside the dungeon.
That's all. What you do with the rest of the day is yours." A pause. "Can I trust you with this?"
Draco felt the words land somewhere deep.
Can I trust you.
He'd been a chieftain's soldier once, in another life — had followed orders because orders were the shape of things, because refusal had consequences.
This was different. This felt chosen. Like being handed something fragile and being told: I believe you won't drop it.
"Yes, my lord," he said, and meant it completely. "Always." "Good.
Take someone with you. Complete the task and you'll be rewarded." The presence faded, leaving only the familiar hum of stone and still air.
Draco didn't hesitate.
He turned toward the pond.
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Sage was mid-berry when Draco found him.
He sat at the edge of the lunch gathering, cross-legged on the ground, working through a handful of red berries with the focused contentment of someone who had earned his meal.
The juice had stained his lips a deep crimson, which he seemed entirely unbothered by. Around him, the other kobalts passed fish between them and argued pleasantly about nothing important.
He looked up when Draco's shadow fell over him.
He swallowed. Straightened. "Yes, sir. What do you need?"
There was something almost effortful about the way Sage tried to present himself around Draco — the careful posture, the respectful tone, the way his eyes tracked a little too attentively. Draco had noticed it before. He didn't dislike it, exactly. Sage's admiration was sincere, and Draco had no desire to crush sincere things.
He simply filed it away as information and moved on.
"Just us," Draco said. "We're leaving the cave."
Sage's ears perked visibly.
"Don't," Draco said, before the expression could fully form. "This isn't an outing. It's work — a mission from the creator himself. We're capturing live animals and bringing them back."
Sage opened his mouth.
"Before you argue—"
"I wasn't going to argue," Sage said. He was already standing up, brushing berry juice off his hands.
"I was going to ask when we leave." He paused, then added, with feeling: "Can we go now?"
Draco looked at him for a long moment.
"…Yes," he said. "Now."
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They made their way up the stairs and through the entrance room, back into the world above.
The air hit differently outside — cooler, carrying the smell of soil and bark and something green and alive that the dungeon never quite replicated. The trees pressed close around the cave mouth, tall and dense, their canopy filtering the light into long pale shafts that moved when the wind moved.
Draco and Sage stood at the entrance and looked north.
"That way," Draco said.
They went.
They found the earth rabbit about ten minutes in.
It was the sound that gave it away — a soft, involuntary rustle as the bush shifted, and then two small red eyes blinking out from between the leaves. The rabbit sat very still, apparently under the impression that if it didn't move, neither would they.
It was wrong.
The moment Draco's gaze landed on it, the rabbit made its decision.
Earth Rabbit uses: Burrow.
The ground opened, swallowed, and sealed itself in the span of a breath. No disturbed dirt. No tunnel mouth. Just grass, undisturbed, as if the creature had simply ceased to exist.
Sage stared at the spot. "It went into the ground."
"They always do," Draco said. He was already scanning ahead, reading the terrain. "They can't breathe underground for long. Watch for where it surfaces."
Thirty feet ahead, the earth bulged slightly — and then the rabbit emerged, small chest heaving, sides working hard.
It sat for a moment in the open air, catching its breath, red eyes scanning.
Draco lowered his voice. "I need you to keep it moving. Steady pace — don't chase hard, just keep pressure on it. Keep it from resting. Can you do that?"
Sage nodded, already shifting his weight forward.
"When it starts slowing," Draco continued, "I'll come in from the side with a rock.
One good hit to stun it, and we go home." He met Sage's eyes. "Don't let it burrow more than twice. After that it'll be too rested."
"Understood."
They split.
It took fifteen minutes.
Sage was a natural at the chase — patient in a way that surprised Draco, keeping exactly the right distance, never crowding, never letting up. The rabbit burrowed twice in the first ten minutes, surfacing each time a little more winded, sides heaving a little harder.
By the third surfacing it wasn't moving as fast. By the fourth it was moving slowly enough that Draco could circle wide through the trees without being noticed.
He found his rock. Smooth, palm-sized, the right weight.
He waited.
The rabbit surfaced again — chest working hard, barely moving, sitting in a small shaft of light between two roots like it had simply given up on dignity and was just trying to breathe.
Draco threw.
The rock caught it cleanly at the base of the skull. The rabbit crumpled without a sound.
Sage arrived a moment later, slightly out of breath, and looked at the still form on the ground with an expression that cycled through impressed, satisfied, and then something softer that he quickly put away.
Draco crouched and checked for a pulse.
Steady. Slow, but steady. Good.
He straightened, tucking the rabbit carefully under his arm, and turned back toward the cave. "Let's go."
They'd made it perhaps fifty feet when Draco heard it.
A sound that didn't belong — high and sharp, carried on the wind. Not birdsong. Not a branch.
A whistle. Deliberate. Signaling.
The skin along the back of his neck prickled. His gut, which had kept him alive through things his memory preferred not to revisit, said one word very clearly:
Run.
"Move," he said, voice hard and flat. "Now. Don't look back."
Sage looked at him once — read his face — and ran.
Draco ran with him. And when he finally did look back, just once, over his shoulder — he wished he hadn't.
Eight of them. Kobalts, armed and organized, moving through the trees with the practiced ease of a hunting party that knew exactly what it was doing. Their markings were familiar in a way that turned Draco's stomach cold.
The tribe that Cabbage had come from.
They'd been spotted.
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I just want to say thank you, for all of your continued support!