I watched entranced as the man’s hands waved as if dancing with the jittery syllables that accompanied them. Magical runes luminescent in the dark room coming to life and a magical portal to a land far away materializing between them. This has become one of my new hobbies. Watching Ha-Fa-Ma-Ka-Yo, the local farmer, and also spy for the kingdom, open his magical portals to transport foodstuffs and intelligence back to the his handler far away. He’s strangely loyal, I wonder what they gave him, or how Freehaven wronged him I suppose. Nobody seems to know he’s even as good of a mage as he is.

  It’s not so much that it’s weird knowing local gossip, after all, my undead have been patrolling the streets for years by now, rather it’s that it’s weird knowing the things that nobody would tell you. I’ve been loosening the soul tethers on my specters and suddenly I’m able to see even when nobody thinks anyone’s watching, and hear what isn’t said to anyone.

  Outside Ha-Fa-Ma-Ka-Yo’s home hundreds were tilling the fields, hundreds that earn income for my coffers, hundreds who answer my calls. I wonder, am I powerful now? Do I have enough capital to stand proud in this world? Excitedly I cast my gaze around town like a god, peering in on the lives of mortals.

  A heavy book flew through the air, smashing into Brice’s skull and causing it to wobble backwards before it stabilized itself. “What did you just say to me you brainless bonehead?”

  Brice, for his part sat there silently as five digits closed around his skull, forcibly turning his head up to stare into Fra-La’s scornful eyes. “You worthless rotting husk of a man, are you a brave warrior or a spineless coward?”

  “He’s busy, I’ll continue to ask” Brice suggested, diplomatically, but Fra-La’s foot came in a clean sweep, catching his chair leg, and the world spun. Brice landing haphazardly on his arms and legs as the chair crashed loudly off to the side and the same foot came down on his head.

  “Did I ask you to talk back to me?” As the silence drew on the farm workers outside picked up on my seething rage, their bony hands tightening around hoes and rakes. “Good, now I’m going to find a real man to satisfy me, a man who can actually get the job done!” With that she stormed off.

  I was ready for war, I was ready to… why are kids this way? Brice told me to butt out of his personal relationships.

  Mind you, I’m probably feeling too restless, too worried about the attack on the Dungeon of Embers. Could I attack Fra-La? Probably, could I afford to start a true war with Ra-Lo? Probably not. This realization doused my remaining flames of passion, but I can’t understand Brice’s decision either.

  This apparently is a thing that’s been going on for quite some time, she had first tried through Jonathon and later through Brice, to meet with me and gain some benefit, probably like how she’s Ra-Lo’s apprentice. Little does she know, that’s just not going to happen. Brice of course notices this too and plays along as if he’s been hounding me for years to meet with her, but keeps getting rejected. The two of them actually look quite sweet at times so maybe she isn’t just a monster, but all that sweetness was laced with bitter spikes of true domestic violence. Weirdly, Brice seems almost more comfortable with that inclusion than he might without it, and it rubs me wrong. Brice was animated from my remains, shouldn’t he have more of my backbone? My vein pride that refuses to be belittled and walked on?

  I mean, it may not really be my best trait, but I certainly know it’s there, some sort of stony stubbornness that refuses to bow or kneel to others. At the end of the day I guess they’re their own people, and seem to diverge further from me the more they’ve lived. I wonder how evolution play into that.

  Am I being too academic about this? Probably, but he asked me to butt out, would it be right of me to dictate all of his affairs? Maybe I should choose what kinks he should have too? Nonsense, people need to be free, they yearn for self determination every bit as fiercely as others yearn to stop having to think, to make tough decisions, to have to take responsibility for their own actions. Personally I’m more philosophically inclined to the former, there are certain harsh realities you face with the latter. If you are just following orders how far can you act without being called out as a monstrous perpetrator of evil acts? People would rather not think that far though, and it’s not like one can’t do great evils fully by their own will either.

  Then it happened, several figures composed purely of fire walked out of the red hallway with similar flame javelins in hand. What were these, fire elemental, fire folk? Seemingly disinterested in conversing about their nature, upon sighting the skeletal fortress they’d just entered, they instead lowered their javelins in a running charge.

  I watch in fixated horror as two armed skeletons are skewered in the chests only for flames to explode out of their backs and eye sockets before they fall lifelessly to the ground. A third flame-person manages to enter my dungeon, but the moment that he does the death attribute manna within me rages like a gale, consuming him entirely. Well that wasn’t too smart of him. The death-pit of younger skeletons similarly springs to life grasping at the second. He seems unprepared, but my skeletons are similarly disoriented as their hands pass right through these flame people, drawing neither blood nor its counterparts. One of the flame people turns to run as the other firms his stance.

  I saw weapons pass as harmlessly through it as before until one skeleton had the thought to use his spear to stir up the fire person’s insides. While doing so he seems to have hit something important, because the flame person’s flames were suddenly flowing out instead of staying in, and I mean out everywhere.. Like a mantle of heat expanding off him, heating the surrounding air and causing it to expand. By the time it reached his assailant it was a blistering how breeze, hot enough to scorch flesh. The skeletons endured the breeze without concern, but I wonder what sort of unflinching resolve a normal human soldier would need to face such a foe. I imagine most would flee, but such is common in war. I wonder if people are the same in this world, or if they’re just so normalized to monsters and horrific displays of violence to the point where they don’t even flinch when facing them in life.

  Unfortunately one of our assailants escaped, and even more unfortunate is that they seem probably sentient. An orderly patrol team attacking as a group with one shielding another from harm? Maybe they aren’t sentient, it’s easy to anthropomorphize humanoids as such, but at the least there’s some strategic mind training or commanding them, and that means they’ve probably gone for reinforcements.

  I promptly did the same, calling Brice and his entourage to rally to me as soon as they can realistically get away from whatever they’re doing. Oddly it seemed to take them the better part of the day to rally, I guess they decided to complete their day jobs first? I can’t decide if I’m offended or impressed. No more flame people emerged, but rather after the deaths it was apparent that the dungeon entrance was burning hotter and growing faster. A full day and a half after the initial attack the Dungeon of Embers erupted into inferno without warning. I was immensely thankful at that time for the tireless nature of my own army who’d maintained battle positions without a need to stretch or rest. As soon as the flames billowed out shields raised and iron heated from dull grey to cherry red, but the lifeless hands did not part their grasp, unflinching they watched the burning warriors flood out like ants from a hive, their spears dancing and stinging.

  I would like to say they had my full attention, but admittedly they did not, so many were dying so quickly that I had become flooded with newfound manna. Unwilling to level up I was putting everything I had into new skeletons and specters in equal measure. Cool mist and bony silhouettes continued to stream from my depths onto the field, and yet I could tell we were loosing. There were too many of them, their militant discipline almost matching that of Brice and his men, far surpassing the newly minted skeletons in both speed and skill. I had initially hoarded death attribute manna in the form of crystals in order to give myself some security to kill any intruders who forced their way in, would I be forced to spend it all reviving my defenders in the initial skirmish? Was this the gap between us as dungeons, the crushing weight of time?

  Then I noticed something peculiar, where they shying away from the specters? It was subtle but they seemed, somewhat uncomfortable with the chilling mists. What my enemies dislike, I enjoy, so I called to my specters, to all of my specters, “Come to me!”

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  It was like watching an explosion in reverse, the mists that encompassed Freehaven all pulled towards one location, slowly mounting and rising into a billowing tide. Seeing them collide with the first fire person I flinched. Almost a hundred specters lives ended just like that, snuffed out in a cloud of clashing heat and ice, but with them so too did it perish. There was no burst of uncontrollable flame, no spiraling cloud of cinders, it was just a torrent of manna flowing through the links into my core. Swayed by the moment of excitement I set my core to just produce specters, and was overjoyed when I found almost as many created as destroyed with every flame-being that perished.

  The problem is that I can’t really understand how or why. I mean, yes, ghosts send a shiver down your spine which is cold, and hot plus cold makes comfortable room temperature, or at least something in between them; but that’s babyspeak logic, it doesn’t really make sense in the context of living beings. The specters aren’t even ice elemental creatures, they’re just dead people. While I suppose they do lower the temperature and raise the humidity, it’s not to such an extent as to pose a lethal threat to others. I could see maybe a campfire doused with so many of them piling on at once, but a magical fire not so much.

  While I was coping with reality the fighting came to a close. There were few skeletons left but still plenty of specters. It was only while accounting for losses that a sense of danger suddenly overtook me. Unbeknownst to me the dungeon had grown much faster after the flame people had surged out from its depths. I mean, it made sense, they were probably gobbling up a lot of ember affinity manna every day, but when it touched me, the rules ability announced in white text that a dungeon battle had begun between myself and the dungeon of embers.

  There’s something really handy about having an ability that actually explains what it does. Perhaps this is the consideration and kindness of the dungeon of rules, an old senior looking out for us youngsters.

  The most important part seemed to be that we were effectively enclosed in the same space until we consumed each other. At first I thought this was some kind of spacial isolation, it’s written as if it were, but it doesn’t make any sense. That is apparently the dungeons will remain in the same geographic locations with no indication they were ever gone or that any fighting took place. Dungeons in general seem to be ginormous geographical structures, my own dungeon was largely outside my manna field making it not really a dungeon, but presuming it was in my manna field and therefore going to disappear, it would be the equivalent of gauging a mountain out of the earth, ripping foundational geographical structures away and causing landslides and earthquakes. Likewise reappearance in place would be implausible given all the things that would have collapsed into the space I had occupied, and moving them aside would cause another similar round of seismic activity. I pause here to consider that there is no real reason to displace anything out of the way since dungeon walls are more manna construct and barrier than they are physical objects, and the ambient affinity manna of a dungeon would naturally erode any overlapping materials. OK, maybe it was possible, but I have another hypothesis.

  I suspect the dungeons simply close. Dungeon walls are one of the strongest materials in the world because punching through one requires you shatter all of them at once, the combined wall strength of two dungeons together would be all but impossible for beings of a similar strength to break. Moreover with them as a closed system not only will they no longer release any signs of life being unable to grow and release manna and monsters, but they likewise won’t suffocate on their own manna. They won’t because…

  It burned. Not the burn of fire, but the burn of acid, a gentle tingling that you could easily ignore, a faint subtle sense that just casually reminds you your body is being melted down while you pilot it. The casual irritation so easily ignored and yet always there until you wash it off. The acid in question however is ember affinity manna, my death attribute manna clashes with it at the boundary of our two dungeons, at the center of the path that links us. The manna generation from this annihilation is frankly atrocious. Attribute mana itself after all is a catalyst, it doesn’t actually have the strength of regular manna, just the intent, and its weak strength is all that remains after the two intents cancel each other out.

  We will never starve, nor drown in our own digestive fluids, until there is only one of us left, until then there will always be someone to eat. In theory this was a perfect death match that favored the stronger core, and yet in reality I see many flaws.

  The most obvious flaw to me was one of scale. My dungeon was small, intentionally so since that kept it easy to hide. A dungeon produced manna relative to its level, but that manna dispersed throughout the dungeon, which meant my death manna was innately many-fold denser than the assaulting manna. Presumably as we ate each other we’d all end up in this sort of state, but it was weird seeing it. Moreover as time passed, the manna that usually flowed out of the dungeon of ember’s other entrances began rippling back and slowly flowing towards me meaning the pressure from it was negligible but building over time until eventually it becomes a competition of sheer manna generation. Another flaw was how I’ve been storing death attribute manna in my solitary cavern. Liquidating a small portion into attribute manna I watch my boundary pulse outwards rapidly sizzling through the other dungeon’s manna and instantly doubling the size of my halls.

  Interesting, but do I really have enough to compete like this? Not really, I’m likely lacking in both generation and scale, even with present manna reserves trading manna for size with minimal manna gains sounds like a complete loss. Is there a way I can even benefit from this? Yes, there is one. Rather than territorial claim, I should slaughter monsters and the core itself, that would give me more manna than I’ve ever had. Moreover I’m presented with an opportunity to see how my own denisens interact with another dungeon.

  Watching my creatures that the other dungeon had directly grown over, the first thing I notice is the soul tethers. Creations of pure manna, that the ember attribute manna is trying to eat and tear apart. Playing with adjusting them I find that if I sink more manna per length into them they become firmer, sturdier, but that means they’ll get vary expensive with distance. I wonder if a more focused erosion of them like my inhospitable ability would still snap them.

  Speaking of my own inhospitability, it’s downright strange watching how normal dungeon manna field interacts with creatures. Is it because they’re the creations of another dungeon? Unlike my own field it doesn’t seem like the manna is actively forced into them, but rather like a gas they breath. No, not like a gas, like a fine dust it gets everywhere, what a horrifying thought, a highly corrosive toxic substance that constantly surrounds and chips at people, no wonder dungeon delving is treated more like an extreme sport for the rich and powerful than an everyday profession in this world. I begin wondering if they’d track that outside before I remember that regular matter neutralizes it creating manna, if anything it would be beneficial to their growth when they leave to be bathed in self generating manna. If absorbing the manna of a dungeon can convert creatures, will my own undead turn against me?

  So I wait and watch. Over the span of several days they continue to breath in the mounting quantity of ember manna that lingers beside me. The other dungeon hasn’t sent any more of the flame people, is it defenseless, or does it simply know it can kill me easier this way? Initially the manna acts to stimulate their growth more rapidly as it neutralizes the death attribute manna they had already ingested slowly converting them. I suppose this is another option, for the manna from our consumption of one another to go to a third party instead strengthening them, and who better than our own denizens? Afterwards there is a short transitional period where their theme seems to change, for example the specters gather clouds of sparks instead of chilling mists, and the skeletons catch on fire. After that… well not much changes really, they have their own minds and wills as they ever have and still remember our history or, in the case of the specters, remain as mindless and unthinking as ever. My soul tethers remain in tact meaning I can still reclaim their spirits and revive them.

  I suppose the weirdest change is that I had grown completely normalized to their continued drain on my affinity manna, and now they were a continuous drain on someone else’s. Honestly, I should use that, I have no reason not to. No, perhaps there is one reason. When beings are fed attributed manna, there is manna feedback from the being’s own generation. I wonder if there’s any way to claim that. It always seemed so easy to since it was my manna by right of it being released into me, but if it’s released into another dungeon than that puts me on the opposite side of it. Theoretically it’s from my own people’s generation though, so it should be possible right? If not for me than for them. After five days of experimentation one of my skeletal mages found that they can actively direct manna towards the soul link to reinforce it, helping to solve both of my main problems at once. Using soul communication to both learn and teach this method allows even the mindless specters to work at it.

  Seeing hope in this path I decide to commit fully and resurrect all my fallen defenders despite the cost. It’s a risk, but with them steadily contributing to the draw on my opponent, perhaps I could even the gap.

  It worked, sort of. In truth my own manna field could never have accommodated all my people no matter what I do, but there were problems too, foremost among them being fortifications. My people are used to being able to build a home field advantage, and here the walls cannot be carved nor excavated, even the corpses of their comrades would melt if brought out into the dungeon of embers. Moreover, while their own manna and the attributed manna they carried shielded their equipment from degradation for a while, by the time the ember attribute manna saturated them their gear had long since failed and disintegrated. That meant fighting unarmed in an unfamiliar environment.