Chapter 40 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Since I hadn’t had time to activate my mana sink projects, gathering the required amount went quite fast as I was keeping myself quite full. I once again pushed myself to the limit before I let the breakthrough happen and started to revel in the feeling it brought.

This time, for the floor guardian, I was finally going to choose a bear. It was also going to be quite a fearsome beast, the one living on the 7th floor, who has somewhat been able to keep up with the massive goblins on that floor.

This beast was way stronger than it should have been, but I was going to need to make the pattern even stronger. I didn’t like the trend of people challenging my floor guardians and, as a matter of fact, my other monsters with overwhelming force.

Now, I would be completely fine if someone just overpowered them, even people who shouldn't be fighting steel-rank monsters. What I didn’t like was that they used numbers to get the same effect. Because of that, there were going to be a lot of changes on the 15th floor. But I needed to focus on the floor guardian.

I tuned the bear's skills and body to be at an appropriate level for a 5-person team. When that was done, the bear was going to be able to use a lot less of its power than the pattern was capable of, but that was the idea. For the five-man team, the drop rate would also be the best.

While I did make the encounter and the bear weaker to account for 4, 3, 2, and one-person parties, I wasn’t going to do that for all the possibilities higher than 5 people. I made a version for 10 people, 20 people, and 20 plus. All of them were rounded up, so if you had six people, you would be fighting the 10-person encounter.

I did rethink the drop rates a little bit and added almost the same rates as the five-person team if you went into the 10-person encounter with six people and the 20-person encounter with 11 people. That would be something I approved of, and I think some crazy people might actually want to do it like that.

The 20-plus version of the encounter was basically me announcing, ’Stop bringing so many people at once,’ because that bear was the absolute limit that I could make before the pattern started to crack. The strongest bear was incredibly massive, at least five times as large as a regular huge bear. It had six skills, and two of them were B rank.

Its eyes glowed like a campfire, and it seemed to emit enough heat that caused the air to waver. It was firmly entrenched in the silver rank and was a counter to the fire mages as it had incredible resistance to fire. Let's see those fireball maniacs that constantly fired them deal with this huge monster.

Having done that, I moved on to my skill enhancing. I once again picked my pattern strengthening skill and put all my allocated mana into it. I was able to bring it to B Plus. It was a small increase in overall enhancement, but it was one step closer to the A rank.

I might want to put my next effort into Creature Making as that was also a B-rank skill of mine. Or perhaps I should start upgrading a new skill, but I still didn’t know what kind of new skill I would need or want.

As I returned to my body, I did an emergency survey of my dungeon. Nothing was amiss, except I had somehow, in my hurry, forgotten to open up the rest of the 14th floor. Well, that was an easy fix, and I was glad that I was able to observe the madness that followed without having to worry about the ant nations just yet.

It seems the rulers have been able to keep everything from escalating. But I wasn’t sure how long they could keep it up; sooner or later, some nation was going to get too greedy, and the current justifications for war were going to be ignored, and madness would follow.

I was also happy to see that for the first time since I placed the goblins into the 14th-floor playroom, their population started to trend upwards. It was a rough time for them as about 7,000 died within the first six months, but after that, it stabilized a little bit.

But now it seems that it's starting to grow once again as more established groups have started to form. One settlement already had 70 goblins inhabiting it. It was fascinating to watch the struggle as they tried to figure out their place in the world.

For the first few months, the biggest killer was actually starvation because when they lost a hunter or two, they really started to struggle, and it was one of the more dangerous occupations for a goblin. Now, that isn't that much of a problem as everyone who had not figured out how to get food had already died.

Currently, the biggest killers are wolves because they can wipe out multiple goblins in a single hunt as they hunt in packs. In the future, however, I believe that other goblins will be their number one cause of deaths.

I started to expand my next floor, but I did it slower as I knew that there was going to be a lot happening in the next few years. However, I also didn't purposely ‘drag my feet,’ so to speak, as I still wanted to complete the next breakthrough in a reasonable amount of time.

This floor was going to be a bit different from my others. I didn’t like how the extreme environments were so empty on the other floors. I did understand the reason; it was because creatures had a more familiar and better environment to go to. This floor was going to fix this as it was going to be entirely frozen.

Well, perhaps not completely frozen, as I did still want plant life as well, but it was constantly going to be below freezing. I was probably going to have to support a few of the plants and creatures so they could stay alive a bit longer and be able to evolve enough to survive, but my enhanced capabilities should make that possible even while still doing the other things I like to do.

With everything planned out, I made myself comfortable and started to expand, maintain, and observe everything in my dungeon. It felt so good to be able to watch so many things and do so many things.

I remember when I was still young and how it took me so long to make a single dungeon room. I wonder if in the future I was going to think back on my current self the same way. That idea was quite pleasing.

Everything went as expected for the next three months. The new floor was coming along nicely, but I was still in the process of expanding it while keeping the height at 500 metres. The adventurers were having a hell of a time trying to map and find all the interesting things about the new dungeon rooms I opened up.

The frontrunners were getting close to reaching the Floor guardian, but a lot of adventurers didn't bother trying to push to the floor guardian as quickly as possible; they liked to explore more widely.

The thing that broke my comfortable position happened in the ant nation. It started ordinarily enough with secret talks of rebellion. They were young ants and unhappy with their lot in life. They were new to this revolution business and lived in a quiet but large colony that wasn’t really that special, so not many influential ants had a need to go there.

However, not long after the talks of revolution began, there was a surprising visit announced from a neighbouring nation where a high noble decided this would be a good place for a short vacation.

The young ants did their best, but they weren't prepared for anything of this magnitude. Their haphazard information gathering, however, did get them in touch with a larger revolutionary group who actually knew what they were doing. But since they didn't have any presence here, they decided to invest in this young startup.

With a little bit more resources, they were able to get a plan on one of the routes the noble ant was going to take while going through the city. They were incredibly excited, as only young ants can be when talking about killing their oppressors.

The noble, however, had competent bodyguards, and they had purposely given out false routes. Unfortunately, this was a huge colony. And completely by chance, from the 100 different false routes that were given out, the one that the revolutionaries got their hands on just happened to cross the real route in one singular place. I watched in absolute fascination and horror as the revolutionaries, by chance, picked the only corner where the routes intersected.

They had gotten basic skill training and could shoot off air bullets like any other young ant. There were enough of them that even the trained guards didn't have enough power to protect their noble.

What followed was a huge outcry from the other nation who, after asking permission from their alliance, started to mobilize. What this nation didn't understand was that they should have declared war immediately because sentiment was on their side.

But their mobilization took 3 weeks, and in ant society, that was enough time for the public to no longer care about the assassination. So when war was declared, it came as quite a surprise because the reason that was so valid 3 weeks ago was no longer relevant.

Quickly, bigger nations allied to the nation that had been declared on started to mobilize as well to protect their ally. There were many attempts to stop the war, and I honestly didn’t know how it was possible that so many unlucky things happened, but one after another all attempts to stop the war failed, more and more nations had to join until a large portion of the ant nations were in a war before they even understood what happened, and the rest most likely needed to pick a side. World War Ant had begun.