Chapter 32 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I was about halfway done with my preparations for my breakthrough when I once again had to redo everything because the war actually escalated, and I didn’t want to miss anything. Fortunately, it didn't get too big, and probably never will unless some of the nations would be stupid enough to directly attack others' territory. But if the fighting is contained in the zone around the fountain, it shouldn't get worse than this. However, this will most definitely be the largest war ever because now many more nations are supporting the war effort and even sending voluntary troops.

In this war, already millions have died and many more will follow. The number of dead seems to be getting worse the longer the war continues, and not because of the constant battles, but because of how those battles are being fought.

Before the new age of expansion and exploration, champions were quite rare. But as the population has grown and more has been learned about skills, the fights have become deadlier, as the regular ants that were the main fighting force are slowly turning into nothing more than walking future corpses.

Nations' militaries already have elite units that all have certain skills that make them incredibly more effective than any ant without them. This changed the battles from a huge melee where two sides collided in mass fighting into something completely different. Now, relatively small numbers of ants can defend against 5, even 10 times the number, sometimes even more. Slowly, the fighting is turning into defensible positions and a deadly no-ants land in the middle.

Currently, there aren't that many of those places, and there simply aren't enough elite units with skills to be able to handle the mass of regular soldiers. But I suspect as time goes on, more and more soldiers will have specialized skills that would make them incredibly effective, and it will change the face of battle forever. However, this isn't the case for this war, and while there are signs of what the future holds, they're only small glimpses.

It didn't take long for those newer battlefields to disappear as the new voluntary soldiers from other nations started to flood in, and mass combat restarted. While the area that the fighting was going on in wasn’t too large, some places had hard times getting supplies, which made winning battles even more important and turned them into desperate bloodbaths. Because if you didn’t win, you were going to starve to death, and the only food around was the enemies' and your own comrades' corpses.

The champion fights were always the most interesting, but I did enjoy how the large floating airships were used to gain air superiority, which helped the combat below. Champions usually took those down, but the few specialized champions that had some skills for air combat were able to effectively keep those airships in the air, which allowed them to cause quite the devastation down below.

There were also smaller kinds of aircraft that were a lot faster and more manoeuvrable, but their damage output was quite limited because they could only hold one skill-based attacker that could do long-range damage. On the other hand, they were quite good at dealing with the airships.

The fighting devastated the entire area, but no one was willing to give up, so the madness continued until a huge battle between champions moved too close to the fountain. Before anyone understood what had happened, their fight had destroyed it.

The three champions who won that battle killed themselves out of shame when they realised what had happened. However, this extinguished the main reason for this war, and while the animosity still lingered, everyone was tired of this war. So, it ended without any resolution and with bitter rivalries being forged.

From the start of the escalations to the end of the war, almost five months had passed. During that time, a bit over 9 million soldiers lost their lives in what turned out to be a pointless war. The area will probably take years to recover, but currently, it's just a wasteland that will be the graveyard for 9 million ants. This devastation, however, was something that the politicians now tried to avoid, and new alliances were carefully orchestrated to ensure that no one would want to fight in a war like this once again.

For me, however, it was time to finally break through. I started by opening up all the sections of the 12th floor for the huge amount of extra dungeon rooms that now numbered 18,752. That annoying person had kept his end of the deal, but now I was only getting new species of plants every few days because they were running out of new things to bring me.

I wanted to breakthrough earlier to show that I was a dungeon core of my word and willing to show good intentions, but this war was the priority for me as nothing this big had happened before. I let my core fill with mana until I couldn’t bear it any longer and triggered the breakthrough.

The pain immediately disappeared, replaced by a wonderful feeling. I immediately got to work. I channeled the different amounts of mana I wanted to go into floor expansion and the floor guardian, and then started designing the room.

This time, I had an interesting idea and decided that it was going to be good enough. A huge Mountain Lion, which I was going to strengthen a bit more, would be the first monster the adventurers will see as it's running out of the forest a bit wounded. It will be a formidable opponent or a possible ally, depending on what choice the adventurers make.

Following it just a bit later will be goblin riders who will be riding wild boars. I need to give them decent equipment and a few skills, especially to the leader. The wild boars will also get skills, so the group of six would be formidable opponents.

If the adventurers were able to get the Mountain Lion on their side, it would help in the fight; otherwise, it would run away or be dead because the adventurers had killed it already. It should be a decent challenge, but perhaps on the low side for the 12th floor, but I felt it was good enough.

Then again, I have been getting tired of so many adventurers using fire skills to make everything a lot easier, so perhaps a fight underneath dark storm clouds with a heavy downpour of rain will make things more interesting and harder.

With this part of the breakthrough finished, I could feel the floor guardian room almost instantly formed. Now it was time to increase my skills, and I did the same as last time, but this time I wasn’t able to get any of my skills to a higher rank.

I did, however, feel like Pattern Strengthening was quite close to the next rank, but Space Expansion was too far off from getting to the SS rank. Perhaps I should rethink my strategies for skill ranking, but currently, I did what I had done before. Something felt off, but I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling that way.

Coming out of the breakthrough, I had to do a bit of housekeeping before I started to claim territory, as my core room was starting to get a bit too small. I expanded it to twice the size it previously was and also made my decoy bigger to fit my current depth.

I could do more things here to make myself secure, but I could bring any creature in my dungeon into this room to fight for me. However, it seems that it was customary to have a core defender, so I guess I should also work on making the baddest and strongest creature I could as a deterrent to anyone who thinks taking out my core would be easy.

I took a few moments to get used to myself and my expanded capability. After that, I checked everything over to make sure nothing had happened over the three days it took for me to breakthrough.

Then I started to claim my new territory and began expanding the new floor. Doing this just felt right, and I comfortably settled in as I started to prepare the new floor for the bug paradise or hell it was going to turn into.