My sword swung through the air in the early morning light as I worked through my forms. I was still a bit stiff compared to Byron, but I was definitely more fluid than I had been when we started.
With no teacher to guide me, though, I was just trying to keep my skills sharp and get some blood flowing. I was about to call it when I heard someone approaching from behind.
“Your forms look good. Fluid. You must have had a good teacher,” Rikton said.
I turned, lowering my blade, and saw the man dressed down compared to the day before. In his hands were two practice swords. “Thank you,” I responded, trying to figure out what the appropriate etiquette was for this kind of situation, but failing to come up with anything. “I’ve been lucky enough to have more than one.”
“Want a sparring partner?” he asked, hefting the wooden swords.
“Sure,” I shrugged, then caught myself for being too casual and switched to a more appropriate tilt of my head. “I mean, yes, sir.”
Rikton laughed, then tossed me a wooden sword. “I already told you, Tovar, no need to be so formal. One of the main advantages to being a baron of a small territory far from the capital; there are no eyes watching and judging.”
“Right,” I said, walking to the side so I could put my actual blade away in favor of the practice sword. I did a few swings with it to get a feel for the weight.
“I never could get Felton to practice with me,” he said with a sigh, as he took a stance. “Not after the very first time, at least. It hurt his wrists, he said. After that, he only had eyes for magic.”
“You didn’t make him practice anyway?” I said, getting into position as well.
Rikton shook his head, chuckling. “Tris wouldn’t let me. She spoils the kids too much.”
I motioned slightly with my head to where Rikton’s second son was spying on us. “What about Fellius?”
The boy’s father lowered his center of gravity. “I’m hoping to start teaching him soon, but Tris says he’s still too young.”
“He seems interested, at least,” I said, raising my wooden sword. “Let’s give him a show.”
* * *
“Tovar is so cool,” Fellius gushed to his older brother at breakfast. “You should have seen it! His sword was like, swoosh, fwah, whoosh,” he said, swinging his fork through the air.
“No swinging your cutlery, sweetie,” Trisellia said, shooting a disapproving glance at Rikton.
“Brutes,” Felton said, shaking his head. “Brutes with sticks, the lot of you.”
“Hey,” I said. I had washed up quickly after the spar and changed into cleaner clothes, as had Rikton. I had been unable to get through the experienced man’s defenses, naturally, but it had been good exercise, and apparently it was enough to impress Fellius. “I’m a future mage brute with a stick.”
As breakfast wrapped up, I excused myself from the family so they could have some time together, saying I wanted to go into the village and check it out. At first, they insisted someone go with, but I managed to convince them to all stay home and catch up. If I could navigate Ivarnel by myself, I could surely manage Obdorn.
The mansion was a bit of a walk from the village; it had seemed closer in the carriage, and as the sun climbed in the sky, the summer heat started to make me sweat. At this rate, I’m going to sweat through all my clothes in no time, I thought to myself as I rolled up my sleeves and untucked my shirt. Hate to make Odel or someone else working in the household do my laundry for me, but I might need to ask.
Once I made it to the village, I immediately felt a sense of familiarity. Obdorn’s village was a lot like the one I grew up in, though slightly wealthier and with more people. I stopped by a well to draw some water, refreshing myself, and spent the rest of the morning exploring.
Being a stranger to the locals, I did get some curious glances, but I didn’t encounter any trouble. I was dressed well, even with my sleeves rolled up and shirt not tucked in, and the rumor mill had likely quickly spread the fact that I had come down from the baron’s mansion. The village also had some guards around, local militia or police, probably funded by the baron as protection and law enforcement in the village. Some of these men could be the ones who would end up guarding us in the dungeon, so I politely smiled at them and made sure I didn’t make a bad impression.
Thinking about the dungeon made me excited for when we’d go check it out. Felton had said it was out west of the village, in the woods. Exploring the western border of the village, I found the road leading out into the woods that likely led there, but didn’t go down it, as much as I wanted to. I didn’t have my sword with me, but even if I did, going alone would be idiotic. Unless I want to be bug chow.
Dungeons, as it turned out, tended to have themes. When the mana coalesced to a point where it created a dungeon, the exact location it did so and what the area contained had an effect on what it generated. If it coalesced around predominantly plants, for example, the dungeon might end up plant themed and largely contain plant-based monsters, which wasn’t uncommon in forests and jungles. If it wound up capturing animals in the process, the dungeon might end up producing animal-type monsters instead. It wasn’t entirely known what caused what effect—some dungeons ended up producing things that couldn’t be easily explained, like undead, or fae—but there was enough of a trend to make some educated guesses.
Obdorn’s dungeon had apparently coalesced around a high concentration of insects. The dungeon primarily produced monstrous bugs.
Of all the things it could have been, I would probably have preferred… not bugs, I thought to myself with a shudder. I had long since outgrown any childhood fears of normal insects, but they could still cause a visceral reaction. Giant bugs would, no doubt, be even worse.
As a resource for the territory, though, it was apparently pretty good. Monster silks and dyes could be obtained and sold for clothing, chitin could be used for lightweight shields or armoring, comb could be harvested for wax to make candles, and so on. Most of this stuff was valuable, but not so valuable as to attract too much outside attention. There wasn’t much in the way of high quality ore worth mining, and the treasures that were sometimes produced weren’t all that desirable, outside of insect enthusiasts.
That meant that the barony was able to manage it quite closely without dealing with outsiders tearing through the place, who would only care about rapidly accumulating riches. Sure, an outsider who tore through a dungeon would owe taxes on what they earned to the landholder, but it usually disrupted the balance of the dungeon and made regular harvests difficult.
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On the other hand, since it wasn’t an attractive dungeon to most, it had to be managed by the barony. Not regularly pushing into it and clearing out monsters could lead to them escaping and wandering, like the goblins that had attacked my village. Without powerful people coming from outside the territory, they also couldn’t push deeper into the dungeon in search of better resources or treasure, and were limited to the already mapped parts that could be managed.
After checking out the village, I was more or less ready to head back. I hadn’t found anything I really wanted to buy, though I almost bought some candles made from the wax produced in the dungeon when I saw it. I caught myself before buying something for the sake of buying something, and decided to save my money. For all I knew the candles I used back at Somnial’s manor were made from monster bug wax already, and buying more wasn’t even a novelty.
Once I got back to the mansion, I rejoined the baron’s family, resting my feet and relaxing. I didn’t want to act impatient, and upon learning that the baron had a small library as well—just books, no grimoires—I picked out something to read to pass the time.
A few days later, it was finally time to check out the dungeon.
Rikton, Felton, Felris, and I, alongside a handful of hired guards, all set out first thing after breakfast, through town, down the road into the woods to the dungeon.
The forest here was much like the forest around Redding, though we followed a cleared path instead of traipsing through the brush. Some small critters scampered off at the sound of us traveling through, nonetheless, more scared by our voices than our footfalls or the snapping of branches. The clinks of armor and swords on belts was also pretty noisy. I adjusted my sword belt, trying to get it to stop slapping the side of my leg as I walked.
“How’s the wild game around here?” I asked Rikton, as a distraction from my gear. I wasn’t a hunter like my father, but having grown up around that lifestyle, I couldn’t avoid thinking about it entirely.
Rikton glanced down at me as we walked. “Between the size of the village and the threat of the dungeon, it’s not great.”
“Do animals avoid the dungeon?”
“Some do. We also try to drive them off, to keep the area around the dungeon clear. Monsters need to eat, just like animals, and if there’s food outside it can draw them out. We rather the monsters feed on each other and keep themselves in check. A dungeon has a delicate balance to maintain, particularly if you intend to regularly harvest from it.”
“Can it be self contained? Do new monsters get produced, or do they only come into existence initially, when the dungeon does?” I knew mana concentrations forced dungeons into being, and from that, monsters too, but I didn’t know the finer details.
“It depends on the dungeon. Ours, being an insect-based dungeon, contains monsters who can breed, and do so in vast numbers. If fed from the outside, their numbers can grow exponentially. We’ve culled eggs in the past to limit numbers of certain species. With no outside sources of food, the monsters prey on each other, and self-manage to a certain extent. But without human oversight, a dungeon like this would most certainly break and release insect monsters widely, and would ultimately need culling to the last egg in order to not become a repeat problem.”
“Huh.” I thought on that for a while as we walked a bit further. I could only assume that had happened before and the country had managed to respond, otherwise the entire land would be swarming with bug monsters. Something to ask Somnial about. I imagine stuff like that was a factor in the demon wars.
“But, to your original question, there’s some decent game in the forest opposite the village.”
We continued chatting a bit about hunting, and talked a bit more about dungeon ecology, before finally arriving at the site.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. I knew they managed the dungeon, but I still pictured a mysterious, hidden cave in the woods, maybe a glowing portal. Instead, we came to an orderly, fenced off worksite with guards on duty and a small workforce, presumably employees from the village, working together in covered open-air worksites to process dungeon materials down to be shipped back to the village and turned into goods.
It was a whole operation out in the woods, a tiny microcosm of the larger village, to deal with the dungeon. There was even a covered outdoor kitchen where cooks were cleaning up after breakfast, the aroma lingering in the air, before starting to prepare for lunch.
I couldn’t even see the dungeon. The entrance was closed off behind a structure built around it, the most guarded part of the camp.
The guards outside of camp saluted Rikton, who saluted back as we walked past them.
“Whoa,” I muttered, looking around at the people working.
“Impressive, right?” Felton said.
“Yeah,” I nodded. I had wondered how a baron would be fine letting his children spend enough time in a dungeon to gain Will, but seeing the camp, it seemed a lot less unreasonable. An otherworldly bring-your-kids-to-work kind of thing, I thought to myself with a chuckle.
I craned my neck to watch as a large, silken cocoon was transferred to a degumming station, while processed silk threads were being moved to a wringing and drying area where it was packed up to be sent on to spinners. The cocoons were huge, and I could only imagine the size of the monsters that produced them. Elsewhere, I saw large red shells on racks, and a crushing station converting dried shell into powder, presumably for use as red dye.
“It’s a mixed blessing,” Felris added. “Obdorn is much better off for it, but it’s all we’re really known for. The rural barony that farms bugs.”
I thought back to Ramius’s classism towards the baron’s children. I hadn’t really witnessed it beyond the first day of school, since he left me alone—and by extension, Felton, since we spent most of our time together—but I did vaguely remember his poor attitude. “Strange. Silk and dye seem like something upper crust nobles would want.”
“They do,” Felton shrugged. “But they still look down on us for providing it.”
“Dungeons can be useful, but it’s still monster farming in the end,” Felris said. “It used to be banned entirely, in the past, and there are still those that dislike the concept.”
I started connecting the dots. Dungeon breaks would no doubt be horrible for the country, and so dungeons were probably culled ruthlessly for a long time, but each one was also a potentially large singular value add in terms of resources. When people started trying to farm them, some probably failed, and that probably led to a lot of losses. There would have been a learning curve before humanity figured out how to do it safely, if there even was a truly safe way to do it.
When they did, though, they likely created an imbalance in wealth. Dungeons only appeared where mana concentration was high, which, as I understood it, was in places where people weren’t congregating, since people drew down mana. Everything living drew down mana, but since people could grow their Will stat and thus draw in more, and in turn burn mana with skills, dungeons likely popped up more in the wild on average. In that case, they could only be farmed in newer settled areas, away from the capitals. That probably destabilized the power structure of a country.
I turned to Rikton, who had been idly eavesdropping on our conversation. “Dungeon products are taxed more heavily than regular products, aren’t they?”
Rikton raised an eyebrow, a small smile on his face. “Insightful. Yes, they are.”
It was the only way the crown could prevent the farthest settlements, where dungeons would be more likely to appear and could be farmed, from gaining the wealth and power that could put them into conflict with the Argadian capital. Oh, it’s even worse than that, I realized as I looked back at Felton and Felris. Dungeons can allow people to become mages, too, giving those with the weakest connections to the crown even more power.
Education for mages was concentrated in the domain’s capital, and the best probably were sent even further up the chain, pulled from Ivarnel to work for Argadia itself, in the royal capital. Some would no doubt still retain strong loyalty to their homes, the oft-neglected or forgotten tiny villages, new marches, and small baronies.
I shook my head. That was interesting, but none of it really affected me. I didn’t really care about the power structure of the country, or the crown, or even humanity as a whole. Humans would do what humans did, and so long as they were in good shape when the next demon king rising occurred—which I was promised by a literal higher power wasn’t going to be during my lifetime—then it was fine. I wanted to gain power for my own future, beyond this world, and my only real plan to use it in this life was to do what I could to help Redding and my family, as well as my friends like Felton and his family if I could, and be the best mage I could be.
As I refocused on where my feet had carried me, I found myself in front of a large, sturdy door, the barred entrance to the dungeon.
“Shall we?” Rikton asked, leading the way as the door began to open.
