I absorbed the dead bodies of the goblins, their stuff, and the debris they created. Despite a total victory against a stronger party, my reward was more paltry–no level up and a mere four Essence.

  That gave me six total Essence. I needed four more.

  In other words, I needed to survive and defeat at least one more raid.

  Bah!--this quest was bullshit.

  I was mollified that I did show improvement, albeit at a high cost. I had spent half of my DP already–two for leveling up Trap Creation and one for the mana refresh. In hindsight, the latter use turned out completely justified: the boost in mana getting me the two skeleton warriors that ultimately defeated almost all of the invaders.

  The Dark Goblins. What was up with them?

  They looted the steel darts, possibly because they were immediately useful and could be used in a fight.They also kept the mana coins, so they knew that those were valuable currency and that they had value to the goblins, specifically. Although, I highly doubted the mint that made the original coin was connected to these guys.

  The goblins had some basic delving survival skills, but they were incurious, incautious, and violent. They didn’t find the hidden stairs under the iron box, but they exhibited absolutely no hesitation about exploring the bottom of the shaft.

  Shit.

  They were hunting for me.

  Sapiophagia. Tenebruous Portal. The Warlock boon.

  The first two had that inky, eldritch darkness when I inspected or interacted with them. The last one had the strange feeling of resonance with my skill. Once is a chance; twice is a coincidence; thrice is a pattern.

  That begged the question: what was the pattern?

  There was a connection between the three. I thought that usually this type of relationship would lead to a synergistic relationship, the connection feeding off the parts to provide a greater whole. And maybe that would have been true if I had chosen the “Warlock” path.

  But I didn’t, and now these bastards were delving my dungeon and likely looking for my core. I worried that whatever connection there was was actually leading them to me.

  Whatever! They wanted to feed me? Feed me!

  I needed to focus. First, I wanted to finish what I was in the middle of, before I was so rudely interrupted.

  I once again brought my focus to the front doors–

  –those dastardly goblins must have been born in a barn! The front doors were still open!

  To be fair, all of the doors were open.

  Well, hopefully my idea would solve this too.

  I focused on the front doors as the start of the big trap. Having sensed and felt my way through doing this before, I followed what had worked. However, I also make some tweaks and adjustments as I went along. Trap Creation strained as I expanded the scope and elements, but did much better. I think the two extra levels it now had were helping. I went through encapsulating the entire dungeon as an “escape-room” aspect and again set the conditions for the portal and trap start and finish.

  I started pushing in my Demesne Points one after the other just as I did previously. But this time, I had a better understanding of what to do as well as what I wanted. I weaved through all aspects of the trap–the doors, the keys, the pots, the skeletons–wrapping it all up with a command to revert to the original position when the trap was concluded.

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  The power expanded and then solidified the magical construction, settling into place like a magic chiffon wrapping around the dungeon and tightening just enough to hold it all together. Then it was complete and I could let go of it in my mind, letting it stand on its own.

  Then the system hit me like an American truck-kun.

  . . .

  My core hurt like the dickens . . . but I didn’t pass out this time.

  The pain slowly receded. Once it had lessened to only being a dull ache,I checked my notifications.

  That–that was too short, too simple. I prepared to force my will on the system, again, to give me more details, but as soon as I thought about the “holding,” a new screen popped up. Then, I understood. The reason for the pain and agony was the system had stitched together an entirely new status screen for me. No, it also had gone inside and rearranged my internals, too. I could feel that I was different than before.

  Holy smokes--the status screen gave explanatory notes.

  But it got even better; when I focused on each of the elements listed, another screen showed up giving more details.

  This! This was what a system should be like! There was information, explanations, numbers!

  I was so elated by what I was given, I could kiss the system. I settled for a silent “fucking thank you!”

  What the system called ‘Holding,’ I had understood as ‘floor,’ but I supposed the system didn’t want to use such limited terminology. After all, the current unnamed Holding had multiple floors.

  The most important thing was that the holding was “instanced.” In other words, when delvers entered my dungeon, they were entering a magical facsimile of what I had made. When the Holding reset, I didn’t have to do anything manually. And as a bonus, I wasn’t restricted to making changes to the dungeon while people were in the Holding. That just screamed abuse.

  Another critically important feature of the Holding was that it was closed. In other words, only a limited number of people could enter the holding at a time (the default had been set to five). Once five people were in the holding, it blocked anyone else from entering. Now, I had an absolute defense against being overrun by large numbers of delvers.

  And the cost savings. Before, if the delvers killed every monster in my dungeon, a manual rebuild would cost me 100 mana just on the monsters. Now, it cost me 16 mana–perhaps about 10 percent–to fix everything.[1] That was an absolute bargain.

  Fortunately, the Holding started in reset mode. This meant I had five days until the reserve would be full and the Holding would be open to new delvers. I felt I needed more time and more mana so I adjusted the Draw down a level, which would give me a ridiculous ten days. The other benefit was that I could budget my mana until the reset, meaning I would have an additional . . . 30 mana to work with.

  I did make sure to write a note of warning to myself, however. If I spent my last DP on increasing my mana regeneration, that would cause the reset time to be shorter. What I had thought was the best use of my DP now didn’t seem so good.

  All-in-all, my creation was a resounding success. Now, I had time and some resources to work with. Even so, it gnawed at me that the Holding didn’t have a name. I decided to play (mostly) nice with the System; I also had an inkling of what this place had been for. I inputted the name into the status and the system accepted it without a hitch.

  Necromancer’s Abattoir 5

  [1]dunpedia/holding/properties/auto-reset

  {Restoration} has two parameters:

  Reserve is another supplemental mana well that fills with mana that is used to reset the Holding. However, unlike other components and based on what the notes say, I believe this number is variable. It appears the system is calculating it based on the features or total cost of the underlying demesne.

  Draw is a parameter set as a percentage of my mana regeneration. When {Restoration} is active, Draw diverts said percentage of mana regeneration to the mana Reserve. Draw’s parameter has three possible settings: 25%, 50%, and 75%.