The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (read novel full .txt) 📕

only going to take a month for that to happen.  She pulled up the Experience Awards and Countdown screen that she hadn’t even bothered to look at before – because nothing had really lasted long enough to matter.

Rank Experience Awards

Type

Variable Conditions

Experience Awarded

Rooms Constructed

Size

1 – 50

Traps Installed

Complexity

1 – 20

Monsters Created

Levels

1 – 20

Rewards Placed

Valuation

1 – 50

Raider Presence

Time

1 – 5

Raider Deaths

Quality

100 – 10000

Rank Experience Countdown

Novice

1 Year

Adept

5 Years

Expert

50 Years

Master

500 Years

Supreme

N/A

It was a breakdown of how she obtained Rank Experience through the actions of a Dungeon Core she was bonded with, as well as the length of time it took for that Experience to take effect.  As she increased in Rank, the time would increase dramatically, because it took longer for the connection established by the Bonds to strengthen enough to handle the Rank Experience transferred over.

What was strange, though, was that the original time was still on there for her Novice Rank – 1 Year.  However, even as she looked at it, the time values started to fade out and then return with shorter lengths.

Rank Experience Countdown

Novice

1 Month

Adept

1 Year

Expert

5 Years

Master

25 Years

Supreme

N/A

It was quite a reduction from the original; the only reason she could think of was because her “Assistant” form was somehow integrated into her new Core, which therefore made the transfer of Rank Experience that much easier and faster.  But why does that even matter now?, she couldn’t help but think despondently

It mattered because looking down at her Assistant Abilities, she also saw that she still had access to them – though Translocation was horribly expensive at 1000 Fairy Mana, compared to the 70 it used to be.  In addition, her Core Bond was now called just Bond…and that was the only thing she could determine from it.  When she first obtained all of the Abilities as part of her initiation into the world of Dungeon Assistants, the methods of their use and their purpose were given along with them; she had a feeling that what had happened to her was relatively unexplored territory, and there was no knowledge of what it did.

As an experiment, Tacca activated her Invisibility – and she disappeared from her Core vision.  Oh, she could certainly still perceive that she was there because of the other senses that came from being part of a Dungeon Core, but if she visually looked towards where she knew she was from the wall of her small space she couldn’t see anything.  Even the very dim glow coming from her Core was camouflaged with the Ability, which was…intriguing, to say the least.

This could work out after all.  She still wasn’t that enthusiastic about essentially dying, but she guessed that the alternative would be worse – Tacca’s soul could’ve been destroyed just as easily as all of the Cores she had been placed with lately.  Nevertheless, she wasn’t sure if her survival was a result of her horrendous “bad luck” or if her luck was starting to change.

Now that she had seen what the result of her transition from Fairy to Core was – at least as far as still having most of the same Abilities – Tacca focused on her new form.  She tried to bring up the Dungeon Core Status screen (which she knew about but had never actually seen before), and though it felt natural…nothing happened.  That’s right!  It won’t show until I decide on a couple of things first.

Tacca decided to count the fact that the previous owner of the Core hadn’t chosen anything as good luck, because otherwise she would’ve been stuck with something not of her choosing.  Normally, a Dungeon Assistant would try to assess the personality of a Dungeon Core after first meeting them and then determine which options would work best for them.  For example:

Do they seem like they would favor attack over defense?

Would they prefer creatures that would complement their traps, or traps that would work better in conjunction with their creatures?

Are they likely to follow the relatively strict rules and regulations set up on Dungeon Cores?

How prone are they to want something flashy and impressive versus hardy and ugly?

These questions – and quite a few more – were determined through the initial interactions with the new Dungeon Core; more than half of her schooling revolved around personality types and the best creatures, traps, and attributes that worked most effectively with certain personalities.  It wasn’t always foolproof, but the methods used by Dungeon Assistants had been around for countless years and had proven to be highly effective…to most Dungeon Cores, at least.  The Cores that Tacca had dealt with over the last few months were outliers from the norm, so of course their choices were quite a bit different and unclassifiable.

One of the exercises that Dungeon Assistant students had to do was assess themselves as a Dungeon Core and determine what would work best for them.  It had been extremely easy to do it back at DAPS, because she knew exactly who she was; a plan was made at that time that detailed her initial choices, as well as the future improvements to ensure a highly successful dungeon that would probably last for centuries, if not millennia.

Now, though, as an actual, real-life Dungeon Core and not an exercise, Tacca found that her previous assessment was…off.  It could’ve been because of her recent experiences with the destruction of other Cores, or the fact that she was one now herself, but when she thought of the safe, straightforward plan that she had developed it didn’t really fit her anymore.  It was the same one that she had devised over weeks of research and strategizing, which could be adapted depending upon the Core’s personality to maximize effectiveness; now,