[Um… Okay! How much time do we have?] Marianna asked Yeshi. He dropped to his knee, bowing his head.

  “The monsters travel slowly in their group. I’d say roughly three hours, my lady.”

  Marianna sucked in a breath. Three hours wasn’t enough time for her to explore all of her new options and figure out how best to use them. Even though she’d told the rats it would all be okay, Mari wasn’t so sure anymore. In her mental space, she habitually fingered her missing keys, before pulling a determined expression and slapping her cheeks.

  Come on, Mari! Confidence is key!

  She quickly changed viewports, staring through Ivy’s eyes in her core’s room. As she scanned the room, her eyes came to a rest on what could perhaps be the salvation of her dungeon.

  For clarity, she used [Review] on the object.

  And what was her current energy? She looked to the counter before wondering to herself if there was any more information she could see. Another menu appeared.

  Excellent. She was sure she had more than enough energy to experiment a little. Mari pulled up the Dweller Creation Pod menu.

  Created by: Dungeon Marianna

  As interested as she was in the second two options, Marianna didn’t have time to focus on them right now. She was in a hurry. She mentally commanded [Spawn!] and the menu was replaced by another.

  Woah… Mari was stunned. She hadn’t expected more options than the ones she’d discovered. And mermaids were already listed on here! She idly wondered how they would turn out, before focusing once more on the task at hand.

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  Those serpopards are definitely not going to be beaten by spiders, so those are out of the question. I wonder what a mimic is? Could it change into a serpopard? Well, probably not if just one was able to nearly destroy the three strongest Ratmen. And apparently Ratmen are ranked C. So I have to get either C-rank, or something higher…

  Marianna’s original idea had been to check if she could spawn more Ratmen. Because if she was able to create more rat warriors, then they might be able to stand a chance. But she had to be careful. A single Ratman cost four-hundred energy, and Mari only had a thousand.

  Dreadnought sounds interesting, though I hate to imagine why it requires a skull…

  It was the same rank as a Ratman, and cost the same amount of energy, but double the time. Mari figured she would summon a single Ratman, and a single Dreadnought, though she felt bad for using the skull that had been laying around, since Miradeen had no use for one.

  The Ratman queen, for her part, had kicked out both Yeshi and Baruk, once he’d awoken. She seemed intensely focused on enchanting, and insisted she not be disturbed. The two warriors had taken it upon themselves to stand guard both at her door, and at the entrance to the cave.

  Mari quickly ordered the Dweller pod to create a Dreadnought, and watched as the skull vanished from sight. She also queued up a Ratman, but was surprised by the next screen to appear.

  She quickly selected Warrior, since she had decided Baruk and Yeshi wouldn’t be able to fight alone against an army.

  I’ll come back to those other classes later… Perhaps Miradeen will want another mage around…

  Then, Mari left the unnamed Overseer’s viewport, switching over to Smitty, who was positioned at the front of the dungeon. Mari fondly considered him to be the first line of defense, and wanted to support him as much as she could. But with only two-hundred energy left, she wasn’t sure if she could do much.

  I want to build traps! She thought, willing a menu to appear. It did, and she proceeded to browse her options.

  She opened customized, wondering what it entailed.

  It seemed useful, but there was no real application to her current predicament. Instead, Mari read through the other options.

  Mari pondered for a moment. She had a lot of citizens living in her small dungeon, and she wanted to be able to keep them all safe. How about a door? Well, that settled it. She imagined a wall that would slide away from the front of the dungeon when she asked it to. It would function like a blast door. Her first line of defense. Marianna would see if she could stop the serpopard attack before it even began… again…

  Mari approved the notification, and watched as a wall formed out of dirt bricks, blocking the light out of the cave. She noted there would need to be some serious discussions about the lighting situation with the rats, when there was time.

  Oddly though, Marianna didn’t have any issues seeing in the dark. The Overseer’s vision seemed to adapt to the darkness swiftly and perfectly. It almost looked like it was still day, though there were now no shadows being cast.

  The wall only cost her a hundred energy, which didn’t seem standard to the rooms she had created, but perhaps it was because digging was a different energy expense to building? Or maybe the traps had unique costs. She wasn’t very good at math though, so she could very well have been incorrect.

  Mari then began to brainstorm. What could she do with moving walls and floors? If each only cost a hundred energy, then she could probably set up quite a few traps before the serpopards reached her dungeon. And since she regenerated ten energy per minute, she could realistically have somewhere along the lines of two-thousand energy to use if she kept expending it before she fully refilled.

  She watched as her energy slowly filled each minute, considering her options. She wasn’t going to have enough time to spawn any more monsters, so the most she could do was use her building abilities to hopefully thwart the attack.

  Mari began planning her defenses, drawing a mental map in her mind of what the dungeon would look like when she was finished with it. While she was experimenting with the moving floor traps to understand better what she could do with them, a vaguely familiar Ratman approached her chamber.

  She maximized Ivy’s viewport, and examined the rat, trying to remember where she might have heard the name before.

  The dark-red fur of the rat shined in the light of Mari’s core, and the creature leaned a white pickaxe against the wall. It was one of the bone tools, and this was Koria, the rat Mari had assigned to mining duty.

  [Yes, Koria?] Marianna addressed the miner. [What do you need?]

  The female rat seemed startled at the sudden conversation, and looked around, locating Ivy stuck to a wall nearby. She looked at the Overseer, averting her gaze, and meeting it once more. Her clawed hands ran themselves over each other nervously.

  “Um,” she began quietly. “I have been mining the ruby, as you requested, my lady. There is a lot of it…” She pointed towards a corner of the room, and Mari saw that there was, indeed a large pile of ruby stacked there. She hadn’t noticed it because the mine itself was right next to it, and so the pile sort of blended in. Or perhaps Koria had only just brought the rubies into the chamber.

  Mari quickly used [Review] on the pile of rubies.

  Mari turned back to the nervous miner, who had been looking around restlessly, and running her clawed hands over each other.

  [Thank you! This will help a lot!]

  The rat seemed to calm down a little bit, and nodded.

  “I will just be going back to the rest of the rats, then… I finished working for today…”

  Mari nodded before remembering that she didn't have a body for Koria to see.

  [Okay! Thanks again!]

  Then, Marianna absorbed the rubies into her invisible storage space-dimension-thing, and returned to her preparations for the incoming serpopard attack. She briefed Baruk and Yeshi of her new creations to soon be released from the Dweller Creation Pod, and caught a glimpse of one of the other warriors, that had moved the Red Core for her, reentering the dungeon with his wooden spear. After a brief flash of guilt at the fate of the other core, she used [Review] on him to rediscover his name.

  Hmm… Mari pondered the last line. She didn’t know what had happened during the Ratman’s journey to escape Cordon, but it didn’t seem like a good title to have. However, she really needed a strategist, and so she called him over to discuss the upcoming fight against the serpopards.

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