"Brimstone Father?"
I ask, unsure of why a stone golem can speak and why it is calling me Father.
"Brimstone Father is the Father of the Dwarven race, a High Dwarf, and the owner of Brimstone mountain. Would Father prefer this one to address him differently?"
Hmm, that makes sense. I didn't know that I owned this mountain now, but I was born here, and claiming the mountain for my future kin would certainly be a good idea. Glad I didn't have to spend any effort on securing a mountain home. Also from that statement, it appears to know a little about the world outside this dungeon, like the name of our mountain.
"King Brimstone is fine, please stand. I have some questions regarding what you know of the world outside this mountain. How much do you know?"
The golem stands at attention, it doesn't look like his mouth moves when he speaks so the voice must be magically produced. But why does it have so much bass if it's magical?
"Certainly, King Brimstone. This one is aware of nothing other than the name of the mountain that this cave rests in and layout of the cave and hallway we stand in."
I guess it gets the knowledge from the dungeon itself and the dungeon only knows about its territory. So our first test should involve expanding the territory and making another golem.
"First, to check what kind of golems I can make."
I tap on the Spawn Golem option, which does indeed open another window that gives me a rather long list of the types of golems I can spawn. To my surprise I can even spawn non-combat golems for labor or desk work, this will be extremely useful. I should spawn another knight golem with two shield-bearer golems and two mage golems to even out the distribution of the party. As I finish inputting the orders for my new golems I also move over to the command to increase my golem limit, might as well test how much it increases my limit and if the cost changes while I wait for the golems to finish. This will also allow me to spend a large amount of Ether to observe how quickly the dungeon recovers it.
"Okay, so I can increase my golem limit by 5 with each use and the cost does not change. That seems a little broken, but I expect it will have a hard limit that I will reach eventually."
So I go ahead and increase my golem limit as much as I can with my remaining Ether, which means I will have a total of 50 on my golem limit and another 3,500 Ether to use to spawn golems. So I used the remaining 3,500 Ether to spawn 12 more golems. A total of 4 carrier golems with backpacks, 4 scout golems and 4 more knight golems to rotate between fighting and defending me.
"Okay golem company, form up with the shield bearers in the front and the mages behind me. The scouts shall check ahead of the party and report back to me anything they find, the new knights shall hold the sides to protect myself and the carriers. Roll out, I want to see what is outside this cave!"
We began marching down the tunnel to exit the dungeon, once I reached the edge of the room the crystal floating behind my back flashed briefly before returning to the rear wall and burying itself again. Not going to lie, completely forgot about the thing.
"The first two knights, you shall stay here and guard the core. Allow no one but myself into this room."
The two knights bowed and stationed themselves on either side of the entrance, looking like those statues in a game that you can tell are going to move once you approach them.
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It took our party only about 10 minutes to exit the hallway leading to the dungeon. In that time the core had regenerated a sixth of its total Ether. So it appears that it takes me only an hour to regain all of my spent Ether, seems a bit too quick but I will continue testing the dungeon later. Right now I should address the sight in front of me.
"I feel like this mountain is much larger than I was expecting, I can't even see the peak and we seem to be about halfway up the mountainside."
I turned to a mage golem standing behind me.
"Do you know how large Brimstone mountain is?"
"Sire, Brimstone mountain is the largest mountain in the world and would take a healthy human roughly 81 days to walk fully around the base, if uninterrupted. And roughly 63 days to reach the peak if they were able to walk in a straight line. But given the steep cliffs that cover the upper peak, the trip would take at least 4 months to reach the peak if traveling carefully. Dwarves such as my lord can easily ascend from any angle, being masters of earth manipulation, and safely reach the peak within half a month."
"Thank you for the information, as an aside. How do the stats of golems such as yourselves compare to humans?"
"I only know that humanity is not especially loved by Ether or Spirit, they can utilize them to some extent but not well enough to be a threat to us, let alone you my lord. A golem mage, much like myself, could easily land Ether attacks from outside the range of an average human mage. I believe you can view the stats of any of the golems you have summoned within your dungeon status my lord, if you have questions I can advise you."
"Excellent, are you by chance aware of where the nearest human town might be?"
"I am not my lord, but it would not be hard to make a guess based on the state of Ether in a given area. I predict that there is a small human village roughly 2 days east from the base of Brimstone."
Hmm, it would be best to shore up my dungeon before going on a trip down the mountain. First I should confirm the stats of my golems, summon some more, expand my territory and send out scouts to find where exactly the village would be.
"Very well, gentlemen, I shall retire back into the mountain for now. You two knights, you will travel with the carriers and scouts, search for and hunt any nearby animals and bring them to me in the cave. The remaining shield bearers and knights shall protect this entrance and the mages shall follow me back to the cave."
It is time to see how rooms and traps work.
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An hour had passed since I spent all my dungeon's Ether, it had finally recovered to its maximum and it was now time to begin expanding. According to the dungeon menu, I could expand my territory deeper into the stone of the mountain for much less than it would cost me to expand into the open outside the entrance. A very fitting setting for a dwarven dungeon. First I expanded my territory horizontally, given that my territory was already up against the mountainside entrance I only really had one direction to go.
It cost me only 10,000 Ether to expand 20 square kilometers into the mountain, this allowed me to order my new team of mining golems to begin digging a hallway to the depths of my new territory. While they worked on this I discovered two functions within my Dungeon Interface that will be extremely helpful.
First, I can open a map of my territory using an option inside the Core Settings section. This map also showed me any minerals or ores within my territory, making it easy to direct the miners on where to dig to retrieve them. And the second function is that my room options expand every time I touch and inspect a new mineral, these new options will allow me to make rooms that will function as regenerating mines. I can force any mine rooms to regenerate the assigned mineral using Ether, this will be very helpful in forging powerful armor and weapons to protect our mountain.
I also discovered that the effects of one of my passive racial skills allowed me to instantly understand any mineral I laid my hands on, it was a disorienting feeling to have this knowledge forcefully injected into my head the first time I picked up a chunk of iron. I will need to check my personal skills the next time I am waiting for the dungeon to recover Ether.
While my miners were faithfully retrieving all the minerals we now knew about, I went to the front entrance to begin work on the guard posts that will need to be here. Along with decorating the hallway just behind the guard posts with a set of wide and heavy dwarven gates, as they should be. Even including some rather nasty hidden ceiling flame traps that would cook anyone who attempted to open the heavy gates without permission.
As an aside, I noticed that I felt no fatigue even after completing our welcoming decorations and noticing it was deep into the night. Looks like this world has three gorgeously colorful moons.