Operation Blackjack Six.
Humiliated and dispossessed, the nobles and rchants quickly capitulated to Marshall's demands. They cared not to go into a Dungeon that had a 0% delving success rate. Everyone who ca down never returned.
I ate the wards in the secure containers and checked the insides. It was exactly what I expected. Money. Piles upon piles of magic stones, gemstones, and jewelry. I could live like a Lord on the surface with this kind of wealth. But they didn't have the LINUX kernel source code and that saddened . At least I had a list of DOS commands and what they should do. That gave a good idea of what an OS needed. Norton's book also detailed the file system and I had already so code ideas in my mind.
Leaving the humans on the surface to their own designs, I used Daydream before the day ended.
Fate is a real entity. Not a deity and not a person but much more than either. Even the mighty Norse Norns, favored by Fate as they are, can only read Her whims. Fate is a cosmic consciousness, the ultimate voyeur. To toy with Fate is to place oneself at the rcy of Her whims. Fate is the ultimate equalizer but still plays to Her favorites. But please, do not flatter nor curse Her. There is a school of magic that deals with Fate's magic. Dabble not in it, unless you are willing to pay the ultimate price to entertain Her.
Okay, warning received. I won't dabble in Fate magic.
The next morning, I used Daydream again.
That which you call Jabberwock is not a unique monster. It is a whole species of Infernali creatures, all with the sa size and appearance.
Fucking hell. Go foreshadow your mamma's next one-night stand, you asshole of a System.
I didn't spend the night idle. I read every book that could help get better at creating software, machinery, or... gardening.
> Your training and knowledge improved your Computer Sciences Skill to rank VI. You have a 10% higher chance of success when attempting to reverse engineer an electronic component.
> Your training and knowledge improved your Computer Sciences Skill to rank VII. When cataloging large amounts of data, your models and algorithms are 5% per rank more precise.
Two Skill ranks in a single night. I felt my Core's tiny seed brains almost bursting with ideas and motivation to finish this damn computer. I called the monkeys and we started coding.
On the side, I was also running an experint. An evolutionary experint. With my Genetic Diversity Perk, I could spawn animals that sotis ca with different traits. Mutations, so to speak. A more aggressive tiger, a bear with larger claws, or a wolf that grazes grass. All of these were within the realm of possibility. With minimal losses by reabsorbing animals I spawned, I started a project on the twelfth floor. Chimpanzee evolution. I would spawn chimpanzees until I found so that had better ntal traits. Fixing that one as a pattern, I would then apply Genetic Diversity to that chimpanzee to get variants that were even smarter or better able to display emotions. I wasn't expecting results anyti soon. The tests I applied to determine intelligence and emotional response were as failed as they could be, based on a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Dutch Academy of Applied Psychology.
But unless I started to grow trees on the thirteenth floor, I had nothing better to do with the Dungeon Mana I was getting. I could make Marshall so magic stones but I rejected the idea on principle.
People ca to retrieve their books. I gave them each an orange and a peach, along with an invitation to co live in the Dungeon. Nobody accepted that. Poor fools, they were already living inside my Dungeon the mont they ca within two miles of the city walls.
*
*
Another week passed. I checked on the Jabberwock daily. The monster kept writhing but it didn't seem to be closer... No. it was still beyond the horizon but it was taller now. The damn beast was climbing the planet's curvature as if it was a hill. I started to record the ntal image of the monster on steel plates down in the Dungeon, to compare the daily snapshots.
But yeah, back to coding. Going to the pillar and back took the effort of a single thought so I never left the Core room and the chimpanzees. I noticed that so of them were stealing pencils to draw or scribble during their rest ti. It seed so of the mories of when I was directly controlling them remained. Perhaps it would give the expression "code monkey" a new aning. I made sure they had boxes of pencils and reams of clear paper available, so they wouldn't sneak into the working room to steal the pages with the actual code.
We started flashing our BIOS candidate software on different machines and testing them. They had varying degrees of failure but so of them actually displayed so ssages on the screen. I taped the papers with the source code next to each Z-80 computer (The motherboard, CPU, and circuits were on the back of the keyboard so they seed to be just a collection of keyboards).
We were close. Knuth Checks rained like confetti on the fourth of July as we started debugging and putting together the pieces of different versions that worked. I got another level. This one w entirely kill-free. The wolf-rabbit floor was giving good dividends and I even had a couple hundred rabbit births for my Circle of Life yearly Exp bonus. I checked and saw that it had skyrocketed. I didn't have a couple hundred, I had several thousand births.
The culprits were the fish in the training room rivers. Fish fry counted as births. I was also getting a lot of Exp from the alligators feeding in the rivers and lakes. That settled it. Floor 13 would be a huge lake with marshlands. Lots of fish to breed and get eaten. Or die of old age. Fish lived short lives, right?
All this effort would be ruined if Jabberwock couldn't be stopped.
*
*
A month passed. Jabberwock now was entirely in sight, being closer to Pitsmouth than the horizon. Closer than 150 miles. A carpet of Infernali prowled around the huge monster, I only knew they were Infernali and not foot-tendrils of the bigger beast because I had a very good telescope now. Jabberwock didn't need to destroy the city, those Infernali there would do the job.
But that was a wonderful opportunity. Kill monsters, farm Exp. Kill monsters in large batches, farm lots of Exp. The level 300 man ca back to mind. I had nobody alive between here and there. I could work with that.
I send a probe forward. it was a rod of stone Dungeon wall one inch in diater that increased the reach of my Dungeon by hundreds of feet every minute. I was so far away that I began to feel a lag when sending commands down the pipeline. Forty-four miles away from my Core was the absolute maximum. The delay was almost twenty seconds. Anyway. I broke to the surface and ford a rectangular fortress with walls. Inside, I started building many types of cannons.
While I designed the cannons and the ammunition to shoot at the horde, my Core watched the yellow team of monkeys playing pong on the computers. Yes, I have finally finished the z80 BIOS and a rudintary operational system. It ran assembly code, read and wrote data in the SSD disk, executed file directory operations, and displayed data on the LCD monitor.
>You completed a great achievent. You restored the ability to use computers on planet Earth. For this achievent, you gained a bonus Sub-Class slot.
What the hell? Damn, this was huge. I opened the list of available Classes. There was one in particular that I wanted. I begged the System for it, without any misheard words this ti.
> Your new sub-Class is cha Pilot (Epic).
> The dream of every young boy, in body or heart, everyone digs giant robots. They don't even need to be giants. Only to be made out of tal, wires, blinking lights, and imagination.
> You gain 1 Intelligence, 2 Wisdom, 1 Willpower, and 1 Hardness per level.
> You gained the Trait: One with the Machine. Enemies cannot perceive your magical aura from inside your machine. Instead, the machine projects the aura as if it was your body. Increase your cha's Dexterity and Agility Efficiency by 20%.
> You gained the Skill, cha Operations.
> Rank I: You can add 5% of your ntal Attributes per rank to the physical Attributes of a cha you pilot. Intelligence adds to Agility, Wisdom adds to Dexterity, Willpower adds to Strength, and Hardness to Hardness.
It seems I had my next project spelled out for . It was a good year we spent together, Bad Bet. But it is ti for your retirent.
*
*
> Your training and knowledge improved your Engineering Skill to rank VIII. Circuits you design are 5% more efficient per rank.
Another month passed. I managed to work out a triple-barrel cannon design that could fire at a target 15 miles away with a fire rate of one shell every thirty seconds, courtesy of a collaboration between Dungeon Automation and Replication. Jabberwock and his horde were now 120 miles away from the city, sixty-one miles away from maximum cannon range. The land behind the monsters was left completely barren and blackened. I started extending the forward fortress to the sides and laying out rows upon rows of cannons. Thirty rows of triple barrels, six hundred artillery pieces wide, all of them angled 45 degrees up. A barrage of 108,000 shells per minute upon the monsters.
In exactly two months, they would start raining death and fire upon the horde.
Inside my Dungeon, I was working on another two projects. A humanoid robot, based on a male this ti, six-five in height, two hundred and fifty pounds of armored steel, and an array of six Z80 computers controlling movent, balance, and positioning. That allowed to use fast servos and get a better response ti than the physical buttons and electrical contacts Kid Sick and Bad Beat used. I could also use a wider range of movents than the buttons would allow . This cha had sixty preprogramd hand movents.
Unfortunately, I couldn't add a transformation chanism. I wanted this cha to have a motorcycle mode to allow to drive really fast over the ground. It would be a project for a later date. But one addition I could manage to squeeze in were audio and video recorders. One of the Z80 computers was running a streaming software that dumped the input from the caras and microphones straight to an SSD drive.
I also convinced more than half of my dwellers to start a video log gig. They each got a device very similar to a tablet, but with a keyboard. Touchscreens were still beyond . They were tasked with recording videos of their daily lives in the Dungeon. Playing with the children, farming the fields, and tending to their livestock. They could take pictures, shoot videos, and watch them on the screens. I even gave them waterwheel chargers to replenish the batteries.
My idea was to get a large database of audio clips that I would later use to train a text-to-speech neural network. The Python books were all about that. I needed to write a Python interpreter, though.
I also installed hundreds of CCTV caras on the hunting grounds and in the city. Four in every waste disposal pit. I didn't put them inside people's houses because I decided to respect their privacy. I also had ten computers with caras attached to the telescopes (I made more telescopes) at the top of my three-mile tower, recording video footage of the horde. Dungeon automation made the telescopes turn slowly, getting panoramic shots of the throng of monsters poised to devour us all.
Feeling giddy, I floated my Core and entered the new cha's pelvis, which locked and sealed inside. I powered the computers and typed in the commands. The capacitors of the fast-movent circuits charged, giving it that powering-up buzz that every cha should have. The robot, now a real robot, stood from its tilted maintenance platform, which existed just to make the scene look cool. LED lights shone underneath its plexiglass faceplate. I went with a Japanese Tokusatsu aesthetic, from the bootleg series I watched in my childhood because they weren't licensed in the USA at that ti.
The movents weren't as smooth as I wanted and the robot felt a bit jittery. That would improve as my Skill gained ranks, as my pilot proficiency also improved, and as I calibrated the damn paraters in the control computers. It was digital, not analogical! And we were collecting teletry data! Live!
I needed to na my new creation. "Bad Bet Sick" I decided, based on the previous two models.
> For creating the level 60 Humanoid Cyborg cha "Blackjack Six" (Legendary), you gained 10991 Experience Points.
> You gained 10 levels in cha Pilot. You gained 10 Intelligence, 20 Wisdom, 10 Willpower, and 10 Hardness.
> You learned the "Believe in the who believes in you" Perk. After the tenth ti your cha takes damage after starting the fight with full health, 1 minute later, so damaged systems have a 50% chance to co online. If they do, it ans half of the damage taken so far is written off. It was not as serious as it seed.
> You learned the "Keep on Digging!" Perk: Repeated effort causes 50% less wear to your cha. Enemy weapon attacks suffer from a cumulative 1% damage reduction.
The System got the na wrong again but I don't care! Whoo hoo! Now, play the the song! By Akira Kushida!
Refer to /fiction/chapter/1084203/ for the full description of all Status items.
Na: Skip May Neming Species: Dungeon Core / Plant (Apple) Level: 61 Exp/ Level: 1,247 / 8,000 Main Class: Electronic Apple Orchard (L) Effective Level (temporary): 50 Sub-Classes: Architect of Destruction (V) Computer Engineer (E) Plains Master (V) cha Pilot (E) AttributesBase ScoreEfficiencyModified Score
Intelligence (In)
628 (200%) 1256
Wisdom (Ws)
678 (200%) 1356
Willpower (Wp)
742 (230%) 1706
Clarity (Cl)
522 (220%) 1148
Hardness (Hd)
634 (240%) 1521 ResourcesBaseCurrentMaximum MP (Cl) - regen (Wp) 235 2885 2885 (4201/day) DM (Cl) 720 280 12280 12280 SP (Wp) 720 12873 12873 StatsBaseModifiersCurrent Materialization (Ws) 320 ---- 4531 Armor sqrt(Hd): 39 ---- (24 / 75%) Control (Wp) 71 ---- 1269
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