You wake up not in, but AS the dungeon

I woke up slowly, the memories of my conversation with those two goddesses already fading into the back of my memory banks.

Wait, memory banks?

My eyes snap open, except they don’t. Instead, I see through what feels like a hundred cameras, filling dozens of old and abandoned rooms. This must be the dungeon I was spawned with. But, there was a slight issue. I had no idea where I was in the dungeon.

What’s going on? I asked myself. I tried to move the golem body I was supposed to spawn in, and saw a handful machine arms move sluggishly above some kind of conveyor belt in one of the rooms I was apparently watching. I stopped, and the arms stopped. I moved a different way, and a series of belts in a different room activated.

As I considered what was happening, I felt what I can only describe as an itch in the back of my head, like I needed to do something. Pushing on that feeling, I saw one of the rooms spring to life. Dozens of various tentacles appeared from hidden panels in across the walls, along with an equal number of manipulator arms, and began to grab at various pieces of what looked like scrap metal and began to build… something. I watched in fascination for a few minutes, but after only a small portion of whatever was being built got completed in that time I turned my attention elsewhere.

While, whatever it was was, being built I decided to explore the other rooms a bit more closely. Most of them were filled with indistinct broken down machinery, but a few held something interesting.

One held the remains of what looked like a battle, with dozens of skeletons and the wreck of a massive robot. It must have been an intense fight, given the damage the room itself sustained.

Another room held the skeleton of some massive machine, easily ten feet tall and at least twice as wide from the view I had of it. I had no idea what it might be for, except that it wasn’t a server farm or anything of the sort.

The last room that held anything more than ruin was some kind of storage room. It was also the largest room by a wide margin. The room itself was filled with what must have been a hundred or more clear tubes, each containing a locking sybian. It was obvious what this room was supposed to “store”, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

As I considered this question, I felt myself expand, and suddenly I was seeing through a new viewpoint. I quickly turned my attention towards the room that was building something. What I found was a little robot. As I focused on the robot/focused on myself, I was flooded with information.

Race: Simple Construction Drone

Class: Builder

Health: Fragile

MP: N/A

Physical Attack: Very Weak

Physical Defense: Very Weak

Spell Power: N/A

Spell Defense: N/A

The “Simple Construction Drone”, as it was apparently called, was a small floating orb with a small pair of arms on the underside of its body. What I could tell about it’s stats told me it would never work well as a front line fighter, and it’s name implied that it would build things.

With the drone’s inclusion in my awareness, I also became aware of a handful of basic construction blueprints I could build with it. It was then, now, as I saw what had to be a tech tree, that I realized what was happening.

I was an RTS base.

Three hours an a half-dozen construction drones later, I had learned several things.

First, I was able to focus on each individual construction drone and control it’s movements at the same time, even as I cast my attention across the whole of the facility I was in. I figured this was a benefit of both my Dungeon Master core, and the second monster core I got for being massive. I had a feeling that anything more complex than these construction drones would not be controlled in the same way.

Second, I found the “heart” of the factory dungeon I was in. In the center of the facility, guarded by the remains of several turrets and large machine wrecks, was a door that had been blasted open by some incredible power. Behind the door, in a room that the drone sensors declared was almost -20 C, was a massive server farm. Me. Seeing myself like this… it was… humbling.

Third, I needed to be way better defended than I was right now. If my predecessor was overrun, than I could be too. I needed to change that. Fast.

I directed most of the construction drones to clean up the wrecks scattered around the facility, dragging the parts into one of the empty side rooms. The room next door, the one that used to be a battleground, I decided to turn into what the constructor’s database called a “Basic Recycle Station”. From what I could gather from the basic description, it turned excess materials into usable steel, wire, and whatever else was needed. Thankfully, the Recycle Station itself needed almost no special materials itself, and was able to create all the materials I’d need for the other “starter” buildings. Once it was done, all the collected scrap would be thrown into the recycler to be used for other projects.

I also set another constructor to build a basic drone factory, this one in a room much closer to my “heart” than the recycler, once the materials became available.

In the meantime, I tried to think of a plan of action. My best-case scenario plan was to just turtle and defend, until I had enough forces to sweep out into the world and defeat the heroines, but I didn’t really think it was feasible. A more realistic goal was to get some basic combat units up and running and quickly gain territory and expand the dungeon.

As I decided to do that, I felt the recycler come online, and my construction drones started feeding the piles of scrap into it.

Another hour later and the drone factory was complete, allowing me to begin constructing new drones. I started slow, building one of each new drone to get a feel for them.

The first I built, the “Small Construction Drone”, seemed like a minimal upgrade to its simple predecessor, but I didn’t want to miss out on something important just because an upgrade seemed negligible. When it finally came out, I learned that it _was _just a minimal upgrade to the original construction drone. The biggest plus to making it at all is that it takes only a few minutes to build, as opposed to the several hours making the simple drones took.

The second, and far more interesting drone was called the “Small Combat Drone”. Taking only a few seconds to build, it was obviously supposed to be a swarming attacker. It was fast, fragile, and had a decent attack stat, being “average” in physical attack. I also confirmed that I wasn’t able to directly control these attacking drones the way I was able to control the construction drones, so that was nice to know. The drone’s form was very insectoid, with six legs, a pair of bladed arms, and some kind of dart gun or something on it’s back, though I didn’t have anything to load it with yet. In the future, I imagined I’d have a limitless tide of metal and blades, but for now I had only the one set off to the side.

The third drone I built, mostly because it seemed to pair with the combat drone, was the “Small Capture Drone”. This one built slower. Faster to build than the construction drone, slower to build than the combat drone, I’d say it took about 40 seconds to complete. The drone was very alien, a mass of tentacles and grapples and netting. Physically, it was stronger than the combat drone, but I also knew that unless I was willing to go far outside of it’s specifications it wouldn’t be able to kill anyone.

The fourth drone I built was the “Scout Drone”, and it came out in less than ten seconds. It was fairly uninteresting, just a camera on a small body. But, I could see through its “eye” like I could with the construction drones, so it could be useful in seeing the outside world.

The last drone, and one that I was very interested in, was the “Small Mining Drone”. It took the longest time to build out of all of these early drones, at almost 5 minutes total. The mining drone was just a box on a pair of treads, with a drill on the front. When it came out of the factory, I was suddenly struck by how random these different drones looked. There was no uniform aesthetic to my drones, each one seemingly taken from a different RTS faction. Maybe it was because those two goddesses didn’t really care about theme like that, maybe it was the original builders just wanted function over form, maybe it was something else. Something to ponder.

I immediately set the mining drone to build a new room or two, while another pair were being built by the factory.

Then I felt a stabbing pain in my head, a silent alarm screaming at me that someone or something had invaded my territory, and I needed to destroy them.

My cameras found the intruders quickly, a pair of female warriors that thankfully didn’t seem horribly overpowered compared to my current abilities. Neither looked like they were tanky fighters; one was dressed in a classic mages robe and was obviously some kind of caster class, while the other wore some kind of leather armor and had a cloak and was some kind of stealth class.

As they got closer to the camera I was using to watch their progress, I was able to hear their conversation.

“I’m telling you, Sam, there’s something strange going on down here. The local animals are saying that some kind of ‘ancient danger has awoken’ or something and it’s focused here. We should at least see what’s happening. If it’s above our pay-grade we can get the guild involved.” That was the leather-wearing figure. I guess she was a ranger.

“I don’t know, there was no hint that there was anything here. I have a bad feeling about this.” The caster-type, Sam, said in return, her eyes jumping from point to point.

While they were walking, I built several combat drones, followed by a second capture drone. Would it be enough? I had no idea, but I had **** but to do my best.

I chose my battleground, one of the larger connecting rooms where my numbers would hopefully be able to overwhelm them without them being able to retaliate.

Now all that’s left is to meet them in battle, and hope for the best.

Stats (free for use, feel free to keep or change any of these, I just tried to make a baseline):

Race: Machine (Factory AI) (LV 1)

Class: Knight (Tier II, LV 1)

Health: 400 (1,600 while in dungeon)

MP: 30 (120 while in dungeon)

Physical Attack: 20 (60 because of machine type, 240 while in dungeon) (please note that, as a dungeon that cannot move, our protagonist can only actually attack people in rooms with preexisting mechanical arms or rooms designed to house tentacles)

Physical Defense: 40 (120 because of machine type, 480 while in dungeon)

Spell Power: 20 (80 while in dungeon, 10 and 40 for all types of spells except Light based spells)

Spell Defense: 30 (120 while in dungeon)

Please note that, for the most part, I will NOT be keeping strict track of our protagonists’ stats and will instead be eyeballing their growth. This is both because our sexual factory didn’t get the HUD cheat, and also because I don’t want to have to keep track of EXP gains with no framework. For the same reasons, I will not be showing how our protagonists’ skill points get allocated. I will, however, keep track of skills that I think they should get and have.

Also, I’m giving my official blessing to anyone who wants to spring off of my factory character. My own chapters will follow my own plot, but if you want to branch the thread from any particular chapter please feel free.