Chương 13: Specialization

It was two weeks later. Matthew sat behind his desk with his feet kicked up and a rock held to his ear. The old ritual helped him think. He stared at a system window, floating there. SYSTEM NOTICE Core Secondary Specialization Now Available Select one path to define your dungeon's evolutionary trajectory. BROOD SOVEREIGN Focus: Maximum spawning efficiency and population density. Massively increased spawn rates and reduced birth costs. Overwhelming numbers of standard goblins.

Throw bodies at the problem until the problem stops moving. Unlocks: Mass Employment, Growth Projection, Razor Margins Trade-off: Individual quality drops. Specialized variants become rarer and more expensive. DREAD WARLORD Focus: Elite unit enhancement and territorial conquest. Your body upgrades into an elite combat specimen, making you capable of taking on even the greatest knights of the land. Chosen elites become ravagers capable of destroying fortified positions alone. The dungeon goes on the offensive.

Unlocks: Warlord Executive, Legal Team, Hostile Acquisition Trade-off: Population growth slows. Power concentrates in a few elites. Infrastructure deprioritized. CHIEFTAIN OVERSEER Focus: Operational efficiency and species-wide improvement. Every goblin gets improved baseline capability, and infrastructure runs at increased efficiency. The goal is a species where every individual is competent and every system compounds, not overwhelming numbers or a handful of devastating elites.

Unlocks: Performance Review, Accelerated Onboarding, Royalty Clause Trade-off: No single facet of your operation is exceptional, floating instead on a constant midline of being satisfactory. Matthew read all three, going through them for a while. The Brood Sovereign was the old way, how goblin tribes had always operated: spawn fast, die fast. Whatever didn't survive got replaced by something starting from zero all over again.

It was the strategy that had produced a species with no institutional knowledge, nothing transmitted from one generation to the next, and it had failed every time it had ever been tried. The Dread Warlord was his rival's way, the force that had come through the fissure with the demon commander and the fire. Concentrated power, conquest through violence. It was effective, like a hammer was effective: it broke things and did nothing else. If he wanted to break things, that would be the move.

But what he wanted was to build something. And if there was anything he'd learned over his years, it was that boring and unremarkable days were the way to run a productive operation. No drama in the team, no unexpected surprises from above made for a good workforce. The Chieftain Overseer was his way. He selected it.

SPECIALIZATION SELECTED: CHIEFTAIN OVERSEER {Active} PERFORMANCE REVIEW Examines a goblin's physical and cognitive traits and recommends role assignment that will help optimize your corporate structure. Cost: 0. 5 Mana per use. {Passive} ACCELERATED ONBOARDING 15% of new spawns are born with baseline specializations matching their genetic profile instead of arriving as standard goblins. Unlike manual promotion, this costs no additional mana.

{Passive} ROYALTY CLAUSE Shaman-class goblins generate passive mana instead of consuming resources. Note: Secondary Dungeon Specialization is permanent and cannot be reversed. Shaman Class? He didn't have any of those yet. But it looked like it was something the system assumed was within his reach. Interesting. That sounded like a magic-using goblin type. He'd have to look into that. He set down the rock phone. There was work to do.

The warren was busy, footsteps and tool-clatter filling the corridors with the productive noise of a factory floor mid-shift, the dungeon's energetic hum underneath all of it. Jerry was a standard goblin, unremarkable in every measurable way, currently trying to move a mush-mush from one side of the alcove to the other so that it would begin eating the refuse there. But all the while it vented spores at him in annoyance. Other goblins ran away, avoiding the purple cloud, sneezing.

It wasn't dangerous for them, but it was irritating enough to be a problem. But Jerry was fine. An unremarkable quirk, maybe. Matthew used his new ability. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. PERFORMANCE REVIEW: GOBLIN (JERRY) Jerry is a motivated, but insecure, goblin with a genetically exceptional resistance to toxins of any kind. He is terrified of deep water.

Recommended Assignment: Toxin and Hazard Production, including spore harvesting and alchemical prep. Unsuitable for duty near deep water.

"Jerry. You're off pushing duty," said Matthew. Jerry looked up at him. The mush-mush he had been pushing let out a defiant shrill chirp and hopped away.

"Jerry?" asked Jerry, pointing at himself. Matthew held out a hand, catching the spores. He showed his palm to Jerry.

"You're going to harvest the spores, concentrate them, and get them ready for arrowheads." Matthew pushed the spores together with a finger and then added a drop of cave water to the mixture, making a small, purple droplet.

"I want you to make poison."" Aaah!" said Jerry, understanding. He nodded and quickly ran after the mush-mush that had only just gotten away. It saw him coming and tried to hop away again. Matthew moved on. Bernice stood guard at the palisade entrance, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her big orange eyes scanning the treeline with restless, unfocused energy. She had ashen gray hair, short, that ended in several downward angled clumps.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: GOBLIN (BERNICE) Bernice is a sociable, extremely lively goblin who has difficulty focusing for long periods of time. She has trouble understanding personal boundaries and is clumsy. She has exceptional grip strength. Recommended Assignment: Forager/Scout. Ideal for surface exploration. Unsuitable for guard duty or any role requiring prolonged stillness. Her body simply wasn't built for standing still. That much was obvious for any onlooker, but the system made it very clear.

"Bernice, you're off of guard rotation," Matthew pointed.

"Get out there and join the foraging team." Her ears lifted, her face brightening. She jumped up and down on the spot, her guard partner looking at her, confused.

"Bernice likes!" she said eagerly. A second later she dropped her spear. It clattered against the ground and she ran off. Matthew watched her go, then stop midway, and then run straight back toward him. A second later she was latched around his leg, strong enough to cut off the flow of blood to his foot. She was a little python.

"Bernice likes Tandaradei!" beamed the goblin up at him before running off again to her new task. The reassignments kept going. Fritzgerald had an exceptional sense of smell and moved from construction to tracking. Barbara had unusual spatial memory and Matthew had her sole task become upgrading his crude 'map' of the region. Audrey had a tinge of psychopathy, a disdain for others, and steady hands. Nurse. — Or, well, 'Healer', as the goblins called it.

She used wraps and the new poultices Jerry was making to tend to the little, lingering wounds that didn't regenerate right. Better, she found joy in righting dislocated bones from accidents, of which the warren had many. One goblin at a time moved from a role that didn't fit to one that did, and the aggregate effect was a warren running with less friction and more output, because every worker's strengths were pointed. It was an optimization of his entire workforce.

He stopped at Nicole, in her usual spot outside the core chamber, knife in her belt, expression alert and faintly critical of whatever he was currently doing. Matthew used the ability and then stopped, surprised at what he saw. Nicole looked at it too, not capable of reading the whole thing, but capable enough of knowing what it was. Being one of the oldest and highest leveled, she was the smartest of his tribe and the assessment made no mistakes about it. But her weakness was not what he was expecting.

They exchanged a glance.

"Tandaradei." He closed the notification. She looked at him, unimpressed as ever. Matthew lifted his hands in surrender.

"I wasn't going to say anything. None of my business. You're a perfect fit right where you are, Nicole." She snarled at him, making it clear the matter stayed between them. The next menu was different.

'Organic Territorial Defenses,' unlocked by the specialization, allowed permanent enhancements to the territory's biology, paid for with one-time mana costs. He could either upgrade his existing monsters or have the dryad tree begin spawning new types of creatures. CATEGORY: MONSTERS UPGRADE EXISTING MONSTERS Mush-Mush {500} Burst: Release a concentrated cloud of poison spores on death or command. {700} Symbiosis: Mush-mushes can connect with the dungeon's inner fungal network, causing their poison to drain mana.

UNLOCK NEW MONSTERS {300} Giant Rat {750} Man-Eating Worm {1200} Mimic CATEGORY: ECOLOGY SHIMMER FUNGUS {500} Aggressive Growth: Mycelia will fuse into large-diameter tendrils, which will restrain intruders. {900} Fungal Crust: Mold will be able to cling to goblins temporarily, protecting them from magical energies. {1500} Mycelial Saturation: Causes a rapid growth of the Shimmer fungus, lowering its lethality in exchange for a massively increased surface growth area.

{2000} Euphoric Fruiting Liquid: Causes roots to secret a euphoria-inducing slime, causing trapped creatures to no longer resist consumption. DRYAD TREE {1750} Deeply Rooted: Instantly blocks any holes made in the dungeon's intended passageways with a thick barrier of thorned roots. {2000} Healing Sap: Constantly produces a thick sap that can be used as a primitive healing potion. {10000} Mother of Us All: Reawaken the Dryad. That last one was interesting, but he had no idea what it meant.

Not that he could afford it. Matthew scrolled through it. The Monsters category was interesting, but with their mysterious enemy repelled, he felt like he needed to take the opportunity to refortify. What the dungeon needed was infrastructure that made it more efficient, more aware, and more connected. Just like his goblin reassignment, he needed to work on making everything in his operation more cohesive. He decided to upgrade the fungus first.

It was his most vital asset, not only as his engine of production but also as a defensive tool. UPGRADE SELECTED: MYCELIAL SATURATION Cost: 1, 500 Mana Mana: 2, 000 → 500 The mana drained out in one clean pull, and the warren changed. The pale roots behind the cocooned hosts started moving, not the slow crawl of a plant expanding at its own pace, but fast, more like a liquid finding every low point than a plant reaching for light. They thickened and split and moved outward from the patch in every direction.

The goblins in the main corridor reacted first, yelping and backing away. The roots didn't care. They moved around them, under them, a white tide that covered whatever it touched and kept going. The core chamber went first, bare gray stone vanishing under a layer of white, fuzzy growth. Then the corridors, then every chamber the warren had, from barracks to nursery to school.

The phosphorescent glow that had once lived only in the original patch was suddenly everywhere, soft and even, brighter than torchlight and gentler than fire. The cave was alight, alive. The goblins stood and stared, some pressing their fingers into the fuzzy surface with a mix of wonder and alarm. The mycelium didn't react to the touch. It simply was a new layer laid over the old one, and the stone was still there underneath, only softer now and warmer.

Matthew walked through it, like moving across a field of long grass. The mycelium followed every contour of the cave tunnels, filling gaps and smoothing edges into one continuous surface that connected every room in a single network. Goblins stood, watching in awe. It was beautiful in a way. It was as if the tunnel was impossibly lit with moonlight, catching in rays of white grass that swayed in a wind nobody could feel. A snarl. A yelp.

Jackson was hanging by his ankle from the corridor ceiling, caught in a cluster of roots that had simply grown through the space where his leg happened to be during the expansion.

"It'll take some getting used to," Matthew said, grabbing his arm and pulling him free. The roots let go with a faint wet sound, and Jackson landed on his feet, rubbing his ankle and staring at the ceiling. He looked down.

"Gonna have to hire a janitor if we've got carpeting now." Jackson didn't get the joke. Matthew didn't expect him to.