Colosseum Core : [The Arena Dungeon-Core LitRPG]

What is life really all about?

It stares, watching with wide, transfixed vision that darts back and forth over the swaying grasslands, blades of grass flowing in the breeze, together within the wind’s grace in which the men are bound — trapped.

There’s a strike of a bell, as metal meets metal, and the two of them come together as a whole in the center present between them, both of them leaning their bodies against their weapons, trying to make the other lose his footing. A shockwave emanating outward, pressing back the gale and removing its unwanted presence from the arena, the blades of grass and bloody wild-flowers all around them for as far as it can see bowing back from the force of their impact against one another, revealing the field littered with corpses — human, elf and all the like. There are hundreds of them.

They were all weak though — uninteresting.

Now that the skirmish is all but over, the battle of the war the humans were fighting here on its meadow, just outside of its dungeon-gate, has all but come to an end, except for the final two combatants — titans in their own right. They’re interesting.

Hundreds of people fought here, died here, but they were all standard, common. There wasn’t anything worth seeing in them, barring the final flash of light in their eyes before the end and the few keen sparks of metal cast ember-glow.

…But these two…

Munera can’t look any closer than it is doing now, limited by its nature as a dungeon-core. Dungeons are large structures in the natural, or magical, world. In a way of thinking, they’re like caves, or like the tunnels dug out by moles and worms, only that they are far more intricate in their design, fielding doorways and rooms, traps and monsters, and all sorts of puzzles and things of such nature. Dungeon-cores are the creatures that create and manage these places; they are, in this metaphor, the mole.

— The two fighters separate from one another, as that single second of that prior impact now comes to an end, the sliding of their metal releasing from the other’s stealing the dungeon-core’s breath as it observes them.

It hasn’t been that long since it became a dungeon-core. It wasn’t born as one, like some animal growing up into its domain. No, actually it, once a he, was reborn as one, and not that long ago either. It’s only been around a week since it has returned to life in this new world, in this new body and new role.

How did it come to this?

The spirit, the dungeon core, returns to its focus back into its interior, looking through its many chambers and rooms that serve a very specific purpose, that being to keep intruders away from its true heart — the core itself. In a way, this is a game of sorts, played between those who break into its domain and it. They try to push through as deeply as they can, but it repels them, both using any means necessary. It is often a contest of muscle, just as much as it is one of wit. Strong monsters might work against strong adventurers, but clever intruders have ways of bypassing raw strength through magic or tricks of many kinds. Adventurers are crafty beings.

— And so, for these particular intruders, it must also beat them in a contest of wits using well timed traps and mechanisms.

It’s a sport.

That thought rings through its head for a while, the final world reverberating around in its deep consciousness for many moments.

‘It’s a sport’…

The entity ponders for a time, that phrase ringing in its ears in a way that is hard to explain. It’s like having a thought on the tip of your tongue but not quite being able to reach it. There’s something right there, on the edge of its memory, but it just can’t…

— Sports.

In Munera’s old life, back in the old world before all of this happened to it, it knew ‘sports’. Contests. Challenges of strength and will between opponents, between teams and individuals.

If it had eyes, whether one or ten-thousand, it would narrow them now as ideas run through its mind. Games of skill and merit, proving the worthiness of one party over the other. But it isn’t so much just that. Is it?

…No…

The dungeon-core returns its vision to the skirmish outside, watching the two embodiments of fire eat away at one another. There’s something different about them, than there is about all of the dead all around. There’s something different in their looks, in their expressions, in their eyes. The contorted dead carry expressions of rage and anguish, suffering, and harrowing indignity. But these two remaining, the final champions… Their faces are blank. They’re focused, intense, and lost in the dance. They aren’t just fighting for the sake of victory, they’re fighting for the sake of the competition itself.

It’s not even sure if either of them cares about winning, as much as they care about simply not losing. The burning in their eyes adorned on stone cold, focused faces reveals as much. The cause that they champion is…

The two of them charge back towards one another, resolved to bring this to an end.

However, one of them misjudges, his foot snags on a loose strap that belongs to a body, causing him to stray from his path, his movements wasted on the act of balancing himself and exposing himself to the enemy who now has the opportunity for a perfect, clean finish, made available by his opponents misfortune.

And then, the blade in the air holds its position, if only for a moment too long. The dungeon-core watches as the advantaged fighter, seeing his opponent’s opening, doesn’t take it.

His sword hangs there for a second, for no other reason than that he holds it there, as the enemy catches himself and returns to strike upward. Only then, after the imbalance of their skirmish is corrected, does the sword crash down onto the other, the metal chipping away together.

He could have killed him then, but he didn’t.

It’s a battle of life or death. One of them must die for the game to end, and there was a clear promise of victory here for one of them, and he simply… didn’t take it. Because it would have been poor sportsmanship. Dishonorable. Some may call it naive, but the pursuit of this greater conquest — a true, earned victory — is more important than life or death.

Amazing.

It recalls now, in its old life, these sorts of games. There were often arenas and stadiums full to the brim with thousands and thousands of people who came to watch only a handful of the selected elite compete against one another in exhilarating competition. But in those games, in that old world, people didn’t die — win or lose. The spectacle, the competitions, could go on forever.

The dungeon-core doesn’t really know what life is all about, not in the last life it had as a human or in this new life it has as this thing that it is now.

— But it does get an idea.

Stones rumble, the ground shaking in a tremor as the world below the surface begins to move, as if by themselves. Dirt and rocks move, an unseen force applying incredible amounts of pressure to them, carving out hollow passages and chambers in the depths. The dungeon-core works, expanding its dungeon.

It is still a young entity, being only a week old, not counting its last life as a human in the other world, so its dungeon is still comparatively small. The threats it encounters naturally are, thankfully, also comparatively small because of this.

Great barriers of rock walls are crushed, powdered, and reformed into tight brickwork that flies up against the dirt, holding it back. Water, naturally present in the underground, trickles through the gaps in the brickwork as the dirt behind it is compressed, leaking downward along its surface into a small channel that it carves out, funneling it along in one direction.

The dungeon-core works on all sides. It doesn’t have a body anymore, not like a person would. Instead, the entire dungeon is its body. It’s a rather abstract concept, in all honesty. But everything inside of ‘itself’ — it’s domain — it is able to control and influence to some extent. It’s able to move things around, burrow, and build, all in order to create this living hive of sorts that it, as a whole, is. Being a dungeon-core is a bit like being the entire ant-hill in and of itself, instead of being an ant.

And so the being, with its newfound industriousness, toils.

Water flows, rocks crumble into dust, and the world quakes as it carves out and constructs segment after segment, following the vision in its head of this new idea it has gotten.

What is life really all about?

Well, it’s not really for any one individual being to give an answer that would apply to all living things across the world, given the unique situations every such being finds itself in. A goblin does not share a blackbird’s problems, in general.

— Great spires of ornately carved stone rise out of the ground. Massive pillars ring, dust crumbling and falling off of them as they rise towards the high ceiling, loud crashing echoing through the underground, as if a titan were running rampage as the construction comes together.

But what all living beings have in common is one simple thing.

Competition.

There is no species that does not live without competition. All living things compete within their own species, be it for food, for mates, for territory, for power, for wealth, and whatever else they might happen to desire, depending on their biological wiring. Just the same, all living things compete outside of their species too, for resources and other such things.

Competition is the single, unifying factor present in all life, no matter how distant it is from any other variants of itself. Worms compete. Goblins complete. Humans compete.

All life competes — it must do so, or it will cease, and life itself, competing with death, will lose.

— The world shakes as the ring comes into formation, an arena rising up, taking the rough shape of what it recalls such a thing to have looked like in its prior human life, and all around it are ornate decorations of combatants and players of many games, hewn into the stone walls of the structure, adorning its pillars and archways, together with the faces and maws of great beasts of old.

There! That’s a good start. Now it just needs to make a few tweaks. The problem with such games of competition is that they tend to be one-time events in this world. But what happens if it finds someone it likes and they have a bad day? What happens if an unfair move is made by another party?

It’s inefficient.

The best thing to do is to simply not let anyone die in the arena. The rest of the dungeon… well, that’s fair game. But the arena…

— It’s like it saw the swordsman do outside, as he spared the other man for the sake of fairness.

The arena should be the same. It should be about sportsmanship, not about its victory over humans or their victory over one another.

Perfect!

Munera’s ‘head’ buzzes with electricity as so many ideas come to it as it looks down into itself at its creation. It can imagine the seats, full of humans, elves, and the like, from the outside — maybe even monsters of its own — all of them watching the melee unfolding in the pit and all of them engaging in the spectacle of life. It’s a reason to push forward, a reason to build and expand.

It has an idea, it has a structure — minus some other facilities of comfort that are still missing — Now all that it needs are competitors. It just so happens to know where it might find some interested people to test out the idea with.

The dungeon-core shifts its vision, looking back outside at the field just outside of its gate, which is littered with corpses.