There is no Epic Loot here, Only Puns.

Chapter 174: Gone Home

Lim felt like the scary tree lady was going to tear him apart if he wasn't amusing enough.

She was worse than the pig knight who told him to eat more protein or the goblin bar owner who gave him a juice box and told him to 'git' out.

"I don't have time to play with you little pumpkins today," the tree woman called Wyin said with a sigh.

"Why not?" Deo asked curiously, and Lim wanted to shake him a little.

She was going to let them pass without issue! Why was he questioning it?!

"Your faces bother me," Wyin said breezily as she swept a branch across her face with a motion like she was pinching her nose. Deo nodded seriously as if this was a grave problem before he yanked his shirt over his head, obscuring his face, and gave a thumbs up.

"Sorted! We'll get moving!" he said and walked off-course and headed towards a wall. Poppy caught up and guided Deo away towards the exit but not before shooting Wyin a narrowed look that said she didn't believe Wyin's reason at all.

Lim crept along the wall, trying to be smaller than a bug, but Wyin turned to him regardless, stopping him from leaving the room after Deo and Poppy with her branches.

"Advice for you… find new employment before the year is up. I suspect stocks in your company will be sharply 'declining,'" she said with a tone colder than any winter. It was like some divine verdict, but she was just a tree, right?

He gathered what courage he had. Something like his brother might have had if he was here today.

"My loyalty is with Captain Yattina. Where she ends up is where I'll go," he said firmly.

"'Broken Scientist' now comes with a squishy little sidekick?" Wyin mused and then smirked.

"The toy stores will be sold out before the day is up," she said, and Lim grabbed his bow despite being pinned.

"Don't call her that! She's smart and knows a lot of things," he protested. Wyin pulled him close, her giant face making him feel so very small.

"Cling to that fire, because she won't defend herself. Every sun needs a moon," she said, then dropped him as if bored.

"Who's your sun?" Lim retorted, and he was surprised when Wyin went quiet.

"Sad little boy… I was someone's sun once upon a time," she said slowly, then closed her amber-filled eyes.

"Now, where there was a flickering innocence, lies the cold bitter ashes of experience," she said, then nearly threw him out of her room.

Her words haunted him as he quickly chased after Deo and Poppy down to the third floor, feeling the Mana almost becoming far too thick for him.

---

Yggdrasil opened its fleshy bulbous eye as his connection to Beta seemed to stutter and then vanish.

Deep within the trunk of the massive tree, his 'core' engorged itself on the hollow shell of a divine woman. The goddess that once resided here was now worm food for his growing ambitions.

The loss of Beta was not as dire as it seemed. He had seen the girl regenerate from some truly terrible wounds. She would come crawling back soon enough. His flesh inside her form would ensure it.

He shuffled some flesh about, frowning at the tender wound that pathetic little godling had done to him. The Brother was strong, but it was clear, more than ever, that he was waning. How sad it was to see someone with such colossal power be reduced to a cripple. The more he gave, the more he was reduced.

He and his sister would soon be stories he would tell to mock them.

He focused as his 'flock' gathered at the base of the tree, the more ripe of them ready to offer their flesh in the efforts to heal him. Yggdrasil looked down at the dwindling population of the town once called 'Small Joy' that he had renamed to something he found in their collective seeds.

A paradise ruled by a singular god. A strong god.

His garden would be called Eden.

Two men and one woman shuffled forward, their tattered clothes and dirty skin unnoticed by anyone as their flesh shifted and their veins bulged painfully. It was amusing to see them rupture like little fleshy balloons, his flesh returning to him with their power. He gorged on them and allowed his own flesh to be healed by the effort.

He would need to have another 'rare' event where Eden opened its gate for scholars and druids alike to flock to the town to marvel at the World Tree. Such people would find their food laced with Yggdrasil, their water tainted with him, the air they breathed infused with him, and they would become him.

Still, if Beta did not return, the years of effort he put into making his next vessel optimal would have been wasted. Which would be a shame, but Yggdrasil was not one to simply rely on one sad little girl.

He always had a backup.

He made his large central eye bulge and pop loose from his main body, which looked like a giant cocoon covered in eyes. The main eye slithered down the inside of the tree, coming to stop at the base, where a shadowy form inside a pulsing crystal prison could be seen.

"Progress is coming smoothly," Yggdrasil admitted as the form within was about an average human sized adult, but their proportions looked slightly off.

"To think this is what would happen when so many of those seeds were put in one place," he sighed with a contented noise. To think… he had almost killed the Head Priestess of the World Tree when she resisted his influences.

How he almost wasted such a strong seed!

This new vessel would need a new name. Yggdrasil was this form, but he was always evolving…

"Thy name shall be…" he trailed off as the crystal glowed for a moment, revealing a woman with a black tree branded on her chest and long pointed ears, but now she was growing a second set of arms and looked to be opening a third eye on her forehead.

"Zohar."

---

The He-Ro units had split up. Three, including the Strength Model, had gone the way of the Mud Room. Two, one of which was the Agility Model, went through the Store room, hacking down the door with ease.

Delta struggled to both track them and continue her fight in the Symbolic Space. The Gamma cast-offs nailed to Dungeon Cores were adapting to her power, able to weather both her solar system storms of aggressive energy and moving closer.

This wasn't like Mharia or even the Spider-Queen.

This was fighting against corpses who 'remembered' how to fight like her. Pulling back her energy, she narrowed her Mana in the Symbolic space into thin needles, sending them flying forward, piercing two of them, which caused one in Real Space to stumble and fall into the mud as its leg locked up.

She was distracted for a moment as two of the units broke through the secret passage to Maestro's room.

"Cois, get Numb and Billy out of there! They're coming!" she yelled as one of the units launched a disk of cutting energy at her, but Foodie intercepted it with a wash of salt and a battle cry that was more noise than sense.

An arrow sliced across her arm, missing her by inches but leaving her with a cut on her skin. The arrow made of opposing mana burned, making her gasp as pain flared up her arm.

"Biscuits!" she cursed at the attacking unit. She threw a mana wave forward, and it washed through Fran's 'planet,' causing a golden echo of her boss to appear, charge one of the blackholes, and run it down with his lance.

The damage didn't do much, but they didn't adapt to it on this side. That was weird…

"This isn't working. Throwing force at them isn't working," Delta said with a frown.

"Salt them! Salt their crops! Salt their loved ones!" Foodie cried, throwing more mana at them, which didn't amount to much.

"Foodie, I would love to, but I don't think salting them is going to…" she trailed off as an idea hit her.

"This is going to suck," she announced and began to focus on the robots, creating voids of mana which was a lot like sucking on a tooth with a wide cavity, then eating ice-cream. It hurt so much to have these bubbles forming, like taking a spoon to her own flesh, but the robots stuttered for a moment as their performance was halted, forcing them to move much slower.

"Call me bubbles… because you can blow me," she gasped as the He-Ro units had to begin to stockpile what energy they had left for moving and attacking.

The evolved versions had it worse, with the Strength Model barely moving at all.

Delta fell to her knees, and something began popping in her head, like tiny little headaches erupting like zits.

She focused on starving the invaders; if she could just stall them long enough that Maestro and Boary could do some damage they couldn't evolve from… then it would be a win.

She just had to-

Suddenly, the pain flared like a solar burst.

She just had to hold on.

She just had to-

-A little longer! She pushed against the gates as the dark forces on the other side threatened to break out. Where was she? Where was Delta? It didn't matter.

She pushed against the gate with everything she had. She could just sense how strong the echo was on the other side, the thing being empowered by a second echo and that damn lich girl.

"I will not yield! My world is not yours for the taking! My friends are not your toys to be used! Our memories are not yours to abuse!" she screamed and pushed with her rather massive hands on the door, holding it closed.

"Stay away from my-"

"-Family!" Delta screamed, standing up, her aura blazing orange in the symbolic space. The black holes representing the He-Ro units shuddered before Delta rushed forward, sucking all the mana away until it was her pure essence against them.

Her skin felt like peeling, her eyes burned like liquid, her voice felt like glass, but she pushed on.

Five highly developed cores strapped with Gamma parts, programmed by a douchy organization?

Against one school teacher out of her depth?

They should have sent more robots.

---

One of the He-Ro units stared down as its hand melted, because the mushroom grove seemingly caught fire of its own accord and the large beast in the middle was absorbing the flames to grow stronger.

It tried to stand up, but all around it, fuzzy blue creatures rained rocks and spears down on them.

Across the floor, two of the units struggled and jerked as all around them, runes glowed with a fiendish order.

"Reverse Delta, enhanced Wyin, conjoined Cois," a voice rumbled as he planted his staff in the hallway, preventing them from accessing the room beyond. As each rune was named, they flashed white.

"Not here. Not in my house," Cois snarled at the robots as he began to grow haggard-looking from the cost of the runes.

There was a sound like a beeping, and the hallway exploded. Heat and smoke rolled over Cois as he covered his eyes.

---

Delta's aura flickered, and she stumbled as she pushed two of the robots back, forcing them to become void of mana.

---

Boary gored one of the units, causing parts to fly everywhere and the glowing core bound in bent metal to roll across the ground. It landed near the Strength Model unit, who picked the core up as if unable to ignore it.

---

Cois watched as the Agility Model walked out of the smoke holding the core of the destroyed unit at its side.

"Oh, you little rust buckets," he said as it pressed the core to its chest and it sunk into its metal torso. There was a flash, and Cois closed his eyes.

Cois will respawn in two hours.

Boary will respawn in five hours.

---

Delta rolled back, landing in a heap as the surface of her hands burned with a sickly green mana.

"Delta!" Foodie said, and she struggled to sit up for a moment, every inch of her in painShe had to release the void bubbles for a moment as it felt like it was going to kill her.

"Foodie, run. Go back to your Dungeon," she told the younger core without hesitation.

"No! United! Network! Food Network!" he protested. Something shot towards Foodie's distracted back, and Delta thrust her hand forward, a dome of orange flickering into existence before it was smashed with more dark green mana.

She clutched Foodie close to her, his tiny little white self like a puff of smoke. They rolled hard and Delta nearly blacked out, but forced herself to get up on one knee.

"Their mana burns. It hurts us so badly," she whispered and stood up.

"But I won't let them hurt you!" she said, eyes narrowed as her arms ignited in burning orange mana. The two new forms were no longer blackholes, but something closer to if a skeleton and a spaceship had been fused together. It moved, but it was unnatural.

All around them was a thick green aura that burned all it touched. Their fields didn't overlap because the Agility and Strength Model weren't together in the actual Dungeon, but if they met up…

But that was when she noticed something.

The Gamma fragments looked a little malformed now, as if the green mana was warping them as well. They were going to melt their own command system if they kept fusing.

They'd be an inert tool of destruction without a driver if all five were one, Delta was absolutely sure of it. If there was no 'consciousness'? No Gamma fragments left.

It was just an object.

Just a thing.

And things were just snacks to Delta.

The issue was she could either focus on nullifying their Mana absorption or being a fighter that drove them to fuse.

She couldn't do both.

One of the fused cores began to fire again, but as Delta stood up, she buckled and fell back to her knees in exhaustion.

That was when a giant blue hand smashed into it, sending it stumbling away.

"Do not touch my Dungeon Core," Nu said in such a low tone that the dark matter of the Symbolic Space vibrated.

The things began to power their mana in the form of a threat, and Nu scoffed.

"I will not yield. Our home is not yours for the taking! Our people are not toys for you to play with! Our peace is not something for you to abuse!" he snarled and raised his hands, causing extremely detailed mana swords made of blue energy streaked with orange to appear.

"I am the Mana Enchanted Notification Utility, and I'm here to notify you that you are already dead," he said and vanished, taking the fight to the two fused cores and single unfused one.

"Foodie! Back him up!" Delta ordered and focused on slowly cutting off their mana intake with much more gentle void bubbles.

---

"Usually, it's 'divide and conquer,' but we hear you, mother… we shall force these miserable piles of secrets to become one," Maestro warned as the Agility Unit entered his room, looking like a spider now with tentacles for legs and heat-proof armor.

"Target. Acquired." it intoned, and Maestro rose into the air, the vines connecting to the Dungeon pulling him close to the ceiling.

"The song for this battle?" Maestro inquired, then his singular eye blazed red as he faded into the shadows, becoming an undefined mass of vines and noise.

"A funeral dirge."

---

Fera put down the rag she was using to clean an already impeccably clean mug. Her pub door was beginning to splinter as something rushed at it. She picked up a bottle off a shelf and poured it into two shot glasses.

"For you, Cois. No one messes with my boys," she said and downed both of them in rapid succession, her nostrils blowing out steam. Her door shattered, and she reached under the counter, grabbing the boomstick from its hiding space as she cocked it.

"I wonder if I can make a new spirit out of a machine?" she asked, voice feral.

A large metal hand punched its way through the door's remains, and she fired, sending sparks of flame roaring into existence.

The monstrous figure beyond was bulky and tough looking, but it had oddly placed sections of heat-proof armor that overlapped badly with the protective weave.

Fera leapt over the counter, kicking up a table which flew at the creature hard. She didn't wait for it to hit as she slammed a bottle of booze into the oddly shaped hole on her weapon, causing the crystal-ladened handle to shift from red to green.

When she next fired, it was with a hurricane of wind that howled and expanded the lingering flames on the machine's body. The He-Ro unit stumbled back two steps, and Fera began to scream as she fired again and again.

"Get out of my pub!" she roared.

She would either blow this thing to pieces or make sure it learned to fear goblins.

---

The Agility He-Ro dodged along the stone Pyramid as vines erupted out the ground, breaking stone as all around it, mushrooms grew with open maws, blasting sonic screams at it.

"Dance! Dance! Die!" Maestro commanded from above in the air.

"With music, I have wings and the power to fly!" he intoned as the harsh drawn out trumpet slammed into the robot over and over, not having too much effect, it seemed. Maestro soared around the room, pointing his cane at the intruder and causing vines to rush it with crushing intent.

"How do you think this will end?" he called to the soulless thing. He knew there was no point, but the fact it had no soul didn't negate the fact that Maestro was overflowing with it! He twirled his cane, and the mushroom choir appeared across the wall, shooting balls of mana which crossed the arena, causing only one side of the pyramid to be safe, which the mech barely made it to.

It was getting faster…

"You sprung my trap card!" he cried, and the 'safe' side of the pyramid suddenly exploded with dozens of vines. From its back, two sharp blades formed, taking up some of its precious armored sections, and it began to cut the vines before they got close.

"Grow! Evolve! Become a god if you desire! I will feast on your corpse with song and dance all the same!" Maestro roared, his eye blazing.

"You can be a shining star, but I am the abyss that sings. You see me… and the abyss sees you," Maestro warned as he slammed his cane into the wall, causing the entire room to expand, letting the 'between floor' space become visible.

The thrumming orange sea would drive weaker men mad.

The mech stared down at the very 'bottom' of the void; a massive dragon on a throne wearing a skull looked up with a dark promise.

"Dance well, royalty is watching!" Maestro

announced grandly.

He raised his cane, and from his back, vines began to disconnect.

"These were support vines," Maestro said calmly, then snapped his glare to the mech as it rushed at him.

"But not for me!"

He blurred and slammed his cane into the mech, bashing it hard before kicking it across the space.

"The floors will have to endure without their star for a time. For the first time since I came on air, Maestro's Magnificent Show will be taking a short break to deal with some bugs," Maestro said darkly.

All around them, the room rotated and spun, pieces of the wall moving in and out of the between with jarring distortions.

The music was now echoing and seemingly coming from every inch of the space.

"Let's go… dirty brother killer," Maestro intoned, and the two charged at each other.

---

Yattina looked at the orange water with a sigh.

She wasn't sure if she could drink it. Something inside her knew it would be a point of no return if she did.

She hesitantly scooped some out with a borrowed goblet and let her fingers dip into the stuff. It made her skin tingle, like a kiss of sunlight.

She slowly put the goblet in the well and brought it out near full. Shaking a little, she brought it near her lips, and the smell was like fresh apple pie.

The garden felt quiet without the music as Yattina held the goblet a little longer.

---

Lim pushed through the massive feast hall, losing Poppy as she diverted to some library, and Deo easily kept pace with him.

Just as he went to open the massive double doors, a brilliant orange light seeped and bled through the gaps in the door, blinding Lim as the floor shook, making him stumble back.

–

Yattina remembered being in the large garden, then she was somewhere else.

Yattina looked around the odd classroom. It looked nothing like any educational place she had been in before. Everything looked clean and warm, with maps of a strange landmass, posters of theoretical scientific ideas, and even desks with equal standing. The floor was made of a strange smooth substance, and the board at the front wasn't black with chalk but a white one with ink lines.

The sun was setting through the windows, and Yattina paused as a see-through ghost of sorts was sitting at the head desk, marking papers and trying to look upbeat.

Only three of her seats were filled with students.

"They're not coming," the girl said with anger designed to cover up heartache.

"Betty, your parents might just have misread the time or got held back in traffic," she soothed, and the girl shook her head.

"And I'm the president, Miss D. They're not coming. No one ever comes for me," she snapped and stood up to stalk out the room.

"She's not wrong. Our parents won't come. My brother is the favorite, and Betty's parents just don't care," one of the boys said in a factual tone that felt… extremely familiar.

"Adam!" the teacher said with a sigh.

"My 'parent' is here," someone said with a snort. Yattina turned her head and saw a void in the memory, a void clawing at her skin, eyes, mind, and soul. A maw of teeth and screams.

She looked away, heart beating hard.

"I'm your sister, not your mother, and I offered to let you switch classes," Miss D mumbled.

"Nah, it's great having at-home-help when the homework sucks," the void teased.

"One day, I'll be stuck in some basement working with other kids, and you'll have to handle your own stuff," she warned.

"One day," the void snorted.

"Oh come on, who doesn't have parent issues here?" the last kid asked, and he looked weedy, like he was stuck between growth spurts. He was building some sort of weapon out of connecting pen tips.

"Gerald-" Miss D began, and the boy looked at her with a suddenly sad expression.

"It's just us here, Miss D, come on," he almost pleaded.

"Sorry, I was doing my best to think of your given name in case your father showed up," Miss D said with an apologetic tone.

"Gemma, don't you dare hit Adam with that pen sword," she said, and the boy grinned, looking pleased as he undid his hair from a tight ponytail.

"But he's so fun! He just shuts down and takes it!" the boy known as Gemma said with a smile as he poked Adam, who looked stone-faced.

Yattina was drawn into the scene because it was something she had always wanted for herself. A place where her oddness might have been accepted by someone other than her sister. She looked down and found herself shrunken, as if she was a young teen once more.

The teacher looked at her, features almost unseeable.

"Ah, Yattina, come join us! We'd be happy to have you," she said brightly, and one of the desks lit up.

It had her name on it.

Yattina reached for it. The wooden chair was warm. It felt like home.

---

"Yattina!" Lim said in panic as his captain laid on the ground foaming orange-looking bubbles out her mouth.

"It's fine! I also drank it!" Deo assured him as Yattina's body twitched and seemed to be feeling weirdly mana-potent when her fake eye suddenly glowed orange and shifted to a deep hue. The eye was engraved with the odd triangle on the Dungeon's entrance.

Yattina started, and she stared up at the ceiling as the whole Dungeon seemed to shake violently.

"Captain!" Lim said, sweating as the mana was starting to get to him. She turned to him, orange foam still on her chin and with a wild look in her normal eye.

"Wefe," she said with a raspy tone.

"Wefe?" he echoed.

"Global! Globe! Planetary wide communication signals! A round world!" she said, grabbing his arms.

"What are those for?!" Lim said in panic as Deo smiled at their 'friendship.'

"CAT PICTURES!"

There was a slight pause before she got an even crazier glint in her eyes.

"And degeneracy! So much degeneracy!" she hissed.

Lim was too confused to argue, and he nearly screamed when a Kobold appeared out of some bushes.

"Did someone say degeneracy? All hail the mighty Pip?" he said seriously.

The Dungeon shook again, and the Kobold shook his head.

"No time to waste. We need to sneak you all out of Quee's tunnel ASAP," he said, and Yattina looked skywards.

"Bands of mana, weaving. The floors are connected, but spaced apart, a tiny space contained far away, relative in dimensions," she muttered, her eye glowing.

"A mushroom that appeared over despair, growing light… corpses come plucking at her heartstrings," Yattina mumbled and then promptly passed out as her body trembled and shuddered.

"I like her poetry," Deo offered.

Lim felt he needed a stiff juice box.