Poisoned Time

Poisoned Time A Dungeon Core Time Loop Time Core – Book 3 Jonathan Brooks Cover Design: Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists Edited by: Ellen Klowden Copyright ©2023 Jonathan Brooks All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. The following is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, corporations, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental. Cover Design Copyright ©2023 Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists Acknowledgements I want to thank my family for all of their support in my writing endeavors, as well as all my loyal readers and Patrons! In addition, I want to thank all my beta-readers for doing an awesome job helping me make this book even better! Aaron Eichler Aaron Wiley Gevan Eldredge Grant Harrell James Boyles Keith Mueller Kelly Linzey Nicole Widrig Table of Contents Acknowledgements Recap Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Final Stats Monster Progression Charts Author’s Note Books by Jonathan Brooks Recap Tempara was still a young Greater Temporal Fox living in the Frozen Reaches when she was captured by a group that originated from the Kingdom of Radia to the south. At the same time, her entire family was murdered in front of her. Forced to become a familiar to a new Mage who belonged to the Order of Defenders, the organization that protected the Kingdom from monster threats in the eight different hostile regions that surrounded it, she and her master were killed on their first dungeon delve. Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of Tempara’s story. Through some fluke with her minor ability to manipulate time, the Greater Temporal Fox’s soul became a Dungeon Core – a fragile, floating sphere that could create dungeons full of monsters and traps. Not only that, but if her Core was destroyed, Tempara’s soul had the ability to travel back in time to the exact moment her soul originally arrived in the world; in other words, her mortal birth. Stuck in a time loop, the Fox-turned-Core was determined to save her family from their impending slaughter at the hands of those who captured her in the future. Through the help of her automatically supplied assistant, who just happened to be her former master without all of the Mage’s original memories, she learned how to create her dungeon, protect against both other dungeons’ attackers and the Defenders from the south, and unlock every single monster and trap available to her as a Dungeon Core part of the Frozen Cohort. But even all that wasn’t enough to stop what was going to happen to her family. After countless restarts, Tempara eventually learned that her family wasn’t actually killed, but was captured just as she was – though for a more nefarious purpose. A Chronomancer named Creetim, a member of a unique Defender Class that could manipulate time, used three members of her family to enact a ritual, stopping the automatic accumulation of Elemental Power for all Cores in the Frozen Reaches – essentially shutting them down entirely. Due to her unique nature, however, Tempara was able to continue to operate at a diminished capacity, and she eventually learned that this ritual wasn’t the only one performed over the next few months. After each elemental region had their accumulation of Elemental Power in their Cores paused, there was a massive buildup of Power that eventually destroyed the entire world. Thankfully, Tempara’s soul was able to return to the past after learning of this potential future ecocidal catastrophe, and she worked to stop the ritual and free her relatives that were trapped inside. After luring the guards that were protecting the magical ritual sphere into her dungeon and killing them, she was finally able to free her Aunt Chrona, her Uncle Timo, and her Uncle Ido – or at least their souls, which were then connected with Tempara’s own. From her relatives, the Fox-turned-Dungeon Core learned that she would need to free each member of her family throughout each section of the Wildlands – and in the specific order of when they would be placed within a similar magical ritual as the one she had just broken. While her Aunt Chrona and her uncles couldn’t tell her the exact order of every ritual to take place in the future, they did know where the next stop would be: Nightgloom Swamp. After selecting a location for her new dungeon in the Swamp, Tempara learned that this particular region of the Wildlands was populated by the undead. With connected islands surrounded by stagnant water filled with deadly creatures rather than a frozen cave, she was able to experiment and create a new dungeon for herself. By utilizing the undead monsters that she was forced to use after learning that she couldn’t create ones from the Frozen Cohort, she learned how to defend her new dungeon using a variety of tactics that had worked for her in the north. Things were going well until a pair of Defenders were chased into her dungeon by another group of Defenders, who appeared out for blood. Riley and Jorden, the two who were being chased, ended up being killed at the same moment that Tempara’s Core was shattered, somehow attaching their souls to her own. At that point, the two Defenders’ souls learned that they were trapped in the same time loop the former Greater Temporal