The Holds depend on harvested core crystals to refrigerate grain and run their pumps. Dwarven companies supply those crystals under contracts. The same companies suppress cognition research and prune young cores. Close a core farm without replacing its supply, and the Holds lose essential services while the company loses revenue.
Opposing extraction does not make a power harmless. The Deep World has predators with centuries to plan. Ancient cores cultivate settlements as prey. Monster migrations pass through villages whose inhabitants have never seen an industrial tool. Powers resisting extraction have ambitions older than the industry, and the emergency gives them new targets for old feuds.
The actual conflict
The crisis brings two forms of life into conflict: an emerging industrial life, within which people live, and an older planetary life that contains cores, creatures, and entire ecologies.
They cannot wait for each other on equal terms. The World-Spirit can take centuries to heal—long enough for whole mortal civilizations to come and go. A Hold needs its water pumps working tonight. When a core attacks, engineers divert more power to those pumps. Keeping the water flowing deepens the injury that provoked the attack.
Civilization has rebuilt millions of lives around consuming an organism as a resource. Understanding what it consumes comes after that dependence has formed. This is the underlying situation; it does not mean the people or institutions involved already understand it. Dungeon sentience remains a contentious fringe academic debate, and the possibility of industrial awakening is more marginal still.
No single person’s removal resolves that dependence. Remove a steward, a core, a monarch, or a company director, and the next shift still has to report to the pumps.