The main obstacle of the still-unfinished second floor was the spike cave, a lightless expanse that would require delvers to carefully pick their way across narrow, twisting catwalks lest they fall to a grisly death on the spikes of sharpened rock that filled the cavern floor. Any monster stationed in the spike cave needed to be able to avoid its hazards — falling and darkness. You know what animal could fly, didn’t rely on sight, and lived in caves anyway? That’s right. Bats, baby.
By now, more than a dozen bats clung to the roof of the spike cave, slumbering the daylight hours away. Hibernating, in fact: their tiny hearts weren’t beating but once every few seconds. I hadn’t realized bats hibernated, but it was obvious once I stopped to think about it. They ate bugs. Where are the bugs in the middle of fucking winter? It was just as well, though — at least this way they wouldn’t wake up while I was working on them.
I had plans for the bats — visions of winged nightmares, swooping from the darkness to dive-bomb adventurers off their feet and into the spike pit. I’d get to that later, though. I had something different in mind for the boss. I turned my attention once again to the atypically large male bat I’d picked out as a boss candidate. The last time I’d tried to start working on him, I’d spent myself into azoth exhaustion right as Pacifica had first chased Striga back to the dungeon. That was not an experience I wanted to repeat, so I was going to take it slow and steady this time. I began drip-feeding azoth into him with [Empower Minion].
Maybe because I’d finally gotten enough practice with it, I felt like I was starting to understand the skill a little better. At first, it had been like a magic trick: I saw it happen, but I didn’t understand how it happened. Now, though, I began to glimpse of the mechanism at work. It was… I’m not sure how to explain it. Imagine the bat as a word, a single infinitely complex glyph. This word was, of course, “bat.” His bones, his veins, his nerves, were the script in which it was written, describing the very thing they constituted. Now imagine [Empower Minion] was a pen, and my azoth the ink. What I was doing was tracing that glyph over itself, again and again and again, carving its lines deeper and thicker onto the page — the page, in this metaphor, being existence itself. Repetition for emphasis. Bat. Bat. Bat. Symbol was referent was symbol. Beneath the mounting conceptual pressure, the bat’s body refined itself — muscle fibers thickening, crystal lattices taking increasingly perfect shape within his bones. As the body evolved, so too did the concept it articulated — which further refined the body, and so on and so forth. The process was surprisingly meditative, and I passed several hours in this way.
I’d expected one random mutation from [Mutagenic Domain] as I levelled him, given the mutation-on-level proc rate of approximately 10% I’d calculated from my experiments so far. By the time the bat reached level 9, it hadn’t appeared yet, but he’d gone from small enough to fit in the palm of a hand to about the size of a dog. That was good progress, but I needed him bigger. A lot bigger. One might assume that my boss monster would simply be a more powerful version of the ordinary mobs in its biome, and that was true to an extent. They were both bats and they both knocked people into the spike pit. The tactical roles I had in mind for them, though, were different. The bats would be hit-and-run ambushers, using surprise and speed to unbalance foes. The boss bat, I was building as a tank. There was only one path across the pit: his job was to physically block it. It was narrow enough that there would be no sneaking past him, so anyone who wanted to reach the third floor would have to confront him — and they’d have to do it one at a time, making it difficult to leverage any numerical advantage. All I had to do, therefore, was build a monster that could outmuscle and outreach any single adventurer. Easy!
I’d need to relocate him for the last phase of his evolution, though. I didn’t want his significantly increased bulk to cause him to lose grip on the cave roof and plummet to an ironic death in the spike pit. That would be a waste of time and azoth — and a sad and pointless end to a life, of course. How to move him, though? I could try and do some fiddly bullshit like scooting around the specific patch of rock he was hanging from… or I could just ask for help.
It was past dusk now, and the goblins were waking up. In the kitchen, Pacifica was watching over Teekas’ shoulder as she cooked — breakfast for the goblins, dinner for Pacifica. In the cast-iron pan that Pacifica had brought to the dungeon as a weapon, thick strips of pork belly sizzled alongside small pancakes of chestnut flour, lard, and chopped wild greens. She dexterously slid each slice of pork belly atop one of the pancakes and folded it in half with a wooden spatula, then flipped them from the pan and onto a rough plank of wood the goblins were using as a serving platter. “Here, try one,” she said to Pacifica, gesturing at the food encouragingly.
The human girl did so, grease dripping down her chin as she took a bite. “Mm!” she said, eyes widening. “
Teekas was smiling — a happy, uncomplicated smile, maybe the first one I’d seen from her — as the other goblins hurried forward to try the food. The simple joy of feeding people shone from her face. Even Ninkur complaining that the food was too greasy didn’t spoil the moment. In fairness to her, it did look pretty greasy. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I just watched. Teekas smiled and laughed and kept cooking, making sure everyone had their fill. It was… good, to see her like that. It felt right. She belonged in moments like these. In joy, not in grief or anger or fear. This was the point of it all. This was what I was fighting for. A world where she was smiling.
And the rest of the goblins too, obviously! Not just Teekas. I wasn’t playing favorites or anything. That would be weird, haha. What were we talking about?
“Hey, Teekas, Pacifica,” I said, splitting my voice with [The Heart Whispers] and [Walk and Talk] to address them simultaneously in their respective languages. “Can I get your help with something? It shouldn’t take long.”
----------------------------------------
“Lady Persephone!” Teekas said, her smile widening at the dark rasp of the realmheart’s voice. This was the first anyone had heard from her today, as far as Teekas knew: she’d been absorbed in one of her projects, as she often was. “Of course, what do you need?”
“I need you to move a sleeping bat for me.” Teekas’ confusion must have shown on her face. “It’ll make more sense when you see it,” Persephone hastily added.
“Is it…dangerous?” Teekas asked, carefully keeping her tone non-accusatory. She wasn’t asking because she doubted Persephone’s judgement or forethought. Really, she wasn’t! She just wanted to know what to expect.
“It shouldn’t be,” Persephone said, sounding a little embarrassed that she’d felt the need to ask. “It’ll require some moving around in the spike cave, but I can widen the walkways and stuff. You won’t be in any danger of falling. Or, well, minimal danger — I guess no situation is ever entirely danger-free. But is the bat going to wake up and try to kill you? No, I don’t think so. He’s in torpor for the winter.”
“
“I’m making him into my second-floor boss,” the dungeon core explained. “Doing some mutations to him.”
Teekas’ heart kicked in her chest, hard. She didn’t really hear the rest of Persephone’s explanation. More mutations. The first place her mind went wasn’t to Harig’s stone feet, or even her sharp new teeth cutting their way out of her gums. It was to the strange flesh that filled the wounds on her chest, and the pressure of Persephone’s domain bearing down on her. There was pain in that memory, and fear — so it must be fear that she was feeling now, too, this sudden ache in her chest.
Though, if this was fear, it was a strange fear. The thought never even crossed her mind to flee.
“
“More or less. More more than less, probably. It’s a pretty radical overhaul,” Persephone said. If she noticed how Teekas had gone quiet, she didn’t say anything about it.
----------------------------------------
They walked as they talked. When they reached the spike cave, Pacifica found it significantly changed. A broad, straight walkway had been raised from the floor, lit by light-glyphs along its edges. It cut directly across the expanse of the cavern, rising into a staircase that terminated just below a cluster of dark shapes on the roof of the cave. The two climbed it together and stood on the flat platform at its apex. A bat dangled from the ceiling before them — a massive bat, more than a third as tall as Teekas. Other, regular-sized bats hung nearby. They were all in torpor, as the dungeon core had said, a dozen tiny bodies and one large one all as still as death. Pacifica had never seen a bat this close-up before, let alone one so large. It was a strange-looking creature, with its great scoop-like ears and its upturned, leaf-shaped snout.
“So they’re just regular animals, before you change them?” Pacifica asked, walking around the giant bat in a circle. She hesitated to touch it — it was an uncanny thing, the velvety skin of its wings stretched around its body like a butterfly’s cocoon.
“Yep,” Persephone said. “You’re probably gonna have to, like… one of you support his head and the other one takes his feet?”
“Is that how it is with all dungeons?” Pacifica gingerly began prying the bat’s claws loose from the rock as Teekas curled her arms beneath his shoulders and began lifting him towards horizontal. “All the monsters are just made from whatever animals were around?”
“I’ve never met another dungeon,” Persephone said. “You’d know better than I would.”
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That drew her up short. The dungeon’s tone had been breezy, nonchalant, but it occurred to Pacifica that it was a very lonely statement. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Eh,” Persephone said in a verbal shrug. “It’s no biggie.”
“No, I should have…I mean it’s obvious, once you think about it. It’s not like you could just… walk down the road for a visit,” Pacifica said, embarrassed. The sleeping bat now awkwardly slung between them, she and Teekas did a shuffling turn to carry him feet-first down the stairs. A thought occurred to her as they descended. “How did you get here in the first place, though? To Planter’s Bend, I mean.”
“Dunno. I woke up in this cave like…two weeks ago-ish? No idea how I got here.”
“
Persephone paused for a moment before answering. “Somewhere else,” she said tersely. “A long way away.”
That got Pacifica’s attention, and from the surprised look she exchanged with Teekas it was clear that the goblin had noticed as well. Persephone was, during her brief periods of social activity, chatty and almost totally unfiltered. This was maybe the first conversational tangent either of them had encountered that the dungeon core hadn’t enthusiastically hurled herself down. Pacifica was obviously more-than-somewhat curious about the sudden mystery of Persephone’s origins, but she also got the impression that she shouldn’t push her luck on this.
She did wonder, though. The legends of famous adventurers usually didn’t have much to say about where the dungeons they’d conquered came from. There were exceptions — the Mad Labyrinth of Ut, for example, or the House of Blood. Dungeons brought forth by the hubris of men or the malice of monsters. It seemed obvious which monsters’ malice had birthed the Planter’s Bend Goblin Warren, given its name, and Pacifica might not have thought any more deeply about it except that she knew something no other human did — the dungeon had been here first. So, if Persephone hadn’t brought herself here, and the goblins hadn’t either…
Pacifica wondered — who had?
----------------------------------------
If [Empower Minion] had been me retracing the bat’s ontoglyph, [Azoth Mutation] put a brush in my hand and set me loose on the canvas. Now that he was safely ensconced in one of the empty rooms on the second floor, I began the final phase of his transformation. Teekas and Pacifica had both stayed to watch at first, but I think they were expecting something more dramatic. When it became clear that the process would take hours, they eventually drifted away — Pacifica to sleep, and Teekas to help the other goblins with their tasks of foraging for supplies and extending the hillfort. That suited me just fine: I enjoyed their company, but a bitch needed some privacy when she was working, y’know?
The first change I made was reconfiguring the joints of the boss-bat’s wing to allow him to walk on his knuckles, ape-like, rather than the all-fours crawl bats normally used when not in flight. This in turn required me to reshape his pelvis, and trim his patagium so that it wouldn’t tangle him up as he walked. An extra digit allowed for an opposable grip: the wicked talons I added to it and the thumb would make his punches and wing-swipes that much deadlier. His short tail, I tucked back into his body, fusing the bones together into a sacrum at the base of his spine — no reason to leave a vulnerable appendage hanging loose. I gave his feet talons as well, and shifted the big toe for an opposable grip. More options couldn’t hurt, right?
A diet of bugs wouldn’t be enough to fuel this guy’s monstrous metabolism, so I changed that next. Comically tiny bat-teeth, left behind at the same size as the rest of his body grew, dropped from his gums to make room for the mouth of a carnivore — thumb-sized canines, broad conical fangs for cracking bone, and wide razored molars for shearing meat. Massively fortified jaw muscles gave him the bite-strength to snap right through bone, and I reinforced his skull so that the new muscles wouldn’t crack it like rubber bands around an egg. I finished it off with a few tweaks to his guts to make sure he could actually digest the meat he ate.
In addition to the externally-obvious changes to my boss bat, I was hard at work on the contents of his skull. I wanted to see if I could make his transition to sentience a little smoother than Striga’s. I’d mutated her based on gut instinct and half-remembered Wikipedia articles. Now, with my goblins, I had working sapient brains to use as a reference. As he grew, I tried to work his grey matter into something that could accommodate abstract thought, language, complex planning — all the stuff he’d need to be an effective member of my revolutionary cadre. I made some additional changes to his mouth and vocal cords, which I was reasonably sure would allow for human-like speech while retaining his echolocation abilities.
My pace had slowed with the increased azoth expenditure and complexity of the work, so it was closer to sunrise than midnight by the time I finished. The bat had grown several times over in size: if he stood upright, even with his naturally hunched posture I estimated he’d be six feet tall at least. He hovered on the cusp of level 10. That had taken almost as much azoth as all the levels preceding it, which matched with the experience formula Abzu had given me. I took a deep breath — well, made a sound effect with [The Heart Speaks] like someone was taking a breath, I didn’t have lungs — and spent the last bit of azoth to push him over the threshold.
Naturally, it was at this point that [Mutagenic Domain] finally triggered. The change was sudden and drastic. A spasm travelled the length of the bat’s body. The new muscles thickly-layered on his frame writhed and redoubled, exaggerating his already-considerable bulk. Fur sloughed from his head and shoulders, revealing pale skin that only grew paler. Its texture changed as well, acquiring a glossy luster reminiscent of polished marble or burn scars. I sensed that it was harder, more durable — perhaps not enough to ignore a blade altogether, but certainly able to blunt a deep wound into a shallow one. Finally, the bat’s eyes snapped open, glowing with a baleful red light, and he let out a screech of confusion as he thrashed awake.
“Good morning, sleepyhead! How are you feeling?” I said cheerfully as I spun off a thread of awareness to open his status window. Now, this was interesting.
Giant Corpse-Eater Bat (Minion) - Lv. 10
[Dazed] [Hungry (x2)]
A nocturnal predator that roost in great swarms. Their ravenous hunger drives them to devour even the foulest carrion. They will often dig up graves to feast upon the dead, and have been known to dwell in tombs and mausoleums. This individual is unusually large for its species.
Health:
███████████████
?/?
Azoth:
██████████
?/?
XP:
░
0/110
[Skills]
[Echolocation]
[Improved Azoth Respiration (Death)]
[Iron Stomach]
- [Carrion Eater]
[Lesser Strength]
[Ravenous Appetite]
[Red-and-Black Feast Nourishes Body]
Corpse-eater bat, huh? This mutation must have been a recognized type of monster, like my mushquirrels. I wondered how the system made those judgements. Those skills were new, too — he hadn’t had any of them except [Echolocation] before hitting level 10. Also, what was up with that last skill? [Red-and-Black Feast Nourishes Body]? That sounded cool as hell! My thought-thread began reading through the new skills as the rest of my attention returned to the conversation.
The newly evolved corpse-eater bat let out a series of warbling chirps that [Apophic Tongue] rendered as “What- where am I- what happened?” He lost his balance on his new limbs and staggered into the cave wall. “What happened?” he repeated, plaintively.
“You’re level 10 now!” I informed him. “And I made a few other changes to you, also. My name is Persephone, and you’re in my dungeon. We’ve spoken previously, although you might not remember it. Your brain was a lot smaller at the time.”
He was turning back and forth to inspect his own body. “I feel…heavy,” he said. “And weird, and hungry. This cave is so small.” He began to crawl towards the door, awkward on his new limbs.
“Woah, woah, slow down there, champ,” I said. “Sit tight, I’ll have someone bring you food.” In the goblin quarter, I alerted Teekas and Nar-shesh that the bat was awake, and asked them to bring him a haunch of venison from the deer tonight’s hunt had brought back.
He fell on the severed leg with a ravenous hunger as soon as it appeared, nearly bowling the two goblins over. Blood smeared across his pale features as his fangs tore chunks of meat free — a tidy eater, he was not. It occurred to me that if his post-evolution species’ diet was ordinarily carrion, as the name implied, his bald head and neck might serve the same adaptive purpose as a vulture’s. Easier to clean filth and gore off of skin than out of fur or feathers, after all. When he was two-thirds done with the leg and showing no signs of slowing down, I told the goblins to bring him the rest of the deer. After eating both legs clear to the bone, he literally tore the deer’s pelvis open to shove his head into the abdominal cavity. I resisted the urge to make some kind of joke about getting really into eating a girl out as I watched him do so, which I thought was a show of maturity and good taste on my part. It was just shy of the ribcage that he finally ate his fill. He sat back on his haunches and, after a moment, let out an enormous burp.
“Feel better?” I asked.
“A little,” he said. “Not hungry anymore.”
I sure fucking hoped he wasn’t! If he had to eat like that every meal, he’d eat me out of house and home! Out of dungeon and dragon? Something something wish I was eating out a dragon right now. I’m hilarious. Anyway, moving on.
“You got a name?” I asked him. Bats were supposed to be highly communicative and social animals, so I figured it wasn’t impossible that there was a specific sound other bats had used to address him. I wish I could say I hadn’t asked Striga if she had a name before giving her one for some thought-out reason about owls being solitary or nonsocial, but honestly it just hadn’t occurred to me.
“No,” he said. Ah well. There went that theory. Just as well: I had a pretty good idea for him.
“Alright,” I said. “I’m gonna call you… Camazotz.”