Let’s break it down step by step. Step by [Shadow Step], as it were.

First off, [Shadow Step] had limited utility. The requirement that the shadow be large enough for Camazotz to fit through was, given his size, actually troublesome. Atop that, Camazotz’s wings already gave him a mobility advantage — short-range teleports were useful, sure, but a much smaller increase in utility than they would be for a regular human adventurer.

Second, [Frenzied Undeath] was conceding defeat before the fight even started. It was inevitable that some of my minions would die eventually, but keeping them alive in the first place seemed like a better investment than trying to maximize the utility of their deaths.

Third, [Hardened Bones]. I suspected that this skill wasn’t just unhelpful — it might be actively harmful to Camazotz. Its description was somewhat opaque: what did “hardness” actually mean, here? If the skill just made his bones more durable by making them thicker or denser, then it would probably also make them heavier — and I didn’t need extra weight on something that was supposed to fly. Even if it changed their mechanical properties without increasing their mass, though, it wasn’t risk-free. I’d learned, during the course of my Wikipedia delvings on Earth, that a bat’s skeleton actually flexed and bent during flight, and that it was an important part of their flight-capability. If Camazotz’s hardened bones also lost elasticity, would they put more stress on his joints during flight? Even tear through the thin skin of his wings? I didn’t know, and I didn’t really want to find out. Even aside from those considerations, though, it seemed like a waste of a boss skill point for one simple reason: I could already change his bones however I wanted. If he needed harder bones, I could just mutate his bones to be harder. I didn’t need a skill for that!

That all being said — [Hardened Bones] might have been the worst option, but it was also the most intriguing to me. I could reshape my minions’ skeletons in any way I could imagine, but my imagination was limited by my knowledge. Magic was real and common in this world. Who knew how skills actually interacted with biology? What if whatever [Hardened Bones] did to Camazotz’s skeleton was something I could reverse-engineer — some bespoke miracle of osteo-formation-craft that I would never have made on my own, but that I could turn around and apply to all of my minions? That… could be worth gambling on. And I was tempted, I’ll admit. But I decided against it. Why?

Well, look at Camazotz. My big, literally-born-yesterday mutant bat son, whose very existence was the product of ethically dubious experimentation on my part. Was it fair to him, to keep using him as a guinea pig? Was it nice? Would I want someone to treat me like that, in his position?

Okay, sure, part of my brain was very excitedly banging the drums at the thought of a hot, evil scientist using my body for her unethical experiments with no concern for my wellbeing. That was because I had mommy issues. As Camazotz’s mother, did I want to give him mommy issues? No, I did not. That was really the final nail in [Hardened Bones]’s coffin. There was probably a joke in there somewhere about coffins and skeletons but I was too distracted thinking about evil women to make it.

I explained my assessment of the boss skills to Camazotz. His ears were cocked attentively, but I wasn’t sure how much he understood. My uncertainty was vindicated, seemingly, by the first question he asked. “Why are the skills bad?”

“I just explained why the skills are-” I began, somewhat annoyed at having to repeat myself. Then I stopped and thought for a second. Remember — the goal is to not turn into my own mother. What explanations for this situation might exist that did not assume my child was an idiot and/or deliberately wasting my time? “Do you mean, why do you only have bad options to choose from?”

He nodded.

“I think it’s random?” I said. “Just bad luck.” My assumption was that the boss skills were drawn at random (maybe with weighted odds?) from a pool of options. I knew that my mythos affected which skills my bosses were eligible for, as did the skills and mythos that the boss monster already had. I assumed that species, stats, and various other factors could also play a role, but I didn’t know for sure.

“I don’t want a bad skill,” Camazotz said. His brow furrowed, and I could practically see the mechanisms of his brain straining to complete the novel thought that was upon him. “Do I… have to have a bad skill?”

I bit back an instinctive response that yes, unfortunately he did, that sometimes things just sucked and we had to make the best of it. That was all true for the most part, and something that kids would need to hear often, but… was I considering all my options? Did Camazotz have to have a bad skill? It would obviously be a huge pain and at least a day of work to create another boss monster for my second floor, but it wasn’t impossible for me to do that rather than pressure Camazotz into a build that didn’t excite either of us. Hm, I could even…

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not. I’m gonna try something stupid, just to see if it works.” The system popup for Camazotz’s boss skills didn’t have any visible way to dismiss it other than finalizing my selection. Even so, I could feel a strand of azoth, thicker than a regular minion’s but not as thick as the one that tied Nar-shesh to me, connecting us — [Bind Minion] at work. I couldn’t close out of the boss-skill selection menu, but what would happen to the menu if Camazotz ceased to be a boss candidate? Say, by not being a minion anymore?

A simple movement of intent snapped the tether. Camazotz twitched, startled, and the submenu blinked out of existence. Interestingly, though, his level also dropped — from 10 to 9. “That hurt,” he said, prodding at himself with one claw like he wasn’t sure where the pain was coming from. “Felt weird.”

“Hm. Check your status for me. How much XP do you have?” I asked. [Bind Minion] hadn’t said anything about a level-loss penalty, but severing the minion bond seemed like the obvious cause here and I wanted to know how bad the damage was.

“It’s mostly full,” he said. “There’s this much empty.” He held up his thumb and index claws a short distance apart to indicate the empty portion of his experience bar. I had no idea what his system display looked like from his perspective, so it didn’t mean much to me, but ‘mostly full’ sounded better than ‘mostly empty.’ Escaping the boss-skill-selection submenu hadn’t been the stupid thing I wanted to try to see if it worked, though, so we weren’t done here.

A brief aside on gacha game mechanics. Most gacha games give new players some quantity of free “pulls” on the virtual slot machine as a sign-on bonus. A not-uncommon tactic among gacha players is to, in search of particularly rare and desirable anime girls, create a large number of new accounts linked to throwaway e-mail addresses until they manage to obtain whichever limited SSS+ waifu they wanted with those free starting pulls. This tactic is called “rerolling,” and I was going to attempt something like it with Camazotz’s boss skills.

With a flick of my mental fingers, I re-bound him as a minion and inspected his status. It looked like he’d lost about a tenth of his xp bar — so, 10xp or so based on the numbers Abzu had given me. I made a mental note to do some more experiments later with other, unimportant minions (such as the thousands of unmodified, level-0 insects and plants in my domain) to gather more data on the penalty and how it was calculated. Flat rate? Scaling with level? Something else?

It didn’t take long to get Camazotz back up to level 10, and I redesignated him as my second-floor boss. Moment of truth — would I be presented with the same boss skills as before, or a new slate of options?

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[Aura of Blood Siphon]

Cost: Low

Duration: Indefinite

Prerequisites: [Blood] mythos

Mantled in the sovereign authority of your hunger, you assert claim by conquest over all spilled blood. Within short range, all spilled blood will have its bloodline marks purged, be drawn to you, and be absorbed. Excess blood volume will not be absorbed, but consumed to provide a bonus to health regeneration and azoth respiration. Very large bonus to resistance against poison and infection from absorbed blood.

[Hardened Bones]

[Tribal Champion (Goblin)]

Cost: -

Duration: Permanent

Keywords: [Title]

Prerequisites: [Goblin] dungeon mythos

Goblin tribes exalt their mightiest and most physically imposing specimens as champions. Captives are often forced to battle these champions to the death in crude arenas. This skill grants a bonus to physical attributes and azoth respiration scaling with positive reputation among currently observing [Goblin] monsters of .

Hah! Gottem! I would have fist-pumped if I had a fist. Take that, system! Take that, vagaries of fate! When the odds are against you — cheat! Savescum without shame or hesitation!

It was interesting that Camazotz could get [Tribal Champion] even though he wasn’t a goblin. “Hero gets captured by a band of little subhuman freaks, has to fight their giant monster in the arena” was a classic pulp adventure trope. Was the system incentivizing that sort of thing on purpose? I did wonder. As for the skill itself, a broad stat buff that could scale without apparent limit seemed quite strong once you got it snowballing, but I found that less exciting than its mechanism of action. Was the skill directly fuelled by the attention and esteem of the goblins, or was the system somehow measuring public sentiment and bureaucratically authorizing the correspondingly-sized buff? How did skills actually work? Where did they work? Was each skill a little magical engine in the user’s soul, or was it all being handled centrally by some fate-weaving megacomputer? One more thing to investigate. Maybe Abzu had some idea. Then again, maybe asking that sort of question would rack up so much heresy that I would immediately get annihilated by heavenly tribulation.

Regardless of the answers to the bigger metaphysical questions, I was going to pass on [Tribal Champion]. I only had a handful of goblins, and no short-term plans to acquire more, so the scaling-with-tribe-size aspect of the skill wasn’t much use. Moreover, it seemed like the goblins would need to be actually watching the boss battles for the skill to work. Building spectator seating into the spike cave seemed like it would defeat the purpose of my highly defensible goblin quarters.

“Alright, [Aura of Bloodclaim] it is,” I said. “This might be exactly what we’re looking for.” A vampiric aura that let Camazotz heal by bleeding his enemies might not have been as flashy or instantly-lethal as Nar-shesh’s [Chain Backstab] — but, crucially, it wasn’t just his enemies’ blood that the skill affected.

“Is that a good skill?” Camazotz asked, brow furrowed in uncertainty.

“It might be,” I said. “Depends on how fast it works. Go ahead and pick it, and we’ll run some tests.”

He did so, after a moment’s hesitation. For the second time, I observed the transformation that promotion to boss-monster status wrought on my minion. Camazotz gained a few inches of height and some muscle, but he already had so much of both that the physical change wasn’t as visually dramatic as Nar-shesh’s had been. [Chain Backstab] had stained Nar-shesh’s knife-hand black, and Camazotz’s new boss skill likewise marked him. On his forehead, the heavenly glyph for “Blood” had inscribed itself in a flash of red light. Its strokes glittered jewel-red, like arterial spray, stark against his pale skin.

It looked, not to be a huge chuunibyou on main, fucking sick. It was cool as hell.

I explained my thoughts on his boss skill to Camazotz as I prepared for the tests. “When someone kills you, why do you die? Like, physically, why can’t your body stay alive?”

“Uh,” Camazotz said, clearly not having ever considered this question before.

“Blood loss,” I said. “Or suffocation, which is fundamentally the same thing. Blood carries our breath from the lungs throughout the body. No breath, we die. No blood, no breath, we die. Theoretically, if it can reabsorb your blood as fast as you bleed it, [Aura of Bloodclaim] could make you functionally immune to bleeding to death.”

“That does seem good!” he said. His ears twitched with what I realized might be literally the first moment of happiness and optimism he’d experienced in his new life. It was really cute. I felt the urge to rub his bald head affectionately — curse you, lack of hands!

“Yeah, it could be pretty busted,” I said. “Okay, test number one. I’m gonna use [Azoth Mutation] to open up a small hole in your skin. Activate [Aura of Bloodclaim], and we’re gonna gather some data.”

Camazotz did so, the rune on his forehead pulsing briefly with red light. I could feel his aura as it stirred the azoth of my domain, like an eddy within a greater current — a little, gnawing thing. Despite the skill’s flavor text, the aura spoke not so much of sovereignty as it did animal hunger. I opened a cut on the back of Camazotz’s hand, carefully. Blood began to trickle from it: before it had dripped even a few inches down his arm, it sunk back into his skin and was gone. So far, so good! I upped the flow volume, gradually lengthening the cut, but the absorption kept pace. It was only when Camazotz’s arm was open almost from wrist to elbow that blood began to flow faster than his aura could immediately reclaim it. It did still reclaim it all, mind you, just not immediately: Camazotz and I watched as the blood dripping from his arm fell, slowed, then rose in a parabolic arc against gravity to sink back through his skin.

“Are you feeling dizzy at all? Cold? Short of breath?” I asked him, running through the symptoms of hypovolemic shock. He shook his head. “Okay, good. Tell me if you do start to experience any of that.” I kept an eye on his azoth pool as I went. His reserves didn’t seem large, certainly compared to my own but even compared to the goblins’, and I didn’t want him to still be massively bleeding if he ran out of azoth and his aura deactivated.

Over the next hour or so, we continued to test the limits of the skill — how big a quantity of blood it could affect at once (a lot), its radius of effect (four yards or so), whether or not it could reabsorb dried blood (no), and so on. We learned that the aura did interact with physics to some extent: it was possible for the blood to spray out with too much force for the skill to “catch” it until gravity had brought it to a halt, and the aura’s effect grew weaker at its edges. It also seemed to move tiny droplets faster than large streams. I noted that it took about two-thirds of Camazotz’s azoth pool to activate the aura, but the cost to sustain it was low enough that he hadn’t exhausted his azoth by the time I called a halt to the tests.

“Alright, that’s enough for now,” I said. “I have an idea that might help with your flight problem.”

He perked up at that, ears cocked attentively. “What is it?”

“Remember how I was saying earlier that blood carries breath from your lungs to the rest of the body?” He nodded. “So, ordinarily, the body doesn’t use anywhere near all of that breath in its blood. During periods of exertion, however, the amount of breath you need spikes sharply — like, five to twenty times as much. When you don’t have enough, the body starts trying to breathe sugar — which it can do, but it’s a lot less efficient than breathing air…”

I fumbled through an attempt to explain aerobic and anaerobic cellular respiration in terms a one-day-old bat monster would understand. Camazotz’s look of blank incomprehension when I was done suggested to me that I had not been successful.

“The point is, we could use your lungs to do gas exchange in your blood or we could just do it directly via contact with the air,” I said. “So I’m gonna put spray nozzles in your veins. You open them while you’ve got [Aura of Bloodclaim] active, they start spraying blood out into the air which accomplishes functionally the same thing as breathing with your lungs, your skill reabsorbs the refreshed blood, your lungs have to do a lot less work, and you don’t get tired so quickly.”

Camazotz frowned skeptically.

“This will work!” I protested. “Probably! And if it doesn’t work, it won’t immediately kill you, so I can just undo the changes and we’re no worse off than when we started.” I was more or less confident that everything I’d just said would work, based on what I remembered from the introductory college biology courses I’d taken. Besides, nothing ventured, nothing gained!