Doyle still isn’t quite happy with skills. Sure, they clearly are designed to exceed the norm, as he had put it, but not in the sense that someone couldn’t manage those things. Rather, the system seems more keyed towards lowering the difficulty of those things and opening up the use of mana or what have you even if not directly. Simple stuff like unknowingly boosting your muscles at just the right time to carve a smooth line that otherwise would have required an extra cut.

Doyle shakes his core and turns his attention to the last room of the tenth floor. While the question of how skills worked was interesting and surely a much debated topic across every dimension with a system, he had a boss to make. Though speaking of the boss, he did receive a bunch of adjustment points to play around with and they’re clearly meant for sprucing up his bosses.

Though the hundred points could be gone with a single purchase. All it would take is to unlock the myconid’s fifth skill slot. Not that all skill slots are that expensive to unlock. Rather, each subsequent slot costs more than the last. The first skill slot is free and from there it costs 10, 30, 60, and of course 100 points to unlock each subsequent slot. Well, Doyle is only guessing that the first slot is free since there hasn’t yet been a monster without it. Maybe it costs a point to unlock or some such.

At this point, the plan wasn’t to open up the fifth slot, not that he wasn’t going to spend a large chunk of points. It just wasn’t going to be even half the 100 points to unlock the next skill. Though it wasn’t going to be cheap either.

There was a skill Doyle had spotted while checking out the various options his monsters had that stood out. Simple enough name, with the only caveat being that despite the skill being in the first ring of skills, it cost 20 points to unlock and another 10 to attach it to a pattern. And what was this skill? Leadership.

Does what it says on the tin. The skill teaches a being how to lead others. Simple enough and you would think something like that wouldn’t be all that necessary. Especially with all the monsters kicking around with the teamwork skill. Except Doyle has a different view on that.

Sure, the various monsters know how to work together for the best effect. The only problem is what happens when there isn’t a clear best answer. Doyle could, and in fact has, put various monsters in charge of others. In fact, he even has a path called “Commanding Subordinates” that is based around boosting the followers. Key to this though, is that the path doesn’t give the leader any actual skill in leading others.

Now, Doyle wasn’t expecting that giving the myconid boss leadership would cause too obvious a jump in ability. What he is expecting though, is for a more basic level of improvement. Even more than kobolds and wolves, the myconids are communal. In fact, the only monster with a higher teamwork skill was the as yet unnamed and unspawned monster he had just gotten.

Though that does make Doyle take another look through the available skills of his various monsters. Suffice it to say, that unnamed monster beats everything except maybe the udoroot if you want to count all the sub skills it has for its telepathy. Impressive since, sure, the overall quality of the skills that new monsters have had, have been increasing.

However, this isn’t like a monster with a skill. This is about the patterns themselves having an innate high level skill. After all, the level of a skill on a pattern isn’t actually the level a monster will spawn with unless they’re a level one monster. No, the level instead represents how adept a monster is with the skill and with each level the skill will grow depending on the starting level.

That meant whatever those unnamed monsters would turn out to be physically, they would be highly skilled. More to the point, the myconid boss wasn’t going to be highly leveled. Well, Doyle could spend some more points to level it up, but each extra level would cost ten points. A bit on the pricey side for how many points he had to spend.

Still, he wasn’t afraid to spend the points for the first level of the skill to see how it would work out. So after the hefty cost of 30 points, Doyle can create myconids with the leadership skill. The question is, what other skills should he put on the boss?

{Spore Talk lv12, Teamwork lv10, Summon Paralysis Spore lv10, Summon Sleep Spore lv3, Spore Magic Lv1, Fungal Slam lv1, Spore Grenade lv1, Fungal Farming lv1, Fungal Construction lv1, Leadership lv1}

Another look over the skills doesn’t exactly have anything sticking out. Leadership was assured at this point and he needed to include one of the summon spore skills, but after that there are still two slots to fill. Doyle dims as something does finally attract his attention. The boss had to have Spore Talk. It was a language without a language.

Doyle hadn’t finished buying the language pack yet so a method of talking without needing words would be highly important to make full use of the leadership skill. Sure, the wolves would likely be able to make use of it, but a sapient being with the ability to communicate complex ideas is going to come out ahead. So, with that decided there was only a single skill slot left to fill. A slot which caused him to sigh, maybe buying the fifth one wasn’t the worst idea.

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It was teamwork. The fourth skill was going to be teamwork. All three of the skills Doyle could choose were going to be directly related to bossing around the other myconids and working with them. No flashy magic. No fancy combat abilities. The boss was going to be a simple leader.

Not that Doyle was looking down on pure leader types, especially under the system. He was actually a little afraid of what a high level general could do with even a ragtag bunch of mercenaries. So, he was going to have to roll with it and see how it works out. Maybe the “Leadership” skill will let the boss get more out of that path or open up new ones.

So with the skill load out decided, all that was left would be creating the boss. Last time he had gone with the option of using a monster that was already in his dungeon and his boss builder path seems to be pointing towards doing more of that. The specific bit is when it says that upgrading a normal monster has a chance to give three choices.

It sounds like Doyle would need to upgrade a pre-existing monster, but it doesn’t actually say that, he checked. All it says is “normal monster” and not some wording like a normal monster in the dungeon. Now, this might end up losing him a chance at a fancy tenth floor boss if he is misunderstanding things.

Doyle doesn’t care about that though as the tenth floor is still early. Better to find out now when the stakes are low instead of later. So, he was going to take the second option. He would create a completely new monster for the boss soul to inhabit. This was mostly because he remembered that the option would cause the soul to have more effect on the monster’s body. That sounded quite tempting and so he was more than willing to give it a spin.

So, plan in mind, Doyle begins the process of creating the boss. It started simply enough, using Creation to start the process. As that happened, he shoved a pseudopod of his soul through the coalescing power, causing the creation to pause without form.

All the while the pseudopod extended outward, piercing through each floor causing eddies in the air despite the lack of any physical form. Then it hits the first floor and Doyle turns it towards the weakest section of the dimensional fabric. Unlike last time, there weren’t any outright holes to patch up.

Still, the weakest section he could see was like a sheet of tissue paper covering a hole. Good thing his soul is able to move through this weakened point without actually piercing anything. Now free, the pseudopod dives deep into the void as it splits apart like a binary tree fractal.

Around him, as much as positional words could be used in the void, Doyle once again felt his fellow dungeons, each one also searching for souls. And of course, there are also the horrors of the void as well. Beings without form and whose location can not be described as their very nature breaks the very concept of dimensionality.

Their territory is where their power reaches, and their power is their body. Each with a form yet stretched across the unknowing depths of a space, which wasn’t a space. Swarms of beasts so called only because they appeared separate, whether that was true or not, shifted through what Doyle could sense.

All the while the void once again tries to cause his awareness to simplify and break down. To cover a space that the human mind could never, on its own begin to sense, let alone search. This time, though, things went differently.

Doyle’s last foray into the void had connected a piece of himself that had been missing, likely because of Flisle and their dungeonafication ritual. This time around though, he wasn’t a human; he wasn’t truly a dungeon either. He was Doyle. Doyle Huxley.

The void tried to claw away his concept of self, reducing him once again to the state of being a pure dungeon core. An effect resisted last time because of being incomplete, now resisted because unlike so many, Doyle had connected with the true core to his existence. As the pressure ebbed, the other dungeons once again congratulated him as they did last time.

Below that, Doyle felt a deeper level. He wasn’t quite ready for it and didn’t know when that might be the case, but he could tell. From that deeper level bubbled up, more conceptually complete congratulations. An uncountable number, not because the number was uncountable, though it might have been. Rather because by not being ready, he wasn’t able to examine it.

Still, he knew what it was. That deeper level was the protected territory of all awakened dungeons within the void. Doyle was not able to enter yet, not because of sapiences, but rather the fact that he was too weak. Though he could also tell that if he was just some wizard that turned themselves into a dungeon, he wouldn’t have even been able to sense the non-place.

To join the others would require the strength to add to the defense instead of adding a weak point. Though with this knowledge also came more chilling news. Doyle had always known there were beings in the void that would eat him like a piece of hard candy if they could find him. So why would awakened dungeons need an area that was protected and not be able to show any signs of weakness? Because there were active predators out there.

Dungeon cores, of course, aren’t defenseless against such things. In fact, at some point, either the system or a very powerful dungeon had deposited some new knowledge on how to combat those types of threat. Though hopefully such a defense wouldn’t be needed anytime soon, as the first step to any kind of defense seemed to be disconnecting from your home dimension.

It made sense once more of this information he had never known before was remembered. A natural dimension was like a bright light underwater. You can’t see it from too far away, but once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to lose. Dungeons, on the other hand, are dimmer and have a much smaller presence. So if you stick to a dimension, the predators and even just void pests would be able to track you down right away. Only by detaching yourself and basically fleeing into the night can you escape.