Mordecai had been playing with several ideas for the bosses of this level, but it was time to start discarding some.
He was sad to discard the Leviathan whale idea. It was one of his favorites, but despite the vast amount of territory they had claimed and made even larger via spacial expansion, even a normal whale would have found this 'ocean' too small.
The inhabitants that he was starting off small would have a chance to migrate later to a larger zone, but that wasn't an easy option for floor bosses.
A kraken on the other hand, well, octopuses were comfortable folding up into small spaces and did not need a large amount of territory to roam. Fortunately, a trader had managed to get a single female octopus to the dungeon alive, which made things much easier, and Kazue had already decided her name would be Cephelia.
Mordecai would have otherwise had to figure out how to mimic a cephalopod from a freshwater clam, which was a long way to go.
Making a giant octopus was insufficient to earn the title of Kraken in Mordecai's opinion, and he decided to be creative with the concept. The first thing he did was give her rapid regeneration and healing, including complete regrowth of lost limbs. He considered a couple of options of where to go from there and discarded the idea of regenerated limbs splitting in favor of giving her more size and shape-changing options.
The splitting option would have allowed for potentially unlimited number of temporary extra tentacles, but by enhancing an octopus's natural shape-changing abilities with sufficient magic Cephelia would gain a lot more tactical options.
Plus it made an easy stepping stone to giving her the ability to shift all the way into a bipedal form that could walk on land, along with being able to split the ends of her tentacle arms into 'fingers' of smaller tentacles, for fine manipulation while in her normal form.
While Cephelia's natural form would be about five hundred pounds with tentacle arms reaching over sixty feet in length, she would be able to shift her mass to as low as five pounds and, hypothetically, to at least five thousand pounds.
The hypothetical was because Mordecai was leaving that ability open-ended, based on how strong she was. That strength would increase as more zones were added topside.
Additionally, she would be able to grow more pairs of tentacles as she grew above her natural size. She might be starting from the base of an octopus, but Cephelia was going to be much more than that.
Mordecai then gave her enhanced versions of abilities from across the cephalopod family. Her suckers had tiny barbs to inject toxins. She had additional ink sacs along her arms allowing her to release as local a cloud as she wanted, and that ink was corrosive to most creatures. The 'ink' also came in a bioluminescent variation, though it was just as corrosive.
Cephelia's skin had spots of mild photosensitivity that were just barely enough to sense changes in light/shadow and a vague direction, to be used to supplement her tactile sense of taste and smell along with the ability to detect faint vibrations and electrical signals.
Even her ability to jet along using compressed water was enhanced, letting her hit bursts of two hundred miles per hour while underwater. The shock wave of that move alone was enough to kill a person who had not been toughened through training and combat.
Then it was time for special powers. Mordecai chose to not give Cephelia a specific suite of magic. Instead, he took what he already knew of different forms of elemental magic and combined that with what he had learned from observing Derek during the boy's training. He filtered out everything that didn't resonate with water and imbued her with that package of energy and potential.
Water, and to a lesser extent ice and mud, would be hers to command, but it would be up to her to learn how to do so. This meant that Cephelia would have fewer and weaker abilities initially than if he'd granted her specific ones, but these powers would grow in variety and strength as she grew in power and practiced more.
Cephelia's biggest weakness was her passive defense. Mordecai could enhance her skin's slime coating to make it briefly harden on impact and he could toughen her skin within certain limits as well as embed it with hard nodules and metallic grains to make clean strikes difficult, but in the end, she was going to be very reliant upon her regeneration. There was a limit on how resilient her skin could be while still being as flexible as her limbs should be.
He was able to do more with her beak, however. Here Mordecai decided to go a slightly different route with the metal it would be infused with. While it would only be in traces at first, her beak was going to contain adamantine. As the zone's power increased, so too would the amount of adamantine that she would be able to incorporate, making it able to crush and pierce ever tougher foes and armor.
To accommodate her potential combat styles, Mordecai riddled the terrain near the end of the designated area with tunnels. Not only could she readily dive in and out of tunnels to attack and retreat, but if pressed she could dive into a deeper cave and grow large enough to attack with her tentacles alone, making it almost impossible to injure her main body without squeezing through narrow tunnels.
Getting into close-quarters combat with a cephalopod, the master grappler family of the ocean, was not a good idea.
These tunnels were also training for Cephelia to fight in the sewers. While her elemental powers would enable her to use her water jet to 'jump' even when not submerged, she would be better off changing into a giant form and attacking at a distance around corners, in support of the sewer-dwelling inhabitants.
For their second zone boss, Mordecai went back to their slime-based jellyfish, picking a particularly enthusiastic one to grow into a giant jellyfish with a 'bell' over ten feet wide. Dhamini, as Kazue named 'her' when Kazue knew Mordecai's plans, would not have an explosion of baby jellies when struck a strong enough blow, but there were plenty of other surprises in store for their delvers.
First of all, the boss jellyfish had an eight 'lobed' main body, and at the edge of each lobe's section of the bell was a large crystalline eye. The eyes swirled with light in shades of yellow, gold, and amber that created magically infused hypnotic patterns. Any foes with vision, which would be most delvers, that faced off against her would have to keep their minds steeled against the hypnotic effect lest they be left defenseless until the effect was broken.
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Each of the eight lobes had a small cluster of crystalline 'nerves' that acted as secondary cores for Dhamini's primary crystal brain. This meant that each lobe could control all of its tendrils independently while being coordinated by the primary brain.
And there were a lot of tendrils to control. Between Kazue's boon and how tough people had to be to make it this far down the combat path, Mordecai felt free to be thorough. The tendrils varied from thick, heavily barbed ones designed to wrap around a target and draw them in close to almost invisibly thin ones that could drift lightly with the currents until they brushed up against an unsuspecting body.
Some tendrils started off coiled and were intended to be shot like a tethered harpoon. Others carried rows of tiny spikes that were coiled instead, to be shot from a shorter range. Still others looked like feathery fronds and were intended to help channel Dhamini's powers, but they still came with tiny toxic barbs.
As for toxins, well, Dhamini was going to begin with only ones already found in other inhabitants, but she had the ability to ingest new toxins and add them to her repertoire permanently. Still, the selection currently available was enough to make her a dangerous opponent, though a rather one-note foe without more to back it up.
Which Mordecai did by imbuing her with elemental lightning powers, much as he had gifted Cephelia with water elemental powers. These were physically enhanced not only by Dhamini's frond-like tendrils by also by the tiny crystalline hairs covering her everywhere.
This allowed her to constantly and passively generate a weak but widely spread electrical field. She could feel even a tiny fluctuation in that field, giving her a rather detailed awareness of the world around her.
It not only allowed for rather precise aiming of her attacks and powers but enhanced one more ability set Mordecai was giving her. Dhamini was their first inhabitant to be given direct mental attack and control abilities, though they were limited to creatures whose biology included electricity in some manner.
So most elemental creatures, constructs, fully spiritual entities, and so on were immune to her mental powers, with the exception of her hypnotic eyes which were visually based instead. Many of those were immune to toxins as well, leaving her with lightning as her only weapon against such foes. None of her attacks were physically powerful, but that limitation was part of what let him concentrate so much of her potential into toxins, lightning, and mental abilities.
As for defenses, well, her crystal slime base still provided her with the same defense against physical blows as other crystal slimes, hardening against attacks briefly and locally while the rest of her remained malleable.
Dhamini could also break off individual lobes if needed to protect herself from an attack. The lobe would act independently for about ten minutes before its metabolism and limited awareness began to fade. Any separated lobes would eventually die if not reintegrated, which Dhamini preferred to do rather than slowly regenerate the lobe.
Her core could continue to function even with all eight lobes separated from it, but she would be greatly weakened in this state.
Mordecai's final touch for her combat abilities was to add the ability to float and fly in the air as easily as she floated and swam through the water. For out-of-combat abilities, he and Kazue had agreed to work toward all their zone bosses being able to interact with delvers as people, so Dhamini was also given the ability to take on a bipedal form. The result looked a little bit like a human wearing a living jellyfish hat and a jellyfish-inspired dress, but that was Dhamini's preference when Mordecai asked for input on shaping her form. It also caused her to fit in with the local pixies, who had taken up the habit of wearing some of the smaller jellyfish inhabitants as living hats.
Giving Dhamini the power of flight caused Mordecai to backtrack to the other jellyfish inhabitants and enable them with a similar ability.
As long as he was doing that, Mordecai decided to go back through the inhabitants for the ocean zone and add flight to several of the others as well. The brine dragons already had it as a secondary mode, but giving even limited flight abilities to their shark-type inhabitants made the skies an even more dangerous place.
This train of thought made Mordecai realize that there was a place for the feathered serpents in this zone as well. They wouldn't see a lot of combat, but there was room for a small nest of the strongest of them on the volcanic island on the far side of the ocean.
Now it was time for the third boss.
There were several possibilities still. A were-shark, a water-elemental dragon, and so many other ideas were floating around.
But in the end, Mordecai discarded the directly powerful options for a very different idea. He'd already been planning on introducing a special group of inhabitants for this zone, but making the leader of the group a zone boss and attaching his six underlings to his status, making them support and part of his power, was a perfect way to create something very different.
The group was comprised of ratlings with ship-handling expertise and a talent for ship-board fighting in even the roughest weather. Their names were Cashew, Cherry, Chocolate, Cobbler, Cranberry, Custard, and their leader, Cheese, also called The Big Cheese or Captain Cheese.
They were the seven pie-rats of the sea; and of the seven C's.
Kazue and Moriko had thrown pillows and cushions at him when he'd told them his idea.
Fuyuko had looked both pained and embarrassed, which he took as evidence of a job well done.
When Carmilla had found out, she had simply rolled her eyes and stalked away from him, though he was pretty certain he'd heard a muffled giggle after she'd turned away.
As for their special abilities, well, Mordecai did something relatively simple in concept. He intensified their nature, enhancing the concepts involved with being a rat. They were fast, agile, sneaky, smart, and most of all, lucky.
That last part was incredibly important, and Mordecai was deliberately calling upon his knowledge of Li to imbue them with the Shattered One's blessing. This wasn't something that was going to be immediately obvious if it was successful, so Mordecai backed up his plan by giving them each a holy symbol of Li, much like Fuyuko's.
The ratlings were also all made immune to harm from poisons of all sorts, though not to all effects. This meant that they could get drunk or otherwise intoxicated, but tying inebriation to a boost in luck and chaos was so easy in this scenario that it would have taken a bit of effort to prevent it from happening in a milder manner on its own. Plus they had to be able to sing, in high-pitched voices naturally.
Of course, pirates of any nature needed the right gear. Each of them came with a pair of cutlasses and a bandoleer full of four-barrel pistols. With their long tails that could wrap around objects to help keep them anchored, they did not always need a hand free on a moving ship and so could have two weapons in hand even during rough seas.
Naturally, all of these weapons were made of corrosion-proof variants of the hard metals that Mordecai had introduced into this zone. They were classified as potential rewards, and Mordecai set them to be enchanted with a random set of runes, with the runes being changed during every reset so long as the weapons were in the possession of the pie-rats. Even during the middle of combat if needed.
He also tasked Fuyuko with being the ratlings' teacher. While the pie-rats all outclassed her in combat ability just from being inhabitants and semi-bosses of a zone this dense in mana, the girl had much to teach them about being followers of Li.
Mordecai didn't leave his daughter to flounder with just her own knowledge, he made sure to give her access to every bit of lore that the dungeon had accumulated as well as Mordecai's previous personal knowledge. But assimilating and passing on that knowledge was going to be her responsibility, with a little help as needed. This would also act as training for Fuyuko, for one of the steps towards mastery was to relearn the basics by teaching another.
As for when and how they would get involved in the available routes, a lot of that depended upon the storylines Kazue was creating for this zone. They could just show up at the end of the combat path as a fight if needed, but they were going to mostly be involved in more complicated roles.
There were several adjustments that needed to be done with other inhabitants to accommodate all the aspects that the dungeon had acquired, but those were going to wait until after Kazue had finished with her section, as a simple matter of prioritization.