The twelfth proved to be a very accommodating floor. In that it was, in fact, a forest. Or a flooded jungle, if one were being precise.

Whatever the case, it was a floor filled to bursting with fertile soil and enough plant matter to quadruple my army's size every few steps.

So, I managed to do just that. While also managing to fit in a few experiments as soon as I'd descended the first few steps.

Yay!

On the other hand, it was also a floor with a particular theme. That theme being spiders.

Boo!

To make matter even worse, their numbers were endless.

At any given time, my neat firing lines would be assaulted by swarming grey grease-covered spiders as big as cats. Charging forward by the hundreds from three or four different flanking positions.

While larger brown spiders burst up from the ground like mushrooms to bite and skewer my rear guard with bladed legs and envenomed fangs.

While even larger white spiders jumped down from the high ceiling on freaking webbed parachutes and bit down on the pals I had manning the middle lines.

While even larger blue spiders literally teleported in. Bit and hugged one or two of my minions and then teleported out to enjoy them elsewhere.

At least the Venomlings and the few specimens I'd kept as melee fighters saw some action now. Though they tended to be slower and clumsier than the monsters they were facing, and therefore lasted about as long as fruit flies in any given skirmish.

And the fun didn't stop there.

In the span of twenty sodding minutes we were faced with red spiders that spat sticky, flammable webs that burst into small fireballs upon making contact with any surface. Purple spiders that shot out webs which they electrified mid-flight. Green spiders whose webs were coated in a corrosive substance which I very much suspected was stomach acid.

There was even one kind of spider that was all dark orange, which I was sure took a steamy dump in front of me before running away. The smell was so abhorrent that I actually doubled over and vomited everything I had in my stomach. My body more or less paralyzed while another ambush raged on all around us.

I ended up running away and using my magic to have my last purebred sunflower brute examine it for me.

Turns out, it wasn't a steamy pile of poo, but a ball of webbing with some chemical inside of it that spewed out pheromones.

How very clever.

Then I had to deal with the Yellow spiders that, when struck, burst open into smaller swarms of yellow spider, which themselves exploded into even smaller swarms about the size of a human toe. Before burrowing into the skins of my minions and trying the same thing on me.

And as if those ones weren't bad enough, I was soon dealing with pink spiders that tried the same trick the big-eyed psychic fish had tried earlier. Only these ones made me think their webs were an open bath or a sumptuous-looking meal.

There were spiders that crawled and spiders that swam. Spiders that flew and spider that ran. Spiders that hid and spiders that planned.

Those last two were actually one and the same in the case of a particularly annoying species. One that preferred to sit back while all the others attacked from every which way at the same time. Always preferring to retreat rather than fight head-on. With the intention of laying down a neat little trap that my minions would inevitably wander into whilst they were attacked by all the other kinds of spiders.

The bloody things were black as night, as big as elephants and as quiet as owls mid-flight. Somehow managing to skitter across two dozen treetops with legs that were half as thick as the freaking trunks without disturbing any of the leaves or making any sort of sound.

They hunted by coming together in groups and laying down traps in the form of webbing. Much like others did. Only, their webbing was actually, literally invisible. And strong enough that two of my Cannonlings had found themselves hopelessly trapped within a single well-placed web. Their bulk doing nothing but entangling them further.

The fact that they were the first monsters I'd found that could shrug off green-bean bullets didn't help matter either.

Now, my first instinct after losing half of my new shiny army to spiderwebs was to burn the entire jungle down. I had plenty of Torchers after all and more Napalmlings than I knew what to do with. It was an intuitive solution. One that had the added benefit of being relatively swift and low-effort.

Best of all, it would be satisfying to watch all those dirty cheating bastards burn while I stood over to the side. Giggling like a maniac.

However, I wasn't here to descend as fast as possible. Nor was I here to get a sense of satisfaction after dismantling an ecosystem. I was here to get stronger and the spiders' strategy, as simple as it was, had proven to be highly efficient at stopping a superior force in its tracks.

Moreover, there was material to work with and I had plenty of time on my hands.

So, I sat right down and began to [Assimilate] a patch of webbing with one hand, while creating new and interesting creatures with the other.

The first new batch I gave life to were the promising Sniperling variants. I made these new batches with three worms each. Tucked away in sacs adjacent to their firing arms. I also gave them another pair of arms, complete with scything, mantis-like claws which were coated in the slime from the previous floor. My reasoning being that I needed another melee unit that wasn't as lanky and slow as the sunflower brutes while also no being as flimsy as the rose goblins or their improved cousins, the Venomlings.

Also, I couldn't make the creatures themselves produce the worms like they did the seeds, so I figured I had to make up for the low ammunition.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

I called them, Body-snatchers and moved on.

For my next trick, I decided I needed something to act as a deterrent for the constant barrage of ambushes and something to clear a path for the rest of the horde to pass through.

At first, I was leaning towards building off the sunflower brute template again, given how effective the Shotgunlings had been at crowd control. However, I decided against it, due to the simple fact that the jungle had very few open spaces where they could excel and most of the losses we'd suffered to the coward spiders had come from their number.

Big and bulky had their place and that place wasn't here.

Instead, I went with the tulip lamia template and created a creature that was twice as long as the Torchers and the Shockers, while retaining a very lithe body. Their tails were filled with the bacterial colonies and their arms were built to function like water guns. Or, once they flexed their muscles a little, pressurized water hoses.

I called them Corroders and moved on.

The next idea I toyed with was a unit that could create cloud coverage over an area. Letting loose the same bacterial slime the pixie had used in gaseous form.

Alas, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the tulip templates to work with this idea. The storage organs could only accommodate one or the other. If I made the model too big then it would have the same problem as the Cannonlings. Getting stuck all over the place and not being able to navigate the tight corners of the jungle quite as well.

That was when I recalled the Slime-o-morph I'd created to act as a punching bag. It had insides that were mostly made of liquids and it moved about using flexible muscle growths that it could shift about when needed. At the same time, it could also mold itself into just about any shape. Including narrow, tubular ones. As Ramji had found out the hard way.

What if I dedicated myself to creating something similar, like a water balloon, but filled with the colonies of corrosive bacteria? It would be vulnerable to penetrating attacks. At least more so than the tulips, what with it not having a solid bone structure or bark-like armor atop its skin and it being one large balloon. But the slime-o-morph had proven that such attacks weren't necessarily a critical error in design. The tissues I'd created for my previous experiment were already resistant to corrosion, given the snail goo I'd placed inside of it hadn't resulted in any harm.

As a matter of fact, I could make it so that the outer skin was constantly covered in the corrosive slime. Kind of like an extra barrier to guard against popping. With the right combination of bacteria and muscle, I might even be able to get the goo to act as a sort of, glue. In order to stem the outflow of liquids in case of a piercing wound. Now that I thought about it, combining the corrosive slime with the snail slime I'd previously used could result in just such a compound. If not, then I was absorbing a powerful glue right now, courtesy of the spiders.

I looked down at my other hand. Noting how it had worked its way through the web.

Then I smiled.

----------------------------------------

"HAHAHAHAAHAHA!! Flee! Fly you fools! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! MY ARMY IS UNSTOPPABLE!!!"

I roared. As three Siege Slimes tore their way through the jungle. The webs dissolving alongside anything else the aerosolized slime came into contact with. All while my own minions were able to pass through without issue. Thanks to me having the foresight to develop them further and coat all of them in a thin bacterial layer of their own.

Yes.

I totally didn't lose most of my forces due to my own incompetence and had to re-grow new ones from scratch. I just, phased out the old guys, who were really lagging behind the monsters in terms of stats and overall performance, and allowed the new and improved models to roll off the soil like new tanks coming out of a factory.

Yes.

I am not an idiot. This was totally planned.

And I'll dissolve anyone who says otherwise.

In all seriousness, the whole thing was really embarrassing and led to me spending a little more time on the floor. During my break, I created another creature. This time inspired by the thrice-dammed spiders.

In essence, it was more or less the same as my drones. A spider, scorpion thingy with a stinger and grasping appendages in front and claws to dig the ground and everything. Only these ones were much, much larger. Easily the biggest thing I'd created so far. Looking at them now, I'd say they were about one and a half time the size of a bull elephant. Significantly bigger than the ambush spiders had been. Like the ambush spiders, I gave them the ability to spin their own webs, as well as specialized membranes on their bodies to go up and down those webs without getting stuck. Like the ambush spiders, I made sure they were smart enough to take advantage of their huge bodies so that they weren't just big brutes I could throw out in droves to get minced by whatever monster showed up on the next floor. I did this by getting all up on their insides and growing a much, much more complex brain structure on each specimen. That, and I replaced the stingers my drones had with parasitic worm rifles. Ones many times more powerful than the versions my sleeker Sniperling variants had.

I called them Infector Spiders and moved on to my next issue. That was, a severe lack of manpower.

Important and useful as the upgrades had been, the fact remained that I only had about 25% of my magic remaining and that was with me taking several breaks to digest each and every spider species on the floor.

My new armies might be deadlier and more impressive, but I was starting to think this wasn't going to cut it on the next floor unless I lucked out in regards to the kinds of enemies I'd be fighting.

No.

This was the deepest I had ever gone.

If I wanted to keep killing monsters and growing at this rate, I'd need to have an overwhelming numerical superiority.

"Come to think of it, is this the deepest I've ever gone?"

Looking at it from a depth perspective, it certainly seemed that way. After all, I was now on the 12th and the deepest I recall going before was the 6th floor of the Dunstonberry Dungeon. On the other hand, I didn't know if that really counted, as the first 7 of those floors had belonged to my own pseudo-Dungeon and not the Dungeon proper. In that case, this would have been the equivalent of the 5th floor? Then again, that made no sense whatsoever given the difficulty. The Rippers were nowhere near as dangerous as the amethyst golem had been. Not to mention the fact that my older, far weaker green-beans had annihilated everything on the 4th floor back then and even coach Russell had admitted they'd been such a pest on lower floors that he'd had to get serious. With unimpressive results.

I decided to try and use [Terraforming] again. To connect my mind with the Dungeon for a moment and see if I could get this floor to spew out my own creatures, as I'd managed back in Dunstonberry.

The flow felt familiar as soon as I tried it. My mind drifting away into the soil and the trees and the very waters of the jungle. I felt that oneness again. Breathing as the life inside the floor breathed. Feeling as the very walls did.

It was...

Was...

"Huh?" I said aloud. My mind going much farther than it had back then.

"This isn't how the skill works. Is it because of the stats? No. That doesn't make sense. They've grown, sure. But they haven't grown this much. Not enough to explain these changes."

I felt my senses extending towards the surface. Seeping into the walls and burrowing inside them as termites would inside a wooden foundation.

Then I felt my mind stretching. Further and further until the act became almost painful.

I felt all the floors I had crossed so far, as well as the seven floors of my pseudo-Dungeon. They were changing, just like the ones belonging to the real deal. Growing wider and wider. The roots sinking further into the earth until they made up the very walls and support columns of the first ten floors, instead of just the ones I'd designed.

Then, I noted the roots taking in more magic. Saw the walls birthing my original sunflower brutes and rose goblins and tulip lamias.

I felt a connection to the whole structure and threw up as a torrent of magic was violently sucked away from me. My vision blurring as the entire world seemed to spin.

And then, the new patterns I'd created started to be born as well. All connected to me, as the regular troops had been. All thirsty for blood.

The last thing I witnessed, was the 12th floor twisting around itself. The trees growing eyes and fanged mouths. All their visages resembling mine own.

Then I felt the strength leaving my legs, and the world went black.