“It’s getting late…” I say after checking the clock. “I should finish this up and leave.”
It’s a good thing that I’ve almost finished here. Are you curious about what I did? If so, allow me to illuminate your pathetic, inferior minds with my wisdom.
First, the room. As you all know, where you test something, the testing area should be isolated from external interference. This is the only way to be sure that the success or failure experiment doesn’t rely on unexpected variables. Any mad scientist who deserves to be called like that knows this.
So, of course, the room I’ve created is isolated from the rest of the dungeon. The entrance door is one of those heavy ones in biohazard laboratories, and once you step inside, there’s a small hall that leads to a big room, where the testing takes place. This hall is empty, but half the wall between the two has been replaced by glass, so you can see what’s inside.
…I say you can see inside, but in fact, it’s too dark to see what’s inside. The lights won’t turn on until a player walks in.
Then, right next to the door leading to the experimental room, there’s a sign with the text ‘Experimental subject #∞’.
Why infinity instead of a number? Well… it’s kind of a clue of what’s to come.
Under the label, there’s a notepad with several instructions on how to proceed with the experiment. I won’t go into too much detail right now, you just need to know that they’re the steps the players must take to unlock the exit door once they’ve stepped inside.
And yes, as soon as the experiment starts, both doors, the one leading to the exit and the one between the hall and the experiment room, will be locked. They will remain like that until the experiment ends with a success… or everyone inside dies, whatever happens first.
Players will be able to leave or enter the entry hall, but not the experiment room.
“Hahaha! Imagine being late to the party and having to watch your party members despair while not being able to help them in any way.”
I won’t bore you with unnecessary details and move on to explain the experiment.
After crossing the door, the players will have to go down a few stairs. This is important because the height difference is necessary to ensure the whole experiment can be observed from outside the room, thanks to the glass wall.
The room below is made out of metal. It consists of a difficult but straightforward path, with narrow walls barely wide enough for two players to walk side by side. And the whole thing is filled with stuff strewn everywhere. Remnants of previous experiments and exploded traps, body parts in containers, machines and laboratory equipment… basically, anything you could find in a mad scientist’s lair. This is to create chaos but also for another more important thing, I’ll tell you right now.
Oh, and everything is open from above, to ensure the experiment can be observed from the other room.
I know that, in other circumstances, this can be a bad idea because players can cheat with certain skills… but it doesn’t matter here. The ‘puzzle’ I created can’t be solved by cheating like that.
Finally, sitting on top of a metal platform placed right next to the end of the stairs lays the most important element of the experiment: experimental subject #∞. Or as I like to call it: the Infinity Cat.
The cat looks exactly like a sphynx cat. Skinny, hairless, big ears and alien-like eyes. I’m sure you know which ones I’m talking about. But this one looks sick.
No, not sick but… corrupted? Decomposing? However you want to call it, the cat is covered by a slimy substance that drips over its body, forming droplets of murky green and brown tones.
“It wouldn’t be an experiment if there wasn’t a test subject, right?”
Anyway. I’ll explain the experiment.
The experiment goes like this: the cat must reach the other end of the room, by following the path, alive. Simple, right? Well… no. There’s a caveat. A HUGE caveat.
“Right, right… you wouldn’t expect anything I created to be so simple, right? Hahaha!”
The cat, as its name implies, has the potential to reach the infinite. Well, not exactly infinite, but… very close. As for what I mean by that, it’s the numbers.
“Numbers? What numbers…?” I make a stupid voice, mocking myself. “Ah! You mean the numbers!”
Yeah… I’m sure this didn’t help at all. Take a look at this status screen for now. In particular, take a special look at the skills, the rest is more or less irrelevant.
Infinity Cat (Lv 2) HP 319 (290) STA 24 (22) SOU 24 (22) EP 220 (200) MP 242 (220) STR 17 (16) CON 26 (24) AGI 14 (13) SPI 23 (21) WIL 12 (11) DEX 3 (3) SPD 5 INT 3 COM 1 Skills
Triggered: Hyperallergenic, Nine Lives (Innate), Split (Innate). Passive: Fragile, Eternal Pain (Innate).
As you can see, a few of the skills are familiar, while the others sound… Catastrophic? Horrible?
Nine Lives (Innate triggered skill) You have nine lives. The first eight times you would die, instead recover all the missing HP. Skills that trigger on death don’t trigger at the same time as this skill.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Do you remember those nasty cats that wouldn’t die regardless of how many times we attacked them? Those Sacred Cats from my sister’s dungeon? If you do, congratulations. If you don’t… there’s nothing I can do.
Anyway, Nine Lives is the innate skill they have. As you can see, it’s a stupidly overpowered skill that makes me salivate just to think of how many ways you can abuse it. But I’ll refrain from doing anything stupid (for now) and not create any unkillable monster. I don’t want that for my dungeon.
“Just imagine the possibilities…”
Noo! Stop! You shouldn’t think of something you’ll regret later!
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just…”
Stooooooooop!
Khm! So, where was I…? Ah, yes. The cat’s skills. The other innate skill, Split, is from the Splitting Slime. As you know, when they take a certain amount of damage, they split up into smaller and weaker copies of the same unit.
Split (Innate triggered skill) When you take more than 10% of the maximum HP as damage from a single source and survive, you split into two identical, smaller units with 50% of your base stats. SPD, INT, and COM don’t get affected.
“But when you mix the two… Fufufu! Hahaha!”
…you end with a monster that continuously revives and divides into more and more copies of itself. Those copies can revive too, inheriting the remaining lives. And when they take damage… Bam! More monsters!
I tried to calculate the maximum amount of copies it’s theoretically possible to achieve by adding the two skills together and… let’s say that I stopped counting at the third revival. The number was way too big.
“This is why it’s called the Infinity Cat! Because its potential, as well as the number of times it can divide, are nearly infinite!”
Of course, the cat will grow weaker the more it divides, up to the point that all its stats except for Speed and Intelligence will be one, but who cares? Its strength is completely irrelevant to this experiment. The other two skills I gave it are precisely to make it die faster, ensuring that it divides even more easily than normal! When paired with Eternal Pain, they almost guarantee the Infinity Cat takes no more, but also not less, than 10% of its HP as damage per second, speeding up the division significantly.
Fragile (Passive skill) All damage you take is doubled.
Hyperallergenic (Triggered skill) You take (5 + 0,05 * Max HP) damage as HP loss every second when touching another unit. This damage increases by the same amount for each extra second you remain in contact.
Those are horrible skills. Skills only demented players, or those with an extremely unusual build would ever take.
But DMA is a game where, sometimes, you don’t want your monsters to live for long, or where you simply add skills for roleplay purposes. And they’re perfect for the Infinity Cat, so I picked both.
Furthermore, the room is filled with traps. But those traps aren’t designed for players, no. They’re designed for the cat. The poisoned arrows are shot below the height of a human’s knees, for example.
So let’s recapitulate. The objective of this experiment is to bring the Infinity Cat, or Experimental subject #∞, as the invaders will know it, to the other end of the room.
But then… when it splits, doesn’t it make the task easier? You just have to bring one of the copies to the end and that’s all…
“Tsk, tsk, tsk! Naive! How naive!”
The rule is clear: to bring Experimental subject #∞ to the end. This means the players must bring all the split-up clones to the end to complete it. The dead ones won’t count towards the goal, but thanks to the Nine Lives, it’ll be hard for any of them to be killed completely. So that’s not a shortcut they can take without considering the consequences.
As a fail-safe, there’s the condition that if all the cats are dead, the exit opens too. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t allow me to create this ‘puzzle room’.
But that’s also very hard, as the multiple obstacles littering the floors aren’t there just for decoration but also as hiding places. As soon as the players attack one of the cats, all of the nearby cats will immediately hide away.
If the players leave the cat to its own devices, it’ll inevitably run into some of the traps, split up, and the task will become extremely difficult. They can’t grab the cat and run, either, as it’ll start taking damage and start splitting. If they try to kill the cats, they’ll start running away and hiding, making the task extremely bothersome.
It’s a lose-lose-lose situation. Whatever they do, they’re in for a lot of pain and headaches.
“The only relatively safe thing the players can do is protect the cat from any traps, effectively taking the damage themselves. They must also be ready to grab the cat for one or two seconds maximum to pass through those traps that affect the floor. But will they be so lucky? Hahaha! I’m looking forward to seeing the player’s reactions.”
Someone would say this isn’t the right place to keep a cat safe, and I’d certainly agree. But that’s kind of the point, don’t you agree?
Ah, I told you to ignore the cat’s stats, since they’re irrelevant for the experiment. But in case you have and are curious, the cat is extremely weak for how much cp it costs to create it.
This unit cost me 700 cp to create, and it’s nowhere close to the stats of my other 700 cp units. This is because the Sacred Cat is a unit that costs 500 cp but has worse stats than the Stitched. Almost all of the Sacred Cat’s stats come from the Splitting Slime.
Just to give you an example, the Minitaur Queen cost 740 cp only. And the stat difference is so huge that it could fight a hundred Infinity Cats at the same time and emerge victorious.
But they can’t be compared, as their purposes are completely different.
“And finished!” I press the save button. From now on, any player who invades my dungeon will be able to come here. “Now I can move to the next task… oh, no! It’s too late. Tomorrow, then.”
Who will be the first to come? I must save the replay to watch later… Fufufu! Hahaha!
image [https://i.imgur.com/ZGSK4Pl.png]
“Of course, you can’t! Are you crazy!? When in the wrong hands, the Nine Lives skill is so broken that any PvP match could be won just because you have it. There’s no way the game devs would allow you to use a monster with that skill in a PvP match. This is also true for other skills assigned to units with special thought because of their power.
In the case of Nine Lives that you’ve asked me, the game devs balanced it by giving it to a weak-ass unit that costs significantly more than any other unit with a similar stat line.
I believe the Sacred Cat’s cp cost is around 500 cp, but it has the same stats as a basic unit… so it costs over ten times extra just to get the extra revivals. This makes it generally not worth the investment.
You can still build an interesting unit using them, but it won’t break the game; so it’s fine if a player from the Divine Blood faction uses a Sacred Cat in PvP.
On the contrary, if you were allowed to give this skill to any unit, it’d certainly break any PvP match. Can you imagine giving it to a dragon? A dragon with nine lives, which by the way is stronger than simply getting nine times the amount of maximum HP, would be unstoppable.
You can still use it on your dungeon as you please, it’s just that you aren’t allowed to bring any monster with Nine Lives into a PvP match. If you mess up your dungeon by adding an impossible monster, it’s your fault, and it’s up to you to fix it… but PvP should remain balanced.
Oh, by the way, are you curious about what other skills are banned for PvP for your faction but are allowed for the original faction? I’m sure you won’t regret listening to me for a while longer! Hahaha!
…”
- Later on, Andreu found out about the Nine Lives skill in PvP thanks to one of Ricard’s ‘knowledge drilling’ sessions. Although he wanted to know and was grateful for his explanation, it doesn’t mean he didn’t regret asking.