A Lich's Guide to Dungeon Mastery

First of all, I pushed away all thoughts of making something horrific. That could come later. My first focus was to make a humanoid rabbit that was still super cute and would catch people off-guard.

I used what I’d done with Fenrir as a base, making similar alterations, though a few were very different for obvious reasons. The bones needed a significant amount of strengthening, especially once I increased the density of muscle to make the boss look like he lifted consistently. Rabbit muscles were already pretty powerful, but with this alteration, he was absolutely incredible in terms of strength and power.

That was before I started weaving magic into his body. Obviously, I stuffed him chock-full of Forbodum, but that wasn’t where it ended. Since the body I’d made wasn’t really alive yet, and had no consciousness to fight the magic, I was able to pack Power- and Speed-related Conceptium into the matter that made up this boss monster, boosting him to even greater levels.

By the end, I had a human-height rabbit that retained all of his rabbity looks while still having internals that resembled those of a human, granting him the ability to speak, wear armor, and use weapons.

To make him match up with the Caerbalope namesake a bit better, I also bleached his fur white and turned his eyes a bright, vibrant red.

Since my newest creation was already an absolute unit under all of his fluff, I just had to make him a suitable weapon, and it was just too easy.

What do rabbits like? Well, carrots of course. So why not just give him a massive carrot?

I chuckled madly to myself as I constructed a person-sized, carrot-shaped bludgeoning weapon out of pure diamond. Now, you’re probably thinking that making it out of diamonds is weird when I could’ve picked a metal that would’ve been more resistant to shattering, but you’re missing the point. The weapon weighed almost 500 pounds, also known as 1,094,400 carats.

I could also most likely use some inscriptions and Absiete to give him the ability to decrease his carrot’s weight while he was moving and winding up his swings, but all of that would have to wait until I finalized his mind and I found out how many layers I could stack into his weapon.

Actually, in regards to getting him up and moving, it would probably be a good idea to animate him and shove a consciousness in there so I wouldn’t be left waiting around for him.

I spent a long moment searching my own memories for what I should give him on top of all of the memories pertaining to his location and the intricacies of the maze floors, but eventually just decided to give him memories of all the fighting movies I’d watched over the years, as well as some of the cooler attack descriptions I’d heard from my years of D&D. Hopefully, with all of my fighting knowledge, he’d be able to at least have some idea of what to do, in spite of my own lacking experience in the area.

I created a Wisp, simultaneously forming a link between myself and the ball of energy, sending over the Mentum and memories needed to keep the bond steady and grant him some starting intelligence. Eventually, I’d passed over everything I thought he’d need and closed off our connection.

Then I got to work on his armor. Fenrir hadn’t needed any magical gear other than his book, partly because he was meant to be a spellcaster and partly because he could just enchant stuff himself if he wanted to, but this rabbit was a different case entirely.

As a melee fighter, this creature would need to be powerful and heavily armed, which meant that a bunch of magical equipment was needed to maximize his efficacy. What’s more than that is that, unlike other bosses, he wasn’t actually meant to die. Sure, it was possible, but I wanted people to need to escape him. That meant that he needed to not only be utterly devastating in close-quarters, but also very hard to kill.

I chose to make the armor out of graphene. Now, I had no clue how to actually make carbon fiber, but I knew roughly what it was, so a bit of experimentation and intensive studying with my Encompassing Knowledge helped me figure it out.

Honestly, it wasn’t all that difficult. A single sheet of carbon atoms was Mentum-intensive to form and observe, but outside of draining all of my energy as a consequence of working with it, I could manage it just fine.

Now, from what I remembered, graphene was only really strong when you layered it up right. In fact, that was what made it into carbon fiber. It was incredibly resistant to tearing apart, but that was just in one direction. If you just put a bunch of layers down that faced in the same direction, it would be weaker to damage that came from its side.

In other words, I had to weave the layers of carbon together. Luckily, I had some experience with this from the stitching philosophy of spatial magic, though that didn’t reduce the intensive drain from affecting change on such a small scale. What was even more annoying was that I knew I’d need to remake Azrael’s armor out of the stuff as well.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Once the first layer of graphene was made, the rest became easier to form, and once the first set of armor was created, I had it down to a science. I only made this beastie a half-set, foregoing a few pieces for aesthetic.

Bunny boy ended up with a chestplate, obviously, as well as pauldrons, bracers, cuisses, and greaves, protecting the shoulders, forearms, upper legs, and lower legs, respectively. To pair with it, I formed a layer of blue-tinted hide for him to wear under the armor, though it was effectively just jeans and a t-shirt– a lot of his body would be exposed, but I felt I could count on him to dodge attacks or just be strong enough to shrug them off.

Side note: I thought aluminum was really light, but apparently not. The entire set of graphene armor weighed about eight pounds, and I knew that this rabbit would be at least as strong as Azrael, though I probably wouldn’t be giving it runescript to mimic her weight-reduction ability. Even still, I’d be able to layer this material– oft heralded as the strongest on Earth– on top of itself at least ten times before it got to be too unwieldy for him.

Luckily, I didn't have to wait too long to find out, as he woke up shortly after I finished the armor.

The rabbit-man’s nose twitched rapidly and his eyes darted open. Before I even got the chance to say anything, he’d hopped into the air from a lying position, done a backflip, and landed in a kneel before me.

“Creator,” he spoke in a hissing but respectful voice.

I nodded in appreciation of the scene. It appears that giving him so much knowledge of super hero moves had given him a sense for dramatics.

That should make him pretty fun to watch fight.

I waved him closer with a boney hand. “Come here, I need to have you test this armor. I haven’t come up with a name for you yet, so you’ll have to spend some time considering that for yourself.”

His rabbit head twitched up and down, ears flopping slightly. It was… kinda cute? From an objective standpoint, of course.

I spent a few minutes strapping him into his gear and showing him how to take it off, in case he ever got tired of wearing it. As an undead creation that was maintained by my magic, it wasn’t like he’d ever sweat, chafe, or rot inside his armor, but there was always the chance that he wanted to take a day off and it would get in the way of that.

I wasn’t a taskmaster. Uban took naps all the time, and Fenrir had his little… hobby. They were intelligent, just like me or Azrael, and so they deserved an amount of respect and consideration. They were sorta like my kids, too, if children were formed from magic as adults and with way too much respect for you.

Anyways, once the gear was stacked on, I started forming more layers of it within spatial folds, linking them together in the same way that I’d done with Azrael’s armor.

I told the rabbit-man to just let me know when things got too heavy for him to move around comfortably, and at eighteen stacks of armor, he looked at me and said, “That feels about right.” He then stomped a foot into the floor and leapt ten feet into the air from a complete standstill. It didn’t even look like he’d been trying.

In case you forgot, a single stack of his armor weighed about eight pounds, which was extremely light for armor, but was still an amount that could, theoretically, weigh someone down a bit. Eighteen stacks of that would mean that the rabbit-man’s armor currently weighed one hundred and forty-four pounds. The old me probably couldn’t have jumped at all while carrying that much weight. He couldn’t jump nearly that much while carrying his weapon, though, so I suppose he did have some limits after all. In fact, while he could still somewhat use his weapon, it was slow and cumbersome, which was something I’d need to fix.

The next step was enchantments, and for that I wanted to focus on his weapon first, both to fix the weight issue and for another reason. His armor was obviously already very powerful, and I did have some ideas for it, but I felt that I should keep it rather generic. The weapon, on the other hand, was something that I felt should invoke fear in the hearts of onlookers, and currently, it wasn’t really doing that. Now, that might be because it’s just a massive diamond carrot, but… whatever. Too late to change that.

Surprisingly, my newest creation was actually full of ideas on what to do with the weapon. Then again… I was probably really underestimating the utility of having a creature whose entire foundation of knowledge and thought process revolved around a certain aspect of myself.

While I was normally all over the place, overlooked details, and had trouble focusing on any one thing at a time, having a creature who knew one subject and only that one subject was a very interesting thing. If I were to give a wisp all of my mathematical knowledge, and nothing else then all that wisp would think of is math. They’d be able to rapidly come up with theories that I’d never imagine on my own, and would be able to do equations much faster than myself, since it’s all they’d ever think of.

On a similar note, if I made wisps with all my knowledge of decoration, dungeon building, and design– and especially game design– they would probably be able to map out floors much more efficiently and with greater detail than myself.

It was a thing to consider when making the rest of my floors. Perhaps there was a better way to do it?

In any case, the majority of the boss’ ideas were centered around horror themes, as he apparently understood his role on the 24th floor.

The first thing the rabbit wanted to add was rather… gorey. Normally, a person’s innate magic would prevent direct manipulation of their body. You could, of course, overwhelm them with your own power, but that was… well, difficult, intrusive, and in my opinion, not very fair.

When a person died, and their magic was released into the world as death energy– not to be confused with Necrosis, which was Death energy with a capital D– their body would no longer have that protection. That meant their bodies would be completely vulnerable to just about any effect we could come up with.

My rabbit’s idea was this: When someone in the maze dies, their death energy and flesh should be drawn towards his weapon.

Now, the practical effect of this would be rather limited, but that’s why I was going to add in some extra Ordinances to give it some more potency. Even without all of that, though, this was a potent psychological weapon. Imagine, you’re running through a maze, attempting to escape the Leporid avatar of death that was my new monster. Your friend loses his traction, tripping and falling prone. He’s too slow to get up, and his body– armor and all– crumples beneath the might of the boss monster.

Instead of simply dying, your friend becomes another part of the monstrosity’s club, his body contorting around it, flesh leaking through the cracks of his armor to join with it.

That also gave me the idea to recolor the diamond used to form said club. Instead of having it be clear with frosted lines all across it, I turned it red.

Now, by this point I had quite the selection of materials contained inside my influence, including a large variety of diamonds. A few of those diamonds– just a few, mind you, as it seemed they were very rare– were red. Now, this wasn’t actually any sort of chemical difference from normal diamonds. Red diamonds were also just carbon, but they had a structural “deformity” on their surfaces that made them refract red light better.

Or something like that. I didn’t spend too much time looking into it, just copied the phenomenon and moved on with my life.

The plan of having my new boss use carnage as a resource also inspired his name– Carnic. It wasn’t super original, since he’d basically just torn a word in half and slapped “-ic” at the end, but at least he’d taken it from the English language, so it sounded unique in Glyphic.

Eventually, Carnic and I finished working on the plans for his gear and aesthetic and I teleported him down into the maze where he’d be spending the majority of his time from now on. I observed momentarily, and found that he was taking to it like a fish to water, hopping around and exploring his new territory with gusto.

Satisfied that my new boss would enjoy his domain for the time being, I turned my attention to the gear that I’d had him leave with me. The first thing to work on was the diamond club. A quick teleport to Azrael’s location and an attempt at puppy eyesockets was all it took to get her to agree to fork over a portion of her magic for the creation of an Absiete energy crystal, which I turned into a sort of pommel for the massive club.

A simple Ordinance rune, linked to an Observe rune that would detect when the club was being lifted into the air by a Process rune, and the club would shed 80% of its weight, going from 500 pounds to a “mere” 100. It was costly, though, and I’d need to find a way to generate Absiete without Azrael’s help, otherwise she’d be needing to recharge the gem all the time.

That was a problem for future Seif, though.

I also put a number of Forbodum gems inside the club, linking them to Ordinance runes that would increase the durability of the weapon, and I also spent some time working on the internals.

Natural diamonds were formed with cleavage planes– points that could cause them to shatter– and by simply copying the designs of diamonds I’d held in my domain, I’d replicated that. I was able to fix it by reinforcing those planes and bringing them up to the level of the surrounding diamond.

Essentially, I removed the weapon’s biggest weaknesses, those being its weight and potential to shatter.

Once that was done, I spent some time considering how to work on the plans Carnic had come up with, where the weapon would absorb dead flesh and energy. That was… harder. Of course, I could simply put an Ordinance rune on there and tell it to wrap loose flesh around the club, but that was… too simple. All that would really do is increase the mass of the already-huge club by a bit. Again, it was good for the shock factor alone, but there was more potential here.

The first effect I thought of was to necrotize the flesh that it was wrapped in, but that wouldn’t actually matter because the only way that would actually hurt someone is if their skin broke and the weapon hit them without them dying.

Carnic was meant to be overpowered, so if someone got hit and wasn’t already dead or dying, it was a problem.

The second thing I thought of wasn’t really an offensive function, but more of a utility one. Carnic was meant to be very powerful and difficult to kill, yes, but there was always the off chance that someone managed to get a good hit in. If that happened, it would slightly mess up the apparent invulnerability of the rabbit, so I came up with a way for Carnic to heal himself.

It was a lifesteal mechanic that would convert some of the mashed flesh and blood into Necrotic energy. It was sorta similar to an inverted Create Undead, but only in function. In actual design, the way that this would work was by using Necrosis’ ability to decay and rot organic matter away, producing more of itself, except this process would be greatly accelerated by an Inscription function I’d created.

One issue with the concept of using Necrosis in this way was that I didn’t actually have Necrosis. I had Forbodum, and the magic of Forbidden Knowledge was a bit less death-centric. Instead, I had to use an Ordinance rune to apply a specific Intent to it– that is, it would tell the Forbodum to consume flesh and convert it into itself.

The energy was surprisingly happy to do this, which had me a bit stumped at first. I’d initially believed that the process would be wasteful and probably consume more than it was worth, but it was actually pretty efficient. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that the energy of Forbidden Knowledge– an affinity that had driven many mad in the pursuit of research– would have no conceptual issue with sacrificing the flesh of man to create more of itself.

It really just makes sense. Creatures that used Forbidden Knowledge were often killed trying to create more Forbidden Knowledge, sacrificing themselves for their cause. This inscription encouraged people to kill creatures using Forbidden Knowledge energy to convert them into more Forbidden Knowledge energy. There was definitely some overlap somewhere in there.

Anyways, after the energy was converted, it just kinda… sat there. That wasn’t really what I wanted, so I drew up a quick Reference inscription to pair to all the different pieces of armor.

Each of the pieces started with an Observe rune that would watch over nearby Forbodum creations– including Carnic, his armor, and his weapon– and if they were damaged, the Observe rune would activate the attached Process rune until they were put back into their proper order.

That actually brought up an interesting subject. The Observe rune itself was somewhat useless. All it did was watch. Seriously, that was it. What the intent I provided it with actually did was tell it where to look or what to look for. Of course, that was a useful function, but I’d previously assumed that it would then output into the Process rune, which would just convert into a useable form for whatever effect rune I was using.

That was wrong. Apparently, the way that I was using the runes was just… wrong. My Process runes were underengineered and my Observe runes were overengineered. The Process rune was currently just trying to tell if the Observe rune was seeing anything at all, but it could just be looking for something specific within the Observe rune. I’d been using the Observe runes to look for something specific, but it would have been cheaper to just have them keep an eye on everything within a small area and use the Process rune to find things within the images sent over. It had been working out alright for me thus far, but it was only a matter of time until something broke, and beyond that, it was just wasteful. While the Observe runes cost basically nothing to keep running, it was still more efficient to use them with less specific instructions, and my Process runes were expending additional energy trying to figure out what the frick they were meant to do before they eventually got some bleedover Conceptium from the energy bleed off of the other runes.

Most inscription magic was stupid, just doing whatever it was told to do, but it turned out that Process runes were rather intelligent, like little clumps of brain cells. They could interpret large sets of data with better efficiency than even some of my living creations, and could dig deeper into the intent they were given, finding things like the caster’s motivations, understanding, ideals… it was pretty intense. I hadn’t realized that those things carried through my intent, and it was a bit concerning.

I wonder if there are mind readers out there, who can somehow get intent out of people and use it to read them?

Nope. Not gonna follow that train of thought. Refocus. What was I just doing?

Right. I was explaining why I went back and improved all of my previous inscriptions. That sounds time consuming, but it was actually pretty quick since I mostly used Reference runes and attached them to metal plates contained within extradimensional spaces. All I had to do was replace the metal plates.

I didn’t touch Azrael’s armor, though. I was already thinking of going back and making a 2.0 with carbon fiber, so messing with it now would just be a waste of time.

So, to get back to the original topic of the inscription I was making that would enable Carnic to have lifesteal, the Observe rune didn’t actually activate the Process rune– instead, the Process rune took the input from the Observe rune, parsed it, and decided whether or not the following Ordinance rune should be on or off.

First off, someone would get splattered. Then, their viscera would be converted into Forbodum, which would be siphoned into two Forbodum power sources contained within the weaponized carrot. The energy from one of them would be used to fuel the runes that healed Carnic, as well as the reinforcement and mending enchantments I left on his armor. The transformation itself would be fueled by the second Forbodum gem, which would do literally nothing else.

My thoughts were that Carnic should be a boss that ramped up in difficulty the more damage he dealt. I mean, obviously he was already designed to be escaped, rather than fought, but he should become even more unkillable and deadly when he was allowed to cause significant amounts of harm. If you let him splatter a member of your party with his massive diamond greatclub, he’d go from tough to invincible, and you’d just have to run, hide, and wait for the energy to burn itself out.

I wasn’t concerned that my new boss would get killed.

Rather, I was worried that he’d kill too many people. I had hopes that, someday, I would be free from my current pressures and could gather up enough people to be a real dungeon, rather than a Tower of Death. Killing everyone would be no fun.

With that in mind, I completely ripped all of the Forbodum out of the main gem. Carnic would have to put in a bit of work to get power for that.

I mentally indicated to my new boss that his gear was ready for pickup.

With that done, I tore open a portal to Azrael, internally wincing at the realization that it had been way too long since I’d checked up on her.