A Lich's Guide to Dungeon Mastery

I internally grinned at the orb hovering in front of me, then at the wand in my hand.

Well, okay, less “wand,” more control stick for my new weapons, but it was more fun to think of it as a magic stick.

I’d decided to call them Runic Detonators because, well, they exploded, and they used runes. Pretty simple. Not all that different from Enchanted Orbs, but more specific and cooler.

I was currently outside my tower, standing on a hill a few miles away from my tower and throwing my Detonators at stuff. So far, they’d proved themselves to be very effective at destruction.

I’d hooked them up to a large cache of energy gems back home, so I wasn’t concerned about them running out of power. I just waved my stick around and broke stuff.

The wand was actually a number of small, stubby cylinders stacked on top of each other and fused together. This allowed me to direct my intent to them all together, rather than needing to control a bunch of individual Runic Detonators.

That did mean that I needed to add a bit of vagueness to my instructions so they didn’t hit each other trying to hit the same exact spot on something, but that was fine.

Pointing my wand at a small patch of trees, I directed my Detonators to destroy it.

From a spot a few hundred feet above me a half-dozen spheres suddenly dropped, moving forward and downward at a high enough velocity to turn the tungsten orbs a bright red coloration from the sheer heat.

Like meteors falling from the heavens, the Runic Detonators came down on the small forests, crashing into the trees.

It would be completely imperceptible to anyone else, but as the Detonators came into contact with the trees, I knew that multiple calculations were ran through it to determine what the damage would look like. In that split second– so fast that not even I could really process it– the orbs decided on their course of action.

A wide semicircle of explosive purple energy erupted out of each of them, flattening the trees I’d pointed them at. The number of angles that they’d been sent from ensured that the destruction wasn’t secluded to a small patch of trees, but instead covered all of them, reducing them to a bunch of splinters.

I tried to grin– really, at this point I should just give myself some skin– as I watched the show of force.

“Yeah, I think these bad boys are about finished,” I muttered to myself, “I should really make some more of them, though.”

As good as the amount of force displayed was, I wanted my Runic Detonators to be able to handle entire armies with little more than a wave of my wand.

“Maybe I should also hook them up to Observe runes that would let them function on their own?” Currently, their only real weakness was me. If I wasn’t able to see what I wanted them to hit, they’d be blind too. If I could somehow set up observer orbs and somehow make a supercomputer out of a number of process runes, that could do… something.

For now, though, I had a wand and a bunch of Minute Meteors to chuck around.

I directed the Runic Detonators to gather up just above my head, and they zipped towards me, ignoring the existence of gravity to slowly hover around me.

Now… time to see if Azrael wanted to go fight some monsters with me.

Unsurprisingly, Azrael was ecstatic that I actually wanted to go do something fun for once.

She’d asked me to teleport us to the biggest, strongest thing in my domain, and I obliged, bringing us to a mountain-sized monstrosity that my Occult Sovereignty informed me was a “Bonehemoth.”

Honestly, the name fit.

It was like a thousand people had died in the same place and been stripped of all their flesh. Seriously, the thing was just a giant pile of bones.

As Azrael and I stepped out of the portal and onto a rocky outcropping on the side of a mountain, facing a small valley, a dozens of skulls turned to gaze at us, and a sound halfway between sandpaper against wood and a pained scream echoed through the mountains around us.

Azrael gaped at me. “There was something like this in your domain?? Why haven’t you already dealt with it?!”

I shrugged. “Look at him. You can’t honestly tell me you think that chonker can walk, do you?”

She frowned, but was unable to argue with my impeccable logic.

Honestly, I hadn’t really bothered to deal with any of the undead in my Occult Sovereignty unless they had domains of their own. Most of them couldn’t even put up a decent fight.

I chose not to tell Azrael that my domain currently covered almost all of the Dead Belt. I also chose not to tell her that this guy was just the largest Bonehemoth– the runner-up was more of a hill than a mountain.

Suddenly, there was movement from the pile of skeletons, and a chain of hands grabbing other hands swung out wildly, capped by a group of five arms that were placed together in the shape of yet another hand.

The massive arm swept towards us, and its makeshift hand reached out.

Azrael suddenly ceased to exist, and I was left to handle the attack alone.

Reaching out and pointing my wand at the Bonehemoth’s arm, I directed my Runic Detonators to pulverize it.

Shooting forward, my orbs moved with unerring accuracy towards different spots along the somewhat whip-like appendage.

The monstrosity roared out in a higher-pitched tone than it had used before as my Detonators suddenly converted their momentum into explosive force on contact with it.

The bones that had been used to form the limb– at least, the ones that weren’t reduced to rubble– flew off into the distance behind me, and I smiled. “Didn’t like that, did you?”

I frowned when I saw that the bones I hadn’t managed to reduce to powder were slowly shifting closer to the Bonehemoth.

I mean, it made sense, but seriously? Something that large gets to have regeneration? I swear, it’s almost like undead are overpowered or something. There was me, who was capable of crazy amounts of magic; Azrael was a magic super-assassin who could unironically one-punch me; the Cadavrrhizae had been a forest-wide abomination; and now there were Bonehemoths, which were titanic bone-constructs that could regenerate.

Inspecting the Bonehemoth’s body, I found that at the center and bottom of its form there was a single skull that was more magically dense than the rest of them– extremely magically dense. Not on my level, of course, since it didn’t seem to have an advanced energy type like I did, but for being a creature that lacked that? I wouldn’t have been shocked if the level 1 version of this thing had started out with an even greater innate buff to its strength than I, a lich, had.

I suppose the tradeoff was that its real body was literally just a skull, and that it probably couldn’t move around at all. Even if it could move, it would be slower than I would be if I just picked up my Repository and walked away from it.

Honestly, it was a wonder how this thing had gotten so large. It would be easy to spot it from miles away, with its size, and I doubted it had the reach to kill stuff and obtain bones for itself.

The only two possibilities I saw were that it had created the bones itself out of magic, or that it had come into being at a site where there were already a lot of corpses.

The bones didn’t seem to bear the marks of matter constructed out of energy– too many flaws and too much inconsistency– so that meant that this place had probably been a battlefield where a lot of people had died during the Kerenth-Yalten war that had caused the Dead Belt to expand so much.

In fact, examining the surroundings, I wouldn’t have been shocked to find out that this location was an important strategic point, one that had been fought over a lot. Then, if an undead had formed and blocked off the passage…

This thing had probably slaughtered entire armies to reach its current size.

I refocused on the fight, realizing that Azrael was currently trying to solo this boss monster.

She was also muttering to herself. “I swear, you take a lady out for some fun and you don’t even offer to help. Jerkface…”

I snickered to myself, then pointed my wand at the top of the mountain of bones. My Runic Detonators rose into the clouds above it, then one dropped.

With the help of two Gravity runes and a Movement rune, the Detonator slammed into the top of the monster, releasing a wave of explosive force that turned a large chunk of bones to dust.

The Bonehemoth screamed again, loud enough to damage the ears of a mortal, and swiped a makeshift hand at the heavens, but it was too late to stop what was coming.

Another Detonator dropped. Then another. Then another.

Slowly, my weapons took turns, one after another, smashing their way through the titanic undead with explosive force.

The Bonehemoth writhed and shot bones at high speeds all around itself, but it wasn’t enough. The strikes of my orbs pounded into it one after another. Soon, one of my Detonators reached the bottom– it reached the Bonehemoth’s true body.

The thing shattered instantly.

The bones that had made up the body of the undead scattered into the surroundings like a liquid, stopped only when they reached the edges of the nearby mountains and forming a lake of bones.

Azrael joined me on the outcropping I’d initially teleported us to.

She squinted at me. “I feel like you did something gross but I can’t tell why.”

Yeeaaah, definitely not going to explain that one to her. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Let’s get back home?”

She frowned, but took my offered hand anyways.

I formed a portal back to the entrance of my tower and ushered her through it.

As soon as we were back inside, I told Azrael that I needed to get back to work, so she gave me a quick hug and let me get going.

I rapidly portalled right to the top floor of my tower, next to my Repository, and pulled some stone out of the floor to transmute into Tungsten.

Previously, I’d wanted a dozen of these Runic Detonators, but now that I’d seen what they could do?

I was thinking I might want a hundred.

Ninety-four Runic Detonators later, I was working on the concept for an observational Enchanted Orb to automate the Runic Detonators– now named Runic Deployers.

It wouldn’t be all that difficult to wire them into the Runic Detonators– a single rune would do the trick. The issue was creating IFF– Identity Friend or Foe.

There were a few ways I could go about making it, but none seemed satisfactory.

First off, I could stuff a Process rune full of information about all the people I didn’t want it to kill– Azrael, the girls in the town, and my own mobs– and then tell them to kill everything else that moved, but that was… messy.

The issue was that they would actively go around killing everything. Any undead they spotted would be a target. While having undead other than Azrael and myself around was a negative thing because we were taking care of a bunch of juicy, tasty fleshbags who probably didn’t know how to properly defend themselves, that didn’t mean that they should murder literally everything. That would be incredibly wasteful.

Secondly, I wouldn’t be able to update that Process rune. If I saw someone I didn’t want my Runic Detonators to kill, then I’d have to cut the power to all of them before the Runic Deployers sent them after that person.

The other way was to create a sort of database rune, with the intent to create an updateable package of knowledge, and use that to determine who I wanted them to kill. I was hoping that it would work, since I wasn’t actually completely certain that runes could change in any way after they were created, but the pseudo-intelligence of the Process runes gave me hope.

I thought that plan was a bit better, so I created an Energized Intent out of that Conceptium, condensed it, and set it to cook over a gold plate.

This idea meant that I had to put the information into that Database myself, though, and that just brought me back to the original issue of needing to see and be near my target.

Eventually, though, I came up with a solution, and I almost slapped myself in the forehead when I realized how obvious it was.

First off, why would I only use one Database? I could have two: the first would be full of the people that I liked, and the second would be filled with the people I didn’t like.

The list of people that I didn’t like would be two-way, though. I’d set it so that a Process rune would check for things harming the people on the Nice list. It would give them three strikes, which would be held in another Database rune, and then it would put them on the Naughty list. Dismemberment or another serious injury would give someone two strikes, and an outright kill– or attacking me or Azrael– would be an instant death sentence. Azrael and I would also be exempt from the Naughty list: we could do whatever we wanted and never be touched.

Anyone who was on the Naughty list would get blasted on sight. Anyone on the Nice list would be protected. Pretty simple.

For the Observation portion of the Runic Deployers, I’d let them access my domain to sense things. The Process runes would be able to handle it, and it would increase the efficiency and range of the Observe runes by leaps and bounds.

I pulled another tungsten orb– this one half the diameter of the others– out of my floor, and tossed it back and forth in my hands for a moment.

I walked myself back through the process that I’d need to inscribe into the observation orbs.

Step 1: An Observe rune would sense things in my domain.

Step 2: A Process rune would detect if any of those things were living, undead or otherwise moving, and pass the information along if so.

Step 3A: A Mental Link rune would send the information of a target to its pair, which would then pass it along.

Step 4A: Another Process rune would decode the information and run it through the Naughty Database, which would be individual to each Deployer.

Step 5A: A Process rune would follow the Naughty Database, and if the target is on the list, it would inform the next Process rune in the chain of the location of the Naughty target.

Step 6A: A Process rune would constantly check for input. If there was none, it would instruct the Runic Detonators to follow their assigned Runic Deployer. Else, it would send them the location of the target.

All of those things would be individual to each Deployer. At the same time as that happened, another Process rune would follow Step 2:

Step 3B: A Process rune would decode the information and check to see if there were two or more targets in the image. If so, it would run them through the Nice Database, which would be shared by all Deployers.

Step 4B: If a target is in the Nice Database, the information would be passed along to another Process rune, which would then check to see if any of the targets were harming the Nice target, excluding any that had the chemical makeup of a human child. If there were any such targets, it would pass their information along to the next Process.

Step 5B: This Process rune would take in the information and check to see if any of the targets had a profile in the Strike Database, which would be shared by all Deployers. If there wasn’t one, it would create one. If there was one, it would check to see if the target had gained a Strike within the last five seconds. If so, it would do nothing, but if not, it would add one Strike to the target.

Step 6B: A final Process rune would constantly check everyone’s status on the Strike Database. If an individual reached three Strikes, it would remove their profile in the Strike Database and add them to the Naughty List.

I rubbed the bones in my hands together in excitement.

My Database rune was done! Now I just had to draw out all of the computational runes somewhere in my room, make the Deployers, and test it!

I stood next to Azrael, almost bouncing on my feet with excitement.

“Why is this a big deal, again?” Azrael was thoroughly nonplussed. Apparently, she thought an automated defense system was useless against everything except Esheth, since the town already had her.

I huffed in annoyance. “It’s a big deal because it’s a huge step forward in my capabilities! You probably don’t realize the significance because you lack the background to really understand what I’m saying, but I built a magic computer!” There was no word in Kerenth-Yalten Glyphic for computer, so I’d tried to explain it as a Metal-Object-Brain, but that had just confused her so I’d just gone back to using the English term.

Azrael gave me a weird look, like she’d done every time I’d tried to speak English to her, then responded, “If it’s so cool, then show me.”

I pulled out my wand and pointed it up at the top of my tower, triggering the Mental Link rune that I’d added into my runes to activate and deactivate the movement of the Deployers.

My Runic Deployers hadn’t actually had an independent form of movement, so I’d needed to design one. Their range didn’t actually go as far as my entire domain– because that would’ve been crazy expensive– instead only going about five miles out.

It hadn’t been too hard to design runes to tell them where to go, knowing that. Process runes would take each Deployer’s flight paths and record the terrain in a communal Map Database, so that the main computer would always know where each one was.

A Process rune would then reference whichever parts of the Map Database were most recently updated, and delegate instructions to the orbs to update whichever terrain data within a twenty-five mile radius was least recently refreshed, thus finding the X and Y coordinates for each orb to head to. Another Process rune would check on each orb and determine how far it was from nearby solid objects, and if that distance was less than fifty feet it would instruct it to move up.

With those two instructions combined, each Observe rune would have a constant input of directions. All I would need to do was power them, and everything in the vicinity of my tower would be obliterated.

I would need to eventually find ways to power things with energy that doesn’t require work from myself or Azrael. Currently, the only things like that were the Energy Conversion rune in the Runic Detonators– which only made it so that the Detonators didn’t require extra energy for the explosion and was still overall a loss in energy when you considered how much was put into moving the Detonators– and the Ordinance rune on Carnic’s club– which required the sacrifice of living flesh.

I was hoping to find a way to hook things up to Kelemnion and have energy pour into my devices directly from there.

Ignoring the strain that they put on my resources, though…

My Runic Orbs were done. At least, for now.

They would be potent weapons against those who sought to harm me and those who relied on me, and that was worth even more than what they had cost me in time and energy.

After all, the best defense is an unstoppable offense.