Chapter 98
This is rather cozy, Maxwell remarked as he walked into the small courtyard Id been working on in the eighth floor.
I figured we might be here for a while, and this was the nicest area so far.
Three days had passed since Raven and I secured this floor. We hadnt ventured deeper, choosing to set about turning it into at least some kind of residence. I used my power over the dungeon to widen the staircases and doors so Tuffy, Snappy, and our three mounts could venture deeper into the dungeon.
While I did that, I had set a pair of skeletons I created with some leftover bones to haul the broken furniture from the other floors down to here. Then I set about sorting through and picking out the most intact pieces to be repaired. I used a ritual to light the crystal mounted in the ceiling to provide something similar to daylight.
You know, this is definitely not how I would picture an undead overlord setting up their lair, Maxwell chuckled.
Raised garden beds had been tilled with new organic soil matter and filled with plants Raven had retrieved from the marsh. Shed stealthily traveled quite a ways away to find plants that werent part of the blood biome.
I snorted. Not gloomy enough for you? I will forever say it: just because I am technically a monster, doesnt mean I have to live in a depressing, gloomy cave.
Way to go, break that stereotype, Maxwell teased. I much prefer this anyways. I ran into Raven up above, and she said you guys had been waiting for me to come back to go deeper, she also mentioned something about a harbor?
Yeah, this floor was challenging enough that I figured we should wait for you, no point in risking it. I then explained where the harbor was.
As Maxwell wandered off to check out the floor, I turned my attention to the furniture, wanting to use up the leftover material from my constructs. Fortunately for me, necromancers had a certain amount of skill working with bone, even in non-undead means. I used some simple magic to make sure the bones were dried out, and where the wood had shattered or been removed, I worked the bone to reshape and repair the broken furniture.
It wasnt nearly as macabre as you might think. Bone shaping, while not a primary talent, was a pastime hobby that I had dabbled in. I finished working on a chair and took it inside the building I claimed as mine. There was a back room barred off by a heavy stone door. Through that door, I had placed my phylactery and my most powerful undead construct yet.
A powerful eldritch bone serpent occupied that space. It was similar to the chitinous crawler in some ways, but it was quite a bit more powerful. It had taken me a while to build the creature, infusing it with every death core gained from the skinks on this floor, with the exception of the boss core which was still embedded. By its nature, it was limited in how powerful it could grow on its own. I did not want to risk my phylactery in any way, so the construct lacked a spark. But that didnt make it any less deadly.
By the time Maxwell was done exploring, I had moved to the main landing leading down to where the horde of undead guarded the stairs, then sorted my minions into three different groups.
One group would guard the stairs where we ventured down. I included my two zombie snakes in that group. While they werent necessarily more powerful than my other minions, particularly my newer creations and the former skink boss, they did have a greater ease in moving through the floors. I also added the chitinous eldritch crawler and the two Ratman ogres.
The second group were the monsters I was planning on taking with us. For now, the only creature in there was the volans death wing, its power and mobility would make it a great asset in any open areas we came to. There was a new map on this floor, and from it I had learned that the next few would be larger open areas, though I didnt know what they were used for.
The third and final group consisted of all of the skinks, including the boss. I had debated this for a while, but in the end, I decided the skinks, while strong in their own right, were not ideal for dungeon crawls.
What you up to? Maxwell asked as he came in from the balcony.
Im about to create some new constructs. The first part will be rather gruesome, but youre more than welcome to watch.
Yea, Ill step out for the first part. The construction parts cool enough, but Im not a fan of how it starts.
Thats understandable. How about you run up top and get me some of that water from the fountain, Ill need it soon. The minks should leave you alone.
Will do. Maxwell headed for the stairs leading up.
My control and connection to the skinks gave me absolute power over them. While some of the skinks, particularly the boss whose spark I captured, had wills of their own, my power was what gave them life. So, when I pulled the power out of the creatures, there was very little they could do to resist me. The simple zombie skinks collapsed first, the ones that still had their spark resisted for a moment before collapsing, and the boss held on longer than the rest. I almost felt bad, but that thought was quickly quashed. This was just the way of the world.
Once all of the skinks lay motionless, I used the power I had pulled out and then more of my own to cast a new spell. It was fairly intricate and took time to cast, using quite a bit of mana, but it was more than worth it. A circle formed under the pile of bodies as the dark magic did its work.
With this particular spell, instead of a pile of bones, flesh, and organs, the bodies were truly rendered down into their component parts.
Any fat within the muscles was liquefied and pulled out, while the muscles themselves were reduced to muscular fiber. The bones went through a similar process with the marrow pulled out, and the bones became tiny uniform geometric shapes ready to be fused into new configurations. Other than being cleaned, the teeth were left alone. The skin became strips of clean tough leather, and most of the organs were shredded into muscle fiber or connective tissue.
Likely the most interesting part, and the most intensive, was the brain and nervous system, including the eyes. The magic broke down the spinal column, gradually lifting the nervous system out and cleaning it like everything else.
The end results were five different piles of materials: muscle fibers, white bone with long sharp teeth, strips of leather, connective tissues, and by far most disgusting was the leftovers.
I ordered the rat ogres to collect the fifth pile and carried it up to Tuffy and Snappy, they would enjoy a treat. As the two zombie Ratman ogres left with their disgusting burden, I sat down and focused on meditation to regenerate my mana pool. I could use a potion, but we had a limited supply.
Maxwell poked his head back in, shuddering at the sight of the piles of material, and walked over to where I had taken a seat on the ground. I just passed the ogres carrying something truly awful. What are you thinking about making?
I have a few ideas. We shall see what I can and cant accomplish.
Maxwell handed me a flask full of thick red liquid from the fountain, which I set into my bag of holding. The first minion I was hoping to create was by far the most complicated, but it was not the one I needed the blood-like liquid for.
You happen to have a song that boosts crafting, or concentration while crafting, or something like that? I asked Maxwell. This is really going to push the limits of what I can do, and who knows, maybe your music can help me some.
Maxwell thought about it then smiled. Havent used it in a long time, but I have a song that boosts productivity. Wasnt a very powerful song when I first learned it, but I got a lot better. Let me give it a try. He pulled his guitar off his back and began to play a very rhythmic tune, using the body of the guitar to produce a thumping beat that he then used a magical node to continue to propagate as he played other parts of the song.
Its hard to quantify the effect I felt, but there was something there. I transformed Mercy into its simplest form, a long black shaft, no need for anything showy, and placed it across my legs.
With slow and purposeful care, so as to not make any mistakes or have any inefficiencies in the diagram that would hamper the power I could bring to bear, I built the spell. With my illusion dropped, my black skeletal hand traced a circle in front of medeepening my concentration and connection with my formationutilizing black death magic.
With the base form finished, I used a tiny trickle of mental energy to form a connection. Before you get excited, this was the only kind of mental energy manipulation I knew, and it wasnt even anything useful outside of situations like this. Damien had helped me learn it for this exact kind of spell.
The connection forged by the mental energy essentially had me sitting in the position with the construction spell that would normally be where the design I wanted went. From there I was able to shape the creature as I willed, without the hindrances of trying to get it right through a diagram. Its almost better to think of this as a meditative state, its a very slow process to work in this way. The spell would normally take me a few minutes to cast, no more than ten, casting it in this way would take far longer.
I stretched my hands away from the diagram as I controlled a stream of death magic from my left hand and a stream of eldritch magic from my right. Controlling the magic like a maestro, I sent the stream of eldritch magic to the pile of brains, and the death magic into the bones.
I fused the separate brains together, building the controlled nexus of my creation. Which is far easier than you might assume, and why brains are important to save. Innately, brains have built-in neural pathways and controls for their former body that make it far easier to create a nexus. The eldritch power I used for this process also had some benefits, and though, yes, it corrupts, an eldritch mind is a powerful mind for a reason.
The geometrically shaped pieces of bone, each no bigger than a marble, began to build the body of my creature. I formed a wireframe structure for the lower partsix legs connected to a central torso the size of my torso. With that complete, I added the structural strength to hold everything in place.
The bottom of the torso was reinforced with layers of thick bone, and the body that rose up across the torso started out oval in shape, growing into a cylindrical top.
At this point I finished with the construction of the nexusa smooth black fleshy orb suspended by the eldritch stream. Underneath the translucent skin of the orb were neurons flaring with purple eldritch light as they processed information.
I directed the orb into the center of the torso and suspended it in the middle of the lower part. The eldritch magic picked up the death core, and I created a spot to socket it directly underneath the nexus. I paused construction with the bone and used both my stream of death magic and eldritch magic to lay out the nervous system.
Technically speaking, you dont need nerves in undead constructs. But nerves are a great medium for magical transfer of power. Using both the death and eldritch magic to lay down the nerves meant they would transfer both equally well.
With the nervous system installed, I completed the body of my creation. The legs, previously solid, I split in multiple places one at a time to add a hinge joint. I added small amounts of muscle fiber at each of the jointstechnically, I did not need them, but they were more effective than having the process done by magic.
Each leg of the monster was as thick as Maxwells arms but made of solid bone. At the tip of each leg, I made them into sharp spikes using the teeth of the boss, I even added small barbs. These tips were meant to allow the creature to grip the stone floor. The joints were reinforced by both extra bone and some of the supply of skin wrapping around the joints as well to add even further protection.
The interior of the lower part of the torso was encased in a thick layer of bone, with large hollow spaces inside. Instead of making the entire lower torso that wasnt occupied by the nexus or the death core out of bone, I left large spaces inside the thick shell where I wove together sections of muscle.
Muscle can store magical energy if either trained or designed to do so. As with the nervous system, I did this process with both eldritch and death magic. When controlled by the nexus, the muscles would be like a heart and provide capacity for the body. At a later date, if I came across powerful storage crystals, I could open the creature up and replace those sections.
I finished my work in the lower torso and continued up the cylindrical part of the torso. That section was built in a lattice of bone designed to take impacts and crumple, but not break. The one exception to this was the central tunnel that wound through the middle where the thick strand of nerves ran. The tunnel wasnt straight, so there would be no direct access into the central part of the creature. Around the tunnel of thick bones was a deep groove set into the top as well.
The cylindrical top of the torso was perfectly flat and about chest high on methat section would be saved for last. Two arms rose out of either side of the torso, with hooks to help it with maneuverability and ward off any creatures that closed within melee range. The arms were relatively weak, and I had no doubt they could be broken fairly easily, but I was confident in my ability to repair damage done.
Returning to the top of the cylinder, I built the platform that smoothly sat on top of the cylinder. It was anchored in place by a phalange of bone that fit into the groove around the nervous system tunnel, and a phalange that nestled around the outside of the cylinder coming up from the torso.
From this platform grew a wireframe of a cannon made of bone a meter and a half long. Not a cannon like you wouldve seen on a tank, the central part connecting the cannon to the nervous system was filled with muscles designed to hold magic and expel it rapidly. That section was walled off by bone, with a few strands of nerves feeding that power into the rest of the cannon.
True to design, the cannon was not a solid shape. In many ways it looked like the stretched out skeleton of a snake whose bones had been thickened and carved with runes that would project a barrier to contain the magic.
Periodically through the interior of the cannon, bone apparatuses formed and were flooded with eldritch and death magic until the bone itself changed color. They became dark purple, crackling with purple lightning energy around them. Down the length of the cannon were three of these apparatuses. The concentration it took for me to build the cannon was immense. When making the third apparatus, Id almost lost control of my spell and was pretty certain Maxwells constant song had kept me going.
Pushing forward, the strain was beginning to bring me down, but I was so close to done. I placed four eyes on the turret, the lizard nature of the eyes giving them a perfect three-sixty-degree view when working together. Two more eyes were mounted at the end of each of the long arms, and though I wasnt sure how useful they would be, I figured it couldnt hurt. Since the nexus controlling this had been enhanced with eldritch magic, the madness and difficulty of controlling that many different ocular sensors would be far easier for it.
Now that the hardest part was done, I added some flair to the end of the cannon, making it a gaping maw with vicious fangs on the top and bottom. I retracted my consciousness from the designing of the spell, and though I was tired, there was one more step. I emptied my death energy pool into the creature, letting the magic flood into my creation. The bones darkened, and the bits of flesh in different areas that controlled the joints turned black.
Only then did I end the spell. The headache was terrible, I was completely out of mana and death energy, and was just glad I was sitting on the ground. I wouldve vomited if I had a stomach and settled for groaning and grasping my head.
Maxwells song ended and I heard him sigh.
How long? I groaned.
Two hours. Maxwell sounded exhausted. That was cool, but also sucked. I dont know if I could have played the same song on repeat for two hours before.
We both sat there in misery for a while as we recovered from the ordeal. I could feel my connection to my creationit was calmly waiting for orders. When I finally lifted my head, I smiled, the fleshy bits in my face pulling to do so.
The top of the cannon only came up to the middle of my chest, and the leg base was wider than I intended, but even at that I was thrilled. There might be some difficulties in it moving around, but I was certain it would be fine. With a moment of concentration, I brought up the description.
Mobile Eldritch Death Bone Cannon
Advanced Undead Construct
Level: 66
Created by: Ezekiel Vernizac
This is a powerful undead construct created and designed by Ezekiel the Lich. Cannon mounted at the top delivers a combination of eldritch and death magic in a devastating blast. Its powerful legs and numerous eyes give this creation incredible accuracy.
This was my first advanced undead construct since I had lost all of my power. I had developed this design a long time ago, back before everything else happened. This was by far the weakest one Id ever madeby the time I developed the design Id been much stronger than I was now, but the fact I was able to create one spoke volumes. It was also the first to be created with the ability to fire eldritch magic, I had only really gained access to that after becoming a Lich.
I gave a mental order for the construct to move to the side, the clicking of its legs reacting immediately to my command. I eyed my remaining material. Far more bone was used than I meant to, but I was certain it would be worth it. I just needed to wait for my mana and death energy to recover before I continued.
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