No Need For A Core?
290: Heavy Metal

As Kazue reached up to claim more territory, Mordecai gently guided Krystraeliv's growth upward to match. Using the living crystal as a conduit for the dungeon's mana made this a lot easier than it might have been otherwise.

A normal environmental nexus wouldn't have needed the support, but that came from claiming territory in spherical rings, with the weakest zones on the outside. Azeria's strange, inside-out topology required a lot more work.

Mordecai noticed that the physical growth seemed to be also helping quicken the growth of Krystraeliv's spirit, though she still wasn't fully awakened to sapience. The dryad spirit inside of her also seemed to be getting stronger at an accelerated rate, though she was probably still years from awakening.

When the basic structure of the metal zone was complete and had been interwoven with Krystraeliv's branches and roots, Mordecai turned his attention to the combat path of the metal zone.

First, he divided the path into five linear segments, coded by color and starting with blue, then green, yellow, orange, and red. This was mostly to help delvers know where they were as he was going to do his best to make sure that would otherwise not be an easy task

All of the metal surfaces were hard and perfectly polished to the point that they were almost slippery and with no visible joints or seams. Combined with the polished monochromatic surfaces, this made it very hard to see where edges and corners were. Mordecai took advantage of these traits to create a polygonal maze that spread out vertically as well as horizontally, complete with steep staircases and slopes, corners that hid merging corridors coming in at oblique angles, and every other trick he could think of to confuse the eye.

Then it was time for traps.

The blue area had moving walls, floors, and ceilings, along with staircases that could be revealed or hidden by turning a section of the floor. Not so much direct traps as ways to keep delvers wandering around for longer and possibly encountering more fights. Given how hard the floors were, just walking could quickly become painful and exhausting.

For the green area, Mordecai implemented basic movement traps: pitfalls, stairs turning into slopes, walls that shoved you into a corridor that set you back from the path you wanted to travel, and then deeper in the occasional trap that pushed you toward your objective, just because people would then try to avoid that path. Those last ones were designed to be slightly more noticeable and more easily avoided than the previous ones.

The pitfalls were sometimes also the location of hidden doors designed to be discoverable 'the hard way', which could be the best path forward at that point.

Yellow was where he introduced sharp traps. As they were not trying to kill people, Mordecai made these traps with short piercing tips, such as a single heavy dart with a short needle but a hefty body. Barring bad luck, it shouldn't hit a person someplace immediately vital, but it should hurt. And if someone was wearing heavier armor, there was a chance that having a hole punched in it like this could crack it at the impact point.

Similarly, spear traps had a 'boar guard' directly behind the spearhead, and the spiked 'pit' traps were only a foot deep with six-inch tall conical spikes, which wouldn't usually penetrate very far. To accommodate the nature of the altered pit traps, the covers were designed to suddenly shatter and fall, rather than swing down.

Orange was therefore home of the blades. These were harder to make safe than the piercing traps, but Mordecai did do his best to set traps more likely to make long, shallow slashes, but making them simultaneously strong enough to potentially break through armor was a tough balancing act. In the end, he decided to reproduce the enchantment on the wooden training weapons that traded damage for greatly amplified pain.

He needed to repeat that enchantment for the final set of traps in the red zone, which were all about liquid metal. In this case, Mordecai was using lightly warmed gallium rather than quicksilver, as gallium was generally non-toxic in its pure form, and gallium was fully molten at the body temperature of any warm-blooded creature.

Liquid metal was very versatile as a weapon, given the right setup. Launching a glob of it at someone, or at a group for a larger glob, was an excellent way to batter your target. Unlike a solid missile, you can't simply deflect it to the side; you either have to dodge it or brace for it, preferably behind something like a tower shield.

If you shot a thin stream of it at high pressure, it was just like doing that same thing with water but gallium was much denser than water, giving it even more piercing potential.

Oh.

Mordecai took a moment to verify a possible new pressurized gun design. It was going to be harder to create a small portal that only extracted gallium from the elemental plane of metal, but other than that all the same enchantments worked. Freeze a bullet's worth of the metal, keep the rest of it liquid at a high enough pressure, and you could fire a gallium bullet. It was even better than the ice bullet as the pressurized stream behind it wouldn't disperse as readily, allowing the bullet to be fired further and hit harder.

Well, that could be useful in the future. He just had to make sure that he used the right steel alloys to prevent corrosion.

When he focused back on the task at hand, Mordecai created animated whips of gallium as the third form of liquid metal trap. This relied more on active magic than any of the other traps did, but he was fine with having a few traps that required a little more energy dedicated to them.

With his array of traps created, it was time for Mordecai to focus on inhabitants.

He began by creating what he decided to call ultra-heavy infantry. This was not the creation of new inhabitants, this was the creation of new gear for inhabitants, namely their smaller laganthro inhabitants.

Every bit of knowledge that they had gleaned from the experiments with their new metals went into these creations, encasing the laganthros in the strongest and thickest armor he could manage without making them too heavy or sacrificing too much mobility. He even had to add fresh air enchantments to the helmets, as the tight fitting visors had lightly red-tinted sapphire glass installed. That was reinforced by mesh wires in a softer laminated layer that would keep it from shattering into the laganthro's face if it did get broken. The red tint was to reduce the impact of light on night vision, which allowed them to switch between light and dark areas with very little adjustment time.

It was impossible to see who or what was in these suits, which is why some of them did not have anybody at all. Mordecai wasn't going to make them true automatons; with Kazue's boons, they'd become sapient but might be somewhat socially isolated as their powerful bodies and great heft would make it hard to casually interact with them. He'd made some mistakes along those lines in his previous life.

Instead, he enchanted these solid pseudo-armors to be linked to one of the laganthros they were in formation with. Combined with tower shields and spears for all of them, a tight phalanx of these ultra-heavy infantry were effectively a mobile wall to anyone who couldn't fly over them swiftly enough to not get stabbed.

They were, however, rather slow, making it easy for most to run away and find a different route around them. Mordecai did give his heavies one advantage in the chase: They were not hampered by the smoothness of the surfaces; even on steeply sloped terrain they could move at the same inexorable rate.

This drawback was necessary to make them a fair challenge for most groups; the ultra-heavies were not really meant to be fought so much as avoided. Of course, if someone truly powerful was delving here, Mordecai could send in multiple formations to surround the target for a more interesting fight.

Mordecai then contrasted the infantry with his next creations: tiny quicksilver flying drakes evolved from some of the many lizards they had acquired during their previous expansion. While not actually made of quicksilver, their glossy metallic scales combined with their fluid motions made them resemble the toxic liquid metal.

Rather than giving them normal magical abilities, Mordecai made sure these creatures all had innate sparks for harmonizing with the elements the same way Derek could, though in this case, they could only harmonize with metal.

The exact manifestation of these powers was going to be very individualistic, and Mordecai was looking forward to seeing the results, though there was one power they would all have in common. He made sure to tie their attunement to their breath weapon, meaning the little drakes would assault their foes with shards of various sharp metals.

These drakes would usually be attacking in swift-moving swarms that could scatter and then come back again later, making them hard to eliminate.

Continuing with the metallic drake theme, Mordecai made larger, six-legged, land-bound metallic drakes with essentially the same abilities as the smaller flying ones, but they were designed for power rather than speed. They could still rush forward in bursts, but that was for charging their prey.

With their sharp claws, hard scales, and tough hides, the metallic drakes were good at latching onto their target and ripping through armor. But Mordecai had one further special trait for these guys: they could move as swiftly and surely on the metallic walls and ceiling as they could on the ground. So while they could charge their prey, they could also ambush from above by simply dropping down.

Given the number of traps and the constraining nature of the metal corridors, Mordecai didn't feel that there needed to be a large variety of inhabitants for delvers to fight, but there was one more he wanted to add.

Metal slimes.

Now, they couldn't be pure metal and still be true slimes, but the existing organic, fluid crystal nature of the Azeria slimes provided a base for developing a metallic variant of their crystalline structure.

The resulting slimes had the basic shape-altering abilities that all of the slimes had demonstrated in the early zone sewers such as forming different shaped blades and spikes as they bounced and spun, but these were heavier and tougher than their more agile cousins. Thus, they did not get the same magical enhancement as the slimes did in the second zone down, though he did make sure they could spray liquid metal globs, shards, or darts, with each slime only being able to spray one of those.

With that done, it was time for the bosses.

Instead of a monochromatic look, the entire boss room had a shimmering iridescent quality with slowly rippling colors ranging from near-black to gentle pastels. The constantly shifting colors made it hard to distinguish subtle terrain features, and the floor of the boss room had plenty of ridges and divots for a delver to trip over.

This arena was set up specifically for his planned bosses.

This was going to be one of the few cases where Mordecai did not evolve an inhabitant. Instead, he started by creating three golem-like bodies of metal. Mechanically, these bodies were incredible works of engineering with complex gear designs to enable incredible movement of the joints while protecting the joints with layers of articulated plates.

On top of that, their limbs had a limited ability to hydraulically extend using heated gallium instead of water or oil.

Mordecai was once more diving into their recently accumulated knowledge to create a precise pattern of fused metals to keep the strength of any given section as high as possible while allowing for any needed movement or flexibility.

They did not, however, have a motivating force yet. But Mordecai did have practice with calling up elemental life forces and his avatar was stronger than ever. So with a prayer to Betieau, Mordecai began a summoning ritual to entice three elemental spirits to inhabit these fine bodies. The requirement of bonding with the dungeon as both inhabitants and floor bosses made for a strong filter, but there were other elemental entities bonded to the nexus who were quite happy with their lives.

Those examples were what made it relatively quick to find three metal elementals who were interested in the offer despite the requirement to form a bond with Azeria.

There were other methods Mordecai could have used to instill elemental life into these forms, such as what he had done with giving life to Cimbu, but he had a specific reason to find existing elementals to take these bodies.

As the elementals bonded with and gave life to the golem-like bodies, they didn't merely inhabit the forms. The elementals had perfect control over metal that was theirs, and giving them a base form of such a useful, powerful body gave them options and abilities that a metal elemental summoned without a specifically sculpted body would not have.

The three new bosses could alter their bodies to use any of the metal traits present, ranging from briefly making their entire body act as a solid piece of metal to absorb a powerful blow to making their entire body flow as if made of molten bismuth, and even extending their hydraulic powered strikes far beyond what would have been physically possible.

This included the ability to change their coloration to match the fluctuation of their boss arena.

Mordecai anticipated being cussed out enthusiastically by some of their future delvers, especially as the elementals also still had their magical powers.

The trio would be truly terrifying beings if the power limitations of this zone hadn't restricted Mordecai to summoning rather young and relatively weak elemental spirits. This meant it was going to be quite a while before they mastered using their abilities smoothly, and they would not be able to manipulate these bodies to quite the extent older, more powerful spirits would be able to.

Now to name them.

He'd had plenty of time to think about it and had searched through the languages and tales available to Azeria thanks to their now extensive library. His final choices were Tlepsh, Ogun, and Kalvus.

Rather pleased with his work, Mordecai turned his attention to the next major task to be taken care of before they left on their training mission.

He needed a fully invested avatar.

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