LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 49: Making Monsters
Nuwa sat the spare avatar back in the chair in her core room before returning to her body, cursing her own stupidity. She had gotten complacent, and allowed herself to be blindsided. Most of the time, Elenoa was just sitting in her office doing paperwork, and she hadn’t set off any triggers that would pull attention to her in a long time.
Actually…that was weird, now that Nuwa was thinking about it. Preparations to kill Lilith should have tripped all sorts of Watch alarms, but they hadn’t. She had tripped a bunch right at the very start, and then…
Oh. Elenoa could feel the Watch. It was the only logical explanation; Kali had told her that people, when they get used to the presence of Worship, become able to pick up on it, just like they would with normal magic.
Right, no more solely relying on the alarms, she’d have to manually check in much more often. At random times, too, just in case Elenoa could somehow tell if she was being directly observed, or if it was just the triggers waiting to go off.
A quick check showed that, yes, Elenoa was just doing paperwork and Baern was hammering away at something in his workshop. Winston was asleep and looking rather worse for wear, and Titania was holding court. Nothing directly hostile to her, though Nuwa couldn’t help but worry that they were using proxies to do most of the nasty stuff so she couldn’t see.
She tore her attention away and hopped back into the spare avatar, wheeling its chair around and turning on the computer she had next to it. In her off time, she had been working on trying to hook the computer up into the dungeon, trying to see if she could mesh the two to the point where others would be able to interface with a computer to change things in the dungeon.
She hadn’t had much luck, so the computer sat in the corner, aside from when she was using to play games or something. She pulled up her favorite code editor, and took a moment to whip out a quick program that would set off an alarm at random times, so she would have a reminder to check her Watches.
She really had to thank Omniglot for that; she hadn’t coded in a while, but it was still as fresh in her mind as it had been when she stopped attending school. Fresher, even; she didn’t have to look up anything to know what to do, Omniglot just…supplied the code for her; it was almost insulting how easy it made the job. Satisfied, she ran the program and returned to her core. It was time to take those ‘vague plans’ she had been making and turn them into concrete plans.
And those plans were about her monsters. She had finally completed work on her mana turbine project, giving her both a very efficient DP generator and a way to store vast quantities of Mana if it was ever necessary.
Though, she would prefer it if those stores never had to be touched. Converting from mana battery directly to Mana was extremely inefficient if the liquid wasn’t directly ingested, so she could only access about a tenth of what was stored if she had to take it out all at once. It wasn’t ideal, but she could store a lot of Mana that way, and it was better to have an inefficient contingency than no contingency.
She mentally chided herself for getting distracted, and turned her focus back to the project at hand. For quite a while, she had been ignoring dungeon monsters as anything other than glorified punching bags for people to train on, and she needed to fix that. She had potential to make an army of sorts, and she was going to use it.
The problem was she hadn’t figured out what she was going to make. She wanted them to be something Lilith could deploy as extra muscle if it became necessary, so her first monsters would need to fit the High Arbiter theme, at least somewhat. They should be something people were glad to see, so anything overtly horrific was right out. They should also be able to at least hold basic conversation, which meant that humanoid was probably the way to go.
So, a humanoid that didn’t look monstrous and fit the theme of judgement, in some sense. In that case, Valkyries were probably her best bet for a base design; she didn’t want to be showing any favoritism to any specific race, and as far as she was able to tell, Valkyries weren’t a race, or even a group of people that existed. Well, existed currently, anyway. They might have existed in the past, she wasn’t sure.
She wouldn’t just be making straight-up Valkyries, though. It was more that she’d be taking inspiration from how they looked. The main issue was that, traditionally, Valkyries were only women. She was trying not to show favoritism, so having her army be made of only women wouldn’t exactly cut it.
Which meant she’d just need to make another set of monsters that were based off of something else. She was leaning towards theming them based off of the afterlives in Egyptian and Greek mythology, though those brought their own issues. Egyptian mythology came with heavy focuses on animals and people with heads of animals, and the Greek underworld didn’t really have anything truly iconic aside from maybe Cerberus.
In the end she decided to make them mostly beast users, using beasts from those mythologies. Cerberi, Jackals, the like. She was hoping she could pretty closely link the beast and the humanoid, perhaps even to the point where they were the same entity.
Yeah, that’d be pretty neat. She could give them a far degraded Parallel Processing and make it so that they could choose to put away one of the bodies, and maybe even give them a form that’s a hybrid of their animal and humanoid sides. Animal-headed, perhaps?
So, what roles would she need filled? Just thinking about combat applications, she needed at least a damage dealer, a tank, a healer, and support if she wanted a balanced team. Outside of combat she’d want scouts, socialites, and tinkers, and that brought her up to seven.
Seven broad categories, anyway. She’d play around with them later and make further specialized monsters and ones that blurred the lines between those categories. Hopefully, by the time it was needed, she’d have a highly versatile force that could be tailored to suit whatever situation was at hand.
She decided to tackle the tanks first, as she already had decided what they were going to be. The “base” tank would be one of the male monsters, with hippopotami as their other form. They were based partially off Ammit, a goddess in ancient Egyptian culture. Ammit was part lion, part hippo, and part crocodile, and she ate the hearts of those that were judged unworthy.
She loaded the monster up with all the regeneration, damage reducing, and attention-drawing Skills she could think of, and then set to work designing equipment for its humanoid form. She decked them out with heavy armor and a tower shield, and for the weapon she eventually decided to give them a one-handed spear.
The issue was what to make that stuff out of. Regular steel would be pretty ineffective against anything tough, so that wasn’t going to happen. She thought about it for a moment, then decided to table the issue and pick something suitable from the materials she knew with Eldritch Abomination later, figuring she could build the equipment into the monster itself instead of needing to make new equipment for each new monster.
When she set to work making the damage dealers, she briefly considered splitting the category into physical and magical damager dealers, but eventually decided against it. There was no real reason to do that when she was going to be further specializing categories anyway, and this way she could keep the main categories at seven.
Much like the tanks, she based her first damager dealer off of Ammit, this time choosing to go with the lion part of her. She chose to somewhat sacrifice its defenses in favor of raw strength and speed. To that end she would give its human form light armor and a singular, massive sword. She figured that normally game-like buster swords would be completely impractical, but she was designing the monster around it, so it would probably work out. She tinkered with the Skills for a moment then gave a mental nod of satisfaction and moved on.
She decided to make the healers and support both the Valkyrie type. The healer got heavy armor and a shield for increased survivability, as well as a simple sword in case anything got too close. The plan wasn’t really for any of the healers to be actively engaging in melee combat, so they really just needed to be able to fend off a few attacks while they waited for backup.
The support was a bit trickier, as it was a very broad category. But, like the damage dealers, it wasn’t like all supports would be like the first, so she just decided to make what she felt like. In this case, she gave it buffs, debuffs, and a bunch of mobility increasing Skills. As for the equipment, she gave it light armor and two long whips that were actually just tentacles sprouting from the wrist that were designed to look like whips. When not in use they would retract into the monster and hide seamlessly underneath the skin. She gave the “whips” vicious barbs that dripped with a particularly nasty paralytic agent she whipped up by combining several different toxins and called it good for the support.
The scouts would be of the male variety, this time with jackals as their animal form. Their Skills were mostly based around perception, be it divination, identification, or just straight up sense enhancement. They were given light armor and a bow for equipment, but no arrows.
Those would be the tinkers’ jobs. The tinkers would be the “non-combat” supports, built to make things to fit the situation. To that end, they were given a far-degraded Assimilation and Eldritch Abomination combo. It would allow them to take the portions of the solid food they ate that would normally become waste and Assimilate it. Then, they would be able to spit it out in one of several different material types from Eldritch Abomination.
Liquids were Assimilated separately and could be turned into different useful secretions. The monster was given a lot of Skills that would be useful in manufacturing or demolition, light armor, a toolbelt, and a large war hammer.
Last up were the socialites, which would also be Valkyrie-type. They didn’t have any built-in armor to allow them to better blend in if they needed to go undercover, and for weapons they only had a couple of small daggers. But, like the combat supports, they had a few tricks up their sleeves. Their fingernails could be morphed into a sharpened point, and they were given the ability to secrete several poisons and toxins through them.
And, finally, she would need a commander, someone who would be able to organize the groups effectively and serve as a face for the whole group. That one would take…well, everything she had thought of for the others, everything and more. She wanted the commander to be something that no one short of a Perfect Chimera could match, and she definitely had the capabilities to make it happen.
She paused, hesitating before she began to truly dive into the commander’s abilities. She…had been avoiding looking at the costs for the monsters out of a desire to not constrain her idea by a budget, and this commander was going to cost far, far more than any of them. She needed to know if anything close to this was viable for the situation at hand before she continued.
She stalled for a few moments longer before sneaking a peek at the resource costs for the scouts. and, to her horror, she found that just one took almost a tenth of her accumulated DP. Sure, she didn’t have too much, having just spent it on the turbine, but that was not a good sign.
The scouts should have been the cheapest of the monsters, as she had made them with low stats and no offensive abilities, at least not without the support of the tinkers. They probably would be able to be beaten out by someone with a combined one hundred or two hundred levels, which was…not boding well for everything else.
And, to top it all off, granting sapience to a monster would then cost something in the realm of five to ten times the original cost investment, though the ability to leave the dungeon was included in that.
Nuwa let out an internal sigh. What that meant was that she wasn’t going to be able to field anything remotely strong enough to actually help Lilith in a combat situation, not for a while. And, that being the case, she had no option but to turn to looking into ways to gain more DP.
Lilith was killing a lot of monsters, so…why not teleport them to the dungeon instead? She could finish them off with the spare avatar to get DP and experience for it, and it wouldn’t be that much harder than just killing whatever it was outright.
Or…she didn’t have to kill them right away. The whole plane the dungeon was on was empty, so it wouldn’t hurt anyone to take over most of the underground. She hadn’t done so since there was no need to and it would be a waste of DP, but…she could set up a whole ecosystem down there. Monsters living, breeding, fighting, and dying, all the while generating DP for her use.
The monsters would…probably end up getting strong, much stronger than what she originally put in, but that was fine. Worst case scenario, she or Lilith dealt with them if they came up. Best case scenario, Eve would be able to use them for her whole ‘Queen of Monsters’ business. She didn’t have the abilities yet due to Kali running low on Worship, but eventually she would be able to take absolute dominion over monsters weaker than her.
Which just meant Nuwa had to make sure the monsters never got stronger than her. She’d have Eve cull the strong ones from time to time, and that would be that.
Actually…if she played her cards right, she might be able to make some of those strong monsters into the peacekeeping forces she was thinking about earlier. There were abilities that would let her change the makeup of an existing monster, so it was entirely in the realm of possibility.
But all that hinged on her getting that set up, daydreaming wasn’t going to do her any good. So, with an internal smile Nuwa got to work.
