No Need for a Core?

Mordecai had always enjoyed designing bosses, once he was experienced to think beyond their potential as defenses. That first group of explorers had taught him how to consider combat as a dangerous game instead of as just conquest or killing. A young dungeon’s instincts were not always kind in this regard before they have some exposure to others. Especially when they first realize that killing intruders gave them a lot of energy, and that the dungeon could ‘eat’ people to become stronger.

Fortunately, there were many other options. While a group that turns around early because they are intimidated provides little mana, defeating them soundly without actually killing them provides lots of energy, if still less than killing them. But two drawn-out explorations provide more energy than a single quick defeat of a group, and that process could repeat more often as well. The dungeons that couldn’t learn to moderate themselves could become dangerously greedy when not enough people came to them.

Not a problem they would be facing, so Mordecai shook off his reminiscing and focused on the task at hand. He knew he wanted a fungal boss, but it was hard to make a fast mushroom creature, especially when it was large. A creature rooted in place was generally very easy to target from afar, but while part of his mind had been wandering, another part had been chewing on the issue, and he had found a solution.

After all, a fungus’s true body was usually hidden. So the first stage of building this boss was to make another large cavern, about a third the size of the main one. Then he sunk the floor well below the entrance, and filled in most of the gap with a room-wide mycelium, mixed with loose earth and then topped with another foot of soil to appear like mostly normal if slightly soft ground. It would be difficult for most groups to completely kill something like this, so while this was the base life form for the boss, he was going to create a few stages, with normal victory being after Stage 1.

His next step was a bit of preparation work, he needed to make the entire organism immune to acid. There was a price to pay, a limit to how much power could be wrapped into a fifth-floor boss, and so he paid it in the form of a balancing weakness. Fungi tend to already dislike fire and cold, so this would be weaker than usual to both. Oh, Mordecai could have made it immune without balancing it out, but then he wouldn’t have been able to make it as strong in other ways.

Filling in the room with look-alike sprouting bodies was going to both hide and be a clue as to the true nature of the boss. They weren’t the same sorts of mushrooms as filled the main cavern, they were extensions of the boss’s true body below the surface, but it would take a keen eye to tell the difference.

Time for the showstopper, the visible main body of the boss. It was going to be clearly a mushroom, though not like any mushroom that could ever normally develop. Its total height was 20 feet tall, but the first ‘cap’ was at 10 feet, spreading out a wide canopy from which tendrils could snap out at prey. Just above that cap was a ring of branching stalks that ended in tightly packed balls that could be launched at nearby enemies, though not at those below the cap of course.

Above that was a double ring of thinner branching stalks, tilted slightly upward, and they ended in the explosive, venom-laced darts he’d developed previously. They couldn’t be aimed below the cap or even nearby, but had a much larger range.

And finally, the topper of this strange mushroom monstrosity was a delicate-looking bell-like cap, from which rained a gentle, steady dusting of debilitating spores. The spores trickled from the small cap and rolled over the stalks and cap below, meaning that some would also get caught in the darts and nets as well.

But he wasn’t quite done yet. The tendrils for his boss were not going to whip around like the other mushrooms, they were going to be directed and grab at foes, to bring the victim towards the maw. Well, one of them. Mordecai gave the main stalk of his boss three distorted, toothy maws, with more rows of hard fungal teeth inside. There was no throat or stomach, it was simply designed to keep chewing on anything it shoved into its mouth until nothing was left.

But for all of its fearsomeness, this mushroom tree was relatively fragile, and none of its borrowed attacks were as potent as the original, despite the increased range of some of them. Most bosses would be much tougher. That would not be quite the end of a fight however, for immediately after defeating the first stalk, another would spawn from the ground below, and after that a third and final stalk would form. Hmm. Might be good to give a small clue here. Ah, that would be easy. In the center of the ceiling Mordecai grew four red crystals, three of them in a triangle with a dark red glow. The fourth sat in the center unlit. Each time a stalk went down, one of the red crystals would turn a brightly-hued blue. When all three turned blue, the boss would be ‘dead’, the forest would go quiescent, and the doorway out would open, ending stage 1 and technically entering stage 2. Usually. Unless the second boss was active of course, in which case the fourth crystal would light up red as well, and stage 1 didn’t end until it was defeated too.

As frenetic and emotionally charged as this fight would feel, a team that could make it to this room shouldn’t have much trouble. It was high tension, but if one handled it correctly it wasn’t actually hard. Treat it like a boss fight, throw around fire spells or alchemical bombs or what have you, and it would be a short, fast-paced fight. The boss trees would want to spawn near the group, after all, you only had to hunt down the first one.

Which meant that it came with a penalty for people who were badly behaved. There was enough information in the way everything acted for someone to figure out that the ‘real’ boss was below. The forest would only be quiet and still until the group had moved on, then would slowly restore its boss trees. But if someone realized that the real body of the boss was below and decided to try and ‘finish the job’ or any such foolishness, inflicting enough damage to the mycelium would stir it back into activity and switch the boss fight into stage 3. The full tree wouldn’t respawn, but the seemingly ‘normal’ mushroom trees would become more active and directed, and the mycelium mat could animate and shuffle itself about, drawing its deadlier trees towards its attackers even as its rippling surface did its best to knock people off of their feet.

As one would have to go out of their way to activate this mode and the first stage was easier than it seemed, the total difficulty and toughness of the boss was significantly higher than it would be otherwise if someone did activate stage 3. Mordecai paused a moment and ran a couple of scenarios in his head, then shrugged at the results. He’d tried out the idea of deliberately activating stage 3 early if hostiles managed to get here, and the simulation didn’t run properly. He thought he might be able to make the transition more sensitive, but the invading party would still have to do some significant damage to the base mycelium.

Well, nothing for it, he’d already committed to it, the energy for this creature already tied to one of the boss nodes for the floor. Mordecai finalized his creation with a name. “I name you Sarcomaag.” And with that it was done, everything sealed. He could feel a mind stirring in the depths of the fungal mass, and it was quite different from most. Slower in some ways given how far it was spread out, but also deeper. He checked its aura and found it to still only have a spirit instead of a soul, but the mind inside was awakening at its own pace, and he could see the first signs of that denser, more complicated knot of energy forming. He expected Sarcomaag to have a fully functioning soul before long, especially as he could feel the first hints of curiosity. Hmm.

Oh. That was going to make things interesting. Whoops.

“Whoops?” Came Kazue’s query on the heels of that thought.

“Erm, I think I got ahead of myself with Sarcomaag here. I mean, what I designed is perfectly fine for a fifth-floor boss. But I didn’t place any proper growth restrictions on them either.” That was embarrassing, and the sort of thing that he should know better than to do. Maybe he was getting too comfortable and ambitious with designing complicated bosses, even with two brains it was hard to keep track of all the little things that had to be tuned correctly.

“Which means what my darling?”

When had Kazue learned to do the sweetly dangerous tone? It was cute, but Mordecai kept that thought to himself. “It’ll be slow, but Sarcomaag is going to spread, and they’ve already started to instinctively try to grow along and inside of the living crystal layer. The fact that some of its fruiting bodies already use living crystal makes it easier. So, well, I’m not entirely certain. They won’t do anything to harm the dungeon of course, and it shouldn’t make much difference to anything. But I also wouldn’t be surprised to find small mushrooms cropping up in places it wants to ‘see’ what is going on.” Its senses were different, but would be as good as vision for most purposes, and better for a few.

“Um, is that okay? I mean, we have rules about what can be where, doesn’t that kind of break them?” Kazue sounded worried, and he couldn’t blame her.

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem? Sarcomaag shouldn’t be able to act on the upper floors, though maybe they can on the lower floors as we grow.” Mordecai didn’t think that the fungal boss was going to default into one of the future raid boss nodes, but he was considering assigning it one anyway. “Well, we can discuss it with them when they wake up. Just don’t expect it to be a fast conversation, their mind works rather differently.”

“Alright. I guess we’ll wait and see. So, what did you have in mind for the second boss?”

Mordecai smiled. “Something much more straightforward love. Though I think most people will prefer to face Sarcomaag.”