Museum Core Chapter 8: First Champion

“So, what do I do now?” Thomas asked after he’d finished resummoning everything and fixing the wall.

“You look into the monster pattern, and find its cores. There should be one that’s just raw energy and potential, you can ignore that one for now, and one that explains its, um, … its being, maybe? It’s hard to explain, but you’ll know it when you see it.”

“Oh, the information packet,” Thomas responded immediately. “Yeah, found it. And now?”

“Wait, how did you … never mind,” Elias shook his head. “When magic is involved, all creatures gain a core that explains what they’re all about.For animals,  it just talks about the creature, but for sapient beings, it explains what path they take to power. I’ll explain more about that later.

“But right now, we just need to deal with upgrading our little kitty. You can create two bosses currently, one for F- and the other for E-Rank. To do that, you just need to alter the relevant creature’s baseline abilities, upgrading it to where you want it to be. You should probably also change the name to differentiate it in the System, and if you don’t like the name, you can always change it later.”

And there Elias went again, dangling countless loose threads that just begged Thomas to pull on and get more information on countless topics, but he still had a mission and right now, that was more important.

“What kinds of upgrades?” Thomas asked.

“Whatever you can imagine, whatever you want, you’ll know when you’ve gone too far. But remember, only change the fundamental core for now, leave the second alone for now,” Elias said.

“Can I experiment, or are the changes final?” Thomas pressed further.

“Just make sure to remove anything that you want to keep immediately, especially if it won’t work. It’ll be obvious if something goes wrong.”

That was good to know. Doctor Frankenstein Time!

Thomas imagined himself grinning viciously as he dove right back into the pattern.

As it turned out, upgrading the fundamental properties of an animal was terrifyingly simple. He decided what he wanted to happen, and it happened.

One couldn’t simply double the size of a creature and expect things to go well, its bones would crack, its muscles tear, and its lungs might not keep up either. Not to mention that at some point, it might cook itself with its own body heat without specialized adaptations, such as an elephant’s ears.

The point was that with a lot of enhancements, countless small changes needed to be made to accommodate the first, big one. Ordinarily, hunting down all those knock-on effects caused by an initial alteration would be a hellish game of whack-a-mole. There was a reason why all kinds of genetic alterations were so damn hard to pull off, why many genetically modified organisms tended to die when someone looked at them wrong.

But with these upgrades, everything was adjusted automatically. Which was a damn good thing because all upgrades needed be purely biological in nature, no magic fuckery allowed.

The first upgrade was simple, straightforward. A massive increase in size and power, blowing the creature up to the size of a Clydesdale, with fangs the size of swords and jaws that could crush bowling balls.

In fact, jaw strength was the second upgrade, along with all other muscles in the body, which were made far tougher and denser, to the point where the boss monster would probably be stronger than an elephant despite being smaller.

The third upgrade was applied to the bones, which were shifted into a harder substance, elephant ivory. Thomas knew that limpet teeth were some of the strongest bone-like substances, and what he would have used if possible, but he didn’t have any to use as an example, so he left it as it was. And elephant ivory was tough.

He also tipped the tiger’s claws with razor-sharp ivory. The material was too heavy and inflexible to replace them entirely, but adding it to the tip would massively increase its damage potential without serious drawbacks.

The hair was up next, which was replaced with something simple yet powerful, namely, the cobweb he’d found in the corner. Working with spider silk was well beyond him right now, but the upgrade was simple, accomplished with merely a thought.

Fur made of the same material as spiderwebs was nowhere near as good as proper ballistic cloth, but it should still provide an ungodly amount of protection.

And then came the fifth change. The one Thomas really felt uncertain about.

Biological redundancy. A secondary set of the most vital organs, mostly the lungs and its heart. The lungs were split up into several compartments, ensuring that a single puncture would not lead to half its lung capacity being gone in a flood of blood, and several additional pumps came into being along vital arteries, ensuring that damage to the primary organ would not lead to immediate death.

Furthermore, Thomas was able to make it so that the tiger’s skin was able to breathe and absorb oxygen, at least a little, compensating for not just the lungs but also, to a degree, the heart. After all, localized oxygen production would mean a lessened dependency on blood flowing from the lungs.

And secondary nerve fibers were added outside of the spine, which would allow the tiger to keep moving even with vertebral damage, to a certain degree.

The only thing that didn’t work was the brain upgrade, unfortunately. It was still a big weakpoint, but thankfully, it was the only serious one.

Thomas sighed heavily, did one final check to make sure that the changes wouldn’t immediately or eventually kill the tiger, and finalized everything.

“Done.”

“Ok, now you’re going to upgrade your creature to F-Rank,” Elias said. “The rank-up process can be very different depending on how you’re chasing power, but with Dungeon creatures, it’s very simple. They defend the Dungeon and kill stuff, energy accumulates, and once a new power core forms, you can assign an ability to it to push them into the next rank. Then it’ll advance through the rank as it works, until eventually it hits the peak when the next core forms, yada yada yada, you get the idea.”

“… And how do I assign an upgrade, hm?” Thomas asked.

“You pick one from your System interface, or …” Elias broke off and started swearing. At least that was what it sounded like. The translation feature that let them understand each other was working just fine, but either it was literally translating everything, or Elias’ home had some seriously weak-sauce insults.

After a minute, he calmed down and settled in front of Thomas’ core.

“You’re going to have to figure out how, then. Any concept can be a possible upgrade, but you’re only dealing with an F-Rank power, it’s going to be weak. You can’t just slap on a concept like ‘godkiller’ and expect it to work anything like how it sounds.”

“That doesn’t help,” Thomas grumbled. He had a few ideas, but no idea how to make them actually function. The orb of potential just hung there in the core of the pattern, ignoring him.

“First, you start looking at your two patterns with powers, the wyvern and the lizard, and see how their powers are structured.

“And second, you create your own based on any example you have. That can be a biological power already present in one of your creatures, a structural concept from one of the materials in your core, an enchantment from a magical item you’ve got as a loot pattern, whatever you want.”

So Thomas began to look inwards. He’d already seen what the lizardman’s power looked like, but the wyvern’s pattern looked interesting. Once again, it had a simple information core, the Null-core as Elias had called it, and two actual powers.

The first was one that was “impossible function”, “flight”, or something along those lines, an ability that allowed it to fly even though it should have been far too heavy and dense. And the second was some kind of acceleration/momentum redirection power that would make it a terror in the air. Thomas was very happy about the fact that it hadn’t been able to come into effect in the tight confines of the Dungeon.

Both powers were likely based on the creature’s wings, taken well past their logical extremes and turned into superpowers.

And now, Thomas would be able to create powers of his own.

“So, can I use the spear’s enchantments as a base?” Thomas suggested, practically salivating at the thought. He didn’t know what those were, exactly, but they sounded powerful.

“You’d explode if you tried to eat it,” Elias reminded him.

And there went that idea, Elias’ old equipment was the only magical gear Thomas had. He had a whole lot of materials, but they were all simple. Something based on steel for durability might work, or potentially adding something akin to rebar to its flesh to grant it an ability to keep wounds somewhat closed … there were a lot of options, but nothing that really spoke to him at the moment.

He shared his ideas with Elias, from passive enhancements to temporary boosts, like giving the tiger the ability to temporarily enhance its hairs with steel, further adding to the spider silk’s already insane durability, or stiffening the hair and making it stand on end, effectively wreathing the monster in razor blades, and it would all work, but didn’t fit.

All of it was too defensive, too simple. He needed something that would work with its present capabilities while also enhancing them in a significant way.

Perhaps something to overcharge its natural weaponry? A sabertooth tiger’s main advantage in a fight were its teeth, which were long enough to go completely through a prey creature’s throat, punching clean through all major blood vessels as well as the windpipe, killing it almost instantly.

However, while those teeth might be devastating in the right spot, biting down anywhere else risked them breaking off.

Thomas tried to go for some kind of automatic tooth regeneration ability, with an additional effect of making the tooth inflict additional damage in the wound, but he didn’t have anything to base it on. The most he could do was give it the ability to manifest a steel tooth replacement if a tooth broke off. That would be cool, but again, it still didn’t feel impactful enough.

Perhaps the claws would work? In the wild, the claws were mostly used to hold onto the prey to give the tiger the chance to land the killing bite, but in the Dungeon, they should also come in handy for slashing attacks.

… Holy shit. Ho-ley fucking shit.

The new enhancement was based on the claws, and allowed the tiger to manifest  sharpened edges that either vastly enhanced their sharpness, could be projected up to a meter away, or hurled as a projectile. A simple power, but flexible, and it should be powerful as hell in combination with what he had planned next.

He checked the power over one last time, mentally named it [Master Lacerate], and applied it.

Instantly, the softly glowing blue orb of potential began to grow cold, its color shifting to a cold white, streaked through with metal, radiating cold steel and killing power.

And now, there was just one last thing left to do, namely, name the cat.

“What do you think about ‘Mittens’?” Thomas asked.

“It sounds silly,” Elias grumbled. “Or are you naming it after some kind of famous cat?”

“Nah, I just thought it would be funny, having a boss monster with a silly name.”

Elias just grumbled, so Thomas kept going.

“Its scientific name is smilodon fatalis, so what about ‘Fatality’?” Thomas suggested.

“You have got to realize that that makes zero sense, right?” Elias grumbled. “I’m guessing it sounds similar in your language, but what I’m hearing is the translation. But ‘Fatality’ sounds dumb, like it’s just going to be a punching bag.”

Put like that, Thomas had to admit that the name sounded dumb. But he had another idea. From Smilodon, his mind had jumped straight to “smile”, and when you put together “smile” and “cat”, what did you get?

“I hereby dub thee ‘Cheshire’,” Thomas proclaimed as he called forth the sabertooth tiger, grinning as he watched her curl up in the corner as if she were just a small housecat. He’d known she was a girl the whole time, of course, but it had taken a while to see her as an individual, as opposed to one of the countless creatures he could spam-create from the original pattern.

“I’m guessing there’s a reason behind the name?” Elias said.

“Yep,” Thomas replied absentmindedly while he reorganized the boss room. He’d already evicted its previous inhabitants, now, it was time to turn it into a death trap.

First, he replaced the floor with a sheet of marble, smooth as all get out, a simple sheet without a single protrusion. His control over precise matter creation was lacking, but the manifestation of simple shapes was automated. And a flat sheet was about as simple as it got.

And second, he poured some water onto it. Not much, but enough to take it from “smooth” to “wet floor designed by a sadistic pyschopath as a method of execution”. Admittedly, it was exactly that, minus the “sadistic psycho” part.

A while ago, Thomas had read that part of what allowed cheetahs to reach such incredible speeds was that they used their claws like the spikes in track running shoes, gaining incredible traction.

And that was what Cheshire should be able to do the same using her claw-enhancing ability. After giving a few explanations to the big cat, he sent her in to try it out, only for the whole thing to turn into a live rendition of “Bambi’s first time on the Ice”.

After several minutes with very little improvement, Elias leaned over and whispered to Thomas in a mock-academic tone.

“Now, I may not be entirely familiar with this species, but would I be correct to assume that those big teeth are meant to stay inside the mouth?”

Thomas’ only response was an annoyed grunt.

But after maybe an hour, a wet and panting Cheshire flopped down on the slick marble and began to pull herself across the floor with her forepaws until she finally lay before Thomas’ core, looking up at him with big eyes.

“You know, you really should feed your monsters. What in the celestials’ name have you been spending your mana on?” Elias asked, causing Thomas to wince.

“Wait, they need food?”

Elias just facepalmed.