Mordecai swore as he shook his head to clear his thoughts in the wake of the sudden explosion. It didn't help that the fsh and bang of it had left even his senses dazzled.

  Nearby, Crios was dang happily at his successful experiment. Fortunately, they weren't in Crios's normal zht now, so there was no one who would get seriously hurt by that uer explosion.

  The crab zone boss of their sed downward zone had been a little jealous that 'normal' crabs in their o zone were more powerful than he was, and Mordecai had been running a couple of experiments of his own to help alleviate the issue.

  The first of those was fairly benign; he was simply trying to improve Crios's defenses in passive, non-magical ways that would still t as fair. Crios's carapaow included enough iron to make it somewhat harder to crack while maintaining the little bit of flexibility exoskeletons required. Mordecai had also been w on armored pting that would be externally strapped on, making it equipment.

  This had only been going so well. Figuring out ways to strap metal ptes onto a crab without hindering movement was plicated for the legs and head. Crios's main body was fairly straightforward, but most people only had a ce to attack his body if they had already damaged his legs.

  The sed thing Mordecai had been doing was to indulge Crios with the use of a bit of polymorphic magic. Battle-form spells were not terribly plicated to create if you uood the target form well enough. Ohe spell was created, just using it didn't require the same knowledge, and self-only versions were simpler than spells that could target others. So Mordecai had created a single-use talisman that Crios could use to cast the spell on himself.

  Crios had ehe experience, but that had only been one variation of the metal-shelled crabs in the o zone and Crios wanted more. The bad forth oopic had required a promise from Crios to only indulge himself once per reset and only if it was certain that his floor would not have any bat parties visiting before the reset.

  Mordecai's part of the bargain involved designing somethihere were potentially a lot of variations of metal-shelled crabs, far more than actually existed in the Azeria Dungeon, and Mordecai didn't want to end up needing to craft a new spell for each variation Crios wao try out.

  While it ossible to craft a spell that could incorporate all the variations, seleg a variation required casting the spell yourself rather than using spell-charged items.

  Instead, Mordecai had created an interfa the warrens that let Crios select different potential traits. This automated the process of geing a spell that was dispensed as another single-use talisman. Well, sort of automated. It was still his core that was doing the work, but it took up less of his attention.

  Over time, Crios’ requests had led to Mordecai being able to signifitly expand, refine, and modify the avaible possibilities. While tinually modifying the interface was more work, it was also free variatioing that Mordecai didn't have to do himself.

  Today's explosion was the result of Crios's experiments. He had been w on having stripes of differeal pounds positioned in specific locations, and the first thing those experiments had taught him was to specify that the stripes be thin if the metal iion wasn't strong.

  With the right metallic stripes in the right locations, it ossible to grind off powders of burals. Another shell modification allowed the creation of a 'pouch' of sorts he tip of a cw, and a final modification allowed grinding two bits of differeal ptes together inside of the pouch to ighe metal powders in a sudden fsh.

  It was Mordecai's bad luck to be there when Crios had finally gotten the binatiht. The most reactive metals could ignite in tiny puffs during the first grinding process, while less reactive metals were hard to set burning while uer. But he had fiuned an alloy that worked.

  Mordecai paused in his own experiments to ehat this new form was still appropriate for the challeheir o level was supposed to present. Power alone became less reliable as a measure of fairness when a dungeon grew deep enough. Much like what Mordecai had doh his avatar, it was teically possible to create inhabitants that were good at everything simultaneously while not exceeding how much piven zone could support and one had to develop a better sense for what was fair.

  Creating an unfair challenge for normal delvers didn't always create immediate problems, but eventually, it would e back around to bite the dungeon. At a minimum, the inhabitant's mana cost would start to increase, redug how many inhabitants they could support. Other backsh effects could include a pulsion to migrate the inhabitant to a stronger zone or a spontaneous ge to a weaker version of the form. Mordecai had always sidered these reas to be simir to how other life forms developed stress reas, but now he suspected it was a case of divine enfort of a dungeon's straining rules.

  Once he felt certain that the ie limitation of the bright explosion could work with certain crab types to make a more banced build, Mordecai formalized that variation as a possible evolution for some of the metal crab types that he'd found to be underperf.

  With that done, he turned his attention back to what he had been doing with his own form. While he had done some limited uer work wheing up the airy water path, Mordecai had eested the uer performance of his avatar.

  There were some minor issues, though only because he was being finicky about optimizing everything. For example, in his ambassador form, the scales on his arm were fag the wrong way for optimized swimming.

  If the scales poioward his hands, which was less effit for swimming, downward strikes were easily deflected, and those were more on than upward strikes. However, strikes ing from in front of him potentially had an ao better attack his forearms.

  If he reversed them, it was better for swimming and protected his forearms better, but his upper arms were less well protected. Also, it ran against the pattern of his body scales, so there was a line where the scales didn't mesh well.

  In the end, Mordecai decided to have the scales run up his arms and to have the patter at his shoulders. The meeting patterns created a bit of a weakness at his armpits, but with a little tweaking he could make the rest of the line overp in a way that created a ridge that would help protect his neot uhe ridges found on some pauldrons.

  The differen his swimming was small enough that it was not a deg factor, it had simply drawn his attention to the dire of his arm scales and made him think about the possibilities.

  Ahing he was w on was improving his senses. It was very hard to have acute sehat were not easily overloaded, but he was slowly enhang them via stant small tweaks and adjustments. Mordecai's physical senses bined enough specialties that they surpassed the performance of any species he knew of, and his non-physical senses were extremely keen as well.

  Crios's little experiment provided an actal test for his sight, hearing, and bodily sensitivity to vibrations. Any one of these could be easily dealt with and pensated for, but when bihat way it was harder to process and filter everything quickly, leading to overloaded senses.

  Testing other senses such as electrical sensors aing subtle ges in current were why Mordecai was currently only wearing a pair of short trousers. He still had to figure out how to best optimize clothing to not interfere with such senses while still be appropriately dressed.

  Mordecai was determio refine every form that his body could take before he awakened his ied avatar. He had a lot more time now than when he'd created this pattern for his avatar, and that was giving him some leeway with the ied avatar.

  As it hadn't been awakened, it could still be edited. It was already taking up an unusually rge portion of his core's memory, though that ratio had shrunk as the core had grown. Mordecai was slowly feeling fident enough in what he wanted or o start deleting some features of his secret form.

  These ges would only affect his ied avatar right now, but that was the ohat mattered.

  His biggest with the existence of that monstrous form was the possibility of being forced to shift into it. That might seem a bit vain at first, but he was mostly thinking about how it would look to the public if he suddenly became an eldritch horror. He did not o hand any more political or social ons to his enemies.

  Various spells and abilities specialized in revealing shape gers by f them to shift, and Mordecai retty certain that this was the form he would be forced to take in such a situation as it was the o like all the others.

  Therefore, it was Mordecai's goal to pletely delete the secret form from his ied avatar.

  While it was the 'source' for a lot of the abilities he was imbuing into his other forms, Mordecai was modifying that by the way he was incorporating the traits he wanted into his other forms.

  It did help that he had a lot of 'base' forms to spread some abilities amongst. Kitsuanuki, and shifters all had at least two forms, and he had included other species as well who had more limited shape-ging, such as the merfolk bloodlihat could shift between having legs for nd and their swimming form.

  Merfolk were a species Mordecai suspected was crafted; there were too many ued variations of fish, sharks, octopuses, and more for him to believe they could all be the same species uhey were designed with that variation.

  He shook off that thought and focused ba his curreing. By taking advantage of the multitude of forms avaible to him, Mordecai could migrate everything he wao keep into other forms. This did mean his ied avatar had unusual forms; after all, bear shifters didn't usually have stony quills hidden in their hair that they could fire at enemies behind them.

  This didn't e without a price, though it was ohat mostly aligned with his goals anyway. For every feature that he incorporated into a base form to make it non-standard for its type, Mordecai had to pletely unmake a feature of simir plexity or energy cost from the secret form without moving it.

  Reshuffling a future avatar's features shouldn't require this normally, but there was a soft strain from its size. Each deletioed a little 'space' and allowed the pattern to briefly rex, and it was during that window of time that Mordecai could move pos around and cut old links after new links were established.

  While his pns made some of his choices easy, such as deleting crab-like cws, some were harder. Mordecai liked having redundancies, but he was having to trim down. Previously he'd had a fairly wide range of toxins avaible to him, now he had just over a dozen scattered across all his future avatar's forms.

  The pattern of his ied avatar was slowly redug in plexity and size, though it had no effe his current one.

  It made Mordecai a bit nervous; once he fully ied in this avatar, he wouldn't be able to edit it anymore. There was so much depending on his power and ability in the near future, but more than that he wouldn't be able to make a new avatar for decades and eve would be hard to sider any new form to be anything other than limiting and straining when pared to this one.

  Of course, he could just wait until their core had enough power and space to duplicate the pattern, which would also mean having the ability to create a variant of it that was focused a little differently and required learning some new skills, but that could easily be a tury away.

  He tried not to think about that too much. He'd never had an avatar out for that long before; even when he was young, it usually only took two or three decades before an avatar had achieved the readily reached limits of mortal skill and power. As he'd gotten older, his avatars had usually started off with a stronger base set of skills, quiing their progress to mastery of a particur style or ability that he had focused that avatar on.

  Once Mordecai was satisfied that his four fully ized forms were operating as well as he could expect when uer, it was time to head back up for dinner. Crios had already run out the duration of his spell a for his home zone again. He was a little disappointed with how long it took to grind up enough metal powder to set off another fsh again, but overall, he'd had fun.

  Zagaroth