Museum Core Chapter 31: Madness, utter Madness

It was at this point that the Landwyrm finally began to move towards the Dungeon. It was just as big as the first of its kind to enter the Dungeon, but it was completely free of any of the injuries that the first one had suffered at the hands of Thomas’ wyverns.

The final challenge. Everything else had either died in the Dungeon, outside it or retreated when the option presented itself. There was still a wyvern left, sure, but despite its power, it was unable to unleash anything close to its full strength indoors.

Thomas’ Dungeon had lost most of its defenses so far, everything that delvers were meant to face, but the areas meant to stay safe even after the main Dungeon had been beaten were largely untouched, meaning the second Landwyrm and the core room with a slip-n-slide floor and three giant sloths.

That, at the very least, should stop the giant snake-monster. After all, they really didn’t know how to deal with slick flooring.

He wound up ordering the giant sloths from the core room forward to see if they could get into Cheshire’s room before the snake.

Ultimately, while he had plenty of solid defenses, he desired to upgrade his own creations more than he wanted to empower the creatures he absorbed from the outside. Cool as they were, he much preferred complete customization.

They reached the boss room shortly, and rapidly tore at the carpet of vines that were currently strewn about it to expose the floor once again, then dragged out the corpses.

Their enemy showed up before they could fully finish, but the room was clear enough in Thomas’ opinion.

An extending arm shot through the room grabbed a hold of one of the snake dragon’s legs, and yanked.

The floor outside wasn’t anywhere near as slippery as the floor inside, but this was still smooth marble liberally covered in blood and other liquids that Thomas didn’t much want to think about. It was enough.

With a startled roar, the Landwyrm slipped into Cheshire’s boss room, its expression strongly reminding Thomas of those prank videos where an unsuspecting passerby was pushed onto a slide or into a pool. Those videos weren’t very funny when one considered how that person must be feeling, but this, this right here, was hilarious, in a murdery sort of way.

One of the sloths shot into the room, grabbed a hold of the wyrm, and stopped it before it slid out the opposite door, leaving it stuck in the middle of the room, facing three powerful dungeon beasts that were infinitely more mobile than it.

There were limits to the elastic arms power, obviously. While the arms were elongated, the muscles didn’t quite attach to the bones the way they were supposed to, so freely altering the trajectory of movements while the limb was already elongated wasn’t in the cards.

“Zoom-punches”, on the other hand, were perfectly fine, as was using the arms like grappling hooks.

A giant sloth grabbed a wyrm leg, pulled itself in, and drove giant claws in a gap between scales and tore sideways, ripping out scales and flesh beneath, followed by a swift escape to the other side of the room.

Doorways and windowsills weren’t nearly as good as the jungle gym Thomas had attached to the roof of the sloths’ actual room when it came to being points to grab onto, but they still served decently well.

And as it turned out, one of the sloths was very smart, perhaps even smarter than Thomas was.

It grabbed a rock, curling its claws around it, pulled the arm back as far as it could, and swung it around in a wide arc, letting its arm elongate as it did so.

Thomas had considered that kind of flail-like attack, but it wouldn’t work with a limb that was essentially a limp noodle at the moment of impact.

But with how that sloth had set it up, the rock cracked into the wyrm’s skull, causing it to veer back, looking dizzy.

Unfortunately, the sloth lost the rock in the process, its “hands” not really being set up for tool use.

Hmm, some kind of weights around the wrists could be pretty useful. Or perhaps an appropriate power? Something to empower impacts, a limb transformation optimized for tool use, or maybe that bone-knuckleduster power he’d seen earlier?

Either way, something for later.

The Landwyrm finally retaliated at that. Thomas had had his creatures smack its head every time it looked like it was about to spit acid, stay away from its mouth, and overall maneuver around the potential attack, so it hadn’t done anything yet, but it seemed like that phase was about to end here and now.

Unfortunately, this Landwyrm had a different version of the acid breath power than the first one. That beastie had been able to blast bolts of the corrosive liquid, this one’s attack was more like an acid mist. Short range, terrible accuracy, and yet, devastating.

The “smart” sloth reeled back, half its fur already vaporized, while its fellows went straight for the wyrm’s throat.

Thomas knew from the absorbed pattern that while the acid was largely power-based, part of the power was heavily enhancing a biological acid gland. Destroying that might not completely remove the threat, but should at least mitigate it.

They struck “gold” on the third slash, the sloth that managed it losing a paw to the gore that splashed from the wound it had opened, and then began to melt as more and more liquid pumped from the wound.

That … it was rhythmical, it’d probably managed to hit an artery as well.

The wyrm began to thrash, slipping and sliding, spraying acid everywhere, and might have killed the last two sloths, but the smart one pulled itself up against the far wall and then lashed out with both arms, pushing away the corpse.

Of course, not being built for two-legged locomotion, the sloth faceplanted a moment later, but it had done a good job, saving both itself and its final comrade.

That was then that the wyvern showed up, glancing in from the dino section door, and stopped cold.

Its head dipped down as it grasped a hold of one of the E-Rank monkeys that had been flung out of the boss room, and began dragging it outside.

At least that one was smart enough to not push its luck.

But when it tried to come in for seconds … the gloves came off.

While it poked its head back in, the wyverns Thomas had on the roof swooped down and flew off with its scavenged corpse while the fully healthy sloth came charging out to meet it.

The wyvern seemed pretty okay with not getting to steal another body, but when it realized that its already “safe” loot had been stolen, oh, the look of outrage on its face.

Thomas started to laugh. The monster had made the mistake of backing out of the entrance hall, thereby vacating the Dungeon, and as it watched, all that food strewn across the floor, painting the walls and on one occasion, even the ceiling, just began to … vanish!

More shock and dismay than he ever could have expected a reptilian face to be able to convey covered the wyvern’s head, he could practically feel the venom in its glare burn him, but that was fine. Let the damn thing be mad, let it stay out there and scavenge what could be found outside. This was Thomas’ house, no stinking invaders allowed.

As he began to clean, he also dropped a metric crapton of his strongest creatures into the entrance hall. T-rexes, sabertooth tigers, a few elephants, a few more giant sloths … oh, let that wyvern try to come in.

Come on, try it!

The wyvern didn’t, sadly. And Thomas decided to not send out his roof wyverns since the former invader was quite a bit larger and stronger than it.

***

Rebuilding the defenses would prove simple, but before he got to that, he absorbed the smart sloth the same way he had with Cheshire … wait, had that just been yesterday? It had, hadn’t it?

Anyway, the point was, he could create a champion for each of his ranks, and the Dungeon core he’d merged with had been E-Rank, so he still had one slot open. A slot he’d love to fill, and highly intelligent creatures were perfect for that.

With that done, he left the creature there. He’d go diving through the archives first before he upgraded it.

Thomas then went ahead and replaced all his creatures, fixed all the damage, cleared the bodies, and overall reset the Dungeon.

And with that done, on to the fun part.

His domain had gained massive expansion potential, so he went right ahead and used it.

First, he grabbed the entirety of the archives on the ground floor and cellar, the gem vault on the second floor, and the rest of the exhibition rooms, including the reptile section, the small deep-sea section, and the three-story geology section on the far side of the museum. He’d take a little time to turn the last one into a perfect dungeon area, once he had the time to focus on it.

Unfortunately, the other two sections were filled with plastic replicas, so he’d be limited to whatever he could scrounge up from the archives. And holy shit, there was a lot of cool shit in there, including plenty of actual dinosaur bones, not replicas.

Sure, a lot were too large for the museum, were too slow compared to upgraded modern-day animals, or impractical for other reasons, but he still had a lot of cool new critters.

He spawned in a few velociraptors, which were actually barely larger than chickens in the real world, yet cute as sin, tiny, and covered in fine feathers.

But those were just for decoration.

The real power stemmed from the three Utahraptors he added to the dino section, which were basically the raptors from Jurrasic Park, but feathered. Those were just plain cool.

He also found a few good snakes to add to his emergency defenses, including the inland taipan. He added a few of that to his Dungeon. Anyone who came after him with ill intentions better stock up on antidotes or it would be lights out.

Speaking of snakes, though, the Boomslang pattern had managed to reach E-Rank and was ready to upgrade. The power for them was obvious, to be honest. The vine control power wielded by the monkeys would obviously go to something, the ability to mess with his Dungeon even with invaders inside would be invaluable, but it also nicely synergized with the snakes, who could now create their own paths along the ceiling.

Overall, he’d gotten a ton of useful powers, including several elemental and body-enhancement abilities, though he could create much of the latter just by creating one of the powers that exaggerated the natural features of one of his patterns.

And he had a lot of patterns to upgrade, though he’d had to downgrade the wolverines, switching to the standard version so he could upgrade them again with the personal gravity manipulation ability of the jungle cats.

Unfortunately, there was a pretty hard weight limit on that power, so there would be no T-rexes tap-dancing on the ceiling, but it was still a cool power to use.

And speaking of dancing, that was something that the power he gave to the dinosaurs would make utterly devastating. He’d thought about a lot of possible options, including the jaw-projection of the lizard that had killed his final big dino, but in the end, this was a T-rex.

It had a lot of physical power, an elemental attack wouldn’t synergize well with it, projecting one’s jaw a couple of meters forward wouldn’t make nearly as much of a difference on a dinosaur that was already fifteen meters long as it had for a small lizard, and bite-force enhancement, well, they could already bite clean through bone. And physical power would only grow as their rank did.

They didn’t need the help.

So instead, he allowed their every step to cause the ground to tremble, messing with the footing of enemies, and only enemies. In essence, it applied a little vibration to the bottoms of their feet as though the ground were trembling, just without messing with the footing of allies or causing the entire room to tumble into the basement after a few rounds of fighting.

The perfect power for such a powerful creature as he saw it.

And the other dinosaurs got the elastic power on their tails, with specific enhancements for their power sets. Basically, the scutellosaurus basically had a flail for a tail, and the camarasaurus got a whip that could stiffen up and hit as though it weren’t rubber even at full extension.

That just left two creatures.

The sabertooth tiger got a simple power that should be devastating, one he’d dubbed “Gattling Dentition”.

It was an exaggerated version of a great white shark’s revolver dentition that allowed it to rapidly regrow its teeth, focusing on the two main saber teeth. Specifically, the big teeth would, once punched into an enemy’s flesh, break off and instantly regrow, while the teeth stuck in the other guy would come apart, breaking into razor-sharp shards. They’d travel through whatever blood vessels or the like the teeth had penetrated and shred anything they passed by until they eventually reached the heart or lungs.

Sure, his enemies were powerful creatures with supernatural toughness, but something whose durability made tissue paper look like kevlar fiber in comparison would still be hard-pressed to survive the shards.

Thomas briefly took over a Capuching to cackle. It sounded ridiculous due to the monkey’s vocal cords being very different from a human’s, but damn, was it fun.

That just left his big, bad, powerful sloth. A future champion, his next exercise in mad science.

Spider silk as fur, claws that used to be designed for pulling down tree branches becoming savage instruments of death … oh, this would be fun.

One of the many nasty creatures he’d found in the archives was a metric crapton of limpets, whose teeth were made of some the hardest biological material in the world, perfect for being turned into sharp implements.

So, bones, claws, teeth-obviously, scale pattern armor over the vital spots … there was a lot he could do with this material, so he did. He also incorporated more metal than was normal into the sloth’s bones to make it heavier, adding more weight to its attacks, literally. The hands also became more flexible, becoming fully functioning tool-using appendages while changes to the body would allow it later to wear armor, once Thomas figured out how to make some.

He also gave the sloth all the standard biological upgrades he had given to Cheshire, such as a limited ability for its organs to take over for others, secondary neural paths to compensate for spinal damage and the like.

Another thing he slapped on was the venom glands of a slow loris. Snake glands wouldn’t work with a creature that would largely fight with its claws, but the slow loris had glands would secrete a venomous oil in their upper arms.

The cute little primates would then lick at these glands, making their bites devastatingly dangerous.

But with the sloths, well, he located a gland at the base of each claw, into which he promptly cut a grove that the venom would run along and reach the tip.

Of course, he also empowered the venom with all the nastiest portions of cytotoxic snake venom he had. Neuro- and hemotoxins didn’t get thrown in, though, since they wouldn’t necessarily get deep enough to have their full effect. If the claws of a superpowered giant sloth ripped that deep into an enemy, the venom wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but the flesh-rotting effect would make shallow scratches medical emergencies.

And finally, the second power. The sloth pattern had reached E-Rank, though since Thomas would make this Champion pattern from it, this power would only be given to the Champion, he’d have to boost the general sloth pattern once more after this.

He’d already decided, though. The whip attack was powerful and this sloth’s “signature”, so that was what Thomas would upgrade with a mass-manipulation power that would allow it to massively increase the mass of one body part at a time. It was a multiplicative boost, so it would synergize nicely with its immense, enhanced, mass. And the power would work nicely on punches as well.

This thing wouldn’t be the fast attacker Cheshire was, it was a literal tank, with wrecking balls for fists.

So, what to name it?

Sid was the obvious choice, but according to Elias, inspection powers existed. And given what he knew about Disney, they’d go after people who fucked with their copyright even in the middle of the apocalypse.

So, what else was the- … oh, Dexter!

Sure, a sloth wasn’t a monkey, but they were somewhat similar, and in his mind, monkey plus museum equaled Dexter. And he did like the name.

The newly named Dexter took his place in Thomas’ new second boss room, the mammal hall. Oh, this would be fun when the next human delvers showed up, he couldn’t wait to see their responses.

Cheshire had also hit E-Rank, though her power was pretty simple. Thomas turned her explosive speed into a superpower, allowing her to move so quickly she might as well be teleporting, in short bursts. Between that and the conditions in her room, she’d be a menace.

And finally, the Capuchins he had deployed en-mass had also grown to F-Rank, letting him create a power he’d simply dubbed “Dungeon Avatar”. The ability to speak, with his voice when he inhabited them, a greater control over their body, hands that could wield tools and the like.

Oh, all the shenanigans he could get up to now …