A day later, Nuwa had everything she needed to really start making headway with monsters. She was able to purchase everything on her list after eight hours of the Parallels sleeping, and after she had purchased Mixed-Up Monsters she was able to purchase an upgrade that let her modify the physical form of her monsters as well, provided the dungeon had learned something that had the modifications she was making. That was essentially a non-issue, as being a Perfect Chimera made her dungeon’s specialization “everything” and she had most basic monsters already known. She could just spawn something close to what she wanted to teach the dungeon, mold it into something else with Carmen’s help, and boom, new parts acquired.

But she couldn’t just jump right in and make a monster. Well, she could, but it would be a bad idea. She’d probably end up with some mess of a monster, and that would just be a waste of time and resources. So, she needed to plan things out first.

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.

The problem with that was that dungeon monsters don’t have any real sentience, according to Kali. Any intelligence was supposed to be just a ruse or preprogramming or something. She was sure there’d be a way to give them sentience, so she’d have to ask Kali about it later. It’d probably cost a pretty penny, but it’d be worth it. There was also the problem of convincing Lilith to allow that, but she was positive that wouldn’t be too hard.

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’ll 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 Greek mythology didn’t exactly have an iconic look.

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 7.

7 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. Yes, she was taking the concept of a female entity and applying it to a male monster, but since Ammit was never humanoid and the sex was basically irrelevant, she decided to let it slide.

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 warhammer.

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.

Nuwa wiped her metaphorical forehead and went to look for Kali using the spare avatar, eventually finding her watching TV alone in her room.

Kali instantly perked up when Nuwa entered, pausing the TV and walking over to give her girlfriend a quick kiss. “Nuwa, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“You clearly aren’t Eve, and the other three are out killing monsters around the cities of Haven or prepping areas to place warp gates. You could have been one of the others using the spare avatar, but you don’t walk like Carmen, Eve would have been louder coming in, Mae would have just used telepathy, and Lilith isn’t the type to stop in the middle of something without alerting me first. So, it was a guess, but a pretty safe one.”

Nuwa shrugged. “You got me, I guess. I was wondering if there was a way to grant dungeon monsters sentience, and also wanted to move around a little, so I decided to come ask you in person.”

Kali smiled, grabbing Nuwa’s hand and towing her over to the bed. “It’s down the line in the upgrade tree. You’re not doing anything right now, right? Just waiting on DP? If so, come watch some TV with me. It’s important to take breaks from time to time.”

Nuwa paused. “I am just waiting on DP, but…”

“But nothing. Breaks are good for your mental health and will increase your efficiency. Now sit down and enjoy yourself for a bit, it’s not going to ruin anything.”

Nuwa sighed, but acquiesced.

---

Lilith felled the latest monster and made sure it was dead before moving on. Sure, the EXP message said it was dead, but she had encountered Skills that let a monster play possum, even going so far as to alter the EXP message. Her method of checking was just checking its Skill list using Envious Elevation to make sure it didn’t have a Skill list to check. It hadn’t let her down yet, so she was going to continue using it until it was proven unreliable, if that ever happened.

“Not bad, newbie.” Isa said, clapping Lilith on the shoulder. “But you’ve got to pay more attention after a kill. If I was trying to hurt you, I could have gotten a real nasty shot in right there.”

Sorry, mistress, that’s my fault. Mae said. I was busy scanning it for potential uses as a dungeon monster. Nuwa asked me to do it, and I should have been more conscious of the surroundings while doing so.

It’s fine, don’t worry about it too much. Lilith replied. She turned around to face Isa, nodding. “Consider my lesson learned. What do you need from me?” It wasn’t too surprising to see Isa here; Isa was still keeping up her patrol of Haven’s cities, so they met from time to time.

“Take a wild guess.” Isa replied.

Lilith frowned. She couldn’t really think of anything so… “You want a rematch, right?”

Isa returned her frown. “Well, yes, but that’s not why. You got the broadcast, right?”

Lilith shook her head. “No, what broadcast?”

Isa gave her a brief rundown of the contents of the broadcast. “I’m not sure why you didn’t get it, though. You should have been pretty high on the list of people who should know.”

“I’ll have to ask Kali about that, it seems like a bit of an oversight, and I feel like she wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.”

“Later. Right now we have to figure out what we’re going to do. It’s pretty clear that Elenoa is going to try and bait you into a trap, and I want to help you out.”

Lilith gave her a careful look. “I won’t say no to your help, but may I ask why you’re offering? I won’t be giving favors for this, it’s too much like bribery.”

Isa laughed. “I don’t expect any. Honestly, I just want to square off against that sword of hers and whatever else she’s got cooked up. It sounds like a good fight.”

“And what’s my guarantee that you’re not going to be leaking information to Elenoa right after we finish here?”

She shrugged. “Technically none, but that’s not my style, you can ask Kali, she’ll back me up. Besides, I won’t go out of my way to help Elenoa if I don’t have to. If I do that even once, she’ll never stop trying to exploit me. And even if she would just let it slide, I wouldn’t help. She’s just an awful person and deserves anything that comes her way, if you ask me.”

Lilith thought on that for a moment. “Alright, but let me double check with Kali before we make any plans, I want to be as safe as possible.”

Isa nodded. “I can respect that. I’ll meet you around this city in three days’ time. We can talk then, I don’t think Elenoa will have sprung her trap then, and you don’t have to respond to the trap immediately anyway, so it’s fine.”

And with that she melted back into the surrounding foliage, leaving Lilith to finish her rounds.

---

Lilith knocked on Kali’s door and opened it after she got a “come in” in response. Kali was on her bed, watching TV with Nuwa.

“I thought I told you not to knock. Well, whatever, what’s up?”

“Why didn’t I get this broadcast Isa was telling me about? It seems kind of important.”

Kali sighed, pausing the TV. “Couple of reasons, really. First, I didn’t want you worrying about it or trying to do anything about it right away. We can’t move until she breaks one of our rules, or else people are going to call it a miscarriage of justice and an abuse of power. It’s unfortunate, but that’s politics. Our job will be a lot easier if governments aren’t actively resisting us.”

She shifted to get a better look at Lilith. “Second, it’s a lesson. You had all the tools necessary to get the information yourself and didn’t use them. Yes, you’re busy, but that’s not an excuse for neglecting your safety. I’m not always going to be available; I’ve got a leave from my duties with my faction due to the big changes I’ve been making, but that’s only for a year. You need to learn to be independent, because there’s a real possibility I’ll be gone for long periods of time. I can’t always bail you out, so I’m not going to when I’m here, not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

She stood up and walked over to Lilith, giving her a hug. “It’s not that I’m not concerned or anything, I really am, I just believe that you can handle this, and it’ll be good for your growth. Please don’t take it the wrong way.”

Lilith paused. “I guess that’s understandable. Mind if I ask if Isa’s working with Elenoa, or can I trust her?”

“Yeah, she’s fine. Her and Elenoa have butted heads quite a bit in the past, and I’m pretty sure the only way she’d willingly assist Elenoa with something like this is if she was being blackmailed, and there’s nothing Elenoa could use to blackmail her. She was a street urchin with no connections, and she hasn’t been looking to make friends so there’s no hostages Elenoa could take, and she doesn’t have any secrets that need keeping. It’s not like Elenoa could intimidate her either, so feel free to include her in your plans.”

Nuwa frowned. “What’s all this?”

A short explanation later, and a very alarmed Nuwa was back off to managing the dungeon and making contingency plans, muttering about how she should have been more careful and how there really wasn’t time for a break right now.

Lilith shot Kali a glance.

“She’s just waiting on DP and making vague plans. There was plenty of time for a break.” Kali said defensively. “Plus, I hadn’t really had much time with her, so it was a good opportunity.”

“That’s fine, then. I’m going to go talk with everyone about this. Do you want to come?”

“Yeah, I can help you make plans.”

After a moment of hesitation, she grabbed Lilith’s hand, and the two went to gather everyone. She was going to have to walk into this trap if she wanted to perform her duty as the High Arbiter, but that didn’t mean she had to go in blind. It was time to prepare.