Chrysalis Rino Z / Tropes A to F

Tropes A to F | Tropes G To O | Tropes P to Z

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A - B

• Absolute Xenophobe: Arconidem's will drives the demons to eliminate all non-demons from the third stratum, where "eliminate" in this case means "attack in a rabid frenzy."
• Accidental Bargaining Skills: Cobalt and Smithant unintentionally drive a merchant down to a reasonable price, because when they hear that his initial asking price is well above market value, they turn away in disappointment, not as a negotiating tactic but genuinely intending to go elsewhere. The idea of bickering over prices is entirely foreign to them and sounds like selfishness, but the merchant wants a sale and repeatedly lowers his price until they accept.
  Irisod: [I genuinely can’t tell if your species are the worst hagglers I’ve ever seen, or the best.]
• Afraid of Their Own Strength: Sarah's life has been one of constant fear, and now that she's an Asura bear, a big part of that is the fear of what she's capable of when she gives in to the rage. The Colony helps her gradually heal, giving her opportunities to let go for a good cause and then come back to herself in safety.
  She didn't want to go back to what she was when she fought things like this, didn't want to retreat back into the madness and savagery that protected her from her cowardice.
• The Ageless: Dungeon monsters don't appear to age at all (although most of them have short lifespans simply because they're all surrounded by carnivores). Anthony relies on this when creating the aphid queen, figuring that he'll only need to do it once if they're careful.
• All Your Powers Combined: After parallel Skills like Fire Magic Affinity and Water Magic Affinity have been raised to a sufficiently high rank, they can be fused together — permanently losing access to the original skills, but gaining a single skill that combines all of them. The strength of the resulting skill depends on which tier they were pushed to first. Anthony ends up fusing tier-5 fire, water, earth, and air affinities, gaining All Element Mana Specialty, which lets him maintain just a single (albeit complex) magical construct and yet freely launch any type of elemental magic out of it, from lava bolts to water cannons to ice spears.
• Amicable Ants: Once Anthony finds his way back to the Colony, he quickly decides that they're a better family than humans ever were; wholeheartedly supportive and caring and trusting. As the ants expand throughout the Dungeon and come into contact with a variety of other species, it becomes clear that despite being monsters, they're better behaved than most of the surface races, with no politics nor selfishness, and Anthony can never quite comprehend why the whole world isn't thrilled to see them. The "Travelling Tolly" snippets give a glimpse of approximately ten years in the future, with a highly integrated society of humans and ants.
• Ant Assault: Despite the story being full of literal assaults by or on ants, it actually defies this trope, setting aside the mindless swarming and victories through weight of numbers. Anthony embraces his new life and considers the Colony his family, so he is not satisfied with their old tactics, due to the number of casualties that they inevitably incur. Instead, he empowers the ants to use tactics, strategy, communication, and diplomacy, greatly escalating their threat potential; they're still entirely willing to die for the Colony, but they'd rather make their enemies die instead. They're willing to peacefully coexist if humans will leave them alone, though.
• Anti-Grinding: The Dungeon tries to keep its various monsters somewhat fair and balanced. Level Grinding is entirely possible, but eventually it becomes necessary to face stronger foes.
  • Evolving induces a substantial penalty to experience and Biomass rewards, ensuring that it's not efficient for higher-tier monsters to just hang around on the upper strata steamrolling everything.
  • Levels are capped by evolutionary tier; level 5 for the first tier, ten for the second, then twenty, forty, etc.
  • The cost of mutation grows very rapidly, with every level costing one more Biomass point than the one before it — and eventually a monster will need to "reset" the organ to a better base material, which means starting the mutations over from the beginning. The maximum level of mutation is also capped by evolutionary tier.
  • Higher-tier monsters require more ambient mana just to survive, so even with great patience, there are limits on how far it's possible to grow without descending and facing stronger enemies.
• Ant War: When the Colony hears that there is a termite nest within the Dungeon, they all feel a deep necessity to exterminate it as soon as possible. The termites are no pushover, though, and it becomes a war of attrition, between armies that are each capable of tunnelling, swarming, and rapidly replenishing their numbers.
• Apocalyptic Gag Order: Wallace gives Yasmine her orders for dealing with the ant invasion of their city, but he insists that she not tell people what's really happening, because it will just start a panic that will be counterproductive. Unbeknownst to Yasmine, he's pulling the same thing on her, by not telling her that he believes the situation is hopeless.
  He'd had to lie to her, to keep her steady.
• Apologetic Attacker: James mentally apologises to the Queen when he completes his treacherous tunnel allowing the Golgari to reach the brood chambers. Not that it makes any difference to the ants' response.
• The Apprentice: The Folk member known only as "White" is apprenticed to her companion, "Grey", and doesn't speak at all during Anthony's conversation with them, referring all questions to Grey to answer on her behalf. The most Anthony is able to get from her is a shake of her head when he asks whether Grey is holding her against her will. Once Grey and White are alone, however, they're more talkative with each other, discussing their impressions of the Colony and future plans.
• Are We There Yet?: Anthony gets this from Vibrant (of course) constantly, when scouting out the advance of the Legion and the Golgari. By clearly spelling out that no, it will take a while to get where they're going, Anthony manages just a few seconds of silence, before she starts up again.
• Arrows on Fire: The Abyssal Legion is able to make flaming arrows practical by using tiny slivers of magma crystal attached to the arrowheads, loaded with fire-attuned mana that lets them pour out lava. However, the crystals are quite rare and valuable, so they're not standard equipment, and at least one historian calls it "a trick that might have been better had it never been learned at all".
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Within ten minutes, the carver ants can fill an empty stretch of Dungeon tunnel with "choke points, traps, hardened walls, embedded steel stakes, and pristine carvings engraved in the stone." Anthony is annoyed because the artwork is usually of him.
  WHY THE CARVINGS?
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: If the monsters of the fifth stratum see someone converting their toxic sludge into something else, they go completely berserk, attacking in a frenzy until they're dead. It's intimidating even to the ants, but strategists like Solant recognise that predictability can be exploited. Anthony uses it as a chance to power-level his pets.
• Attack on One Is an Attack on All: Played very straight with the Colony, which is community-minded to a literally inhuman degree, but really taken to extremes with their larvae, where natural instincts combine with practicality to make the ants very protective indeed. Even Anthony, who retains many un-ant-like patterns of thinking, becomes incensed when ants are killed; after all, they're family, direct siblings in most cases.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Anthony's chomp skills risk being bitten by this as he upgrades and fuses them. "Omen Chomp" and "Doom Chomp" are very potent and destructive, but rapidly drain his Stamina, so he can only really use them when his Collective Will Vestibule is well supplied.
  • He also has access to various gravity magic forms that can do cool things, such as the gravity bolas that flies into the distance and attempts to drag the target with it. But they're mostly pretty inefficient compared to the simple gravity bolt that weighs an enemy down and makes it easy to finish off with a bite.
• Bait-and-Switch: Anthony hears the voice of the System welcoming him to his new life, and thinks that its timbre reminds him of a legendary bearded figure dressed in white and worshipped all over the world.
  Anthony: Gandalf? Is that you?
• The Beastmaster: One of the many uses of a monster core is to reconstitute it into a pet monster, which will faithfully obey the one who created it. The Sophos have made an art of this, compensating for their limited physical capabilities by carefully engineering and customising powerful monsters to serve and protect them.
• Beast of Battle: When Isaac levels up his Spearman class all the way to 40 alongside the ants, the System offers him an upgrade to Ant Lancer. It's like being a knight on horseback — if the horse had chitin instead of skin, and giant scissors on its face, and the ability to run along walls and ceilings and spray acid, and was fully sapient. Reasonably enough, he goes to consult the ants before deciding whether to accept the upgrade.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: This is effectively the feeling in the underground city of Rylleh after attracting the Colony's attention and being swiftly conquered. Their portal gates are dismantled so they're not a vector for attack, but otherwise they're mostly being allowed to live their lives, with the ants filling in the shortfall of supplies and ensuring that the dungeon waves are a non-issue. And providing rapid construction, utterly incorruptible leadership, access to rare materials harvested from the Dungeon...
• Berserk Button: Beyn's great pilgrimage really didn't need to become a crusade, if only the cities they visited had remained polite. With so much fervour aroused, though, things easily go sideways.
  "Priest Beyn tried to stop them…."
  "They really should have listened," Alis groused. "Deepward wasn't that rude to us. Still, a little more manners and…"
  "And we wouldn’t have burned their city to the ground?"
  "Yes… that."
• The Berserker: The System has various options for this.
  • The "Four Blade Berserker" monster automatically goes berserk in combat, as an inherent part of its nature, "increasing its strength but causing it to struggle to tell friend from foe."
  • Morrelia has a Berserker class that lets her enter a powerful rage while she can maintain her anger, but leaves her fatigued afterward.
  • Sarah has a darker variant in her Asura heart, feeding on any negative emotion to pump her strength to massive heights, but increasingly robbing her of reason, to the point where she is likely to turn on her allies. Once she eventually runs out of targets and calms down, she generally falls unconscious for a while, and doesn't remember everything she did when she awakens — which she finds quite stressful.
    The heart fed on her negative emotions, her rage, pain and fear, magnified them, liquified them and sent them pumping throughout her body until every inch of her frame was suffused with them. She could feel it now. The pain of betrayal, the anger of broken trust, the fear of losing herself again. She could feel it all echo through every cell of her body until she was drunk with it.
    
    And it made her strong.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Anthony often comes across as foolish and comedic; even on the occasions even he goes Large Ham (eg at the sentencing of Jim, where he decries "wretched worms, with your hearts filled with wretched evil and wretchedness"), it's so over-the-top that it's easy to just laugh. But he's actually entirely serious about killing and eating anyone who threatens the Colony. He'll quip, and pun, and make jokes that are lost on his Pangeran audience, and then when all is said and done, he feasts on the entrails of his foes.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Ant hatchlings start around one metre long, and can easily add half again, or even double, with each evolution. They don't seem to suffer from the breathing problems or square-cube difficulties that might be expected, possibly because they're innately magical beings.
• Big Eater: Monsters need to eat to satisfy mundane hunger, but they also accrue biomass points that can be used to mutate their body parts into superior forms.
  • Anthony frequently eats as much as possible, especially from higher ranked monsters with higher biomass density, and later discovers stomach mutations that allow eating even more, so that accruing points is easier.
  • Crinis goes further and has an extradimensional stomach with nigh-infinite capacity. Unfortunately for Anthony, who is usually carrying her, she still takes on all the weight.
  • Tiny has three loves, eating, sleeping and fighting. Anthony can't tell where he puts it all, but even when they have to run for their lives, he'll grab a limb off what he was eating, for the road, rather than just abandon it. When they come across a fungus species that Tiny isn't enthusiastic about eating — he tries it and just shrugs — Anthony "can only assume it tastes like radioactive waste."
  • The ant Queen has organs that turn biomass into eggs, so she eats huge amounts every day to enable the Colony's rapid growth. She can also use it to mutate herself, which Anthony wants her to do, but she prefers to just pour it all into her children.
  • Grokus is a demon obsessed with eating, and has been stocking up all the biomass he can find for years. He's actually able to use it to achieve Nigh-Invulnerability, with a skill that lets him spend biomass points to rapidly heal from any injury. And an aura that drains health from nearby enemies, essentially eating them alive.
  • The ancient monster Yarrum the Eternal Worm is apparently capable of eating an entire city in a single bite, with an appetite second only to Tarriflyx the Hunger — "Though there was quite a distance between the two."
• Big Fancy Sword: The Golgari Warrior caste, being up to three metres tall, typically have swords strapped to their backs that Anthony considers "comically large" and compares to the Buster Sword.
• Bioweapon Beast: Anthony's experiments in core shaping are limited to making adjustments to existing species. Probably the biggest set of changes he has made is the creation of the aphid queen. But the core shaper ants who specialise in those skills are able to go much further, crafting custom pets to take on niche roles that the ants aren't well suited for, like the centi-sludges used to harass the invading Legionaries, and later the "wuffers" that can absorb and purify the toxic mana of the fifth stratum.
• Blob Monster: The Colony experiments on centipede cores, and produces a "centi-sludge" variant that is basically a pile of moving shadow flesh goo. Easily hacked apart, but that doesn't harm them much, because the pieces will be absorbed and reused by any other centi-sludges in the area. Oh, and they can extend tendrils full of toxins.
• Blind Obedience: Anthony gets an uncomfortable amount of this from Crinis, the Colony, and especially from Beyn the preacher.
  • Even accidentally throwing a shield at Beyn during combat, almost killing him, just makes him think he's been assigned to carry it and protect others, despite it being really too heavy for him (and Anthony, who tries to stay away from Beyn's devotion as much as possible, doesn't even realise he thinks that).
  • When the ants turn up at the village of Renewal and carry many of them away to the Colony, the villagers make no protest against the beings whom many of them worship, despite having been warned not to interact with the workers. Turns out that after gaining sapience, the ants became smart enough to ignore Anthony's pheromone barrier and recognize the humans as a food source; Anthony arrives Just in Time to prevent a massacre. On the other hand, their complete lack of resistance actually saved their lives, since it meant the ants carried them back to the Queen so she could get the experience, instead of killing them immediately and just bringing back the biomass.
• Blood Knight:
  • Tiny the gorilla has only three loves: eating, sleeping, and above all fighting — preferably with his fists. Unfortunately, he has no sense of self-preservation in pursuing a fight, requiring constant intervention to keep him from getting killed. The fact that every evolution reduces his Cunning stat doesn't help, either...
  • The Folk love combat, and their most respected members are the "blademasters" who have reached the tenth sword rank. Their territory is full of arenas that operate around the clock, letting them test and show their process against each other.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • In his first few evolutions, Anthony skips over the options to upgrade his stomach, focusing on more interesting options like additional brains, and even contemplating gaining wings. Eventually, however, as he watches what monsters like Crinis can do, he realises that a more efficient stomach — one that can hold more of a large haul, or take a smaller penalty for eating weak enemies — is an important asset for gaining strength quickly. He eventually makes it a standard requirement for all new hatchlings, when they evolve the first time, to make their stomachs mutable.
  • When his legs are mutated to +10 and he's offered a choice of mutation advancements, he considers options like rapid mana absorption, bladed feet, or grasshopper-style leaps, but ultimately settles for just making them run faster.
    Very basic and utility upgrade. Even if it doesn't work out exactly the way I want, I can't imagine complaining about being able to move faster. Whether running into danger or out, going faster is always a good option.
  • Of all the possible materials for a golgari's "true skin", granite is neither impressive nor particularly strong. But because it's cheap and plentiful, it's very easy to repair, and Granin doesn't mind being underestimated.
  • Among the many skills that can be purchased with points gained from levelling up, from magical affinities to ethereal blades of light, there are basics like dodging better, enduring hits better, and keeping one's balance. Nothing at all fancy, but a solid combination for taking less damage in extended combat.
• Brain Bleach: With the amount of brutal combat that goes on in the Dungeon, both for food and Level Grinding, and with Anthony inheriting human sensibilities, it's not surprising that there's things Anthony would like to un-see.
  I mean, was that strictly necessary, Tiny? You could have just punched it in the face, but no, pulling it inside out from its mouth. That’s an image I have to live with now, thanks.
• Bring It: Anthony's confidence in his family leads him to be defiant even to the spectral presence of Arconidem the Demon God.
  Anthony: You got a problem? Come down here and catch these face hands!
• Brown Note: At one point, Anthony asks Allocrix to close his eye, and Al is bemused but tries it — with the result that Anthony collapses on the ground screaming.
  Anthony: [HOLY MOTHER OF GANDALF! OPEN! OPEN IT!]
  A moment later I come back to myself, twitching on the ground. The horror. The sheer horror of it. I couldn't even close my own eyes so I couldn't see it…
• Bug War: Inverted; the Abyssal Legion launches a campaign against the Colony, but the insects are, of course, the protagonists. And they would really rather not exterminate humanity; coexistence is much more productive. The Legion is relentless, though...

C - D

• Can't Catch Up: Anthony's bodyguards firmly believe that their role should be to remain hidden until the moment they need to spring into action to save him, but he repeatedly insists that they need to be more proactive about levelling up, or they won't be effective when that time comes.
  Anthony: Yeah, I'm sure you're meant to live the most sacrificial lives in the history of the Colony. Always on duty, never resting, never a moment of peace. It's all super noble and everything, but let me ask you this question. If I evolve and I'm tier six, whilst you’re all still tier four, what exactly are you going to protect me from that I can't handle myself?
• Captain Obvious: When Anthony's "gravity bomb" is raging, dragging in a whole crowd of monsters, whipping up tremendous winds, pulling on all the grass and trees, and howling all the while, Anthony sends Morrelia a warning message to "Hold on! You don't want to fall into that!"
  Morrelia: [You think?!]
• Casting a Shadow: The second stratum of the Dungeon is the realm of shadow mana, where the ambient light of the Dungeon veins changes from blue to black, leaving everything in complete darkness.
  • Crinis is reconstituted from a native of the second stratum, so she has a natural affinity to shadow magic, eventually allowing her to pull such stunts as treating shadows like portals and extruding parts of her body from any shadow nearby.
  • The torpor enforcers make use of shadow magic to suck in all light and render their secret passages entirely dark, so they're harder to spot and follow.
• The Cavalry: When Anthony is in a prison cell and facing a deathmatch tournament that he probably can't win, he starts to feel an itching in his Collective Will Vestibule, as one ant comes into range, then two, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand...
  In the back of my mind I can sense a flood of connections reaching out across space to whisper in my ear, each of them saying the same thing.
  "We're coming."
• Chain of People: A forest of ants form living chains to seize a heavily injured Anthony and anchor him to the ground, preventing him from falling into his own gravity bomb along with Garralosh.
• Chainsaw Good: Crinis' tentacles have "Ripping Spines" that can rapidly move back and forth to approximate the effect of a chainsaw. Even monstrous crocodiles are paralysed with fear when they see their compatriot undergo the 'Crinis experience'.
  She'll probably get a few more levels of Dismembering from this.
• Character Witness: Enid attempts to provide this for the Colony, testifying of how the town of Renewal is safe and prosperous under the ants' care and supervision, but Titus is unmoved.
• Charged Attack: When assembling a spell, Anthony has the option to compress the mana involved, which takes more time and effort, but produces a dramatically more potent result.
  • A water cannon spell knocks monsters down and can wash them away. A compressed water cannon just bisects them.
    The trick I found in my test run is that I can't quite transform Mana and then compress it fast enough to keep up with the demands of the spell. Meaning, I ran out of juice and the spell failed only a few seconds after I cast it. Those few seconds had been enough to drill a hole three feet in the tunnel walls though, so I'm expecting good things.
  • A regular gravity bolt pins weaker monsters to the ground, and hinders the movement of stronger ones. A compressed gravity bolt, however, fatally crushes them.
  • Compressing a simple sphere of gravity mana gives Anthony his signature Nuclear Option, the "gravity bomb", which essentially creates a temporary black hole.
• Childhood Friends: It's a pretty short childhood, but Vibrant hatches at around the same time Crinis is reconstituted, and they both spend much of their time riding around on Anthony's back until they've matured. They can't really talk at first, but they still manage to communicate, and they remain good friends later, despite being separated by their different responsibilities.
  Vibrant: Hello Crin-Crin! Are you ready for more tag? I sure am!
• Classified Information: The first five strata of the Dungeon are reasonably well understood, even though only a small fraction of the non-monster population have visited them (and even fewer can survive the fifth for long). However, what little information exists beyond those five is officially classified.
  (Inquisitor Note: Information of the lower strata is strictly forbidden. The remaining pages are sealed to the scroll.)
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Despite the complete lack of monster romance of any sort, Crinis still manages to largely fit into this trope, including literally clinging to Anthony and not letting go after he's rescued from the Golgari.
  Crinis: [I'm with you, Master!]
  Anthony: [Stop choking me!]
• Colony Drop: Greystone Fortress is a tremendous mountain, that has been artificially expanded to stretch from ground level all the way to the top of the fourth stratum. The golgari blast a chunk of it free, the size of several cities, in an attempt to squash Anthony and his fleet.
• Color-Coded Elements: Mana typically changes colour when it's given an elemental attribute, such as brown for earth mana. Anthony's distinctive gravity mana is purple, which often draws attention, since gravity magic isn't widely known. He also notices when first descending to the second stratum, the realm of shadow mana, that the dungeon's light changes from blue to black.
• Conflicting Loyalties: When the Colony comes into conflict with the Legion, Morrelia feels very torn. She has spent months with the Colony, knows that they are peaceful, and considers many of the ants and their human allies to be friends. But she also has obligations to the Legion, having signed up to fight for them, and knows that the Legion's desire to eradicate the Colony might be justified if there is a risk of the ants becoming aggressive in future.
  Morrelia felt sick. The thought of the dead Colony members weighed heavily on her, and the thought of Anthony, filled with a thirst for revenge fighting and killing her fellow Legionaries was awful. Who was right? Who was wrong? She wasn't sure what she should do in this moment.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Anthony plans to force Leeroy to endure endless teatime and grub-tickling if she charges off into the Dungeon instead of fighting sensibly.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Garralosh seems to have created her children's evolutionary paths by just picking whatever sounded cool. Crocodiles that gain extra tails as they evolve? Why not? Fire breath? Absolutely! Two heads? Better than one! The resulting crocodiles can become quite powerful if they evolve far enough, but that really only happens due to her supervision.
• Cooldown: When Anthony and his pets are in a tight situation within the termite mountain, Invidia demonstrates that he can push his Eye Beams to a different level of power at need, causing devastation all around. However, he's not just exhausted afterward, his eye is bleeding and needs time to heal.
• The Corruption:
  • Krath sludge pools are filled with the invasive mana of the fifth stratum, and creatures imprisoned in them will be forcibly altered, body and mind, into loyal minions of the Krath. The bruan'chii Mercy Kill their siblings who have been lost to the pools as a matter of course. Anthony is alarmed to hear about them, recognising that a corrupted ant would be able to evolve into a queen and churn out the eggs of a slave ant race.
  • The ants' chosen response to fifth stratum mana is enlisting the core shapers to create reverse-corruption pets, producing clouds of mist that consume the toxic green mana and change it back into regular blue mana.
• Coup de Grâce: Subverted when Anthony pins down a Rhinosergradon into helplessness, then chomps down — and still can't get through its armour. He has to bite it so many times that he wears himself out and has to rest on its back for five minutes before finally penetrating its hide and killing it.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: This is Anthony's theory about the root cause of James betraying the Colony; James is possessive of Sarah, and felt that a) the Colony was allowing her to put herself at risk, and b) she was coming to rely on the ants more than him.
  Anthony: [You know my view. He wanted you to depend on him, but you came to rely on the Colony instead. In his eyes, the ants need to be removed, then you will be forced to run back to him for support.]
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Anthony has big plans for executing Jim the earthworm, eg cutting him in half and letting each half regrow, so that he can be fed to grubs repeatedly, or "tenderising" him so he's easier to chew. Sarah talks him down, though.
  No cruelty? Noooooooooooooo! NOOOOOOOO! Those words are like poison to Dark Anthony, a knife wound straight in the heart! I can already feel my power weakening. The darkness, it's receding, its fading! It's not fair, the time was so short!
  [Fine,] I tell her begrudgingly. [It won't be cruel.]
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • One of Anthony's early farms is overtaken by a monstrous toad, which quickly slaughters all the other monsters present. Tiny is excited about the prospect of a more challenging fight, until he explodes it in one punch.
  • Anthony's first tournament match-up is very poorly chosen, all brawn and defence, no brains — or flexibility. It doesn't land a single hit before Anthony is able to pin it down (even though it's still quite hard to actually kill).
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • The voice of the System believes that Anthony had an awful life on Earth, but he insists that being abandoned by his parents at age fifteen, then starving to death because he gave his last food to his pet ant farm (which partially inspired his reincarnation) wasn't so serious... nonetheless, he is grateful to be on Pangera instead.
    Gandalf: [Could have been worse?!]
    Anthony: Sure! … Could have had my leg cut off.
    …
    Gandalf: [Didn't that happen too?]
    Anthony: Well… A bit.
  • Morrelia suddenly lost her younger brother when he didn't survive the Legion baptism, shortly before she was eligible to join the Legion, and it shattered their family. Her father became withdrawn, her mother went away to work for the Legion full-time, and Morrelia turned away from the Legion to become an independent mercenary for several years. By the time Anthony meets her, she's abrasive, cynical, and hardened. It's even hinted that the tragedy may have contributed to the rage that qualifies her for the Berserker class.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The second stratum is a place of darkness and poison, with even the ambient mana veins emitting the blackness of Shadow Mana instead of the blue glow that they have in the first stratum. However, there's nothing particularly evil about it; sure, it's a dog-eat-dog environment where monsters endlessly compete and devour each other to see which species will come out on top, but all of the Dungeon is like that.
• David vs. Goliath: Compared to the titan that is Garralosh, Anthony is tiny, weak, and fragile. However, he's reasonably fast, and his gravity bomb spell lets him punch above his weight class.
• Deader than Dead: The One Tree infuses her children with slivers of her own soul, and if one is killed, she can reuse the sliver to recreate them. Unless the sliver is destroyed too...
• The Dead Have Names: The Legion keeps a memorial wall, where they carve the names of those who do not survive the "baptism" — or who choose a quick clean death instead of going through it. Titus himself chisels in Trelik's name after administering such an execution. But carving in his own son's name, after Romanus didn't survive the baptism, was surely harder.
• Deadly Dodging: The charge of a Rhinosergradon is practically unstoppable. When Anthony ducks under it (by digging a hole with earth magic), it doesn't stop until its horn is firmly embedded in a wall, leaving it as a sitting duck.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • After crushing a powerful lizard into the ground with Gravity Bolts, Anthony finishes it off with his mandibles — but it's so well armoured that he has to bite it twenty times before he finally breaks through.
  • He later bites a Rhinosergradon, pinned down by Gravity Bolts, so many times that he gets worn out and has to rest on his opponent's back for five minutes before he can finish the job.
• Death Seeker: Leeroy and the Immortals want to die for the good of the Colony, but with so many resources invested in them, their peers all want to keep them alive, and keep working to save them (and they're still too loyal for actual suicide). They end up as an elite fighting unit because they have so many power-ups, and have taken only a single casualty, but they still yearn to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
  Immortals: WE SEEK!
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • For a fairly loose definition of "friendship", this applies to Brixin the demon, who, once defeated but not killed, is eager to piggyback on the Colony's successes.
  • In general, after killing a monster and retrieving its core, the System gives options to either absorb the core, or reconstitute it. In the latter case, the result will be an infant monster "pet" that is bonded to the owner and must obey them. Anthony picks up Tiny this way, without really knowing what he's doing, but later he is more deliberate about it, studying and carefully customising the core that will become Crinis after the colony killed the original tentacle monster.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The pre-chapter excerpts note that in the early days after the Rending, when the System was new to the world, many practices were common that would later be seen as bizarre or horrifying, such as parents on their deathbeds being killed by their children so that XP could be awarded. Dying of natural causes was seen as a horrible waste.
• Dig Attack: Jim has just enough time to start freaking out about the blade beast in front of him, before the ground gives way under its legs and it's dragged underground by dozens of mandibles.
  Anthony: I wouldn't worry about it.
• Disadvantageous Disintegration: It's technically still possible to extract biomass from the super-compressed results of a Gravity Bomb, but it takes so much effort that Anthony generally doesn't bother, and it's often contaminated by the environment.
  Oh sure, I could try eating this ball. It has the croc in it, after all. Also, a good chunk of dirt, muddy water, leaves, sticks and goodness knows what else that got pulled in there.
  Even Tiny is eyeing the ball a little sceptically.
  ["Uh… anyone want to try eating that?"]
  "Nope!"
  [Bad.]
  [I'm afraid I must decline, Master.]
  That's what I thought…
• Disc-One Nuke: Anthony gets lucky with one of his early evolutions, and gets access to a Gravity Mana Gland, which would normally belong to a higher tier of magic. Not only does this allow disproportionately powerful spells for his evolutionary level, such as the gravity bomb (which lets him take down monsters far more powerful than himself, like Garralosh and her children), regular use of it also nudges the System toward giving him other high-tier options sooner than might have otherwise been the case, such as mind magic and healing magic.
• The Disembodied: Anthony's Tier 7 evolution options include the "Formless One", which would see him giving up his body and existing as pure energy distributed amongst the cores of every ant. He's freaked out by the prospect, though, and lacking real information on what he would gain by it, he rejects the option.
• Dissimile: It's so relaxing for Anthony to be running through the wide open plains with his friends by his side and the fresh crisp air in his lungs, except that actually, the plains are choked with demons, and the air is full of smoke, and he doesn't have lungs to breathe it anyway, and his friends are busy slaughtering the hordes and blowing up the landscape.
  Anthony: At least Al is being cool. I mean, he can’t really be cool in a temperature sense, due to his nature as a knowledge demon formed entirely from fire, but he’s… cool… in a different way.
• Do You Want to Haggle?: Enid would really rather not negotiate terms with a brathian, because she knows that they're a Proud Merchant Race with Skills that make them unreasonably good at it. She doesn't see a way out, though. She's at the point of being taken to the cleaners, but turns the tables by pulling Anthony in and having him cheerfully stomp all over the brathian's expectations.
• Don't Think, Feel: At very high levels, combat takes place so quickly that there's no real time to think about what's happening, relying instead of reflexes and instincts.
• Dope Slap: Whenever Anthony is being troublesome or foolish, which realistically is most of the time, he can expect a good THWACK on the head from his mother's antennae. It's all out of love.
  Oof! Still hurts! Maybe after my next evolution and my carapace is upgraded these won't be quite so sharp? Or perhaps I should concentrate a build-up of extra dense carapace on the top of my head? I eye the Queen's antennae carefully. I'm certain she's chosen some form of mutation that makes them hit harder.
• Draw Aggro: When Anthony needs just two more levels to evolve, he decides to kill two birds with one stone and attack Garralosh's horde from behind, in a way that will draw the ire of her backers — thus making it easier and safer for the Colony to hit the horde from the front.
  Isaac: You want to draw the attention, and lightning, of the Ka'armodo onto your head?
  Anthony: That's right.
  Isaac: I love it. I won't stand next to you, but I love it.
• Driven by Envy: This is Invidia's entire nature. He wants others' knowledge, levels, their lives... But with the pet bond making him loyal to Anthony, it actually works out quite well.
• Drool Deluge: When the party is feeling the pressure of the Garralosh Praeceptorem's aura, Anthony tries giving them a pep talk by talking about how much biomass they'll get from eating the croc, how it's so dense they'll probably get a point from every bite — then interrupts himself to ask, "Why is it raining?" Turns out that Tiny was standing over him and paying very close attention to his talk about food.
  Before I'd even finished speaking, he was drooling a river all over my precious Diamond Carapace!
• Dual Wielding: When Morrelia's berserk rage activates, she snatches a second sword from its sheath on her back before rushing forward. Since she doesn't care about self-defence or finesse while in that state, it's only logical.
• Due to the Dead: Commander Titus threatens to kill Anthony painlessly and bury him with honour if High Blade Balta keeps toying with him and withholding information.
• Duel to the Death: The Blademasters of the Folk will only draw their swords for serious matters, not for sport or spectacle, so when they duel, it's to the death. As a result, pretenders to the title of Blademaster tend not to last very long.
• Dumb Muscle:
  • Not only does Tiny the Lightning Fist Ape play this completely straight, he actually becomes less intelligent every time he evolves, in exchange for extraordinarily high bonuses to physical strength. Anthony affectionately refers to him with such terms as "thicker than a concrete milkshake" and "the Cunning of brick forged out of smaller bricks that were themselves made of the distilled energy of pure stupid," but Tiny still serves a very valuable role in dishing out damage to both individuals and groups; even the thick hides of Garralosh's children can't entirely stop his fists.
    Anthony: I'm actually impressed, Tiny. You may be thick as three bricks fused into one, but you know what you like and you've stuck with it.
  • The Rhinosergradon is covered all over in armour so tough and so all-encompassing that even a Coup de Grâce can't work, and can build up so much momentum when charging forward that it's considered to be an unstoppable force. However, it has so little brainpower that that unstoppable charge is the only strategy it knows how to use.
  • When designing shadow monster pets, the Core Shaper ants deliberately reduce their Cunning so as to have more energy available for physical enhancements. Since the pets are meant to be entirely controlled and directed by their ant handlers, they don't need to be independently smart.
• Dungeon Bypass: Ernes is confident that no monster will be able to breach the massive, magically reinforced city gates. Anthony can't understand why Ernes hasn't already abandoned his futile post, as the Colony goes under and around him.
  Anthony: What did they really expect gates to do? We're ants! Never happier than when we're digging!

E - F

• Earn Your Bad Ending: Anthony points out that the Golgari leadership put quite a lot of work into forcing a confrontation that has ended badly for them.
  Anthony: [You had so many opportunities to prevent this outcome. You could have left me alone in the Dungeon, but no. You could have treated me with dignity, but no. You could have taken my bargain when it was offered, but no. You're going to get the bad ending that you worked so hard to achieve.]
• Elite Army:
  • The Abyssal Legion are relatively few in number, but their Powered Armor lets them slaughter their way through hordes of monsters. Even the Colony greatly struggles to inflict any damage on them.
  • The ants are in turn outnumbered by the termites, but are individually more powerful due to their standardized training and focus on helping every Colony member — and they have superb coordination and cooperation.
• Elite Mooks: Monsters are occasionally spawned with stronger abilities than usual and a tendency to draw other monsters to follow them; the usual term for them is "champions" or "brutes".
  • Anthony hasn't heard of champions when Vibrant is born, but he notices how energetic she is and the fact that she was somehow born with a core, so he takes her onto his team and feeds her more resources, letting her take maxed-out special evolutions from the start. It doesn't take long before she's stronger and faster than he is (physically, at least). As she grows further, she becomes a de facto leader within the Colony, other ants instinctively following her around and forming a personal army.
  • By the time Brilliant hatches, showing signs of unusual activity and energy levels as a grub, Anthony knows about champions, and he makes sure to give her similar personal attention — but struggles to handle her Bratty Half-Pint personality. Nonetheless, he manages to keep her from getting killed by her own insatiable curiosity, allowing her to develop into a Mad Scientist worthy of her name.
• Elite Tweak: Anthony doesn't initially have a guide to the System, but he makes some important discoveries as he goes along, which get incorporated into the Colony's training programs.
  • Drinking mana-infused water enables a monster, next time it reaches its maximum level, to condense a core instead of evolving. The core will then provide additional energy for each future evolution. So, drinking mana water at the first evolutionary stage is crucial to strong development.
  • Evolving doubles the maximum mana capacity of the core, so it's important to absorb enough captured cores to maximise the core's capacity first. For selected elite individuals, it's also worth absorbing a Special or even Rare core to supercharge it (though it risks Explosive Overclocking if pushed too far). Pushing a core to its limits this way has a cumulative effect with each evolution, since it keeps doubling all previous gains.^note Eg a monster that starts with 10MP, and evolves three times without reinforcing it, will double it three times, to 20, then 40, then 80MP, and all its evolutions will be based on that limited amount of energy. But if it can triple its core size by absorbing others, then it can push its core to 30MP before evolving, double it to 60MP by evolving, reinforce it to 180, evolve again to 360, reinforce up to 720, and then evolve again to 1440MP. If it can push itself to quadruple the original core size by absorbing special cores, then the final result is 40MP * 2 * 4 * 2 * 4 * 2=5120MP.
  • It takes several evolutions before Anthony discovers it, but maximising all mutations gives bonus evolutionary energy.
• Emotionless Reptile: Rassan'tep is able to keep several junior ka'armodo in line just by hinting that their preferred course of action (pressing the assault on Anthony) might be "hot-blooded" — practically a curse word among their people. One of those juniors was so close to losing her cool that she nearly scratched an itch, which would have been a severe social faux pas.
• Empty Levels:
  • Weak classes tend to have awful stat gains, such as [Farmer] granting 0.2 Toughness per level and 0.1 for every other stat (apparently it does grant a reasonable amount of Stamina, but that's a hidden metric). Since combat and killing gives far more experience than any other activity, this is a vicious cycle, where people with weak classes are not strong enough to advance or change those classes.
  • For monsters, levelling up doesn't increase stats at all, it merely grants skill points, used to purchase and upgrade skills. Which is very useful at lower levels, but as a monster advances, the number of opportunities to meaningfully spend those skill points diminishes. Skill upgrades and fusions become further apart as skills advance, and diversifying into brand new skills can easily lead to Master of None territory. The only real driving force to gain levels is the fact that they're required in order to evolve — but at higher tiers, that can mean gaining hundreds of levels to qualify, gaining nothing along the way except more skill points.
• Enemy Mine: Despite having been in conflict before, Anthony considers calling on the Abyssal Legion for help in dealing with the soul-eating termites, figuring that they'll want to do something about this.
• Energy Absorption: Anthony can't find a way to permanently heal Tiny's shadow magic infection, but evolving causes it to be consumed and turned into extra evolutionary energy.
• Equippable Ally: Crinis' preferred travelling position is to drape herself around Anthony like a second skin. As far as she's concerned, this is a chance for her to protect him. As far as he's concerned, she squeezes too tightly when she's excited. It does, however, mean that he has a forest of tentacles on call, which can be useful.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Vibrant and Crinis are basically Childhood Friends, having grown up together while riding on Anthony's back. But when Vibrant is about to escape from the torpor enforcers, it's Crinis who trips her up and holds her still.
  Vibrant: Crin-Crin? ... why... would... you?
• Even Evil Has Standards: Odin Malum was a Professional Killer on Earth, and has no qualms about it, but he still finds the carnage on the third stratum, billions of larvae an hour destroying each other, to be distasteful.
  Loss of life was something Odin could relate to, given his previous line of work, but each death was supposed to be significant. It should mean something, when a creature dies. Most of these larvae wouldn’t make it past tier two, and none would remember them, or even notice their passing.
• Evil Gloating: Anthony, of all people, indulges in some of this after Jim is captured and trussed up.
  Anthony: [How does that feel, Jim? Are you scared? Feeling helpless? Like a grub? Just wriggling on the ground, unable to protect yourself when the big bad golgari come? That must be terrible Jim. Awful! However will you cope? MUAHAHAHAHAAA!]
• Evil Lawyer Joke: Anthony hears that Pangera has lawyers, and wonders why it's monsters that everyone is afraid of.
• Evolutionary Pressure Cooker: Performed in layers. The colony requires monster cores, but demons tend to evolve without developing cores, as the energy required is expended fighting for survival. To solve this, demon larvae are spawned in cells that only open after a core is detected, so they grow stronger killing one another, then the survivor has time and freedom to build a core. Once a core is present, the cell opens to progressively larger containers, repeating the process of forcing the monsters to grow by killing one another and then enhancing their cores, until the strongest reach the top and are harvested.
• Exact Words: Demons are sapient, but not friendly, and when they reach a high enough evolutionary tier, they can rise above the rabble to become cunning, scheming aristocrats. The third strata, where they live, may seem more civilised than the previous ones, but many a careless adventurer has fallen prey to their guile. The Abyssal Legion training manual says of them, "If a Demon tells you something, it's probably true, just never in the way that you expect."
• Exploited Immunity:
  • The Gravity Domain spell greatly increases the weight of those in the area of effect — except the allies of the caster. Which means that when Anthony uses it, pinning monsters helplessly to the ground, Tiny can then go around smashing them without any hindrance.
  • Having a much higher Will stat than your average monster, Anthony is better able to resist the effects of Tiny's stunning scream. Several times, he has Tiny scream into a melee that includes him, knowing that he'll recover better than the monsters all around.
• Explosive Breeder:
  • A mature ant queen, supplied with plenty of Biomass, can lay 600 eggs per day, which hatch within weeks and can evolve to maturity within a few days after that. That would be enough to make them quite intimidating. But when you then consider that some of them can choose to evolve into more queens, making their growth exponential...well, it's understandable that the Legion wants to preemptively wipe them out. The Queen is actually quite shocked to hear from Enid about how it takes a whole nine months for human women to carry a child to term.
    [Have you tried eating more?] the queen asked, concerned. [I know it isn't the same between you and monsters, but I feel that such a length of time just can't be healthy.]
• Explosive Overclocking: Monsters can absorb the cores of their defeated enemies, to reinforce their own cores and increase the amount of energy available for their next evolution, up to a cap based on their current evolutionary tier. However, stronger enemies can leave "special" or even "rare" cores, which allow the consuming monster to go past the cap and get an extra boost — but overloading one's own system in this way causes burning pain, which gradually fades but never completely goes away until the monster evolves and is able to cope with the energy. Then Anthony tries absorbing both a special and rare core...and nearly pops from the excess of energy, having to be wrapped up in Crinis' tentacles just to keep him together long enough to wade through the evolution menus. The voice of the System is impressed, telling him that he really should have died from that.
• Eye Beams: Invidia has a single eye laser (green, naturally), which makes sense, as he's a single floating eyeball. It's extremely destructive, but he needs time to recover afterward, and it's unsafe to use in enclosed spaces.
• Facepalm: When Anthony suggests resetting every single body part during an evolution, Granin barely restrains himself, while Corun doesn't manage it and smacks himself in the face. Torrina takes over the conversation while they compose themselves.
• Failed Attempt at Drama:
  • When Anthony comes to visit Irette Plamine in prison, she sneers at him and mentions that she's been wondering when he would come and gloat — until it turns out that he had forgotten she existed.
    Anthony: There is a lot going on around here.
  • Ants don't really understand drama, or sarcasm, which rather undercuts Anthony at times.
    "Anyone else think our guests look thirsty?" I ask nobody in particular. "Let's give them a drink."
    A moment of silence.
    "Should we release the acid?" comes a hesitant scent from behind the ceiling above me.
    "Yes. That's what I meant when I said give them a drink. I don't mean for them to actually drink the acid, but rather insinuating… never mind. Just tip it out."
• Family of Choice:
  • Sarah is thoroughly adopted by the Colony, at Anthony's insistence as a fellow reincarnator. She struggles to relax and accept the unconditional love and support that they offer, but it does go a long way to helping her face her fears and heal from her traumatic time in the Dungeon.
  • Anthony himself, though he's biologically one of the Colony, has a lifetime of experience as a human that sets him apart from them in many ways, and is even offered several evolutionary options that would grant him additional bonuses in exchange for giving up his species and cutting ties with them. He chooses, though, to embrace his new siblings and mother, throwing himself wholeheartedly into his second family (especially as his first, human, family didn't work out so well).
• Fantastic Racism: The System divides "monsters", which are spawned from the Dungeon, from "non-monsters", which breed independently, and most non-monsters, such as humans, take that division very seriously, treating all of the Dungeon's creations as acceptable targets — no matter how intelligent they are, or how they behave. Possibly the saddest case is the Sophos, who actually predated the Dungeon, but lived far enough underground that the System coopted them and treated them as monsters instead of surface races, stripping them of their ability to reproduce (except by intermittent Dungeon spawning) and forcing them to live on Biomass. Most surface races now mistrust them as a result.
• Fascists' Bed Time: Played for Laughs when some of the ants take Anthony's admonishments for regular mandatory rest breaks very seriously.
  • They form a shadow organization, utilizing unlit hidden tunnels to rapidly travel through the nest in search of those workaholics who have kept awake for days, knocking them out with special pheromones and putting them to bed. Serious offenders may even find themselves facing carapace waxing and aromatherapy!
    Nameless one: Working hard I see...
    But work time is.. OVER!
  • And then the humans of Renewal begin to discover that they've been truly adopted, when they too start "disappearing" if they don't meet sleep quotas. They're torn between being pleased and horrified.
• Fastball Special: When Crinis is still small enough to sit on Anthony's head, he's able to throw her into a melee with his antennae. Since she doesn't have legs, but does have masses of independently mobile tentacles covered in ripping spines, suitable for shredding every monster nearby, this is quite an effective strategy.
  Crinis slingshot has been loaded!
• Feed It with Fire: Naturally, in a LitRPG setting, anything that doesn't kill you tends to make you stronger. Notably, while the dungeon waves are cause for most nations to batten down the hatches and try to survive the unending tide of spawning monsters, the Colony — which is capable of hatching thousands of new ants every day — treats waves as a source of plentiful biomass and experience, helping them to rapidly expand.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: When Crinis is itching to go to town on Anthony's enemies, he ponders whether Pangera has any Geneva equivalent, but decides it's unlikely.
  Any laws regarding being partially rendered by a void beast from the depths of madness and despair? Probably not, now that I think about it. This world doesn't muck around when it comes to the war between surface and Dungeon creatures.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Morrelia is very suspicious of Anthony at their first meeting, but before they go their separate ways, a wave of monsters approaches the village. Watching the ants pitch in to help fight it off goes a long way toward persuading her to give them a chance (the chapter in question is even named "Battle of Unity"). Anthony also gains a lot of respect for her combat prowess. Then she joins him in investigating Garralosh, including fighting a lot of lesser monsters together on the way. By the end of Morrelia's time with the Colony, she's still not exactly their best friend, but she's convinced that they're willing to deal peacefully with humans. To the point where she deliberately sabotages her father's assault on them, not wanting him to kill them all.
• Fishing for Mooks: The marsh expanse is too dangerous to just wander around, but Anthony and his pets can sit in a side tunnel and have Tiny throw rocks at passing monsters, which invariably come charging after them and get slaughtered in the confined space.
• Fist Pump: Crinis extends some tentacles to make a miniature "guts" pose when she's freshly evolved and about to mow down a wave of monsters with her new strength.
• Flash Step: The Regulus Bestiae saltus monster looks "thin as an anorexic stick on an Atkins diet" and is able to launch a devastating strike faster than the eye can follow, though it can't maintain that speed all the time. Fortunately, Anthony has enough enhanced reflexes himself that it can't easily hit a critical point, and his carapace blunts the effect of anything less.
• Foreshadowing: One of the many monsters caught in Anthony's pit traps is an Infant Garralosh. Garralosh herself is the Big Bad of book 3, a giant fire-breathing crocodile who is being groomed by the Cult of the Red Truth as a candidate for the twentieth Ancient, and who filled the first stratum with her children to help her break through the Legion's blockade.
• Frontline General: The "general" caste of ants is physically weaker than other soldiers (in exchange for better tactical and planning abilities), but typically fights on the front line regardless, acting more like a squad leader. Since they often get auras that buff the ants around them, this is actually practical, as well as fitting their self-sacrificial mindset.
• The Fundamentalist: Beyn's preaching is actually fairly light on fire and brimstone, but his fanatical worship of the ants goes to extremes. Enid gives him a lot of credit for the village of Renewal being successful, since his powerful sermons about following the ants' examples of selflessness and hard work do a lot to bring the community together — but she doesn't much enjoy being around him, and Anthony can only handle him in small doses.
  Beyn: We have been delivered from Monsters, by Monsters! Our insect saviours, led by the Great One, have defended us, provided for us and granted us sanctuary in these times of fear and death. A miracle has occurred here! The Great One is a miracle sent to grant us succour in our time of most dire need! The monsters rise, friends! They rise but they shall be defeated! Our guardians shall overcome them. They shall roll back the tides of darkness that sweep over the lands and we shall be saved!

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