I knelt over the burnt corpse of the hobgoblin, Prinkipas, and failed to resurrect him. I transferred his corpse to the subspace, but I could tell as soon as I did that it was pointless.

I still don’t know much about how my subspace’s resurrection works, but I know vaguely the reasons why it could fail. It works the same as most any other resurrection magic: The body can be reconstructed from its own mana, so long as you get some of every type it has. Of course, some mana dissipates into neutral mana much faster than others. The non-physical is usually the fastest. In the case of humanoids, that would be the soul. It's never been a problem before, but usually I retrieve the body within a few minutes at most.

It’s been several hours. It’s gone. Just another pointless death.

I continued on down the tunnel, and went around the goblin village, whose screams were louder than when I left it. Maybe I should go to collect the other goblins, but I think I’d rather stay away. I’ve done enough damage for now.

Instead, I’ll return to where I first encountered the goblins and take the path untraveled, continuing on to where I first meant to go.

* * *

For the travel, I returned to wolf form. No need to stay in a monster form now that I can actually shift without major delay.

The scent of goblins grew faint as I descended deeper and deeper into the caves, giving way to the stench of rot. Monsters and humanoids both, but I can’t tell what — if anything — is alive. The closer I get, the more the stench of blood overpowers everything else.

It’s either a cavern or a nest up ahead. If it’s a cavern, then why all the bloodshed? It shouldn’t be this bad, even if a Barbearian passed through. If it’s a nest, then why isn’t there a single distinctive scent from the owner, and what could hunt this number of creatures?

That being said… Why should I care, even if there is a strong monster or monsters up ahead? What do I have to worry about? I have more than enough wolves to spare should I die. Even if I were in a more important form, I could just shift into something more expendable before approaching. I lose some irrelevant form, and have to crawl my way out of its digestive system… I suppose that wastes a lot of time, and the last time I did that was as frustrating as it was disgusting.

Still, my soul can’t be targeted on account of it not existing. I suppose some mind-aligned could do some permanent damage, in addition to the ever-looming threat of the voice. That I really have to watch out for. But what else is there? Is that the only worst case scenario?

* * *

The tunnel opened up to a clearing as I approached my destination. Tishina’s scent stopped abruptly at the adjacent wall, but the stench of death seemed to be coming from above, somewhere. I phased a torch out to get a better look.

The cavern walls opened up to a perfect square with a cave wall that seemed to have been sanded smooth. Clearly the space was unnatural — well, technically the whole labyrinth is unnatural, but this seemed purposefully placed here.

The only opening to the room was the tunnel I entered from. There were a few small holes in the wall, and a large doorway on the side opposite, both covered by glistening silver bars.

All I could see above me were a few more long bars of silver, extending across the cave from edge to edge. The only sounds in the cavern was a faint rustling from above, and fist-sized droplets periodically dripping down onto the floor.

I squinted my eyes, peering into the darkness, but the cavern ceiling rose too high to see in the torchlight. My attention turned back to the droplets. As the silver droplets fell, they didn’t splash as water tended to, but rather just kind of splatted down, as a viscous liquid would… As a slime would.

I looked back up just in time to see the massive hand of the other worst case scenario stretch down from the darkness.

‘

Dominus Fortitudinis:

Size: generally as big as a house

Alignment: force

Rank: C

Description:

Dominus Fortitudinis, by the best guess of those who have seen the monster and lived to tell the tale, is a fusion of slime and the Spiderilla. Its body is silver in color and translucent, made entirely out of slime with no other apparent organs. Dominus Fortitudinis prefers to keep a form with the head and body of a spider, and 8 gorilla-arms — each several times larger than an orc — in the place of legs. Of course, since its body is liquid, it can reshape its body as it pleases.

Besides having the Spiderilla’s aura-sense, allowing it to detect any mana that touches it or its webbing directly, the Dominus Fortitudinis’s force alignment also mingles with the slime’s sense of touch. In a closed environment like the labyrinth, this essentially means that it can detect any movement or impacts within a large radius of it. In other words, it will see you long before you can see it.

The Dominus Fortitudinis is often described as a living calamity, and is one of the main reasons force-aligned specifically do not venture into the Elosian minor Labyrinth. It will know.

Personality:

Like the Spiderilla, the Dominus Fortitudinis is fiercely territorial. Unfortunately, the Dominus Fortitudinis is much less of a home-body. Though it spends much of its time near its web, it roams as it pleases, smashing through labyrinth walls to do its hunting.

Diet:

Dominus Fortitudinis’s diet is closest to that of a slime. It feeds off of mana of its alignment. Rather than killing and eating force-aligned, the Dominus Fortitudinis prefers… Farming, for lack of a better term.

The Dominus Fortitudinis gathers force mana by trapping all force-aligned creatures it can find in its web, keeping the creatures alive by feeding them the scraps of all other creatures it hunts, then drains them of mana through the webbing. All while keeping those creatures trapped and completely immobile in a closed cocoon.

Curiously, the Dominus Fortitudinis has not wiped out the Spiderilla species within the labyrinth, as it has most other force-aligned in the Elosian Minor labyrinth. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they are its ancestors. Or, perhaps it has just come to understand the concept of over-hunting.

Combat:

The density of its mana is almost always C rank. However, its combat strength is often considered to be closer to the lower bounds of B rank. It is one of very, very few recorded monsters to have broken past the alleged “high rank barrier” to kill people and other monsters of B rank, on its own, at only C rank.

As a force aligned, the Dominus Fortitudinis is capable of using mana to enhance its own and its webbing’s strength to a much higher degree than other monsters or powereds of its rank.

The Dominus Fortitudinis can stretch, reshape, or create and reabsorb trails of its slime as a faux spider silk at will. Its hardened slime webs are quite possibly the most force-resistant substance in the system.

Piercing or cutting the webbing is outright impossible. Unlike its liquid slime, where force is pointless due to slime's liquid nature, the dominus fortitudinus's force alignment makes its webbing more akin to an unbreakable rubber. Once it’s hardened, the most you could do is bend it, regardless of how much force is applied. Even among the strongest recorded powereds, not one has been able to break the hardened slime through force, only overcome its adhesive or break whatever the slime is stuck to.

In addition to having finer control over the force alignment than spells (or any recorded force specialization) even allow, the slime will regenerate after eating unless every ounce of it is destroyed on a molecular level.

There is no such thing as an honest fight against the Dominus Fortitudinis. You either take advantage of the weaknesses of slimes, or completely overpower it from a distance. Typically both.

It does, of course, have more resistances than a typical slime that needs to be watched out for.

Not only physical attacks, but all attacks with any physical element will do more harm than good against it. As a force-aligned slime, Dominus Fortitudinis will eat and regain mana from the force applied to the attack. For example, throwing a rock will give the slime mana, making most earth-aligned attacks detrimental in a fight against it.

Soul-aligned attacks should be a decent course of action against a high rank slime. Of course, for some god-forsaken reason, this thing’s soul defenses are almost as impenetrable as its webbing.

On the few occasions the Dominus Fortitudinis has been spotted outside of a labyrinth, the most common strategy to kill it is the widely revered “Primary Raid Stratagem”, which can be summed up as wearing down a monster’s mana reserves by pelting it with an extreme volume of spells, forcing it to expend mana on a barrier.

Of course, raid strategies are avoided in the Labyrinth due to the Labyrinth’s “mana restructuring reaction”. Thus, the most common strategy to use against the Dominus Fortitudinis is to run away. Even B ranks usually avoid it, as the mana it usually takes to kill it far exceeds the value of its own mana, and it often takes most of their mana reservoirs to kill it, which high ranks seldom do.

Origin:

To all questions of the Spiderilla’s origins, this is the answer. They exist for the sole purpose of spawning these icons of death.

Even if the spiderilla is natural — however close to natural any monster can be considered — there isn't a single doubt in my mind that this thing is manmade.

The only question about its origin is: who could have made such a monster, capable of feats not even the dwarves have perfected?

‘