Chrysalis Rino Z / Tropes P to Z

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P - R

• Paralysis by Analysis: Crinis is so fixated on pleasing Anthony that she just holds onto all her skill and biomass points, not purchasing any skills or mutations, in case she picks something that he wouldn't have wanted.
  [All of them! You haven't spent a single thing?]
  [I'm sorry, Master! I didn’t want to spend them incorrectly!]
• Perception Filter: The ants of Operation Silent Shield develop a special stealth organ that causes everyone to ignore them. Anthony is able to sense them via the Collective Will Vestibule, but when using his normal senses, even touching them goes unnoticed.
  Idly, I bump up against the wall and even though I don't actually reach the heated surface my brain doesn't seem to register it.
• Percussive Therapy: After the tension and danger of killing Garralosh, Anthony and his pets relax by heading into the Dungeon and smashing things.
  Time for these stupid monsters to become my stress relief!
• Phlebotinum Overdose: Humans exposed to the Dungeon's high levels of ambient mana will eventually suffer "mana sickness", which will become fatal if untreated. The deeper they go, the higher the mana levels, and the more rapidly the sickness develops. There are, however, ways for them to adapt, either by eating biomass for a partial uncontrolled mutation into a monster, or a risky process of rebuilding their bodies to operate on higher mana levels — which is not only fatal for a small fraction of participants, but also means that, like a highly evolved monster, those who survive the treatment can no longer live in the thin mana at the surface.
• Phlebotinum Overload: Abyssal Armour suits incorporate monster cores to help them draw in ambient mana, but during dungeon waves, when mana becomes more intense, that can result in drawing so much that they overheat and have to be vented.
  With so many performing the vent at the same time, the air in front of the line shimmered with heat haze, but Morrelia didn't care. The cores mounted on the back plates of the armour no longer felt like they were going to melt through the metal and into her back, which was all she cared about at the moment.
• Physical God: In his tier seven evolution, Anthony is offered a "Larval Deity" path, where he would spend tier 7 as a giant larva and then emerge at tier 8 as a being powerful enough for the System to consider it a deity. He turns it down because he doesn't want to make the Colony wait on him hand and foot for six months.
• Play-Along Prisoner: When Anthony is captured by the Golgari, his legs are cut off so he can't run, and the journey back takes five days of dragging him around. Once they arrive, he demonstrates that he can regenerate his legs in seconds.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: After Sarah loses control while fighting the Golgari, causing her to attack and injure the Queen, Anthony suggests that she approach the Queen about it, and she resolves to take whatever punishment the Queen prescribes. The Queen dismisses the idea of blaming her, and thwacks her on the head for being foolish. Then thwacks Anthony for sending her.
• Poisonous Person: One of Anthony's tier seven evolution options would change his body into toxic fifth-strata materials. He'd be almost entirely immune to poison himself, but everyone around him — including his family — would suffer the effects, so he firmly rejects it.
• Powered Armor: Abyssal Armour suits are driven, not by the wearer's muscles, but by their mana — which is why regular humans can't use one. They're also covered in enchantments, nigh-indestructible, and the Legionaries wear them for days at a time while training.
• Power is Sexy: Odin's calm composure and ruthless self control crack when he comes face to face with Sarah's powerful bear form, leaving him fumbling over his words.
  Odin: [Are you the most perfect killing machine the world has ever seen?]
• The Power of Friendship: Anthony obtains a literal power in the form of the Collective Will Vestibule, which draws strength from the faith and goodwill of all ants within its range, rapidly refreshing both his health and Stamina. With enough ants around, he basically never gets tired.
• The Power of Trust:
  • The Queen implicitly trusts her children to act in the best interests of the Colony. As a result, Anthony is able to easily persuade her to bring the Colony to the surface, escaping both the wave and — unwittingly — the Abyssal Legion, which was hunting for them and would have slaughtered them all if they had stayed put.
  • When the Colony seeks closer cooperation with the people of Renewal, they bring some of the humans to a meeting room quite close to the brood chambers, as a gesture of trust. Enid is not especially comfortable at being so close to thousands of grubs busily chewing through biomass, but she does recognise how much it means to them. Beyn, unfortunately, is so overwhelmed by the honour that he doesn't dare move a muscle, lest he unleash an outburst of praise that could bring trigger-happy guards down on him — to the point where he can't even breathe, and passes out on the floor.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: Humans who eat monster biomass undergo a form of mutation, gaining some of the monster's appearance and the ability to survive the Dungeon's elevated mana levels. The process appears not to be controllable, though, leaving them misshapen; one such specimen is unable to stop himself from constantly slobbering acid.
  Half human, half monster, they were not a pretty sight to see. Not to mention, no two were ever the same. The twisted mutations they manifested depended in part on the monster flesh they were fed and on the human being.
• Predator Turned Protector: The ordinary behaviour of any monster is to view everyone as a source of experience and biomass, but after the kingdom of Liria is massacred by Garralosh, the refugees take a chance on the ants who had previously passed them by without eating them. Anthony is exasperated by the risk they're taking, but allows them to stay, where they form the town of Renewal. It's not long before the Colony's aggressive pacification of the surrounding wildlife makes the villagers a good deal safer than they could be anywhere else. After the Colony gains sapience, there is a brief hiccup where they nearly ignore Anthony's perimeter and eat the villagers anyway, but they're eventually helped to see the value of an alliance, with the humans bringing a wealth of knowledge about skills and industry. And then the ants kill Garralosh, winning them the undying gratitude of the humans. Story snippets from years in the future show the two species highly integrated.
• Prisoner Exchange: Subverted; Titus tries to ransom Morrelia, but Enid correctly points out that the Legion has killed every ant they've laid hands on and so they have no one to exchange.
• A Protagonist Shall Lead Them: Due to altering the ants enough to be recognised by the System as a new species, Anthony becomes the de facto leader of the Colony. The ants' extreme selflessness means that formal authority isn't really a part of their society, and he certainly doesn't try to micromanage them, but "the Eldest" commands great respect, and they all listen to what he has to say, as he works to make them an ascendant power in the world.
• Psychic Nosebleed: In the final grueling lead-up to graduation, defending against a Dungeon wave, Donnelan the mage is so wrung-out and exhausted with constant combat that he is bleeding from his eyes. He reports it to the centurion, and gets...a five-minute rest.
• Pummeling the Corpse: Tiny doesn't much like being poisoned, and keeps beating the plant monsters responsible well past the point where they're already dead.
• Punch a Wall: Titus is most displeased to learn the true nature of the Colony, doubly so since his allies could have told him sooner if they weren't being difficult, and triply because he's now understaffed to fight the ants. Morrelia watches him punch into the dungeon wall so hard that he sinks his arm up to the shoulder — then pull it out again without difficulty.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Since the golgari have made it clear that the trade delegation is not really welcome, Eran announces that they're going to promptly set up, display their wares, and leave, without stopping any longer. The golgari are surprised by the abruptness, but she isn't taking any nonsense, and warns that if they don't fulfil their trade agreements with the brathian conglomerate, then "there. Will. Be. Consequences."
• Pyromaniac: Propellant takes her attachment to fire magic well beyond mere academic interest, basing her whole philosophy and life outlook on it.
  Propellant: Ant mages! Prepare to burn! Burn it all! ALL OF IT TO THE GROUND! AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
• Quantity vs. Quality:
  • A typical ant colony takes the quantity route, but Anthony's influence causes them to trade off a bit of it, basically dropping it back to ten, in exchange for a lot of quality. They can still grow exponentially, though a little slower than before (eg longer hatching times), but they're now gaining far more levels, mutations, and Skills, so every ant can make far more impact. Plus, being sapient means that they have strategy. They are still willing to die for the Colony, but they're now smart enough to supplement that with ranged barrages of acid and magic, walls, gates, traps, tactical and feigned retreats, ambushes, attacks on supply lines, and diplomacy. Even when they charge forward in a mass, it's now planned and synchronised rather than haphazard.
  • The System generally favours Quality over Quantity, with each evolutionary stage giving a substantial power boost compared to the previous one; a high-level monster like Anthony or especially Crinis can mow down hordes of mooks. However, if the power gap is not too extreme, eg a one-tier difference, then mobbing an enemy from all sides can still be highly effective.
  • Granin is insistent that Anthony should focus on evolving himself as far as possible, but Anthony wants to share the experience around to his pets and close associates too.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: The Sophos appear to be modelled on this stereotype, at least in their manner of speech.
  Formosus Bellus Pulcher: [No it isn't the worm you BLIGHTER! Humph! No respect these days, that's the trouble with the Dungeon nowadays, no RESPECT at all!]
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Defied by Anthony when one of his evolutions offers an option to reset his carapace and mandibles' base material to Fetid Diamond, for greatly improved hardness, automatic recovery, and a built-in toxin — but instead of being shiny, it's a dull yellow-green. Anthony immediately and forcefully rejects it.
• Rash Equilibrium: After Anthony helps the queen of Liria to return to her throne, she declares, "You can only blame yourself for trusting too easily, creature!" and summons her guards. Tiny then breaks into the room, having already taken all the cores that were promised as payment, and they make their escape. Anthony reflects while running away that it would have been a bit embarrassing if she had actually honoured their deal right to the end after the Colony had already broken in and looted everything (but it was clear from everything she said and did that she wouldn't actually keep faith with a monster).
• Recognizable by Sound: Wallace isn't sure what the monster array is detecting, at first, but then he hears a steady clicking, and knows it's ants.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • Once Tiny gains enough Cunning to manage his own evolutions, Granin and Anthony insist that he upgrade his bones, not just his muscles, or else he'll break himself when he punches things.
  • Vibrant's personal army is all about going fast, but that doesn't just require increased movement speed; there's a whole suite of mutations to enable it. Faster sensory processing cortexes, boosted nervous system, high-speed vision, every part of them has to be optimised for travelling at speeds beyond what a baseline ant can handle.
    Moving at that kind of speed without being able to think fast enough to keep up with it or react fast enough when something jumps out at you, is a shortcut to getting yourself splatted on a wall somewhere.
• Reveling in the New Form: Anthony's initial reaction to reincarnation as an ant is, "I've been reborn as a WHAT?!" But it doesn't take long for him to decide that ants are much better than humans — especially the unconditional love and acceptance that all the ants in the Colony have for each other.
  You'd think hands would be great for shifting dirt, but nope, mandibles is where it's at. The two face-hands are excellent for both cutting into the unyielding rock, and gathering up loose soil into a clump.
• Revenge: Anthony loses two legs to an ambush by a resilient hippo-turtle monster, which he finds irritating. Once the team finally brings it down and settles in to eat, Anthony starts with its legs.
• Revenge Before Reason: When Anthony gets captured by the Golgari, he antagonises and embarrasses their leader, who swears revenge on him, and has political connections. As a result, when Anthony offers to trade knowledge about gravity magic for his release from the tournament, which would otherwise be accepted in a heartbeat, he's turned down.
• Rigged Contest: A Golgari honour duel is required to be a strictly "fair" one on one contest, with no magic allowed. Which means that it's entirely un-fair when it's a member of the physically powerful Warrior caste versus the magic-using Shaper caste. It's all part and parcel of their society's prejudice against magic.
• Rocket Jump: Anthony apparently played Doom in his first life, and he's familiar with the concept. He uses Invidia's explosions on several occasions to propel him toward an enemy faster than they expect (starting with Invidia himself).
• Running Gag:
  • Anthony always refers to his acid-shooting abdomen with various synonyms for "business end", frequently confusing allies who don't know what a "commercial district" or "global financial markets" are.
  • He calls the voice of the System, who speaks to him before he's reincarnated and again at each evolution, "Gandalf". "Gandalf" himself is bemused by this.
    [This name you have for me is amusing. You continue to insist on using it?]
    It's not as if I know your real name now, is it?
  • Every time Anthony uses biomass points to mutate his body, the affected parts suffer a severe itch, proportional to the amount of mutation. And every time, he forgets about the itch until he's actually kicked off the process. For bonus points, no other monsters seem to suffer from it.
    [Would you like to confirm these choices?]
    Awwwww yeah!
    Wait a sec...
    Noooorrrr-FLETABINNNNN!
  • And thanks to Crinis' regularly scheduled Mook Horror Show, he keeps telling himself over and over that next time he evolves, he's going to add eyelids. When it actually comes time to evolve, though, he never remembers.

S - T

• Sanity Slippage: Wallace is never quite the same after his city is overrun by ants, prone to inappropriate giggling, short-term thinking, and disregard of his personal safety. While the soldiers alongside him are either relieved or mistrustful of being given An Offer You Can't Refuse, Wallace is just chortling. He can still think and plan afterward, but those who know him can tell that he's not who he used to be.
  When he thought about it, his entire day had just been insane. He may as well lean into it.
• Sapient Eat Sapient:
  • Quite a lot of monsters are not particularly intelligent, but when the Colony starts encountering some who are, like third-strata demons, they still get eaten after death. (Since the demons achieved all their levels and Skills by eating other demons, it's not really surprising that they don't make a fuss about this.)
  • Vibrant gets a taste of humanity when she's only partially sapient, before the change to Formica Sapiens and finds them delicious.
• Searching for the Lost Relative: When he's reborn as an ant hatchling, alone in a tunnel, it doesn't take long for Anthony to realise that he must have come from a colony somewhere. Then he comes across a pheromone trail leading deeper into the Dungeon...
• Secret Secret-Keeper: After Anthony tells the Council what he knows about termites, which he only knows from his first life, Cobalt stays behind and hints to him that they already know he's a reincarnator, and they're unconcerned. He's one of them now regardless.
• Sensory Overload: Termites don't actually have ears, but they're so sensitive to vibrations that they can detect another termite banging on a tunnel wall. So, when Tiny unleashes his Super-Scream at short range, it's enough to make their whole army stumble.
• Serious Business: When Grey asks if Tunnel Ball is a game, Anthony responds that no, it's a religion.
  Grey: [We aren't religious, as a people.]
  Anthony: [Not yet.]
• Shock and Awe: Along with his mighty fists, Tiny the ape gains electrical mana glands, allowing him to channel lightning through his punches, or even shoot lightning bolts as a ranged or area attack. This works especially well once Anthony gains water magic affinity and is able to douse hordes of enemies, making them more conductive. (Tiny finds it less satisfying to roast a roomful of enemies than to punch them, but it's still a fight, so he's content with it.)
• Shoot the Medic First: Once Anthony forces Operation Silent Shield to work with him more actively, one of their methods of intervention is to sneak-attack the healers of any groups he fights.
• Shout-Out:
  • Within his first few days in the Dungeon, Anthony finds and eats a spider, internally ranting about how being a spider in the Dungeon is easy mode.
    Anthony: All he has to do is sit inside his web and wait for the prey to be delivered, stuck and unable to fight! Practically free Biomass!
  • When Anthony's "Dash" skill reaches level 5 and upgrades, it becomes "Rapid Dash. Like a flaming horse the user will be able to dash faster and with more precision".
  • Upon first learning about the economic value of monster parts and cores, he resolves not to end up like Anjanath.
  • When he jumps above an explosion to propel him toward a demon faster, he yells out, "IT'S A ROCKET JUMP FOOL! DOOM GUY LIVES IN MEEEEEEEEE!"
  • Anthony loves his diamond carapace, but recognises that "If I get any more sparkly than this, they'll think I'm a vampire! The lame kind!"
  • His first impression of the sword strapped to a Golgari's back is that it looks like a Buster Sword.
  • Before learning the species name of the Golgari, Anthony refers to them as (among other things) the Stone Temple Pilots.
  • Coriinam Balta's silvery "true skin" earns him the nickname of "Silver Surfer" from Anthony.
  • One of the other reincarnators he meets is a giant earthworm named James.
  • When Anthony learns that Granin has been appointed by the Cult as his sponsor, his reaction is, "So, you're like… my trainer? What am I, a pocket monster?" Naturally, Granin doesn't know what he's talking about.
  • Just for fun, Anthony uses wind magic to attach an aerodynamic blade to Tiny and Invidia, so they can travel faster.
    Invidia: [I am ssssspeeeed.]
  • Smithant encounters a full set of Abyssal Legion armour, and starts fawning over it. "My gem... my preciousss."
  • A pre-chapter note references Anthony misquoting Exodus 22:18, or possibly Warhammer 40,000, "Suffer not the termite to live."
  • When unsuccessfully testing the Altar of Self, Anthony remarks that "the energy, unlike the spice, does not flow."
  • The twin cities of the fourth stratum are made of "heart gold" and "soul silver".
  • After the Colony's business at Greystone Fortress is completed, Marzban informs Anthony that it's time to sail away.
    Anthony: Sail away?
    Marzban: Sail away.^note Also, the chapter title is "Orinoco Flow".
• The Siege: Subverted for Lord Korbell, who knows his city is prepared and supplied to hold out against a siege, but doesn't get one. The ants tunnel straight through the iron wall like tinfoil, and overrun the city before anyone can react.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The termites are individually comparable in strength to the ants, and even more numerous, but the ants are far more disciplined and coordinated. Where the termites are a horde fighting on instinct, the ants fight in tight ranks, backed by mages, making careful use of area buff auras, firing well-drilled volleys of acid and magic, and rotated out to healers as needed. Even as the ants advance unstoppably forward, they're double-checking contingency plans and anticipating threats. The result is a very one-sided slaughter.
• Soul Eating: Monsters can develop a "soul container" that draws in the souls of their defeated enemies and consumes them to power the monster's own growth. This is especially dangerous to the One Tree, who puts pieces of her soul into her children. The Ka'armodo customise their termite swarm to have soul containers to be better at fighting her.
• Spam Attack: Tier-seven demons could probably fight a thousand tier-four ants each, but they still have a bad time when facing an artillery barrage, of mixed acid and magic, from ten thousand.
• Speed Demon: This is Vibrant's defining feature. She can't tolerate staying still. She uses Hit-and-Run Tactics faster than the eye can track. She not only skips mandatory rest periods, she's fast enough that the torpor enforcers can rarely catch her. As she mutates every part of her body to be ever faster, even her pheromone language starts to drop all the spaces.
  Vibrant: Gogogogogogogogogogogogogogogo!
• Sports: What starts out as a competitive training exercise for hatchlings develops into a full-blown spectator sport of "Tunnel Ball", with teams of ten ants seeking to get a ball past each other to the goal, in front of large crowds of both ants and humans. Given its origins, it's not only a full-physical-contact sport, it also allows the use of magic, whether it's to reshape the pitch, slow down the opposing players, or outright destroy the ball. (The non-sport variants allow direct injury to the other team, so long as it's not fatal.) The "Travelling Tolly" future snippets make mention of Anthony playing, just once.
  Emilia: They retired immediately afterwards, but the story has become something of a legend.
• Squishy Wizard: Invidia's physical prowess is minimal, but good luck hitting him, because his ability to cast spells is through the roof. Anthony considers him to be the perfect complement to Tiny's Dumb Muscle, providing distractions and barriers and healing so that Tiny is free to achieve his full Glass Cannon potential.
• Stab the Salad: After hours where most of the Colony tries to track down a missing grub, she turns out to be with Anthony — who promptly tosses her into Invidia's mouth, to the horror of the Brood Tenders. She's not actually being eaten, though, she's just getting a timeout in Invidia's pocket dimension stomach.
• Status Buff:
  • The Antmancers can't directly contribute much in a fight that the ants can't do better, but so long as they are fighting alongside each other, the Antmancer class gives a buff to all the stats of both species. It's worth having them in a fight just to boost the ants.
  • Ant generals emanate an aura that buffs nearby ants, and stacks with the Antmancer bonus.
• Stealth Expert: Anthony's first ever skill purchase is Stealth, but he never really becomes a master of it, especially once he's coated in diamond and the size of a minibus. There are ants who properly specialize in it, though:
  • The nameless ones can operate in total darkness, and use a network of tunnels hidden even from the other ants, allowing them to strike from ambush to snatch away ants who have worked too long without rest. Typically the only sign of their presence is that their target is no longer there when you turn around.
    [Ghost Stealth (VI) has reached Level 94.]
  • Operation Silent Shield utilizes a special organ that allows them to vanish from everyone's senses; they literally can't be noticed by most mechanisms unless they allow it. They use it to surround Anthony in shifts as unceasing bodyguards. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that their raw power is limited, especially since the constant hiding limits their opportunities for Level Grinding, so their ability to actually help Anthony increasingly falls behind.
• Storm of Blades: Skilled swordsmen can project blades of light far beyond their actual weapon. True experts take this further, able to launch many strikes at once to hit an entire company.
  "HOLD!" Rianus roared. "Folk Blademaster!"
  That was all he could say before the rabbit creature flickered and vanished before them. An instant later, a slash rang out overhead, followed by a barrage of sword light, slivers of silver death, raining down from above.
• Stunned Silence: After Anthony wipes his opponent out with a single gravity bomb, powerful enough that even the spectators feel themselves being dragged in, the whole audience just silently stares at him.
• Stupid Sacrifice: Anthony has to spend a lot of time teaching the Colony to defy this. There's just no point throwing yourself into harm's way to protect your fellow ants, when you could instead join in a barrage of acid and win without casualties. Most of them eventually adjust to this new mindset, although Leeroy just can't make the transition and remains intent on dying gloriously for the Colony.
  Anthony: Ok. Let's try this again. The enemy is down there. We can see them, we are in a superior position where they cannot fight back. All of the advantages are ours. So, what are you going to do? What is your strategy?
  Worker: Well, I see the monster down there.
  Anthony: Right.
  Worker: I know that I have numerical superiority.
  Anthony: Right!
  Worker: I also know that we have a positional advantage here, and the ability to attack our opponent when they can't fight back.
  Anthony: Yeees?
  Worker: So, I will charge down to engage the enemy, forcing myself into its jaws so that by my sacrifice my fellow workers will be able to attack without being harmed!
• Success Through Insanity: In Anthony's first conversation with "Gandalf", he learns that only souls who are a bit deranged to begin with are selected to reincarnate in the Dungeon, since a certain amount of madness is necessary to have a chance of surviving and thriving. Anthony isn't really sure how that applies to himself; lots of people get abandoned by their parents and starve to death because they gave away their last food, right?
  Gandalf: [I have found it takes a certain resilience of mind, a certain … Insanity, to allow a sentient creature such as a human to survive the transition to life in the Dungeon of this world without… breaking. I try to find souls such as yours, souls that have lived a life of deprivation and suffering. I find they are better equipped to handle the madness, slaughter and solitary life of a monster]
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Crinis invests heavily in fear magic, on top of her horrific base appearance, to the point where Anthony introduces her to Invidia as, "she's in charge of being terrifying and tentacles".
  As tears began to roll down her face, Yasmine watched as each of those mouths opened impossibly wide, paused, then screamed, a piercing wail that blew through every mortal soul that heard it and rattled their minds like weathervanes.
  That sound seeped through their ears, into their brains before it sunk into a deeper place, a primal place of fear and terror that every child knows and adults wish they could forget. For many, the madness that followed was almost a relief.
• Super Prototype: To an extent, Anthony functions as this to the entire Colony, as do the Twenty, with more cores and biomass invested in them than the standard training program, including special and rare cores. Justified by the fact that gaining maximum strength at each evolutionary stage requires a considerable investment of valuable resources; when scaling up to hundreds or thousands of ants, they can't afford to max them out quite so much. (But they do make use of the lessons learned to give it a solid try.)
• Super-Scream: Various monsters, including Tiny, can produce a shout powerful enough to rattle brains. Anthony even meets a flower that can do it. Crinis has a variant, too, but hers is less of a shockwave, more of a horrific scream born of a nightmare and imbued with fear magic.
• Super-Senses: As a new hatchling, Anthony's eyesight is very poor, but he prioritises mutating and improving it, until his thousands of compound lenses are each approximately as effective as a human eyeball.
  And there's no need to stop now! I want sharper eyesight! Better motion tracking! In all directions at the same time! Gwehehehe!
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Enid's guess that Anthony is tracking her with mind magic is not quite right, but she wouldn't want to know the full truth, so he doesn't tell her. She's present in his Communal Spirit Nave, meaning that to some degree she's one of his worshippers. Since that would mean comparing her to Beyn the fanatic, she's happier not knowing.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: At first, Anthony can only use the basic spell forms with his gravity magic, like a simple bolt that weighs down the target, the gravity spear that doesn't directly harm them but pulls other monsters toward them, and the domain that weighs down all hostiles close to him. However, once Anthony gains the gravity magic affinity skill, he unlocks its true potential — with a single new spell form, the gravity well, which gives him total control of gravity within its range. He can move things, lift things, crush things, individually or en masse, all with the one spell.
• Tactical Withdrawal: The ants are very skilled at retreating in good order. Their pheromone-based communication isn't affected by noise, and they are inherently cooperative and obedient. When Advant sees reinforcements approaching a heated battle, she issues a command to fall back, and the battlefield is emptied out in ten seconds.
• Taking You with Me: Granin warns his superiors that if they push Anthony too far, then Granin will take steps to publicly expose the Cult of the Worm, resulting in his own execution and theirs.
• Talking in Your Dreams: The cults of the Ancients have only fragmentary information about the beings they worship, typically gathered from individuals seeing them in dreams — and often suffering dire effects, such as visions of Carriflare causing one's eyes to be burned out. Granin sees Yarrum the Eternal Worm in a dream, and is urged to hurry up and ensure Anthony's ascension, as time is limited.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • Anthony is surprised and alarmed to discover that the biomass produced and freely offered by aphids contains a weak but cumulative poison. Having spotted it in time, though, he's able to work around it.
  • Solant arranges for a tainted cake to be delivered to Anthony at half-time of their Tunnel Ball game, seeking victory at any cost. When Anthony learns that the "poison" was actually a tenfold dose of sugar, in hopes of making him behave erratically, he can only respond, "That's adorable."
• Teach Him Anger: Sarah starts off full of fear, which can feed her Asura heart and make her strong, but means she's always unhappy with herself for using it. A big part of her Character Development is finding a cause that she actively wants to fight for, and slowly learning to trust her own potential for berserk rage. When she comes to her tier 7 evolution, although she finds all her options intimidating and frightening and distasteful, she ultimately chooses the one that will take her anger to the next level, in exchange for the greatest power, trusting that she will find a way to stay in control of herself and make it work.
  It was time to accept that her fury, her rage, was a part of her. It belonged to her, and she would no longer let it be in control. She would clothe herself in fury, she would wear it like armour.
• Teleportation: Brilliant's research into higher dimensions, and the associated skills, result in her being able to teleport herself around the Dungeon. She can even bring passengers — although it's a rather unpleasant experience for them, passing through realms like the squiggly line dimension, or even stranger places. Building gates that other ants can use, however, takes a lot more work.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Lampshaded after Anthony gets exasperated with his pets' antics, and internally hopes that the next generation of ants will be more useful.
    Did I just jinx myself? No flags! Shut up, Anthony!
  • After thinking that there's no way the next wave will be able to get through the ants' gates unless a battering ram made of living metal spawns nearby, he immediately follows it up with, "That's not a challenge, Gandalf!"
• Tentacled Terror: Anthony specifically introduces Crinis to his next pet as, "She's in charge of being terrifying and tentacles." As she grows, she can directly control hundreds of tentacles, with a thousand on autopilot. They are covered, not in suckers, but in Ripping Spines, which move back and forth like a chainsaw once they seize her prey, and she doesn't always bother to completely kill monsters before tossing them into her maw and letting her stomach disintegrate them. Oh, and she invests heavily in fear magic, so even giant crocodiles and spiders are inclined to run away from her.
• Termite Trouble: It's expensive for the Mother Tree to manifest a garden on the fiery third strata, but she does it anyway to contact the Colony, because the Ka'armodo have bred a tame termite swarm to bring her down. The Colony's reaction is deeply instinctive.
  How can the Colony live knowing that a giant monster termite nest exists out there in Pangera? We can't! We must destroy it! They cannot be permitted to exist within the same Dungeon!
  Anthony: [I've heard of termites, yes.]
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Crinis tends to be a bit overprotective of Anthony and excessively vengeful toward his enemies.
  [Master! Are you well? Are you hurt? I think I can feel a scratch on your carapace. WHO DID IT?! Tell me, and I will rend them into pieces and grind the remains into paste! Then I will dive into the mind of the paste and drive it insane for a thousand years! Death! Deaaaaaaaaaath!]
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The cults of the Ancients have only been able to gather fragmentary information about the monsters they worship, from dreams granted to the faithful — many of whom suffered serious side effects from those brief glimpses. From those who view Zothoth and Go Mad from the Revelation, to having one's eyes burned out by seeing Carriflare, to one poor soul who glimpsed the realm of Tarriflyx the Hunger and chewed off his own arm in his sleep. Piecing together the snippets has been a work of centuries.
  Only when networked together did we arrive at the realisation that these may be more than just figments conjured by imagination, but rather glimpses at a reality we should never see.
• There Are No Coincidences: Wallace is Properly Paranoid enough to become suspicious when the city's alarm network registers an unusual number of hits from shadow monsters over two days. They're deep enough in the first stratum that shadow monsters are certainly not unknown, but he doesn't think it's normal to have this many. He's right, but it doesn't help him, as the ants flood in with unstoppable numbers and overwhelm the city that their shadow pets had scouted out.
• This Is Unforgivable!:
  • After the death of many brood, Anthony declares a vendetta against James the giant earthworm, his former friend.
    Anthony: There's no coming back from that, not with us.
  • Consul Minerva severs all ties and support in response to the Ka'armodo engineering a race of termite servants.
    Minerva: Some lines you only have to cross once. There is no going back.
• Throwing the Fight:
  • Morrelia intentionally berserks her way into the ant lines and gets herself captured, so that the ants will have a hostage to make her father back down.
  • When Rassan'tep sees Anthony invading the entire termite colony with just his pets and Sarah, he thinks he might have to manipulate things to deliberately lose, since he doesn't want to kill off such a promising candidate. However, he's pleasantly surprised when Anthony performs better than expected and wins more or less legitimately (although Rassan'tep did deliberately hold back insights that could have tipped the scales if shared with his colleagues).
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Most monsters aren't sapient enough to really care about the taste of biomass. Anthony, on the other hand, finds it revolting. But it's the only food source available to monsters (and even once the Colony develops others, only biomass gives points for mutating and improving their bodies), so he chows down anyway.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Anthony probably wouldn't punish Beyn by thwacking him on the head with an antenna, if he realised how much Beyn enjoys having any kind of physical contact with the Great One.
  Richly deserved punishment that nevertheless sent him into paroxysms of faith induced joy. It was wrong for him to find such delight in the touch of the one he revered so, but he couldn't help it! He wasn’t worthy, wretched unbeliever that he had once been, far too lost to receive such contact!
• Tough Room: It's understandable that Anthony's Earth-based jokes generally just attract blank stares or requests for explanation.
  Anthony: [All right, everyone, it's time to form up for the attack. Tiny in the front, Crinis with me, and Vibrant on the flank. Our mission is complete subjugation. All crocs must be handbags or tasteful jackets by the time we're done. Nothing too out there, I'm fashion conservative.]
  [Beat]
  Crinis: [What is a jacket, Master? Explain it to me and I shall prepare a thousand for you this day!]
• Tournament Arc: After being kidnapped, Anthony is forced into a series of death matches against other monsters, purportedly with the aim of strengthening the eventual winner by letting them take all the experience and biomass from their competitors. He wins several matches, surprising the sponsors, and turns one of the resulting monster cores into his third pet, before breaking out and meeting up with the Colony.
• Tranquil Fury: Eran Thouris has built up a fine head of steam, raging and storming at the golgari with a volume that impresses Isaac but makes him worry she'll literally shake the roof down. Then, however, the golgari bluster about demanding compensation — and the mood suddenly shifts.
  She went ice cold, her eyes as hard as diamonds, even her scales seem to tighten around her. The golgari felt it, how could they not? Every brathian had the same response to his demand for payment, every one of them becoming an icy pillar of cold fury.
  Eran Thouris drew herself up to her full height, almost half that of the imposing warrior before her, but she didn’t appear small in the slightest.
  "You will hear from our lawyers."
• Troll:
  • The Death Seeker "Immortals" make quite a lot of work for the healer ants, so it's perhaps understandable that the healers find joy in taunting them with detailed descriptions of their not-quite-fatal injuries.
    "Ooo. That's a rough wound, nearly enough to kill you, wasn't it? Good thing you survived!"
    "Just a few centimetres to the left and you'd have been done. Look at the scoring in the carapace next to your eye! Punched right through the armour, it did. Not a problem though, you'll be back to full health in just a few hours."
  • While Granin and Torrina discuss Anthony's skill options, Corun has zoned out, mumbling about centipedes and how horrible they are. When they return, Anthony tells them that "poking at people in the Nave is more entertaining than I expected."
• Turncoat: Jim the giant earthworm turns out to be more self-interested than Anthony realised, betraying the Colony in hopes of eliminating it as a threat. In fairness, the Colony is pretty dangerous, but helping enemy soldiers to break into the brood chambers and slaughter infants is something the ants will not forgive or forget.
• Turns Red: The Regulus Bestiae saltus literally turns red when it gets angry, triggering a berserk flurry of blows, and corrosive blood. It deals some heavy damage, but ultimately, staying at close range is the wrong tactic against Anthony.
• Twinking: The ants' monster-farming strategy relies on two principles. The first is working together. The second is having a stronger ant pummel monsters into submission before having a weaker ant deliver the final blow as an intentional Kill Steal. Anthony even offers this service to the people of Renewal, to get them better classes than [Farmer] or [Grower] and break them out of their Can't Catch Up cycle.

U - Z

• Ugly Cute: In-Universe, Enid considers the ant grubs to be "kind of cute, once you got used to them." They're off-limits to almost everyone but the brood tenders, though.
• Unreliable Narrator: The pre-chapter excerpts include an In-Universe example, with an extract from a letter by Poran Alact, complaining that the author of the Book of the Red Truth wasn't necessarily entirely reliable, and that the book should be subjected to the same standards of academic rigour as any other text.
• Unstable Equilibrium: A monster that makes serious mistakes in the early stages of its life will likely find that it Can't Catch Up with one who was able to optimize things.
  • The amount of growth possible with each evolution depends on the amount of energy in one's core. But the size of the core is based on how many other cores are absorbed — and there are limits on how many cores can be absorbed between evolutions. So, a monster that fails to fully reinforce its core before evolving will be permanently disadvantaged. One that takes the option to evolve before forming a core is practically crippled. Jim the earthworm made this mistake, and although he's an excellent digger and has good stealth, he's just not combat capable.
  • In the other direction, early access to "special" cores allows a monster to push its core beyond normal limits, gaining extra energy and stronger evolutionary paths. Overclocking one's core in this way is painful, and lethal if pushed too far, but highly effective. As the core grows and adapts, it becomes possible to supercharge it further with "rare" or even "mythic" cores, attaining heights of evolutionary energy and extra abilities that would never be achieved with a more conservative path. Such as the Collective Will Vestibule organ, granted to Anthony as part of a rare evolution, and unlocking further powerful paths such as the "Larval Deity" when he absorbs a mythic core. Without that earlier boost, he would have been restricted to being a powerful-but-ordinary worker, soldier, or mage.
  • Evolving imposes a penalty to the number of biomass points gained from less-evolved foes. A monster who doesn't max out their mutations before evolving will find that it's now even harder to collect the necessary points... Anthony actually does manage to catch up on that one, maxing out his mutations before evolving to tier five — and then he learns that he has permanently missed out on bonus evolutionary energy at each tier by not doing that sooner.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: Fire Iron is, by its very nature, able to tolerate extreme heat. A properly made suit of it would allow a human to stand in lava unharmed. Working and forging it, therefore, requires ludicrously powerful furnaces, so hot that they quickly burn themselves out from the strain and need to be replaced. Convection Shmonvection is not in effect here; Smithant, observing a pour, can feel her carapace sizzling and has to turn away, despite having Skills and mutations and enchanted equipment specialised for the work.
  The gigantic furnace weighed over a thousand tons, but under the tremendous forces they subjected it to, it shrieked like a human kettle. The air inside had been superheated to such a degree that regular iron would be reduced to slag in a second. Yet for Fire Iron, it still wasn't enough.
• Unwanted False Faith: Anthony doesn't mind the fact that the villagers of Renewal are grateful for the help the ants have given them, but led by Beyn the priest, they go far beyond simple gratitude and well into religious veneration of the "Great One", which he's far less comfortable with. Even Enid, who's far more sensible, can't deny that the things the Colony have done seem miraculous, which makes Anthony half-jokingly despair of humanity. It doesn't get any better when Anthony's evolutionary path actually starts treating him as a figure of worship, empowering him from the faith and goodwill of his people. Or when Beyn launches a crusade in his name. Or when people start getting special "Templar of the Great One" classes...
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: The Legionaries are incensed to see Tiny wearing a patchwork of Abyssal Armour pieces salvaged from their fallen comrades. It works, though, making him much harder to hurt and free to go all-out on punching them.
• Verbal Backspace: Anthony takes the chance to vent to Morrelia about the guy who nearly cut him in half, and how unfair it is for someone to be so ridiculously powerful — until she tells him that that was her father.
  Anthony: [Lovely guy. Charming even. I mean, so human. Such a warm personality and totally regular level of strength.]
• Victory by Endurance: This is the Colony's strategy for fighting the Golgari, since the ants are individually weaker but far more numerous. They can afford to tire out ants taking extreme range acid potshots at the enemy, if it will slow them down at all; there are plenty more ants. And tunnel collapses, even if there are ways to counter them and avoid actual loss of life, will cost time and energy to deal with (whereas the ants, as natural diggers, can easily set them up).
  We don't need to win, we only need to hold. Forcing the Legion to go back to their camp and try again another day, that's a victory.
• Victory Pose:
  • After her first kill as a hatchling, Vibrant poses on top of the corpse. Since her foe was completely crippled and pinned by Anthony first, and still took her tiny mandibles a minute of dedicated biting, he's not exactly overwhelmed by her prowess, but she's cute.
  • She later copies Anthony's pose, which (seeing her tiny form raising a leg in the air) makes him feel childish.
  • After Anthony kills a Death Creeper with a single gravity bomb in front of a flabbergasted audience, he stands on his four rear legs and throws his forelegs wide.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Despite the lack of monster romance, Crinis very much has the "violently protective" part down. It is not wise to attack Anthony in her presence.
  The solid bone claw scrapes along my pristine Diamond Carapace and sparks fly, but the claw fails to penetrate through to my soft, fleshy insides. The carapace is triumphant!
  [DEATH!] Crinis screams, and a boiling mass of tentacles lash out and wrap both legs of the double-croc.
• The War Room: The General caste of ants eventually needs a dedicated space, especially once the carvers start producing comprehensive and highly detailed maps of the terrain and the tunnels. (Even with those maps, coordination is still a challenge.)
• Weak, but Skilled: Invoked by Anthony when he alters the Queen's core to produce brood with longer hatching times and less physical prowess, but much greater Cunning, trusting that intelligence will triumph over raw power. It works beyond his wildest dreams.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?:
  • Anthony asks this when forming a separate team of combined humans and ants to slow down Garralosh's horde. Naturally, that's when the Ka'armodo's assistants start to seriously respond with high-level magic, including conjuring a cloud over him and bombarding him with lightning strikes.
  • He asks it again when Victor wants to be cautious in the aftermath of a wave, breezily asserting that "There's nothing here to stop us right now."
    Even I feel a slight chill in the air that descends in the face of my brazen overconfidence.
• What Have I Done:
  • Anthony is horrified to realise that rushing back carelessly and openly to warn the Colony of the approaching wave has resulted in a large group of monsters following, and many resulting deaths.
  • And then has another freak-out, worrying himself into a tizzy and outright asking "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" when he sees the first Formica Sapiens about to hatch.
  • Also, when his Gravity Bomb gets a significant upgrade, firstly because he was able to take lots of time to shape it, and secondly because his Forceful Mana skill upgraded to Condensed Mana partway through, he's quite alarmed by the results.
    What exactly has my Mana become? What is it that I have unleashed?!
  • And yet again, "What have I created here?!" when he watches Crinis put her new "soul seeker cilia" to work, driving dungeon monsters into fits of horrified screaming — and Crinis starts giggling.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Some of the skills available for purchase are less useful than others; Anthony has to trawl through long menus searching for the few gems.
  This one? No…
  How about—No…
  Hmmmm… No.
  Who would want to get better at that anyway?
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The System draws a line between the Old Races, including humans and a handful of others, vs monsters, and the Abyssal Legion considers all monsters to be acceptable targets — even if fully sapient. Indeed, sapient species are considered to be high-priority threats. Some of the New Races have gathered enough clout to be left alone for practicality's sake, but there is always conflict between the New and Old.
• Workaholic:
  • Every ant except Anthony works practically non-stop. Even their greetings are gentle chiding to work hard. They need a Gestapo-style police force to make them get enough hours of sleep. (Anthony is no slacker by human standards, but he does like breaks and vacations.)
  • Morrelia throws herself wholeheartedly into Legionary training, with all the stubbornness her family is known for, which draws a smile even from her stoic father.
    The Centurions in charge of her training used some interesting terms: manic dedication, boundless tolerance for bloodshed, and disturbing disregard for pain, were a few of his favourites.
• Worshipped for Great Deeds: Everyone agrees that Beyn's fanatical worship of the ants is overblown and tiring, but even level-headed characters like Enid have a hard time completely ignoring his point of view when the ants have acted like saviours, taking scattered desperate refugees and making them a strong, secure, self-sufficient community.
  Anthony: [You aren't starting to buy into Beyn's rubbish are you? I am certainly not a divine messenger of any kind.]
  Enid: [If you keep producing miracles at the rate you have been, I'm not going to have much choice am I?]
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: The Colony is entirely communal, with no currency or even trade. An extract from a merchant's letter mentions how some of his competitors tried to bribe the ants into giving better deals, and were left holding out purses while ants stared at them without comprehending.
• Xanatos Gambit: The ants use a multilayered defence strategy when fighting reaches their gates.
  • If the flood of twenty million litres of acid gets the enemy, great! If, however, their mages shield against it, that will distract them and make it harder for them to contest the ant mages who are attempting to drop the ceiling on them, filled with giant metal spikes.
  • Or the mages can keep focusing on the ceiling, while mundane soldiers pack together and rapidly carve trenches in the tunnel floor to divert the acid around themselves, letting it splash their armour but not wash them away. Except that it will dissolve away the covers holding back the swarms of centi-sludge monsters.
  • And if the centi-sludges manage to poison the enemy, that's great, but if they don't, well, their Blob Monster physiology means that killing them for good takes a lot of work, which means the soldiers will be distracted when the ants sortie.
  • And, of course, when the ants charge, they're using ranged attacks, so if they get someone, that's great, but if they don't, they don't immediately lose any ants, and they'll tie up the mages' concentration further, allowing Anthony to toss a condensed gravity bomb that will kill anything it hits if the mages aren't able to unpick it on the way.
  • Oh, and if the enemy puts their all into it and stops everything thrown at them, that's okay; they'll have tired themselves out, and stalling is still a win, because the ants breed thousands of new hatchlings every day, and a dungeon wave is coming soon that the ants are better able to endure than their opponents are.
• X-Ray Sparks: Upon encountering metallic-looking pigs, Anthony sends Tiny after them, since he can blast them with lightning, with spectacular results.
  I do not want to be caught in the middle of that… Still, it seems my hypothesis on the metallic skin being weak against Tiny rang true. Pretty sure that monster's skeleton was visible.
• Yandere: Since romance doesn't appear to be a feature of monster life, Crinis doesn't expect any from Anthony, nor does she seem to harbour any resentment toward the other pets, leaving her somewhere between Yandere and Violently Protective Girlfriend. Nonetheless, her stammering dialogue shows that she is extremely devoted to Anthony, overprotective, very shy about her feelings, wanting to be and do whatever Master wants, and psychotically violent toward any monsters who would threaten Master, or fail to show proper respect, or whom Master tells her to kill.
• You Are Not Alone: Sarah spent her first years on Pangera with no one to rely on but herself, and fell into madness and violence. Then, she was rescued by the Golgari, but essentially kept as a comfortable prisoner for decades. Anthony basically adopts her, insisting that the Colony is "OUR family", which she likes but struggles to let herself accept.
  Anthony: You might have been on your own before, but now you have thousands of us who are on your side. You'll be taken care of, okay?
  Sarah: I can't get used to that, turning toward the things that I avoided for so long and embracing them. I just feel so scared.
• You Can Turn Back: Titus offers the people of Renewal the opportunity to walk away from the Colony before the fighting starts, and Enid passes the offer on. The ants certainly wouldn't try to stop them if they chose to save themselves, but none of them do.
• You Can't Go Home Again: This applies multiple times over to Anthony.
  • He's dead on Earth, so can't return from Pangera. But he never had much of a home there, and wouldn't want to go back anyway.
  • The more a monster evolves, the harder it becomes to survive in the relatively thin mana on the surface of Pangera. At tier six, Anthony is only able to visit the surface colony and the village of Renewal for a few hours during the peak of a mana-rich wave, largely to say goodbye.
  • Once he reaches the fourth strata, the Ancients take an interest in him and Call him to descend deeper and join them. He likens this to embedding a fish hook in his soul, physically preventing him from walking to higher strata and causing him intense pain if someone else carries him there.
• You Do Not Want To Know: When Anthony hears "[NOM! NOM! NOM! NOM!]" over his mental link with Tiny, he wonders for a moment how Tiny managed to transmit the sound of chewing, then decides he doesn't want an answer.
• You Owe Me: Invoked in desperation by Jim the earthworm, as the very last thing he's seen to say. But it's not clear what he might be owed, and he's ignored anyway.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: When Anthony asks about the value of the metal used in Torrina's "true skin", she tells him that it's rude to ask, but then laughs and explains it anyway.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Played straight during the dungeon waves, when mana levels rise and monsters spawn endlessly out of the Dungeon walls. They start at level 1, and so they are mostly easy enough to kill, but they just keep coming, for weeks. And then, the ones that spawned further away, and successfully competed with others to survive, come stomping along with some more experience and levels...
  • Initially played straight by the Colony when Anthony first encounters his kin throwing themselves suicidally into fights and winning through weight of numbers. Later defied when he modifies the Queen to produce more intelligent offspring, causing the ants to use much more sophisticated strategies — much to the horror of everyone who finds out.
  • Played even straighter by dorylus ants; they're blind, but a dorylus queen can lay over a million eggs a month (vs the Colony's tens of thousands).
    Donnelan: Think of millions of monsters crawling across the ceiling, bursting out of the walls and scrambling on top of each other to kill you, what does it matter that they can't see?
  • The unending tide of ants flooding into the underground city of Rylleh is about as effective through its mere psychological impact as their actual combat strength, with all the defenders immediately knowing that they don't stand a chance, and losing any semblance of coherent resistance.
    They ran up the walls, toward the ceiling, fanning out in all directions as more and more poured out each second. If anything, the flow increased with each heartbeat until the area around the entrance was carpeted in a living wave of giant insects.

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