The Reminiscence Hydra of Malicious Compliance
The keyholder boss of the eighth floor: a six-and-a-half-foot, stitched-together ball of flesh on four stumpy legs, sprouting nine long, screaming necks. Each head is the likeness of a dead person the crawler knew (for Carl: his half-brother Asher, his stepmother, his boss, his landlord, a friend, a former coworker and a cat), and each grants the whole a different resistance and a matching attack (fire, acid, a death ray, lightning, anti-magic). Only the deckmaster head (the cat-show judge Lucian, an acquaintance of Donut's Carl doesn't recognize at all) plays the card game; the rest fight as minions. The dungeon rebuilds the dead from the “biological excess” it harvests, and the AI gleefully announces it built this one itself as a classic “Scolopendra Nymph” reskin, changing “one molecule” on each recognized loved one to dodge the rules against reconstituting recognizable loved ones. Mordecai's counter: blow off the fire-resistant head, cauterize the stump so it can't regrow, then burn the body. Carl decapitates Bea's mother (the fire head) with a shrink-wand snap collar, and the Bedlam-Bride totem devours the rest.
Book 6 appearances
- Chapter 46 — Carl and Donut fight it as the Floor-8 keymaster; Carl cauterizes the fire head and Shi Maria’s totem rips the rest off, ending the card-combat key fight.
- Chapter 47 — Looting the corpse yields the floor key, the Map of the Stars and a Champion Pack; its deck held totem-cards of the dead crawler Frank and “Alpha Carl,” which Carl refuses to weaponize.
- Chapter 48 — Most other squads facing the same hydra fail to win a key: the AI has set the final phase up to be a slaughter.
Related entries
- Asher (Character)
- Carl’s Father (Character)
- Deck-to-Deck Combat (The Card System) (Notification)
- The Bedlam Bride (Shi Maria) (Creature)
- The Three Phases (Floor-8 Key Hunt) (Notification)
- The System AI (Character)
- Carl (Character)
Browse
- All Creatures & Bosses
- Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 46
- All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride