Legionnaires of the Damned Spell

This article contains unmarked spoilers for Book 6.

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“I’ve always been badass, Carl.” --Donut^[1]

Legionnaires of the Damned is a summoning spell that reanimates recently unequipped weapons or pieces of armor with undead wailing spirits, which are considered minions of the caster.^[2] The target items must have been recently equipped on a combatant or a corpse.^[3]

AI Description

Tome of Legionnaires of the Damned.
Type: Summoning Spell.
Cost: 25 mana

Duration: (spell level*2 + intelligence level) seconds.
Cooldown: One minute. May only have one active instance of this spell at a time.

Target: May only be cast on recently-unequipped armor or weapons. Total targets allowed varies based on multiple factors.

Effect: There are a lot of angry souls out there. Like, a lot. It’s said if one has the ability to actually see all the wailing souls that filter through the edges of our world, one would go quite insane.

The AI gave an unsettling giggle.

Quite, quite insane, actually. All that death, spiraling down, down, down into the drain. Where do they go? Why are they always screaming?

Uh, anyway. This spell reanimates physical weapons or armor pieces for a period of time with an undead, wailing spirit plucked straight from the river of falling souls. These will be temporary minions of the caster. Strength of the summoned symbiotes varies, depending on multiple factors.

Warning: In most cases, armor and weapons utilized with this spell will disintegrate upon the completion of this spell. Certain cursed and enchanted items may react in an unpredictable manner upon the completion of the spell.^[4]

Description

The tome has a bumpy leather cover and is dictionary-thick, and chained shut with a lock. Wisps of purple smoke emanate from it, and the book itself is squishy and warm; it quivers and wriggles. (Apparently, quivering is a thing that tomes of powerful summoning spells sometimes do.) When a crawler applies the spell, the book lets out a little scream as it disappears in a puff of purple smoke.^[2]

When the spell is cast, a purple gash appears in the air and wispy, white, shrieking ghosts spill down into the recently evacuated armor and weapons. The ghosts swirl into something almost like a tornado. When the spell times out, the armor and weapons and ghosts disappear in a cloud of smoke.^[3]

Story

Donut learns Legionnaires of the Damned shortly after arriving on the Eighth Floor, after receiving the Tome in a Legendary De-Sleeving Box for casting Laundry Day to eject Circe Took from Diwata on the Sixth Floor.^[2] Mordecai explains:

“Remember the swordsmen guards on the third level? This is kinda like that, but scarier. Wailing spirits are creepy. Now that Donut has level 15 in that Laundry Day spell, she can sow a lot of chaos with just those two spells. If she trains this one up, she can remove all the armor off a group of mobs and then reanimate their own armor with the spirits, and they will tear through the unarmored monsters like wildfire.”^[1]

The first time she casts the spell, she uses it to defeat Asojano.^[3]

References