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“No shit he’s a war mage. What’s his race?” - Carl
“War mages are war mages. That one looks like an elf." - Levi the 7th[1]
War Mages are a race / class of magic-users known for casting brutal dark magic such as You're Not Done Yet Spell.[2] War mages are symbiotes who survived at least 12 resleeving Flesher attacks.
AI Description
Description of Akuma the War Mage
Want to know some interesting trivia about war mages? These guys have been around since the very early days of Dungeon Crawler World, but they are one of the few, true dungeon-born entities. They weren’t dreamed up by a sweaty, caffeine-addled writer, nor were they developed by one of my kind. They just sort of happened, a result of too many combatants having access to You’re Not Done Yet.
The final form a war mage takes is entirely dependent on the combination of its first two forms, in this case, a human crawler from a very long time ago and a high elf. The skin of a corpse is ripped off of a body and turned to a creature named a Flesher. The flesher then consumes a living being, melting the original skin off and re-sleeving the creature. The flesher casts Boned, reanimating the skeleton, and the two become a symbiote.
Symbiotes are extremely attractive targets to other fleshers. And because young symbiotes are slow and awkward, they are oftentimes quickly re-sleeved by fresh fleshers. Each iteration results in a more powerful being.
It’s rare for a symbiote to be resleeved at least a dozen times, but when it happens, the magic itself can become sapient. When this happens, the flesh finally fuses to the reanimated skeleton, turning the three creatures—the skeleton, the flesher, and the sapient well of magic—into a single being. A war mage.
This process usually takes at least 12 iterations, but there’s no hard rule about it. Sometimes it takes up to 15 or 16 iterations. It depends on the latent magic in the skin of the fleshers.
War mages come with knowledge of hundreds of spells.
They’re also all complete dicks. If they ever made action figures of these things, their accessories would include keys to a BMW, a few bumps of cocaine, and a membership card to some secret club where you can hunt homeless people for fun.
If these things were non-corporeal, they’d be called magic elementals. Instead, they’re just grumpy, lumpy assholes who get their rocks off by showing just how unpleasant they can be. The very nature of most magic spells is cold cruelty, and that shows when the magic itself is allowed to talk.
And nobody made them! All of this just happened on its own. In fact, the very existence of these things has actually been the focus of multiple, boring-ass studies and books. But, in the end, because they were “born” in the dungeon, they are of the dungeon, and just because nobody engineered their existence doesn’t mean that existence hasn’t been exploited, as evidenced by the fact most war mages find their minds wiped and themselves sitting in quests or mercenary guilds each time a new dungeon opens.
However, their very existence also creates problems. Each war mage one may find in the dungeon was created naturally, meaning they could have been made several seasons previous, and because the showrunners like to use war mages, especially for their precious Faction Wars, they are rarely recycled.
So here’s a message for all the assholes reading this. If you can’t see why that’s a problem, maybe you should ask that pissed-off changeling army that’s in the middle of wrecking your shit why you should probably keep an eye on the things you unleash, especially when you don’t fully understand what they are.
Oh, by the way.
War mage heads explode and create something called a Sapient Moment of Destruction approximately ten minutes after they die. So, heads up. Pun intended.[3]
Story
Book 3
A War Mage rides every named train on the Fourth Floor Iron Tangle, but each one attacks in a different way (e.g. Dismember on the Dismemberment Limited).[4] Dismember was part of the Levi is on the Menu Quest, most likely trying to turn Levi the 7th into another War Mage. [2]
Book 7
Trivia
Shi Maria suggests that a War Mage's head may make for an interesting ingredient[5]
References
- ↑ Dinniman, Matt. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Chapter 12) (p. 184). Dandy House. Kindle Edition.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Dinniman, Matt. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Chapter 12)
- ↑ Dinniman, Matt. This Inevitable Ruin (Chapter 61)
- ↑ Dinniman, Matt. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Chapter 13)
- ↑ Dinniman, Matt. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Chapter 71) (p. 651). Dandy House. Kindle Edition.