Troglodyte - Sophos

An ancient race that existed even before the system had come into existence. Most of their communities are in the second strata since there a lot of high-tier cores there.

## Description

The Sophos have small bodies, with thin, gangly arms with gnarled, claw-tipped hands and legs that emerge from an unimpressive torso so thin the ribs are visible which in turn supports a massive head which gives the Sophos a hunched back from carrying them. They have no eyes, no ears, and a large bulging forehead that tapers down to a wide toothy mouth. Their faces are featureless and the only real defining feature to seperate them apart is the mottled colouring of their skin. Most of their skin is green, but there are some patches of either red, blue, or orange on their skin too. They appear completely hairless and somewhat wrinkly, which is very visible, since they don't appear to wear any clothes other than a loincloth. They have balance that is so bad they aren't able to walk properly due to their huge heads and weak bodies.

## Culture

They are usually loud, pugnacious, and sound like a british general from the 1800's but can lower their tone of voice depending on the situation. Despite bantering with eachother a lot, conflict between Sophos has never happened. Due to their past they carry an immense grudge against the dungeon and are pretty anti-system in general.

They find the name "Troglodytes" that the System gave them to be highly offensive and prefer to be called by their original name.

They can't make children the way they used to anymore, because the Dungeon doesn't allow natural reproduction from 'monsters', so Sophos invest most of their energy in their pets since they are the only children they'll ever have. Of course, not all pets are treated this way. Some are disposable soldiers, an unfortunate reality of living in the Dungeon, those who've been with their owners for a long time though, have an emotional impact on them when they die. They are also passionate about the topic of pets and get excited at the chance of being able study new, interest types of monsters. Despite all this though, they don't give their pets so much free reign as to them do something like deciding their own evolutions.

They hardly waste time on core shaping their real pets until they reach rank six.

## History

### -3000+ ago

The Sophos were underground dwellers even before the dungeon appeared. When mana began to seep through the ground, they were the first to experience and make use of it. When the Dungeon tunnels connected to theirs, they were the first to come into contact with monsters and battle them. The surface races ignored the warnings given by them and laughed at their pleas for help.

### - 1000+ years ago

After the rending and adapting to the changes of the system they began to thrive but after hundreds of years, they were so steeped in the mana of the dungeon the system couldn't differentiate between them and monsters and thus they lost their classes, levels, ability to reproduce, and could only eat biomass. Branded as monsters by the system they were first excluded and then hunted to near-exitnction, causing them to conceal their settlements and withdraw from contact with those they had fought beside during The Rending.

### -Present

After nearly being wiped out, there are only some of the Sophos race left. Fortunately, their pets still remained faithful and did not desert them. Now they build build settlements around any spawn point that has produced a Sophos and battle against the Dungeon wherever they can by exterminating the species that are "successful". As they battle and fight against the System whenever they can, the System in retaliation set the spawn rate of Sophos as abysmally-low, leading to the race's small numbers. The surface races attitude toward them is basically the same compared to around the beginning of the Dungeon.

Most of their civilization was lost when when the system changed them since there wasn't any need for farmers, artists, poets, and the like. They mainly focus on manipulating cores and creating pets to fight for them.

## Military Power

The Sophos have an affinity to mind magic and are able to edit, fuse, and reconstitute monsters perfectly thanks to their high mental stats. They delibrately don't evolve much in order to keep their settlements in the upper levels of the dungeon. Most of the Sophos are tier five and a few are tier six. They use mana concentration enchantments to bring mana up from below in order to sustain themselves. Their core-related skills are arguably their most powerful abilty since it played a significent role in keeping them alile up to this point. They use mana concentration enchantments to bring mana up from below in order to sustain themselves since if they kept on evolving, that'd become impractical and they'd have to move down more.