The next vault: chaos, war and wealth. Seemed too easy at first. Wealth's puppets were like flies, buzzing around a lot, but easy to swat. Torgal's Messengers didn't speak, so they couldn't contribute battle commentary, and didn't have names, so didn't count as notable. They were all weapon masters though, and after one managed to knick my foot I decided those weapons were too dangerous to be permitted and confiscated them. I was there to collect them all anyway; I didn't necessarily need to wait until they were done with them. Their corpses were only 109 Urists, yet their clothes were too large for me to wear?! Tch, such bullshit... I really could've used new capes and socks.
As easy as they were, I was starting to dread the Ruination, and I was right. It definitely had the mass for charging, and the wings to divebomb. A towering bat with large mandibles, had 4 legs, wings, and a stinger that I presumed was venomous, but it never used it, so I may have wasted my time targeting it first. It backed me into an open space off a 12 zlvl drop. I managed to get most of the way down the stair, it knocked me off the last 3 zlvls, which is actually pretty dangerous with a slade floor. I hit it with a thrown spear, which didn't do much except ground it. I had set aside the whip for a sword, and as soon as I had an opening I hacked it's head off. The body weighed 10960 Urists, the head and neck weighed 1659. Just picking up the head reduced my sprint rate to 0.099.
Mastering that whip was kind of pointless; it's only good for mortal enemies, of which I have faced few and dealt with barehanded anyway. Even the candy scourge and lash was pretty worthless against these guys. The only training benefit was from supplementing it with strikes, kicks, bites and misc obj, which will be useful no matter what I'm wielding. It's not so much a martial arts form as a street fighting style.
After hacking through the rest and flipping their levers, I came to a 7-floor dropoff to another roomful of ramps leading down to a ramp that lead nowhere but back up. I tried climbing the shaft I came down to its top point, 29 zlvls up, but there weren't any passages there, either. df reveal shows no passage immediately beneath that lowest ramp, but 3 lvls below that are more rooms and passages leading to -- a slab! So that's what one looks like. I deconstructed block walls and built a stairway down from the slade, because that's the only passage I could see connecting the points that should've been open. I continued on to read the slab properly.
Unfortunately the demon I learned the name of isn't on my itinerary for awhile. Couldn't I have a more conveniently located demon? Am I asking too much? All I got out of this dive was elaborate names for weapons I already had.