《Blastocyst》 Chapter 1: Touchdown in Paradise I awoke to the memory of falling. Endless, slow, cold falling, from so very far. Heat against my chest, then nothing, for a time. My body felt strange, warmth on my back that also seemed like food, or power? I was having trouble remembering what I was doing. Info: Self? I thought dully. Name: ? (set name?) Race: Star Seed Level: 1 Experience: 0/100 to next level Health: 40/40 ¡À0/min Mana: 50/50 +.3/min Stamina: 220/220 ¡À0/min (Info: Self Stats for more) A game sim, I thought, trying to get a sense for my limbs. Clearly I was in a non-anthro form, maybe a plant? I couldn¡¯t seem to move much, but there were several organs and pouches that I was starting to get a feel for. Info: Sim? I sent to the System. Sim Name: Osterglathar Beyond Dew Bright Stars Sim Styles: Survival, Cooperative, Competitive, Creation, Combat, Multi-agent Sim Uptime: 278,739 days, 22 hours A long running new world type. Agents in my Chorus tended toward single-agent new world sims on the rare occasions we ran them, and I was clearly membound, so there was probably a good reason I didn¡¯t want to remember why I¡¯d loaded into this sim. Still, first things first. Every survival sim guide I could remember agreed on the basics: find water, food, and shelter. Kind of a problem for someone without limbs or eyes, but I felt like one of my new organs could fix that. Feeling like I was clenching my lungs, I ejected a nugget of what felt like glue and plastic from one of my many¡­ mouths? Openings? Sphincters? For an instant, nothing happened. Then I heard? Felt? Some kind of confirmation from the thing. I felt it open its eyes, and then I could see through them. There was a thick sap covering a black tendril. Feeling like I was moving a hand that wasn¡¯t attached to my body, I had the probe clean the gunk off of itself. Through its senses, I could smell honey, walnut, and citrus coming from the sap. A glint of thought had me instinctually directing the probe to eat the sap, the food causing it to move faster and easier even as clearing the gunk with its raspy tongue and scraping mouth left it more agile. I got a sense of satisfaction and gratitude from the probe, which was odd as it also seemed like I was eating, though I both did and didn¡¯t feel fuller. Through the process, I got to see and feel more and more of my probe. It was a sphere on a stalk with four thin tentacles projecting beneath it. It had several eyes and nose pits studded around its head, and a three sided sucker like mouth with triangular teeth and a flat tongue covered in sharp hairs. The tentacles split into three hairlike graspers, which were extremely sensitive to touch and vibration. The whole creature was covered in shiny, oil-black scales, somewhere between bark and crab shell in texture, and long, fine sensory hairs grew from the underscale gaps. When compared to the pebbles and dirt on the ground, it was perhaps two centimeters across the head, and ten long from the top of its head to the tips of its tentacles. My own body was equally strange. I was an irregular squat cone, about two meters tall and five wide, though a portion of my chest, or base I guess, was buried at an angle in the soil. Most of me was covered in the same color of scales as my probe, though much larger and thicker. My base was more of a matte silver grey, almost uniform in color and texture. Variously around my circumference barnacle like protrusions of differing sizes were internally closed by what looked like beaks. One of these had a slight golden residue of the sap-honey, probably the one I launched the probe from. Experimenting, I pulled back my control from the probe, simply ordering it to clean the remaining¡­ saponey(?) off of me. I got a sense of delight, and watched as the probe slithered over to me like a snake, then extended its tentacles and climbed up my scales. With a quick, rasping lick, the honap(?) was removed and my carapace port was cleaned. Energetic curiosity rolled off of the probe, and it slithered and climbed across my shell, inspecting both me and the world from a higher vantage point. The place I had arrived in looked to be a small forest glen. Several trees and branches were broken, and a trench corresponding to my tilt was dug for about ten meters behind(?) me. My shell and the area around me smelled of burnt wood and ozone, according to my probe¡¯s senses, and a couple patches of grass nearby were black and burnt. The evidence was adding up to a hot drop, either high altitude ballistic or, more likely, from space. I really hoped I hadn¡¯t spawned in someone¡¯s lumber farm or game reserve. I was feeling a little out of my element. Anthropomorphic avatars were more my style, and the memories of my Chorus didn¡¯t have anything like a sessile hive form in them. Moreover, I wasn¡¯t used to having strategy units with their own feelings and desires, preferring even to use programmatic drones over reward driven beast-minds, even where the latter would be a more optimal force multiplier. So having my probe¡¯s curiosity and wanderlust filter back into my psyche was a strange, somewhat disconcerting experience. ~Uh, go find stuff, I guess~ I sent at the probe. Unlike my control and commands, actually talking to the little thing felt like I was humming slightly, with a tiny, painless tingle of electricity flowing through one of my strange organs. Probe perked up and adjusted to face its front eyes toward me, but radiated a sense of confusion. Muttering about dog-brains in my mind, I sent a command to it to explore, and in particular to find water. As the probe left the clearing, I felt my connection to its senses fade into the background. I could still see what it saw (trees, grass, and dirt) and hear what it heard (mostly just trees creaking and its own slithering), but it took a bit of effort to pay attention to it. Calling up Info: Self, I could see that my Stamina depleted by about a point a minute while I was sensing through Probe, though there was no cost when it was in the clearing with me. The lack of stamina regeneration was worrying, however. I had no clue what could be causing it, so I did the only thing I could think of. Info: Self Stats I sent to the System. Attributes Agility: 10 (0) Movement: 10 (0) Strength: 10 (0) Toughness: 20 Processing: 30 Organization: 30 Instinct: 30 (20) Charisma: 20 Skills (none yet) Talents Broodlinked, Fleshwarper, Font of Nectar, Soulforger Effects Unrooted, Senseless, Sessile, Fortress Shell (Info: Attribute, Talent, Skill, or Effect for more information) Info: Unrooted seemed the most likely, and it confirmed my suspicions. Effect: Unrooted; This creature must absorb nutrients from its surroundings to heal and restore stamina. However, it has not made itself ready to do this. I searched my organs and sacks, and quickly discovered a nodule in my lower cone that could be deployed the same way I had launched Probe, and that would do something root-like for me. I wasn¡¯t sure that I wanted to stay in this clearing for very long, but the prospect of tiring myself to death trying to find a better location seemed like a gruesome probability. I was also fairly sure that I could grow more root nodules with relative ease, so once again I opened one of my barnacle sphincters and spat a creature out of me. The root nodule didn¡¯t seem to carry any nectar on its body. It had very limited senses, simply touch and scent. I commanded it to root for me, and got a puff of lazy resignation back. Sliding around on the ground like a worm, the creature seemed to be seeking a particular scent. Somewhere near the burnt side of the clearing, the rootworm paused, then began to rapidly burrow. Cool earth and rough stone brushed against its slimy skin, becoming sealed with a rapid drying mucus into a hard tube around the rootworm¡¯s path. After about two minutes, the creature seemed to find what it was seeking. The rootworm burrowed into wet mud and clay with a feeling of relief. Slowly, it extended dozens of tendrils from its front, headlike area. From those dozens split dozens more finer tendrils, then hundreds of near microscopic threads. Once in place, the threads began pulling water into the main trunk of the rootworm, which it used to bloat and unfurl its body back up the burrow. At the top, the rootworm snaked along the ground toward my main body. When it reached me, it used its sticky mucus to climb and adhere to my shell. Once it reached past my solid base, it spread itself flat beneath one of my scales, where it sent wet veins searching for a path up into my body. So attached, it began to excrete excess water and minerals into a waiting bladder, while slowly drawing a small amount of nectar from my ample reserves. A few seconds later, I felt mucus layers beneath my scales begin to warm and swell, the water flooding them and beginning the process of nectar secretion. I had to guess that it was some form of photosynthesis, though I wasn¡¯t sure exactly how it worked. My health and stamina began to regenerate at .01 and 1 per minute, respectively. That worked out to about a day and a half for full healing from near death, and under four hours to fully rest from stamina depletion. I was sure there were ways to shorten my recovery times, but at the moment I couldn¡¯t think of any. A burst of fear from Probe had me locking into its senses. It had climbed a tree, and was peering down on a large boar, with several sows and hoglets following behind. The boar had something like a spiked copper mohawk down its back, and arcs of electricity snaked their way from base to tip between them, like a natural jacob¡¯s ladder. The sows had tufts of similar spikes on their heads, and the hoglets were sporting short wire bristles in spots as well. The boar was about half a meter tall, and two meters long, so it would easily crush Probe even without considering whatever electrical powers it might have. If they found and attacked my main body, I couldn¡¯t see a good way to fight back, though I might be able to survive by just waiting for them to get bored and leave. Searching through my organs, I could find nothing like a defensive or guard creature. In addition to what I already deployed, I had an aerial probe variant, a marine probe, a symbiotic dual creature that felt like it was for building and repair, a nectar transfuser, and an ovipositing drone with a cleaning hive symbiote. The hogs weren¡¯t coming toward me now, so I decided to attempt a bit of base building, along with some unit creation. Readying my launch sphincters, I spat out a build/repair duo, and an ovipositor drone. The ovipositor was upright first. It had weak vision and little sense of hearing, but the spectrum or scents I could gather from it was amazing. Every tree and blade of grass had a distinct scent, as did differing patches of earth. It could detect the types and number of microbe and insect colonies for about a dozen meters around itself, and the hive it carried swiftly went to work cleaning the birth nectar from itself, feeding it back into the creature¡¯s mouth and then returning to the hive. I got a sense of buzzing and scuttling from the hive components, but their connection to me was much weaker. The construction and repair symbiote took a bit longer to clean themselves. The builder had excellent vision and vibration senses, while the fixer seemed to navigate by echolocation. The builder looked like a fat slug with several bulbous, translucent cysts of a variety of colors across its body. Four prehensile eyestalks held remarkably sharp eyes that looked like crystal globes laced with thin, beige veins, and the majority of the slug was a neon orange and green striped pattern. The slug was affixed to the underside of a creature somewhat like a beetle, but with six tentacles sprouting from where its face should be. Its shell was the same black as my scales, and it parted down the back to allow for four transparent wings to unfold from it. The whole ensemble was about a meter long, with the slug being a cylinder about a third of a meter across and the beetle being proportioned as an Old Earth cockroach might be. Interestingly, the slug had no mouth, and fed by absorbing secretions from barnacle like spouts on the underside of the beetle. A flood of new information was available in the instincts and ancestral memories of the new lifeforms. It seemed that I could direct the slug into building a variety of simple structures with vaguely defined purposes like ¡®nursery¡¯ and ¡®materials depot.¡¯ The matron, who looked something like a hairless white rat with a meaty wasp¡¯s nest growing from her back, had hundreds of creature designs encoded in her genetic stores. From mobile ant colonies to whale sized snakes, I had a massive database of possible creations tailored for everything from war to fashion accessories. My only real limits were growth time and nectar consumption, though the latter could be ameliorated by growing nectar vats of various sizes and requirements. Some of them were clearly designed to float on internal hydrogen cysts and gather moisture from the air with ballooning, lunglike membranes hundreds of meters across. Others were deep sea pressure domes intended to scuttle over volcanic fissures and float pods of nectar to the surface in nautiloid carriers. All of that was for the future, though. In the moment, I needed inexpensive protection with fast growth time. Two creatures stood out, so I directed the matron to deposit six eggs of each. A slightly surly denial came back up the link, with a sense-image of a small structure that looked like a morel cap and smelled of nectar. With a mental shrug, I searched the slug¡¯s memories and found that exact structure with a ¡®nursery - tiny¡¯ tag. The whole thing would be a dome about a meter tall, and the sheer variety of materials it could be constructed out of was baffling. Ice, tar, meat, other slugs¡­ for my purposes, a sort of muddy clay construction would be the easiest. The slug and beetle went to work with vigor and joy. The beetle scraped dirt and soil into piles that the slug wrapped around itself. A thick mucus hardened in seconds into a hollow tube partially filled with thin, hard trabecular struts. In all, it took about fifteen minutes for the whole job to be done. When finished, the matron waddled to the tiny nursery, extended a tube from her mouth, and disgorged a twenty centimeter diameter egg into a small lump on the side. In moments, a new creature formed a link to me. Feeling similar to the rootworm, this being had no eyes or ears and a weak sense of touch, but a strong sense of smell and what appeared to be close range electroreception. It unfurled itself through a tube from the base of the structure to the top, where it opened its face into seven broad, leaflike scales of the same translucent black substance as most of my progeny wore. In the base, it extended tendrils from its rear, dozens of the same type that the rootworm had deployed. Filling itself slowly with moisture, it spread arteries through the nursery¡¯s vascular tubes, each attaching to a port somewhere in the structure where it began to secrete a more viscous and concentrated nectar. Now that the nursery was manned, the matron radiated a feeling of mild contentment laced with a hint of impatience. Extending her ovipositor tube, she planted twelve small eggs into a ring ridged bowl in the nursery¡¯s outer wall. Hairless batlike drones the size of Old Earth mice squeezed themselves from the meaty hive on her back and carried each egg into the nursery, placing it gently into the waiting nectar pools. They then took a moment to clean each of the eggs with a thin crimson tongue before flying back to their hive. I could tell that the guards were about an hour or so from finishing incubation, and though I could have the nursery secrete a strong growth hormone to cut down on that time, I worried that it wouldn¡¯t be able to supply nectar quickly enough to meet the growth demands. Noting to myself the need to look into a nectar transportation system later, I turned my attention back to Probe. The hogs had left the tree Probe was hiding in, and after a short time, it returned to exploration. Not long after coming down, Probe caught the scent of water and made a beeline for the source. Along the way, it had found several bursting berry bushes and a pair of mature apple trees, though the fruit on those hadn¡¯t smelled ripe. Many smaller animals were active in the canopy and floor of the forest, with more being apparent the further Probe got from my landing site. Very few had even noticed it, and none had any desire to tangle with something that looked like a spider-snake hybrid. The water source itself turned out to be a small creek fed by a spring pond. Careful testing of the water revealed few microbes and nearly no toxins of note. Certainly nothing that worried me, what with my above average toughness and a rootworm acting as a filter. I knew instinctively that a solid source of water was vital to growing my fledgling colony, and the vague drive to expand along with my own preference toward having a large resource stockpile gave me a solid reason to take it. The problem was getting there. According to my vague sense of distance and Probe¡¯s memories, the spring was around four kilometers away from my landing site. Unless I could get a few dozen labor symbiotes ready, there was no way I could move even a centimeter, and feeding that many beings for the duration was unfeasible. Even now, my current labor pair had expended about half of the nectar they¡¯d been deployed with just building the single structure. Some rough math and a few guesses told me that I could sustain around twenty laborers for a day off of internal stores, and I¡¯d have to leave behind whatever meager nectar production I¡¯d be able to field here beforehand. Perhaps I could get a mobile stockpile of nectar to work from, but even still I¡¯d need at least twice my current storage to make the trip.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Nectar could be synthesized from more than just water, light, and air. Most meat had all the needed ingredients, and with a bit of help from some of the creatures in Matron¡¯s gene stores I could breakdown almost anything living or once living into its component bits and transmute that to nectar. A few of the most complex organisms could conceivably produce nectar from trace elements in the regolith of an asteroid, though very slowly, and their growth times were measured in weeks instead of minutes. In the end, I felt like it would most likely be several days until I felt secure enough in my nectar flow to move my colony, assuming the nectar transfusers had as much storage as I thought they should. Each transfuser felt like it would be able to provide nectar to six empty laborers, and if my current nectar secretion stayed stable during daylight hours, I¡¯d be able to fill five transfusers each day. Depending on their own consumption rate and how long it would take a mobile nectar secreater to grow, I might be able to bring the time down to two days at best. Directing Probe to return by nightfall, I poured over the genes available to Matron. More than half of them were locked off behind ¡®mutation pathways,¡¯ something I hadn¡¯t noticed before. My creatures could enter a cocoon and transform their bodies into more specialized forms, much like a larval grub might pupate into a hairy moth for reproductive purposes. Almost all such mutations required large infusions of nectar, and a few needed spells cast into them during their pupation. Obviously nectar was going to be my bottleneck for growth, and I had no idea how to cast spells, let alone something like ¡°Moon¡¯s Lament Over Fallen Snow¡± to mutate a matron into a queen of ice and tide. I could group my available creatures into five major clades, four each descended from one of my four starting organisms and the last being focused on combat. The scout clade was similar to Probe, made in some way to be difficult to injure or detect and carrying a strong sensory package. Most of these had something like a large or concentrated internal nectar store or some ability to obtain energy from the environment. Probe had a bit of both, the land scout holding concentrated nectar in a hardened cyst in its stalk while also having the ability to digest many sugars and starches into a weak nectar facsimile. Probe¡¯s specific species had a low efficiency photosynthesis mode, which was why I had deployed it in particular. The labor clade was usually built tough, like the roach portion of my duo. Rarely they would be capable of amazing regeneration, like the slug was. Many laborers were large and strong, able to move vast amounts of material or mine solid stone with mineral infused appendages. A few were tiny, purposed with microrepair to delicate structures or able to quickly swarm raw materials and shape them into artifacts of exquisite workmanship. The nectar clade was shaped around the likes of my rootworms and nectar transfusers, though many in some way resembled myself. Many shapes and capabilities were present here, though all had something to do with the secretion or movement of nectar and its components. Less than a quarter of my currently available species were mobile, and all but a few of these were glacially slow. Looking into the remainder, I had small, flying nectar transports, quick but expensive water carriers, and some sort of wind powered wheel that produced nectar from grinding starchy grains and rolling into water, where it floated to the top like a lilypad and had to be fished out by another creature. The caretaker clade contained species that focused on the production and care of other creatures. Ovipositors were common, as were cleaning and temperature modulation. Most of this clade was locked behind mutations, which I assumed would lead to more and more specialized gene pools. Even still, a few of my available creatures seemed ridiculously specific as it was. Hopefully I wouldn¡¯t need six meter tall organic air conditioners with fire suppression capabilities anytime soon. I didn¡¯t really feel like any of these were needed at the moment, as Matron was able to produce about a thousand small eggs a day and had a huge gene pool that I couldn¡¯t realistically see failing me anytime soon. The combat clade was the largest and most varied I had, which vaguely worried me. I had flea sized toxin injectors, housecat sized octopedes with bladed limbs and the ability to link together into larger configurations, elephant sized snail things with organic cannon that shot tungsten tipped exploding spikes, massive sky jellies dripping with caustic oils that ignited in air, up to something over a kilometer across that looked like a headless turtle with thousands of legs and acted as a hive for bird things the size of trees and hydrox powered missile pods. My personal favorites from this clade were a rabbit sized worm that acted as a flamethrower or teargas dispenser, and a sea urchin looking thing the size of a horse that launched its spikes on thick silk ropes, and moved by spiking itself to its destination and reeling back in. The spikes were coated in a fast acting paralytic for creatures with a variety of exotic nervous systems. Strangely, this clade carried the most¡­ notes, I guess? Each creature had a dedicated, readable portion of its genes that carried a description of its abilities and left me with a faded image of what I would get if I grew it. I supposed it would be tactically important to know what your warriors were before you ¡®recruited¡¯ them, as it was. The hour of incubation time passed quickly while I was examining my genetic choices. Twelve new minds opened themselves to me, the first of my colony''s defensive forces. Six were bulbous mosquito like things, held up by long, thin, hollow legs and four rapidly buzzing wings. They were mostly transparent, only small portions housing their life supporting organs had black scale shells. About the size of a softball, their massive abdomens contained a mix of acids intended to melt flesh and bone in seconds, which would be injected by their needle like legs. In the off chance they were killed, an extremely strong base held in a mucus lined tumor would be released into the acid reservoir, popping the creature in a shower of acid and needles. The other six were basically just what happened when you crossed a dog sized crab with a porcupine, then gave it another set of claws and coated the quills in a rage inducing, irritating toxin. Their dense shells were eye searing neon colors, with pink, orange, green, and yellow being the ones on display. Focused on toughness, these crabs were intended to draw the attention of anything attacking my colony, and with the ability to throw clouds of quills up to twenty meters, an echolocation trill that sounded like two rocks banging together ten times a second, and a smell like rotten meat and urine, I was pretty sure they¡¯d do the job. I sent my new babies to patrol the nearby forest in shifts of four, two pinecrabs and two aciditos in each wave. The remaining eight defenders guarded the nursery, my shell, and the shaded area behind my shell that Roach had cleared to nest in, and Matron was still fussing over. She had Roach dragging the branches and twigs I had dislodged into an orderly pile, while Slug glued them into raised platforms. It was working on assembling a canopy when I queried it, happily calculating the correct stick and mucus ratio needed to withstand any strong gusts. I was being used as an anchor point, the canopy extending down from my shell like a lean-to. It was sunset when Probe returned. It was holding a particularly shiny rock in one of its tentacles, which it deposited in the nest site as soon as it returned. I made sure that all of my children ate what nectar they needed to top off, secreting it from my barnacle ports for Probe, Roach, and the defense force. Apparently Matron¡¯s ovipositor doubled as a proboscis, so she was able to eat without a mess, thank you very much. Most of the brood entered torpor when the stars came out. Probe was designed to need around half an hour of sleep a week, so it remained awake to act as a lookout. It was nice to look at the stars, even if the eyes weren¡¯t my own. Nothing in the sky was similar to the real one, though I mostly knew that one through sims anyway, and my star memories were no more real than the stars here. A large moon drifted across the sky, banded by rings of smaller satellites. Small blue flashes, which must be the size of cities on the lunar surface, would blaze for an instant before being obscured by a cloud of lunar dust. The sounds of nocturnal birds and insects acted as a background hum to my senses. Of course, a peaceful night would have been too much to ask for after crashing through the forest canopy. Still, Probe was alerted by the smell before it could see or hear a thing, so their stealth couldn¡¯t be questioned. Coming our way were eight lithe humanoids. They wore gilded green leather tunics belted at the waist with fiber cords, brown or grey linen trousers, and all but two carried thin, bronze bladed spears and narrow hatchets. The remaining two had long bows strung with wire and bronze tipped arrows. One of the archers had a steel shortsword in a gilded leather scabbard, while the other had a simple bronze hatchet. They approached in near total silence, their eyes faintly reflecting the moonlight, and they spread out in the treeline as they neared the clearing. All of them smelled of blood and fire. I roused my brood, instructing the defenders to remain still until one of the humanoids broke the tree line, and ordering the others to run to the other side of me as soon as the fighting started. I was very confident that the creatures couldn¡¯t harm me with what armaments they had on them, but the same couldn¡¯t be said for Matron and Slug. Even Roach had joints a stray arrow could sever. I told Probe to avoid movement unless it was targeted, as the senses it provided gave the best overview of the battlefield. The humanoid with the sword made two sharp cutting motions with its long, thin hand, presumably directing the other aggressors to inspect the nursery and lean-to. Knocking an arrow, it waited at the treeline, presumably preparing to snipe anything flushed by its warriors. The moment the first aggressor crossed the line, my colony exploded into action. The pinecrabs rushed out from cover first, their horrendous clacking and scent glands kicking into overdrive. Both archers loosed at them, but one arrow went wide and the other was caught by a lucky pinch. My aciditos were out a moment later, rapidly rising into the air in a corkscrewing, evasive pattern. They were vulnerable to any weapon the humanoids carried, and they knew it. Their minds were filled with a mix of fear and anger, wanting nothing more than to inject their acid into an enemy but afraid to be spotted closing in. Dancing back and forth in the sky, they were little more than wisps and distortions, their humming flight drowned out by the clacking of the pinecrabs. Matron and Roach were the last, the former riding the latter like a palanquin. Matron¡¯s hive buzzed with rage, and several bat things flew dizzying patterns around their mother, hoping to distract or intercept any arrows headed her way. For her own part, Matron was screeching, incensed at the audacity of the intruders, and terrified that her babies were fighting such brutes. Roach was strangely calm. Its mind was focused on following my orders more than its own risk of impending death. Slug had barely woken up, and as soon as the menagerie cleared the fireline, it fell back into torpor with a diamond will. The aggressors approached warily, not sure what to make of the awful smelling crabs with the ear splitting noises. One of them grew bolder, and started to charge a pink pinecrab, spear held horizontal. What it got for its efforts was a faceful of quills and shell shards, with a side helping of rage-itching toxin. The creature screamed and dropped its spear to claw at its eyes, which had swelled shut the moment the rage cloud touched them. Its fellows halted their advance, waiting to see what happened next. A guttural scream of pain and rage tore from the afflicted humanoid, and it tore the hatchet off its belt and rushed the pink pinecrab, swinging blindly with wide, overhead chops. The pinecrab, for its part, danced around the raging thing, only dipping in for a pinch here and a quill jab there. The remaining aggressors took the bellow as a warcry, rushing in to try their hand at my crustacean defenders. All of them kept their arms in front of their eyes as they charged, stopping the worst of my pinecrab¡¯s volley. Still, ten centimeter quills and glass like shell shards aren¡¯t pleasant no matter where they land. None of the humanoids came out unscathed, and their charge broke the archer¡¯s lines of sight. A couple of arrows were loosed anyway, falling well off mark. Gathering courage, one of my aciditos dove at the back of the blinded humanoid. Stabbing deeply into the warrior¡¯s neck, it took less than a second for the fine tipped needle to pump a fair volume of acid to the now doomed creature¡¯s body cavity. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride from the little winged defender¡¯s mind, and it rapidly detached to rejoin its fellows. A hissing sound could be heard over the clacking of my pinecrabs. The blinded warrior clapped its hand to the wound on its neck, only to pull away with a screech as a cloud of vaporized flesh and acid poured out of it. The thing fell to its knees, parts of its liquified innards already dripping from beneath its leather tunic. It tried to scream one last time, but there was only a wheeze followed by a puff of reddened steam, and it finally dropped face first to the ground, the hissing sizzle of its dissolving body fading into the sounds of the battle. Level 3 Elf Tough defeated! + 3 XP (%10 due to minion kill) While the reward was interesting, I was focused on the much more important task of clearing the intruders from my home. I directed the now open pink pinecrab to harass the archers with quill dust, hoping to open them up to my aciditos. Emboldened by their sibling¡¯s success, my other needle footed kids were dancing closer and closer to the melee. My pinecrabs were doing their best against the taller elfs, but the reach of their spears was troublesome. The scent of their rage was building, though, and their jabs took on a wilder mein. One of the aggressors had two quills lodged in its left palm, but the intense anger brought on by the toxic salts made it grasp its spear with both hands, disregarding the quills and driving them deeper into its flesh. This had the effect of making the spear much harder to hold for thrusts, so the creature started swinging the pole like a thresher, the sharp tip ignored in its fury. My pinecrabs were easily withstanding the onslaught, one yellow one grabbing the spear from its opponent¡¯s hands in one pincer, while clamping onto the elf¡¯s arm with another. The iron infused shell of the claw¡¯s serrated teeth tore through the leather tunic and meat of the arm with equal ease, crushing and splitting the elf¡¯s flesh and stopping only at the creature¡¯s bone. Screaming and flailing, the elf¡¯s wild swipes and punches served only to embed more quills into its remaining arm and hand. Sensing weakness, another acidito dove in and scored a shallow stab on the back of the elf¡¯s neck, pumping acid as fast as it could before being thrown off by a feral lunge that saw the elf¡¯s shoulder and upper arm impaled on the pinecrab¡¯s more solid spikes. That was enough, though, and the potent acid rapidly ate through the creature¡¯s spine, leaving my neon yellow pinecrab stuck to dead weight and needing to carefully peel the corpse from its shell. Level 2 Elf Tough defeated! + 2 XP (%10 due to minion kill) The other pinecrabs were finding similar success, embedding quills into open flesh and parrying spears with their claws. My only worry was the archers, who were managing to mostly evade my pink pinecrab by darting around trees and bushes, while the little pink crustacean needed to waddle slowly around the obstructions with care. If its quills or spikes got caught in the foliage, it would take a lot of time to untangle itself. Luckily, the archers seemed to be too focused on avoiding quills to line up good shots, and their arrows were inflicting only minor cracks in my defender¡¯s shell. The quills acted as a sort of ablative buffer, slowing the arrows and angling their path away from the pinecrab¡¯s center of mass. As small wounds piled up on my defenders, Roach seemed to grow more and more agitated. I could feel its desire to involve itself in the defense somehow, but I kept it restrained with repeated denials. I was proud of the little thing for its bravery, but annoyed at it for distracting me. The tentacles on its face wouldn¡¯t be able to stand up to a hack from one of the elf¡¯s hatchets, and the pinecrabs had the grappling well in claw regardless. The victorious yellow pinecrab managed to clear its shell, so I sent it to assist the pinky against the archers. Directing them to flank the hatchet archer, it was a matter of seconds before the elf was pinned to a tree and taking rage volleys. The lead archer took the distraction of my defenders as cue to fire on them with impunity. Chanting a short phrase in whatever language the creatures spoke, it caused one of its arrows to burst into a brilliant red flame, the radiant heat lighting the surrounding bush ablaze. I tried to order my pinecrabs behind the trees, but to no avail; the arrow flew from the elf¡¯s bow with a roaring blaze, tearing through saplings and embedding itself deep into the yellow child¡¯s shell. I felt a dull pain from my brave defender¡¯s mind for a moment, before the link faded out. All of my noncombatant children let out waves of sadness at the loss, while the defenders flew into a righteous fury. All six aciditos dove through the canopy, latching onto the sword wearing elf leader with as many limbs as possible and pouring their acid much faster than was safe, their hatred of this monstrous thing pushing them to strain their acid sacks to the limit. The elf had an instant to swipe at my babies with the limbs of its bow, breaking two legs off of one and crushing the eye of another. This had the effect of spraying acid from the broken limbs across the elf¡¯s face, while the rest of the aciditos spent the last drops of their payloads throughout the aggressor¡¯s body. Taking off, their target couldn¡¯t even scream at them, so bloated was its torso with the caustic liquids. In seconds, the elf leader melted from the inside out, no trace of its body except for a puddle of pinkish sludge slowly soaking into the barren ground. The sword it carried lay near the middle of the puddle, scabbard melted away and tang bare of wood or wrapping. The pink pinecrab stopped toying with its opponent, overriding my orders and latching its claws onto the thing¡¯s throat and limbs. With no support to aid it and its weapon useless at the short range, the last elf archer died swiftly, neck a mangled ruin and arms shattered uselessly at its sides. Level 8 Elf Pyre Archer defeated! + 16 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 3 Elf Archer defeated! + 3 XP (%10 due to minion kill) The spear wielders, already weak from their enraged flailing and covered in quills across most of their bodies could do nothing to stop my now furious crustacean defenders from disarming them, in one case literally having an arm torn off of its shoulder by two of its opponent¡¯s pincers yanking sharply while the other two held its torso and skull in a vice-like grip. The four weakened elfs were carried bodily to a spot near the nursery, but far enough that they¡¯d have trouble getting there if they felt like attacking my incubating eggs. The pinecrabs hemmed them in, a wall of shell and spikes creating an impassable barrier, never stopping their intentionally dissonant rapid echolocation clicks. The elf with the amputated arm was licking its hand and slathering the saliva on the wound, somehow causing the open socket to scab over near instantly. Scuttling over to join its fellows, the pink pinecrab dropped into a crouch under the legs of a green one, somehow managing to seem menacing with its legs splayed out widely around it. I finally caved to Roach¡¯s demands, hoping that ¡®seeing¡¯ the elfs contained would ease its worries. Instead, Roach scurried to the pink pinecrab, wriggling its tentacles across the cracks and chips in the combat lifeform¡¯s shell. With a sense of urgent care, Roach¡¯s tentacles split open at the tips, revealing sponge-like tissue glistening with a greenish fluid and dozens of threadlike white tendrils. Slathering the fluid over the cracks, it worked the liquid into any fractures or broken crevices with the tendrils, rapidly coating each injury with a delicate touch. Once satisfied that its patient was tended, it did the same thing to the other defenders, liberally spreading the ointment into any tiny injury it could find. The injured aciditos were next, though Roach switched fluids for the missing legs of the most damaged one. A thick paste with a pale yellow color was secreted onto the jagged stumps, rapidly ballooning into a wide blister that crusted over after formation. All of my damaged babies seemed to exude relief, the fluid removing the already dulled pains they had accumulated. With a weary heart, I sent Roach to drag the remains of the elfs to a corner of the nesting area. Pinky¡¯s distress made my heart ache, so I sent it to retrieve the remains of its fallen sibling. Once back in the nest, Matron sent her cleaning bats to scourge dirt and char from the body, keening softly the whole time. I had to order Roach away from the fallen one, its distressed attempts to find living tissue to heal interfering with Matron¡¯s cleaning efforts. Even Slug and Probe felt the need to examine the body from up close, Slug fusing the shape and color into its memory and Probe gently prodding its lost sibling, trying to rouse it to no avail. The rage hormones were fading from the elfs, who were taking turns pulling quills from each others bodies and rasping what I assumed to be curses. I was on high alert for anything that sounded like more chanting, my instructions to the pinecrabs amounting to ¡°rip out the throat and pull off the limbs.¡± Night was less than halfway through, so I made sure my babies rested as much as possible. A pinecrab in torpor looked exactly like a pinecrab awake, ignoring the lack of chattering echolocation mandibles. I could feel my children¡¯s hunger, though, and I didn¡¯t want to risk rotating guards away from the prisoners. The nectar transfuser seemed like a good solution, so I prepared my birthing tube and spat the big creature through one of my larger barnacle-ports. The transfuser awoke slowly, clearing the greasy birthing nectar from its body with thin, hairy limbs shaped like spikes. Its senses were mediocre, but the link I felt from it was surprisingly robust. Through Probe¡¯s senses, it looked like nothing more than a meter tall tick with a pair of hollow, segmented, antennae in place of eyes. The main body was the same black, translucent shell that many of my children wore, but the wide, empty reservoir at the rear was clear as glass. The tick, as I immediately called it in my mind, was impressively fast, its eight limbs scrabbling up to my cone shell in a flash. One of the elfs screamed at the sight of it, only to be choked and silenced by its fellows. The tick seemed amused by the byplay, but its duty drove it to work. It placed its mouth at one of my barnacle sphincters, unfurling a long elastic proboscis into one of my nectar bladders and slurping a vast quantity of the sticky secretion in moments. Draining the first bladder, it waited patiently as I squeezed nectar through internal tubes from other stores to refill the deflated sack. It took two more fills before the tick was topped up, its reservoir filled with golden nectar that sparkled in the moonlight. Apparently there were crystals containing various nutrients in the substance, which explained where my brood was getting their less commonly needed, but still important inputs. The aciditos and Roach gathered to feed, able to intake nectar from my hardened ports like infant kittens suckling from their mother¡¯s nipples. The pinecrabs required the attentions of the tick, though, each one having a small, membranous hole somewhere near the rear of their shell, covered by a flap of black scale. The tick used its antennae to pump nectar into those ports, the sap like fluid oozing visibly through the transparent tubes. Two pinecrabs could be serviced at a time this way, and quickly all my babies were fed. The tick returned to my shell to once again top itself off, though it made sure to send me the image of a blister like nectar vat, broadcasting to both myself and Slug to ensure that we had the needed materials. The tick seemed to be smarter than the majority of my brood, though it only radiated confusion when I attempted to talk to it. Searching through its available mutations, it seemed that nectar transfusers were designed to transform into backup nodes or secondary managers in the event that my progeny became too numerous for personal management. Interestingly, there were mutations designed to transmute nectar into a sort of mana potion, though they were locked behind spell requirements I still had no idea how to unlock. I spent the rest of the night trying to determine what my next steps should be. My landing had obviously been noticed, and trying to build up a bunker at this location would take time I may not have. I was fairly confident that the water table here was too deep for a rootworm to burrow through, and mutating a larger rootworm would take days. Without water, my nectar production was bottlenecked hard, and even if I grew one of the cellulose to nectar transmuters, I would only end up with nutrients my brood would be dehydrated trying to intake. Taking the spring looked like my best bet, and I had an idea of how I could move my prodigious bulk. Rummaging through Slug¡¯s designs, I felt that I could probably get there by the next nightfall, if not sooner. As long as everything held up, that is. Hungry Hungry Abominations The morning of the next day was a flurry of activity. Matron was directed to lay eggs for three broad backed labor beetles with tags suggesting quarry, mining, and logging uses. I had three hours before they would mature, and I intended to use them to gather information from my beleaguered prisoners. The fourth egg¡¯s incubation took about ten minutes, and when it hatched I had a miniscule, transparent, wasp like creature covered in fine hairs and dozens of limbs of varying design and material. I made it fly stealthily over to the tick¡¯s head, hiding it behind the antennae. Sending the tick to stand near the penned up elfs, I used my new child to produce tones, warping and shaping its vibrations until I could manage something approximating a voice. This had the effect of further unnerving the elfs. While it wasn¡¯t perfect, I managed to use my little signal fly to create a sort of buzzing, hissing, clicking approximation of a primate voice. I cycled through languages until I hit one that the elfs seemed to recognize, a sort of proto-celto-germanic pidgin trade language called ¡°Gwethonk¡± by its refiners. ¡°We may provide food,¡± my buzzing voice said, ¡°if you answer questions.¡± The elfs looked at each other and muttered in their native language. Finally, two of them nudged the amputee forward, chattering another round of likely curses. ¡°What are your questions, demon?¡± the elf said, before its compatriots prodded it sharply in the stump of its shoulder, causing it to hiss in pain. ¡°Why did you attack my colony?¡± I asked. I was hoping that they were a lone tribe of creatures, and that their absence wouldn¡¯t be missed. Of course, that wasn¡¯t meant to be. ¡°We¡¯re scouting and clearing the forest¡± it said, turning back to another elf for confirmation. ¡°Our prince wants to hunt power hogs, and it is our duty to clear his path of trash and take any vagabonds back to act as rations.¡± A cold fear shook me. ¡°When is the prince due to arrive?¡± ¡°When we set out, the festivities were two weeks behind us,¡± the elf said with a toothy grimace, ¡°they will arrive at the forest in the next eight to ten days, perhaps sooner if the prince grows impatient with the revel.¡± ¡°What forces does the prince command?¡± I asked, my fear only growing. The amputee turned to chatter at its comrades, but I didn¡¯t feel like allowing them to feed me false information. I had my pinecrabs create a defaning clatter, and then made Pinky and a green crab seize the amputee while the others were grabbed by their necks, the sharp serrations of my children¡¯s claws poking small holes in their skin and restricting their breathing. ¡°Your friends will die unless you answer me truthfully,¡± I directed my signal fly to say, ¡°I will question each of you separately. Whisper your answer and I will judge the value of your lives as hostages.¡± Writhing in the serrated grip of my protectors, the amputee nodded. ¡°His host numbers two thousand revelers and servants, three hundred and sixty warriors, a coven of witches and his own honor guard. I know not the levels or number of his extra forces, but the prince himself carries the level of twenty three and has the class of ¡®Flawless Zephyr Marksman Prince.¡¯¡± Another odd class, like Pyre Archer. I wasn¡¯t sure what that meant, but it sounded important. I only had one more question. ¡°If I let you live, will you remain in captivity if I fight your prince?¡± A hard look came over the elf¡¯s face, and it said nothing. Not willing to chance tampering with the rest of my interrogations, I had Pinky grab it by the throat and haul it off into the trees. Turning to the rest of the elfs, I set to work. ---- The interrogations ended as I had feared they would. The rest of the elfs corroborated the amputee¡¯s story, and none of them were willing to wait idle if I sent my children into battle against the prince. Not wanting to risk a two front attack, I ensured their permanent silence, piling their bodies with the rest of the dead raiders. Another eleven experience brought me up to thirty five total. We buried the fallen yellow defender at noon. Not wanting to leave its marker without a name, I took the time to name each of my children. Pearl, Jasper, Jade, Flint, and Mica were my pinecrabs, Pinky taking the name Jade. My aciditos were Gus, Roscoe, Ben, Yolanda, Amelia, and Lina. Matron remained Matron at her insistence. Roach was Ralph, and Slug became Sam. Probe didn¡¯t like any of the names I suggested, so it remained Probe, the signal wasp took the name Francis, and the tick wanted to be called Dick. I was debating that last, but it seemed to find the connotations amusing, so I¡¯d probably give it what it wanted eventually. Our fallen hero was named Galahad, who ascended from the plane of the living in a righteous quest. I didn¡¯t think any of the brood understood, but they seemed content with the feelings it evoked. With an infusion of potent catalysts and enzymes, Sam was able to fuse the quartz and mica in the soil into a large crystal with trulang characters spelling out Galahad¡¯s name and invoking Systemic memory of its deeds. We placed the crystal atop a cairn, with the brood falling into an odd melancholy. The hatching of my new workers seemed to be just the thing my children needed to get them out of their funk. They filed out of the nursery, broad flat ovals with huge mandibles and thick, toothed tentacles protruding from their front end, alongside a smaller set of pincers on their rear. Their shell was black scale, and they had a partition on their abdomen that opened to reveal a pair of iridescent wings. Two meters long and a meter wide, they stood a meter and a half tall when their legs were fully extended. I gave my brood a few minutes to get to know their new siblings. Probe was enamoured with the colors of their wings, the shifting polarization mesmerizing the little thing. Ralph seemed to take an older sibling sort of role towards the new babies, though their age difference could be measured in hours. Matron, for her part, fussed over their shells, sending her hive to clean away any hard to reach birthing nectar. The defense forces stood by, a fierce protection instinct filling their minds, though apparently the aciditos felt the sheer size of my new young was intimidating. They took the names Poppy, Daisy, and Lily, an interesting theme for such big lugs. After my brood finished their wordless welcome, I sent my new workforce to gather logs. Sam and Ralph went with them, the former to pick out the correct sizes and the latter their to ensure that no hidden defects caused a dangerous situation. At a hundred meters out, the links dropped to the periphery of my mind. I could detect their overall status and how hungry they were, but feelings and senses required an expenditure of stamina, exactly as it had with Probe. Dick, who cajoled me into accepting its name, seemed to have an odd, nagging issue. Its ability to communicate it to me was limited, but there was a sense of something missing imposed over a Probe view of my cone shell, then a cascade of my brood with feelings of rightness, ending with an image of Galahad¡¯s headstone with particular focus on the trulang symbols comprising its name. It took me perhaps a full minute to realize what it was trying to explain to me; I still hadn¡¯t named myself. While it wasn¡¯t an issue to me, the sense of special connection my brood had to their names seemed to improve their overall moods, so I shrugged mentally and went to set my name. I wanted my name to suggest the peaceful existence I wanted for my colony and brood. I decided on Nest, which seemed simple enough that it was unlikely to be misconstrued, and generally had neutral connotations in most languages I could gather. Directing this information to the sim¡¯s artist, it updated in my Info:Self. I assumed that any agents capable of scanning my information would be informed of it. At that thought, I mentally facepalmed. Taking direct control of Probe, I focused on Matron and invoked the nearly universal command, Scan. Name: Matron Type: Abomination, Minion Class: None Level: 1 Health: 20/20 +0.1/min Mana: 20/20 +.01/min Stamina: 20/20 +.5/min (Improve Scan Skill for more) Skill: Scan has reached level 1! I could level skills. I could gain skills without external training. I¡¯d been sitting on my shell, playing with my babies, while the power to improve our survival chances was a thought away. I spent the next few minutes scanning everything in Probe¡¯s impressive sight range. It seemed that living trees and grass didn¡¯t show up on Scan at all, and dead things required the use of Appraise. My Scan increased to level three, and appraise reached level two by the time my workers had felled the first tree and dragged it back to the clearing. All of my brood carried the types Abomination and Minion, though their resource pools had differing sizes. Dick and Probe had stamina pools of fifty, and the pinecrabs health pools of seventy. Despite everyone having the same regeneration rates, all of my brood had full health pools apart from Roscoe, the acidito with the missing limbs. Its health had a debuff to it, but the regeneration rate was point five per minute. It looked like whatever substance Ralph produced gave a massive buff to healing rates, good information to have in case anymore of my brood was injured. The nursery returned only my name as owner, with a Factionless tag appended. Nothing about its materials showed up on Appraise, and Scan gave no stats for the nudibranch within. The return of my logging team set my colony to work. The flower crew crunched through the massive yew with ease, sawing with their tentacles and tearing bark away with their mandibles. Sam and Ralph went to work assembling the rough planks into a wide base that I¡¯d soon be resting on, Sam¡¯s thick mucus acting as a fast, air drying glue and some sort of thin lacquer filling out any ridges or valleys. The widest end of the tree was cut into six disks of nearly equal size, Sam evening them out with discrete expulsions of some sort of caustic paste. Three young trees were ripped from their roots, my laborers quickly shaping them into axles for my new mobility cart.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. When all was said and done, only a few hours had passed and we were into early afternoon. A rolling ramp was built out of leftover scraps, and with a heroic effort from my whole brood I was pushed onto the cart. The only snags were when the lean-to caught the sleeping platforms and had to be scraped off my shell, and when the rootworm woke up part way through, a long section of its body already dragged out of its burrow. Convincing my limpet like symbiote to dump its excess water and join me on the cart was an ordeal unto itself, but it gave up and came along before I had to command obedience. Once everything was set on the cart, we bid the nursery a fond farewell and set off through the forest. Luckily for us, large trees were far apart in this area, and my flower crew more than had the strength to remove any saplings in our path. The aciditos flew overwatch, spotting nothing but small mammals, birds, and insects in our way. Their senses weren¡¯t even close to Probes, but I feared that the tremendous racket my cart made would attract predators and spook any large beasts on our route, so I kept it back to act as a spotter for our procession. We were three quarters of the way down our route when my fears were realized. The family of power hogs we had spotted earlier were headed out way at a quick trot. Pulling back my overwatch, I had the pinecrabs form a rough crescent to wrap around our possible aggressors. My noncombatants were stationed underneath the cart, with the flower crew closest to the possible defense line, their thicker shells and powerful appendages our last hope if everyone else was lost. As they thundered toward us, I Scanned the boar. Name: None Type: Beast, Electric Race: Power Hog Class: Berserker Level: 10 (Improve Scan Skill for more) Skill: Scan has reached level 4! By itself, the boar was a possible match for my pinecrabs. I held them back from launching their rage volleys; I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to cause a berserker to rage even harder. As the hogs got close enough to see us, arcs of energy flared from their tusks and bristles. The hoglets squealed and bounded out of sight as the boar tore at the soil with his front hooves. My crustaceans synced their arhythmic clacking, weaving and snapping their claws in a show of bravado. The boar must have taken this as a challenge, as he squealed with impressive volume and charged the center of my defensive formation. At five meters out, the arcs of electricity pouring from his tusks ramped rapidly, and with a powerful toss of his head he gouged a large crack into Jasper¡¯s green carapace, leaving with a faceful of quills. Jasper spasmed, the shock scorching its innards, causing it to fall back and protect its wound with its claws. The other pinecrabs leapt forward, furious at the monstrous boar¡¯s callousness. While any one would have trouble holding the beast, their combined strength was more than enough to restrain it. Roscoe and Ben, my two bravest aciditos, swooped down to quickly stab at the boar¡¯s hindquarters while Pearl and Mica kept his legs still. Only a moment after their jabs, the boar squealed tremendously and tore its legs free, stamping and kicking fiercely to drive my flying defenders off of it. They retreated not a second too soon, as arcs of electricity began to rain freely down the beast¡¯s hide, forming a cage of lightning around it that burned quickly through my pinecrabs¡¯ health. Directing them to let go and back away, I found that two of my pinecrabs couldn¡¯t respond to my directions. Quickly scanning them, I saw that they had the Effect: Electrical Convulsions, their wire like nerves unable to provide enough power to override the electrical energy surging through their claws. Still able to move their legs due to the compartmentalized nature of their control systems, they began writhing with as much force as they could, trying to rip their claws through the boar¡¯s tough hide like meat knives. Jade was lucky enough to tear away, but Flint had managed a tighter hold and was stuck fast. With no other apparent options, I instructed Flint to detach its claws from the rest of its arms. Four wet, sucking pops resonated through the trees as Flint effectively removed itself from the fight. While its scent glands and quill spray might still be of use, it had eight health remaining, and even attempting a distraction would be too much of a risk unless there wasn¡¯t a choice. I directed Flint back to the cart, hoping the higher ground would give better chances of landing volleys in the hogs¡¯ sensory organs. The acid my flyers had injected was starting to seriously inhibit the boar¡¯s rear legs, the tendons and muscle fibers degrading into a blackened sludge. Without the leaping trample, the lightning cage fizzled, only the ladders on its back bristles still showing. The sows still hadn¡¯t joined the fray, prowling around in the surrounding bush and hiding behind trees. I hoped that if we managed to defeat the boar, we¡¯d end the engagement altogether. Wary of the beast¡¯s tusks, I had my crustacean grapplers move slowly towards him, flinging quills and shell shards the whole way. While no single puncture would do much against the boar¡¯s thick, fatty hide, the cumulative volume of spikes in its skin would hopefully slow its movements and drive it mad from the itching. Jade, Mica, Pearl, and Jasper descended on the boar with zealous fury. Unwilling to allow them to become stuck again, I directed them to slam the spiked undersides of their chelae against the boar¡¯s face and head, taking turns battering the blinded aggressor so as to keep up constant pressure from multiple sides. Flint continued raking its shell with its rear legs, rapidly delivering quills to ensure that any dislodged weapons would be quickly replaced. When the boar seemed too dazed to move, I directed Mica to attempt to choke the beast while Jasper and Pearl held its head still. Carefully avoiding the flaring arcs from the tusks, my defenders closed in and began the work with stoic efficiency. The battle seemed over, so I sent Gus to ensure the boar was ended. An instant before it would have landed at the base of the animal¡¯s skull, a beam of golden light lanced from the largest sow to the boar. To my horror, wounds all over the boar closed, pushing blood covered quills and dissolved meat out of its body and reknitting its flesh and hide almost instantly. I ordered my babies back, but it was too late. Arcs of electricity poured from its bristles to reform the lightning cage, searing any defender within a meter with renewed vigor. Jasper, Mica, and Pearl, forewarned by Flint¡¯s sacrifice, opened their hold before they could be caught by the convulsive power of the hog¡¯s defense. Jade had already been moving toward the sows, intending to scare them away from our convoy. Gus wasn¡¯t so lucky. The lightning cage caught Gus as it was landing, and while its wings were supremely powerful for a creature of its size, physics doomed the poor hero more than anything else. The needle sharp legs it would have used to pump acid into the boar¡¯s brainstem plunged into the beast¡¯s thick hide and stuck fast. With no defense against the attacker¡¯s power, and a direct conduit between it and the boar, its health dropped to nothing in under a second. The moment after Gus¡¯s death, the alkaline solution inside of its cyst was flushed into its fully stocked acid bladder. Nothing could have prepared us for the sheer force of the explosion, the potent chemical bomb detonating with far more energy than I had expected. The shockwave drove the acidito¡¯s namesake in a sphere ten meters across, driving its needle legs deep into the boar¡¯s neck and splashing the trees and pinecrabs with the caustic mixture. Jasper, already injured, was lucky to have scuttled back further than its siblings, and only took enough damage to reduce its health to fifteen. Mica and Pearl caught a larger portion of the splash, their health totals dropping to four and seven, respectively. Jade was far enough away to lose only three health, bringing it to twenty six. Even I took a point of damage from the blast, though the acid pitting on my scales looked much worse. The noncombatants and Flint were spared from the blast by the carts massive bulk, though Ralph¡¯s plaintive hiss at the carnage tore at my heart all the same. Probe was too high up my shell to catch any of the acid, and its tentacles seemed to be vibrating with rage. I scanned the sow responsible for our loss, instantly understanding my massive mistake. Name: None Type: Beast, Electric Race: Power Hog Class: Blessed Mother Level: 9 (Improve Scan Skill for more) My brood¡¯s rage was only eclipsed by my horror, the sick feeling of loss warring with the fear of knowing that there was little chance we would escape this fight without losing more of my precious children. With my most durable defenders down to a total of sixty health and the lightning cage precluding an aerial attack, I felt like the best plans would be a matter of lowering our final body count. The flower crew was shaking, their instinctual fear of combat warring with their fury at the animals who would take our family from us. I had to clamp down hard on Ralph and Lily or they would have thrown themselves into the fight in hopes of preventing the deaths of their siblings. The boar squealed again, rage meeting with an almost laughing grunt. The beast must have been aware of our feelings, or maybe it knew how injured our remaining defenders were. Either way, the staccato grunting burned through my horror, transforming it into a blind hatred. I hated this beast, for killing Gus, for maiming Jasper, for forcing Flint to dismember itself, and for making the rest of my children feel this way. The hatred ignited something in me, something primal and dark. With a low creaking noise, my shell opened. The seam between scale and base was jagged, the rib-like spikes of black shell material meeting the rippled silvery bone unevenly. From this dark maw, I extended three long, multi-jointed arms of no color; they simply reflected and refracted light endlessly, a distorted kaleidoscope of shattered mirrors with no fixed shape. Ended with anthropic hands of five lithe, thick knuckled fingers and no palm. Each finger was tipped with a pair of thin claws a third of a meter long, coated in a viscous black fluid that spasmed and twitched. The liquid clung to the serrated edges, flowing like oil but never dripping, movements keeping to no pattern a rational mind could unravel but felt so tantalizingly familiar. A moaning roar tore from the darkened recesses of my shell, and I felt a hunger like I never had before. Afflicted with Status: Insatiable Hunger (Duration: Indefinite) Bestowed Status: Inescapable Hunger (Duration: Indefinite) Status Suspended: Sessile Status Suspended: Senseless Status Suspended: Fortress Shell Bestowed Status: Unveiled Voidmaw (Duration: Indefinite) Wind whipped into my new mouth, bringing with it the flavors of prey. I could taste the nerves in the sows firing as a sudden fear overtook them, the lightning cage of the boar a spicy tang, the disruptions their bodies caused in the currents of power a palate of textures I¡¯d never before experienced. My children caught echoes of my insatiable hunger, their minds lighting up with reverence and devotion, their senses coordinating to direct me to the choicest morsels they could find. I dragged myself toward my meal, the animals pulled toward me by currents of air and twists of gravity. Dirt, stones, and leaves disappeared into my gullet, each leaving me with a distinct texture and taste. The boar was the morsel I wanted most though, and I flung clumps of earth and trees away as my bulk lurched to him. Grasping the first part of my meal, I ignored the pain caused by its cage of lightning and squeezed. My jagged claws ripped through the beast like it wasn¡¯t there, black fluid entering the animal¡¯s wounds and ripping free a gossamer wisp that writhed and shook. Delighted, I shoved the thing into my gaping hollow, the beast folding in on itself and disappearing in short order. The glowing veil was the last part to go down, its indescribable flavor one of the most wonderful things I had ever tasted. The sows were shaking now, as without their protector in my way they had no defense against the feast. The ¡®Blessed Mother¡¯ was first, the spirit I rendered from its flesh an even greater treat than the boar¡¯s had been. The remaining three sows were less wholesome, but anything was better than the endless gnawing pit my gut had become. In the distance, I could sense more food. Rabbit, deer, hog, wolf, human¡­ anything would hit the spot, as long as I could reach it soon. I began pulling myself toward the nearest concentration of life I could detect. Stamina Depleted! Status Suspended: Insatiable Hunger Status Lost: Inescapable Hunger Status Lost: Unveiled Voidmaw Status Resumed: Sessile Status Resumed: Senseless Status Resumed: Fortress Shell Afflicted with Status: Unconsciousness (Duration: 4 Hours) Lunatic Cultist Status Cured: Unconsciousness Level 10 Power Hog Berserker defeated! + 200 XP Level 9 Power Hog Blessed Mother defeated! + 180 XP Level 7 Power Hog defeated! + 70 XP Level 7 Power Hog defeated! + 70 XP Level 6 Power Hog defeated! + 60 XP Level Up! Health, Mana, and Stamina Restored! Level Up! Health, Mana, and Stamina Restored! Level Up! Health, Mana, and Stamina Restored! Skill: Induce Fear has reached level 3! Skill: Unarmed Combat has reached level 4! Skill: Awareness has reached level 18! Soul Consumed! Soul Consumed! Soul Consumed! Soul Consumed! Soul Consumed! Soul Consumed! Soul Well +30% Flesh Tasted: Power Hog New Fleshwarps are available! I woke slowly, drifting up from a murky, indistinct place of faded dreams and memories. Choosing to put aside my experiences for the moment, I groggily opened myself to the senses of my colony. We had arrived at the spring pond, my children returning to their pre-assigned tasks when I stopped responding to them. Apparently, their link quality degraded drastically when I was indisposed. Dick was able to act as a backup relay, but had neither the mentality nor the authority to alter my orders. Luckily my orders had been complex enough for my babies to finish the whole errand by themselves. I directed the rootworm to drink deeply from this new water source, ending my rootless situation. I was surprised to find that none of my brood had any damage remaining. Each of them leveled to four alongside me when I became unconscious. In the future, I would try to engage strong opponents while close to levelling and with a nearby source of experience, as this source of healing was well beyond the regeneration buffs Ralph could provide. The spring pond was deserted when our cart arrived. Apparently, the creaks and crashes had driven off any animal life that made use of it. There were fish and insects in the water, which didn¡¯t show up to Scan but were labelled as ¡®Food - Low Quality¡¯ to Appraise. I assumed that they didn¡¯t produce experience when preyed upon, and confirmed it by having Jasper snap one up. Without anything pressing on me, the memories of what I did immediately before passing out couldn¡¯t be held back any longer. That terrible hunger, that awesome power¡­ I worried what it meant that I had enjoyed each moment of the slaughter. I couldn¡¯t bring myself to feel anything but debauched intoxication about the actual act of consuming our enemies, and vindication that I delivered justice to Gus¡¯s murderer. What would it make of me if I remained on this path of epicurean militancy? Would I be willing to end an agent with as little regard as I had for the boar? Would I become a beast myself, focused only on attempting to sate an endless hole? More, I clearly had been neglecting my own body and talents. I knew almost nothing of what I could do; could I open my shell without falling into the hunger, how did I use Fleshwarping or Soulforging, what did those talents even do? Were there more organs similar to those odd arms? Starting with Fleshwarper, I examined its information document. It seemed to be a complex system of altering living creatures, able to add elements to an entities body from a template of parts obtained through tasting the flesh of a ¡®donor¡¯ creature. The catalog I obtained from the power hog was extensive, with some useless adaptations like reproductive fitness markers, and other more useful traits like mana to electricity transformers. Creatures receiving the grafts would require extra nutrients, the grafts would require fleshwarping skill checks to maintain, and they would take time to grow. However, if I could get a complex enough set of adaptations I would be able to engineer massive changes to my existing brood, tailoring them to the form they would find most effective. Soulforger was somewhat similar to Fleshwarper in that it was intended to interact with living beings, but the methods, costs, and speed made it a very different talent. Soulforging was a method of consuming the energies released by spirits moving from the dimensions of life and light to one of the many shadowed realms of the dead. Normally dissipated back into the local mana flows as a short lived negentropic binding lattice, consuming the soul of the being in question allowed a soulforger to contain that power for itself in a ¡®Soul Well.¡¯ This power could be imbued into a willing creature, the lattice partially mutable at the moment of transfer. With such an imbuement, a living being would be able to hold enchantments in the same way objects could, allowing a soulforger to grant flight to the wingless, anomalous energy projection techniques, direct bonuses to attributes, and many more magical effects both complex and mundane. Skill in soulforging gave access to a deeper Soul Well and better lattice tweaking success. At my current, nonexistent skill level, my Soul Well would be filled by twenty souls, and my chance of successful imbuement was fifty percent for even the simplest lattice shapes. Attempting to open my shell was a non-starter. I simply couldn¡¯t feel any muscles able to move the heavy lid, and none of my children could wrench the thing open; going so far as to have Daisy and Poppy lift Lily while it held as tightly as it could to one of the riblike outer scales ended in the poor dears collapsed on their backs and needing Ralph¡¯s assistance with righting themselves. Explorations into exactly how many organs I had control of, and what they did, would need to wait until later, though, as night swiftly fell while we were working on our various projects. I sent Lily and Poppy to clear our grounds and gather more logs under the watch of Mica and Ben. I took a short time to teach Francis a few simple pieces for violin, flute, and piano, which it took to like a shrimp to water, and surprised me by rapidly improvising and improving on. It seemed to offload much of the needed thinking to the link network, but it had a playful and creative attitude that none of my other babies had expressed. Ralph and Sam were set to work on another clay based nursery with Daisy¡¯s assistance, as a nursery seemed to be the single most important part of a new base with the possible exception of myself. Lily and Poppy ended up collecting a stack of logs, poles, sticks, and other assorted wood scraps that had to mass at least eighty tonnes. I intended to use this material alongside the wood of the cart in a palisade around the edges of our new home. The best chance I saw at avoiding conflict was to look like we were too tough a nut to crack. Once the nursery was pumping, I had Matron start three nectar eggs. One was a photosynthetic producer, sessile like myself but much more efficient; its sole purpose was nectar production, and it would be much, much better at it than I was. The second was a sort of refinery, able to concentrate nectar while cerating it with other reagents to distill and congeal various alchemical products. I was unsure what effects we would discover, but I had high hopes in the potential. The last egg would blossom into a length subterranean cystic vats, able to store vast amounts of nectar out of sight, protecting our most important resource with the simple but potent defense provided by twenty meters of soil. About halfway through the night, we were visited by a pair of large owls. Their nest was a hollow in an enormous, gnarled tree growing from the middle of the spring pond. They watched us closely for a time, seemingly undisturbed by either our appearance or activity. The aciditos were annoyed by their presence, seeing themselves as the undisputed masters of our airspace, but I was unwilling to attack animals that hadn¡¯t attempted to harm us and kept my flying defenders back. They retreated to their nest to sleep as the sun began to rise, and I was somewhat comforted by their apparent trust in us. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, I was alerted by an odd feeling in my link to Jasper¡¯s mind, its emotional state a turbulent mix of anxiety and a weird form of longing. Peering into what amounted to its thoughts, I could detect a sense of incompleteness. Jasper had a need to be stronger that none of my other pinecrabs were experiencing, so I sent something similar to a promise of relief to my brave child, then spun inward to its possible mutations. The options open to my pinecrabs were rather limited, befitting their simple design. Larger crabs with harder shells that lost two claws but replaced them with gluey mucus pores, thinner ones focused on quill fire with hormone cocktails intended to kill, or a breed that did away with quills entirely and bent its focus toward clamping enemies in place and decapitating them. I had plans for the long ranged defense of our colony, but the other choices seemed useful, both of them filling a gap in our protections. Encapsulating the basic intent of each mutation, I gave Jasper the options and asked it to pick. It took its time, clicking and bubbling gently while concentrating on the decision as only a giant four armed crab covered in toxic spikes could. Once it gave me its decision, I directed it to squat beside my shell while Sam secreted a cocoon of purple silk around it, giving Jasper the best protection available during its metamorphosis. Dick filled the durable sack with nectar, giving the pod an amethyst sheen. I could feel that the seed creatures for the nectar structures were close to hatching, so I directed the ovipositing of more eggs, making sure to time them such that the nursery would be able to maintain optimal nectar flow during the incubation. We would soon be welcoming three more pinecrabs and five ranged combatants to our family, the pain of our loss during the power hog attack something that we all wanted to avoid. With the logging done, I set the labor clade beings to work on the palisade. It would be three meters tall, the wood secured together with Sam¡¯s most potent glue, a reddish mucus that ran like water for about ten minutes before hardening to a translucent black, possibly the same substance as the scale that covered many of our kin. I intended for the palisade to be backed by dirt from the area in front of it. The structure would encompass a fifty by fifty meter hexagonal area with the spring at the center, a crosshatch portcullis allowing exit through the same path the stream took out of the pond, with plans for a tunnel system allowing other exits to come later. The aciditos spent their free time chasing each other over and around the spring, diving and looping at speeds that had Matron and I quite worried. Dick was lazing in the shade of my shell, listening to Francis¡¯ elaborate, improvised song. The little signal bug had begun to combine ¡®instruments¡¯ in its performance, some sort of instinctive tonal sense giving it harmonies well beyond the childlike notes I had started it with. The pinecrabs were content to torpor at the corners of our colony, only a faint and rhythmic click from Jade keeping them from looking like ornate statues painted in eye searing neon tones. Throughout the day, animals slowly returned to the spring. The first visitors were a family of small primates. Cautious of my brood, the bluish grey beasts stayed on the opposite side of the spring pond, catching water insects and fish with deft sweeps of their tiny hands. Each time an acidito swooped past one, it would run to the base of a tree and screech loudly for a time, only returning when another primate led it back by the hand. The next creature to brave our presence was a red and orange lizard with a flaming head. Ambling out of the forest, it took no notice of my brood, walking right past Daisy and Lily as they were cutting a log into boards. It scrabbled up a large stone on the edge of the pond, splaying itself out to bask in the morning sun. The flame on its head was heatless to Probe¡¯s infrared vision, but the creature¡¯s skin was itself hotter than any natural flame. What it was getting from the sunlight was a total mystery to me. The stone itself began to glow red hot as the lizard lay on it through the course of the day. By midday the first side of the palisade was erected, and I could tell that the largest bottleneck to our construction progress was only having one builder duo. With all of the design, securing, and manipulation falling on Sam, it was using nectar much faster than it was designed to, and I could tell that exhaustion was setting in. With the elf raiding force only a few days away, we needed our projects finished swiftly. I took a moment deciding between construction lifeforms. The roach and slug design was intended to be multipurpose, a basic creature able to function in any environment. What I needed was more specific: a creature that was good at moving materials and securing them in place. We had all the lumber we would need for a long while within easy reach, so the ability to melt rock and earth into cement wasn¡¯t really useful. We also didn¡¯t need aerial or submersible workers, as there wasn¡¯t any real worry of attack from the sky or sea. With my decision made, Matron laid four more eggs, their incubation time twelve long hours.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Around that same time, the nectar structure seeds and new pinecrabs were ready to be born. The pinecrabs were coated in the normal sort of greasy birthing nectar, something Matron seemed annoyed by as she sent her cleaners to scour the more difficult crevices in their shells. The seeds were different, as they released a sort of cloudy brown mucus that covered the membranes of their eggs and turned them into opaque, moist, dun colored skin sacks. Extending grey tendrils, their dull minds sent requests for deployment positions. I brought the photosynthetic nectar excreter and the alchemic refinement bladder close to me, instructing them to deploy as near the spring pond as possible. The burrowing storage cyst was directed to dig in near the base of the nearby rocks, its cluster of feeding sphincters hidden between two granite boulders. I made sure to have Ralph hide the wrinkled bulge of its openings beneath a carpet of the orange mossy lichen that grew copiously around the spring pond¡¯s edges. The nectar facilities slowly grew from their seeds, taking shape over the course of about fifteen minutes. The producer first extended several thick, rubbery, intestinal roots into the pond, their lip ended tips slurping water in a slow rhythm. It then grew a tall, thick stem, pale peach with crimson spots and standing a good eight meters high and a meter wide. Sprouting from the top, a six meter wide disk only a few centimeters thick spread out to gather light, the top layer transparent black shell with a few small tumors scattered across its surface. Hanging from the round blossom, a few pinkish grey sacks were tasked with pumping atmospheric gasses into the main trunk, allowing for rapid infusion of useful elements into the spongy interior. The alchemical transmutation plant was much squatter, starting as a spreading carpet of thick and thin transparent veins that covered a three meter wide rectangle, some dipping into the pond, others lying on its surface, and more twisting above and through the earth like a tangled nest of worms. Blisters formed randomly across the vein¡¯s lengths, gelatinous sacks of various color and clarity that rapidly swelled into a riot of bubbles in differing sizes, the smallest an opaque golden sphere only a millimeter across and the largest a meter high clear dome. Long, metallic tubes of differing heights grew around the edges of the carpet, each grown from a similarly hued craggy base that sprouted jointed limbs tipped with human-like hands. The pinecrabs were green, yellow, and pink, and had the same general demeanor that their slightly older siblings carried. They seemed to enjoy Francis¡¯ songs, swaying to the tempo of its buzzes and beeps. Francis didn¡¯t seem to notice the attention, focused as it was on improving its music. A few small songbirds were attracted to the noise, perching in trees and on rocks, singing back at Francis in their own ways. The ranged defenders hatched a few hours into the afternoon, and I was instantly impressed with whatever had designed them. Three were winged tubes, serpentine black scale studded with an array of thin brown spikes. They had no limbs intended for use on the ground, flitting about with their six brown feathered wings. A meter and a half long, they had four independently mobile eyes at their front, above a wide, toothless, gaping mouth. They could fire wide, serrated silicate spikes at incredible speed, or spray a lesser form of the acidic cocktail the aciditos injected. The other two were short, broad quadrupeds with a thick orange hide and stubby, toadlike legs. Their heads were large and ovular, with wide mouths and sporting two eyes with vertical irises and one with a horizontal iris on their bulbous foreheads. The wide, thick torsos were covered in holes twenty centimeters across. These were biological mortars, able to launch fully aware explosive payloads that were designed to steer themselves mid-flight with small fins. The minds of their explosive children were apparently run in duplicate in the mortar hive¡¯s reproductive tubes, learning to be better bombs with each flight. Their effective range was half a kilometer, giving us a chance to frighten off or soften up any aggressors well before they engaged our close defences. Naming the new children was a fun family experience, most of the older siblings giving opinions on the options I provided to the new protectors. Keeping to the themes I had started earlier, the new pinecrabs were Emerald, Topaz, and Ruby. The spiny snakes, snikes, would be Fletcher, Bolt, and Quarrel. The moartoads, or toad mortars, would be Pop and Bam, which amused Dick. Sometimes I wondered how intelligent the transfuser really was, and if it was holding out on me to avoid being put to work. The nectar structures didn¡¯t really seem to be aware, the feeling I got from them more like an extension of the linking effect into their workings than into a mind, similar to the nursery. I decided against giving them names, which didn¡¯t seem to matter to the rest of the brood. Apparently, they were thought of as places more than creatures by my more mobile children. We had a few more animals approach our colony; squirrels, deer, and moose feeding on acorns and pine cones our logging had displaced. With them came small birds, predators of parasites and small insects that stayed near the moose and whistled shrilly at the aerial acrobatics of my aciditos and snikes. Of course, when you saw prey animals, predators were sure to be hiding nearby. Probe spotted a pair of green furred wolves with vine like tails, leaves included. Also stalking the deer was a jet black cat over three meters long that seemed to flow like smoke from bush to bush, only its golden eyes giving it away to even Probe¡¯s vision, especially impressive as it managed to hide its infrared bloom and left no heat where it stood. None of the animals beside the flaming lizard had been willing to get within twenty meters of my shell, but the wolflike things seemed especially aggravated about our presence. When Amelia¡¯s looping dive brought it too close to the smaller female, they growled loudly and bounded off into the forest. After a time, a pair of nearby howls they probably gave were answered by many more from much deeper in the woods, a disconcerting issue I was sure we¡¯d need to deal with later. As the sun was beginning to set, the hot lizard scrabbled its way down its basking rock and slowly ambled back into the forest, pausing to flick its tongue at the part of Dick¡¯s shell that Francis was sleeping on. Seemingly satisfied with its own inscrutability, it meandered its back the way it had come, disappearing into the woods and leaving gently smoking tracks. With most of my brood resting, I had time to contemplate what we would need to do about the sheer number of elfs that were only days away. I would wager that any one of my pinecrabs was worth at least three equally levelled humanoid opponents, their natural advantages and the tactical superiority provided by our link easily enough of an advantage to make up for numbers and equipment. The moartoads would likely remove many of our foes well before they could strike back, and the snikes were likely to be extremely potent ranged support, their agility and speed well beyond anything a normal archer could handle. It wouldn¡¯t be nearly enough. The first problem was higher levelled irregulars. The Pyre Archer elf had completely annihilated Galahad, and if he¡¯d noticed the aciditos above him before they were in position to strike he¡¯d have slain several with the heat from one of those flaming arrows alone. What would a ¡®Flawless Zephyr Marksman Prince¡¯ be able to do with fifteen more levels? Could he take down our palisade with his arrows? Could he pierce my Fortress Scale? Moreover, we weren¡¯t facing a three to one disparity with equally levelled enemies, we were facing at least a twenty to one disparity with enemies of unknown levels. While there was a chance we¡¯d be facing primarily level one elfs, I very much doubted it. If a small janitorial squad had no members at level one and merited a level eight leader with multiple classes, the main force wasn¡¯t going to be comprised of lesser warriors. How could we handle even a dozen opponents like the Pyre Archer? The third issue was the unknown quantity of witches and royal guard. With no clue as to their classes, levels, gear, or tactics, we had basically nothing to work from. Worse still, witches would likely be spellcasters, a type of enemy we hadn¡¯t so far encountered and one that could potentially sink any tricks I came up with well before we could use them. For all I knew, they were scrying us and reading my mind at that very moment. I did my best to keep the frustration and helplessness I felt out of the link, not wanting to worry my children. By the time the moon had risen and the stars were twinkling in the night sky, I still was no closer to an answer. We could perhaps manage to survive by tunneling deep into the earth, but that only promised a slow death by starvation instead of a quick one by steel. I was startled out of my rumination by a voice in my nonexistent ear. ¡°What¡¯s got you so bothered, hmm?¡± Nervously taking direct control of Probe, I had it spin slowly in a circle while scanning everything nearby. Of course, the voice should have been familiar, as I¡¯d heard it the night before. Name: Quonorol Type: Beast, Shadow Race: Night-talon Owl Class: Lunar Psychic Spy Level: 18 (Improve Scan Skill for more) Skill: Scan has reached level 6! I tried to mentally push my words to the owl. ¡°Hello? Are you talking to me?¡± The owl rocked back and hooted, ruffling his feathers. ¡°Ooh, quite the loud voice you have there, little clam. Try to speak with a bit less¡­ force, please. My wife would be displeased if I went thought-blind from being yelled at by a giant mollusc, or whatever a Star Seed is.¡± ¡°My deepest apologies,¡± I sent back with far, far less effort. ¡°How are we communicating like this, though? Are you tapped into my broodlink somehow?¡± ¡°Better. Still loud, but much better,¡± the owl said with an impression of amusement as he hopped to a closer twig. ¡°No, I¡¯m not in the mindweb you have with your minions. No, any psychic pathed class can speak mind to mind. It¡¯s one of the first talents learned, and acquiring the spell to do so is the prerequisite for walking on that branch.¡± ¡°I see. I don¡¯t know how to acquire a class in the first place, much less learn spells or pick paths. I¡¯m sorry for any confusion caused by my ignorance.¡± ¡°It¡¯s no problem at all, my clammy friend,¡± the owl said, ¡°Going back to my earlier question, what problem has you blasting anxiety like a salamander does lava?¡± ¡°Well, I suppose it might be of importance to you as well. An elf prince and his host will arrive in under a week, hunting boar and taking slaves.¡± ¡°Hoo boy, that is a real issue,¡± the owl said, hooting softly in the physical world as well. ¡°You¡¯re probably not much of a runner, I¡¯d wager, so you¡¯re trying to figure on your odds fighting or hiding, am I right?¡± With my projected affirmation, the owl continued, ¡°hiding won¡¯t be too effective in my experience. Any hunting party worth the name¡¯s gonna have trackers, maybe postcog or seer paths if they¡¯re rich enough. No, fighting it out would be your best bet. Get a couple more levels, take a class, dig in, and minions like yours are gonna chow down on anything so much as blinks your way. What¡¯s your minion cap?¡± Confused, I had to take a moment to look through my status screens. ¡°I can¡¯t find that information, what should I be looking for?¡± ¡°When you summon a new minion you should get a status message saying something like ¡®ten minion slots filled out of max twenty,¡¯ or whatever number your cap is. Haven¡¯t you been paying attention to your messages?¡± ¡°I¡¯ve never gotten a message like that. I don¡¯t summon my children, they¡¯re grown naturally.¡± With a strangled squawk, the owl almost fell off of the branch he was perched on. ¡°Well ain¡¯t that a hoot! You¡¯re tellin me there¡¯s no cap on your minions? You¡¯re like a dungeon without the tunnels. How much mana do they cost to upkeep?¡± ¡°They don¡¯t cost any mana,¡± I said slowly, suddenly nervous, ¡°they have their own mana regeneration. Is that not normal?¡± The bird went very still. After a moment, he shook his head, cooing and clicking his beak. A feeling of astonishment poured off of him, followed by a mix of worry, awe, and a hint of jealousy. ¡°You¡¯ve got a real power there, little oyster thing. Empires have crumbled for far less than you¡¯ve been handed. Take care or you might find yourself with a lot less freedom than you¡¯ve got right now. I think I¡¯m gonna need to wake up my wife, she¡¯s gonna need to know about this.¡± The owl ducked into his nest before I could stop him. Very nervous now, I woke all of my combat capable children, but before I could get them ready to fight the owl came back with a larger, darker feathered female. Name: Oovonoov Type: Beast, Shadow Race: Night-talon Owl Class: Blessed Psychic Lunar Oracle Level: 29 (Improve Scan Skill for more) Skill: Scan has reached level 8! Terrified, my suppression of the broodlink shattered like crystal. My children felt my emotions and turned on the owls in a rage. Before I could think to stop them, Pop and Bam had launched their explosive progeny at the gnarled tree. The organic bombs struck simultaneously, perfectly targeted at the female owl. Their detonation should have levelled the tree and blown splintered shrapnel into my colony, but instead it disappeared into a black veil that rose over the Blessed Lunar Oracle, shimmering like lace woven of silver. The Blessed Lunar Oracle arched her stately feathered brow. I clamped down hard on my brood, forcing all but Probe into an instant torpor. If she decided to fight, we were all dead. I was confident that I¡¯d have no chance, even if I managed to open the voidmaw again. ¡°You should teach your children better manners, Star Seed which goes by Nest,¡± her voice a whisper louder than thunder. ¡°You¡¯ll need to make friends going forward, and most people aren¡¯t as¡­ forgiving as I.¡± ¡°My most sincere apologies,¡± I said, every vein in my shell running cold. ¡°How should I address one of your majesty?¡± Cooing, she sent back a sense of amused arrogance. Turning to her mate, she said, ¡°Finally, a creature that knows how to be polite. You should take lessons, husband.¡± Turning back to me, she said ¡°I will accept Blessed Oracle, Nest.¡± If I could breathe, I¡¯m sure I¡¯d have let out a sigh of relief. ¡°Blessed Oracle, how can I be of service?¡± Quonorol preened his feathers in amusement. ¡°Don¡¯t let the missus walk all over you, clammy. You¡¯ll regret it later when she¡¯s making you pick mites out of her tail feathers.¡± The Blessed Oracle pecked gently at her mate. ¡°What my childish husband means to say is that formality isn¡¯t needed here, Nest. No, I¡¯m going to be helping you much more than you¡¯ll be helping me. I can see many tough decisions ahead of you, nexi of great import are going to hinge on your choices. I feel my Goddess¡¯ will, and She desires that you be guided to the right fates. Our first task will be keeping you and your colony alive against the march of Garthenburk and his hunters.¡± A divine guide was going to grant me her knowledge and keep me alive? It would be no stretch to say I was floored, my relief pouring through the broodlink and comforting my brood in their torpor. ¡°What do I do, Blessed Oracle?¡± I asked reverently. ¡°First, we need to find a turnip.¡± Juvenile Mutant Executioner Crabs Apparently, classes in this sim took a bit of investment. A creature could get a class in several ways, but the first class you had was one of a few basic starters, and once you had one you could begin advancing it up or adding paths. The prerequisites for each basic class were very simple. For example, to become a hunter one had to kill a creature from a hidden position. To become a berserker, one had to kill a creature that had taken at least half of their health. To be a merchant, one had to sell an item for gold. The reason that we needed a turnip was so that I could become a mage. Without accessible limbs, I couldn¡¯t qualify as striking a killing blow, and if I didn¡¯t accept the class prompt within five minutes of receiving it, it would automatically be dismissed. So even though I easily qualified for warrior or murderer (an odd class that actually led to many of the most sought after guard advancements) during my voidmaw rampage, the chance was lost at some point during my unconsciousness. Becoming a mage was as simple as casting a single spell, something that anyone could do by waving their hands in a few arcs or saying a couple words. Again, I had no limbs, nor did I have a mouth. Some spells could be cast by thought alone, though most were locked behind the mage class or one of its advancements or paths. The bare few that weren¡¯t almost universally had expensive, rare, or short lived components. Except for Equansil¡¯s Turnip Duplication. Glorious Emperor Equansil was an Archmage who lived on the Isle of Enchanters about six millennia ago. Deciding he was bored with the life of an ascetic, he flew to the nearest continent to get himself a kingdom. The locals were more than happy to accept the rule of a benevolent archmage capable of rending fields in twain and calling tornados from blue skies, and who only desired a small palace where he was waited on by nubile servants. With his backing, they could freely absorb many of the surrounding kingdoms, rapidly snowballing his small section of land into a massive empire spanning half the continent. As an immortal archmage, his rule was unquestioned and he was able to sort truth from lies with a flick of his hand. Everything went pretty well for about four hundred years. And then came the Unending Winter. For a decade or so, things weren¡¯t so bad in the Equansilian Empire. Their neighbours crops failed, their citizens froze, and their rivers were stopped with ice. But the archmage was able to counter the effects of the long, cold months by magically making the ground far more fertile and warmer than the air above it. This heated the fields enough to allow hardy crops to grow, and while the citizens were less prosperous and their food was blander, well, at least they weren¡¯t scraping and boiling tree bark to get by. Then it got colder. A lot colder. As the Unending Winter dragged on, frozen rafts of sea ice began to expand from the poles down into the rest of the oceans, and the reflection of the sunlight by the white ice reduced the heat the oceans could hold. Moreover, the ice trapped several important greenhouse gasses and angered the ancient volcanic spirits, who left their lairs on the surface to live in the deep magma below the world¡¯s crust. Without the gasses trapping heat and the progeny of the volcanoes to keep springs flowing, even the warmth of the enchanted farmland couldn¡¯t keep grains alive. Tubers and root vegetables could be grown if they could be cultivated with low lying leaves, but there wasn¡¯t enough of the enchanted farmland for the wide leaf spreads needed by these sorts of vegetables. The archmage could only sustain so much enchantment at a single time, and even his prodigious mana pool bottoming out. So, using his mastery of magic and impossible intellect, the archmage invented a spell that could be cast by anyone, even the lowliest peasant, as long as they had even a single point of mana. It required no gestures or words, could be taught in moments, and performing it was an almost negligible act of will. Truly, a masterful piece of spellcraft. The Equansilian Empire stood to this day, diminished in size and standing, bits lost at the edges after its emperor left to study other dimensions, but still a powerful force in the world six thousand years after its founding. Even now, Equansil¡¯s Turnip Duplication was considered one of the most elegant and efficient spells ever invented. Thus, I really needed a turnip. ----- Of course, finding a turnip in a forest on volcanic mountain on an island in the middle of an inland sea was a bit of a process. Learning about the geography of this planet was fascinating, but the particular issue I had was the isolation of the island I was on. During the Unending Winter (which ended about two centuries after it began) the island was part of a land bridge between the continent of jade and the continent of gold, so named for the materials used in the respective currencies most common to those continents (though silver seemed to be a universal ¡®second tier¡¯ currency.) Though there were many tribal settlements on the island, they tended to rely mostly on foraging, and their agriculture had regressed to a kind of ¡®drop it in a hole and walk away, it might be a plant when we come back in a couple years.¡¯ The only major crop grown on the island was cassava, a bushy root vegetable that would cause a potent toxin debuff if you failed its milling skill check. The island was a veritable paradise for hunting and gathering, so it wasn¡¯t too important to maintain large food stores for the majority of the year. Still, we had a fair chance at it. Turnips could grow wild, and the trade routes during the Unending Winter would have carried many as rations. It was likely that at least a few would have been lost along the way, taken root, and grown wild. The owls didn¡¯t know exactly what we were looking for, but could give me the general shape and color of the leaves, from which I could start a search. All I needed were eyes. The Matron had all sorts of scouting options. I didn¡¯t really want to create too large of a nectar drain, so I limited myself to the smaller bionts. Still a large group, I narrowed it further by aiming for intelligence, independence, speed, and sight. The most interesting option was a fairly quick incubator, so less than an hour after having Matron deposit an egg, we had a new baby. Or many new babies. It was complicated. The scout ¡®creature¡¯ I decided on was actually a mutable swarm combinator, one of many such entities in my library. Comprised of thousands of small, octopodal mites each the size of a popcorn kernel, their gestalt processing and perception abilities were fantastic. They also had the ability to link their flexile limbs together and move as larger units, each part of the swarm pulling or pushing the others to multiply their overall strength. Their most interesting ability was a sort of camouflaging biomimicry, their gelatinous torsos melding into their neighbors while shifting colors, allowing them to look like all sorts of objects or animals. The only part of them that was static was the orange sized, black shell core that housed their repair and replacement organs. New to this gestalten mind was sapience. The aggregate creature, about the size of a sheep when fully combined, had an intelligence comparable to a young humanoid. The moment it hatched, it began speaking through the link. ¡°What do you need me for, Progenitor Nest. Are we short on food? Oh, I know, we should eat those feathered things up there! They look dangerous, but they¡¯ll probably be full of organics from the smell of this place!¡± ¡°Relax, child,¡± I sent to it with mirth, ¡°we are quite well for nectar. Those owls are going to assist the colony.¡± Sending a flow of sterner thought, I continued with, ¡°They are also extremely dangerous, so do not attack them.¡± ¡°You¡¯ve already gained the trust of a local power structure? Wow¡­¡± the flowing mites sent with a feeling of awe. ¡°That will make it much easier to propagate. You¡¯ve not even mutated yet! I¡¯m so lucky to have been instantiated by such a clever progenitor¡­¡± Setting aside the many questions that that raised, and hoping that the owls really weren¡¯t tapping my broodlink, I said to them, ¡°Our scout entity has hatched. We¡¯ll start searching for a turnip now.¡± Of course, explaining to the energetic carpet of tiny eyes what we were looking for and why took another several minutes, but it left with a promise to find and return with a turnip, ¡°even if it took ten million mites!¡± I very much hoped it didn¡¯t. With the new scout searching, the owls left, informing me that they would know when we had possession of the vegetable. I awoke my brood from their enforced torpor, and I was left to contemplate the whirlwind of new information I had received over the last hours. The fact that this sim had deities was surprisingly comforting. I probably didn¡¯t have to worry about apocalyptic threats popping up before I was ready, as generally ¡®gods¡¯ were run with the intention of either being the ultimate combat challenge for a sim, or they were a sort of caretaker system with the power to stop external disasters before they got too bad. With how long this sim had been running, I was leaning toward the latter. Of course, the sim artist could easily change things up at any time, but my assumption was that such major events would be foreshadowed by portents and oracular visions. Luckily, I had an oracle nearby in case things started heading that way. Of course, it could be that I was the apocalyptic event. A biological swarm with the ability to eat anything and make massive hordes of high powered combat lifeforms? I was basically an otherworldly invasion in a can. Maybe I couldn¡¯t remember why I was in this body and sim because I was working with the artist, acting as a major plot event intended to shake up the normal routine? Neither of the owls had ever seen another being like myself, but I didn¡¯t have any desire to conquer the planet. Maybe that would happen later? It was too soon to be sure, but I would be surprised if that was really the answer. I probably wasn¡¯t the kind of agent who signed up for that sort of thing. I was also beginning to understand that my reluctance to expand was a major hindrance. I loved each of my brood, their lives worth more to me than anything else this world had to offer. But I wasn¡¯t doing any of us any favors by denying reality. If we didn¡¯t have an army to fight an army, all of us were going to die. I could easily produce a dozen nectar blooms at this spring alone. With that much nectar, I could have an army of thousands of creatures, spread across the island, and take over the biosphere. It would take a few days, a week at most. But how would I care for my children when hundreds would die each day just to clear out the strongest beasts? That much loss would harden me to them, and I didn¡¯t want that. I knew I needed to gather a stronger force, but where should I draw the line? ----- Shortly before midnight, my new constructors hatched. It took them quite a bit of effort to get out of the nursery; they were the biggest sort of creature a tiny nursery could grow. They were similar to Matron in general shape, ratlike with pointed snouts and pale white skin. They were much thinner, though, had no hive rising from their backs, and stood on six thick tentacles. As soon as they made their way from the nursery, they extended those tentacles to their full lengths, towering twenty meters up on precariously thin supports. This showed the lateral orifice on their undercarriage, a mouthlike opening with a pair of wide tongue-like tubes of an ivory hue, that extended from their neck to the last third of their torso. This was the method they would use to excrete and spread their biological solvents and adhesives. These adorable little things would be the real powerhouse that allowed our colony to ensure our safety, and we welcomed them with open limbs. As soon as they were ready (and Matron deemed them clean enough,) I set them to work on the palisade. Their tentacular limbs were incredibly strong when compacted, allowing them to move the heavy boards without needing to bother the flower crew. The adhesives they produced were just as effective as Sam¡¯s, and they could lay them on with much more precision and speed. About the only part of the process they couldn¡¯t manage by themselves was the shaping of the wood, a task that the flower crew excelled at. This meant that I would be able to send my gathering force out much more often, and the whole project would be finished in hours, as compared to days. Sam really hit its stride as supervisor. The build-rats were excellent workers, but their senses and processing were far weaker than the little slug¡¯s, so they worked far more efficiently under Sam¡¯s direction. Ralph had a great time buzzing over their work site to allow Sam the best vantage to observe from, the sluglike builder¡¯s eyestalks twisting and pulsing as it examined each join with an expert eye. Once my construction crew was up to speed, I turned my attention to the skill of Fleshwarping. I had a limited palette to work from, but I was interested in the lightning cage ability shown by the power hog boar. The actual manipulation of the graft to ready it for application to a lifeform would probably be fairly difficult in a normal situation, but I had direct access to the biological structures of my progeny, an information pool that would be nearly impossible to gather without vivisection in other circumstances. Each of my children had a fairly standardized biology, with morphological divergences only altering what needed to be changed for their individual use cases. For example, the musculature that drove the wings of my aciditos was basically the same as that used by my snikes, size and location notwithstanding. The black scale was the same material as the black shell, grown through differently shaped structures in the skin; even the brightly colored shells and quills of the pinecrabs were basically this substance, differing pigmentation and layers of silicate matrices allowing for very different presentations. I used this knowledge to prepare a pseudo-genetic ¡®graft¡¯ for my pinecrabs. Their external spike structures could be made to hold the filaments copper and organically deposited quartz granules shaped into the arcane glyphs needed to invoke the lightning shell when mana was channeled through them. The mana attuning glands used by the power hogs made this process even simpler, taking a complex technique of mental calculation and spiritual transmutation and duplicating it via simple rhythmically repeated muscle contraction. I took aside Mica and Topaz, explaining to them the possible risks and side effects taking on such a graft would entail. Their response was an enthusiastic bubbling from their mouthparts, emitting a scent that Probe compared to the three day dead opossum it had discovered during its first outing. When I tried to simplify the message to ¡®pinecrabs get strength, but maybe are in danger,¡¯ their reply was basically the same with an added tint of ¡®same environment, differing only in light cycle.¡¯ Praising my babies for their bravery, I had them put claws on my shell and activated Fleshwarping. Fleshwarping skill check: 198/54. Success! (Rolled: 59, + 100 subject data, +39 Processing, + 0 skill level.) Skill: Fleshwarping has reached level 4! Fleshwarping skill check: 230/54. Success! (Rolled: 87, + 100 subject data, +39 Processing, + 4 skill level.) Skill: Fleshwarping has reached level 7! The process was incredibly simple. Once I had the fleshwarp I intended to apply fully visualized, I willed the change onto the pinecrab¡¯s bodies. A surge of thought I wasn¡¯t able to remember, and the roots of the change were in place. My subjects were immediately ravenous, their rapid growth and repair systems seeing the lack of the grafted systems as ¡®damage¡¯ and ramping their metabolisms up to ¡®fix¡¯ the issue. Dick worked its magic, refueling them with nectar twice over the next half hour, the fleshwarping able to take full advantage of their highly tuned biology and complete the graft in wonderfully short order. I decided to restrict the experimentation, unwilling to risk any unforeseen issues wiping out my colony¡¯s defenses. If everything went well, I would consider the application of the graft to my remaining anvils, and then see what else the electrical mana channels could be used for. I was reluctant to use my soul well for any forging, as I didn¡¯t know when I would be able to safely refill it, and the on-the-fly application of a regenerative forging could possibly save one of my broodlings when mundane healing was ineffective. With that, my agenda was down to waiting for my scout swarm¡¯s acquisition of a turnip. Oddly, despite the likelihood of my colony¡¯s need to fight in just a few more days, I felt at peace with the gentle tempo of my build-rat¡¯s construction and the contrasting percussion of my wrestling pinecrabs. My family was building a home in this strange world, and I knew we could overcome any obstacle through teamwork and cooperation. ----- The sun was beginning to rise when I felt a sudden surge of success from the scout mite swarm. Willing the link open, I was instantly bombarded with ¡°I did it! I did it!¡± sung in a hundred different tones. Apparently it was still capable of linguistic communication while divided into distant enough portions to need to act as multiple entities. I congratulated it, then sent my aerial defense forces to gather the vegetable and return with it safely. I didn¡¯t trust that some sort of animal wouldn¡¯t jump my team the moment they pulled the turnip from the ground. We had too much at stake. I was proven right, sadly. On their approach to the dry riverbed the turnips grew from, the scout swarm alerted me to a pair of three meter tall, silver spotted white badgers headed straight for the turnip patch. I ordered it to uproot one of the vegetables and carry it up a tree, to hopefully save one from the bulky animals¡¯ hunger. As soon as it assembled enough sub-bodies to form a digging tool, the badgers started running at the mass, the air fogging in their wake and frost falling from their shaggy coats. Working as quickly as it could, the swarm drilled through the stone riddled soil, pebbles and dust flying in a great, swirling arc around it. Just as it seized the vital reagent, the lead badger reared up on her hind legs, thick bluish ice enveloping her forepaws. The scout swarm, already coiled from its drilling, sprung away as the badger slammed her glacially extended claws into the riverbed with a hissing chatter. Twisting its mass into a jagged line, the scout swarm landed against a large oak. It rapidly ascended the tree, its serpentine shape allowing it to move through the bark with ease, and terror of the monstrous beasts behind it gave it a surge of power unlocking hormones, allowing it to burn energy swiftly and making it willing to harm its mites in the effort to save the majority of the mass. The lead badger clawed at the tree behind the swarm, frozen sap cracking on the oak¡¯s damaged surface. The rents she left in the tree formed frost that expanded rapidly and shattered with each potent crash of the badger¡¯s ice enhanced claws, widening the damaged area much faster than she would have with normal slashes. In a matter of seconds, the old oak let out a deafening creak and began to fall. The scout swarm slithered to the top of the leaning tree and jumped to the nearest, some kind of silver leafed maple. This turned out to be a stroke of luck; as the female badger tried to slash at the golden bark, a shield of silver leaves flew from the branches and intercepted the claws of the beast. In the same moment, a spear of golden sunlight lanced from the tree¡¯s crown and into the badger¡¯s thick hide, causing a narrow but deep puncture in shoulder of her left forelimb. With a hiss of rage, the badger shook her great torso and rolled into a tight ball.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. For a moment I hoped that the creatures would be scared off by the tree¡¯s magical defense. Then a pale, translucent shell of ice and vapor built itself around the badger, leaving only her joints, paws, and the lower half of her snout bare. Around each joint were spikes of pure, clear ice half a meter long which tapered to a jagged point. The massive badger¡¯s male partner followed suit, and they both started raking at the tree, ignoring the golden projectiles glancing off their supercooled armor. The maple had many leaves with which to shield itself, but there was still a limit: each time they came to its aid, the tree¡¯s bark blanched slightly whiter, and its glow dimmed. It seemed to be using its living essence in place of a mana pool, or perhaps it was somehow made partially of mana. I was unsure, but whatever was happening to it didn¡¯t seem like something it could handle forever. Luckily, it didn¡¯t have to. Less than a minute after it started, my scout felt the air defender¡¯s broodlinks open to its mind. In seconds, silicate spikes three centimeters wide and a third of a meter long started impacting the heads of the badgers, shattered shards filling their eyes and snouts. The snikes had arrived. Less helpful were the aciditos, who darted around the crown of the tree, trying to find a path to grab the scout mites and their turnip prize. The storm of metallic leaves swirled through the branches leaving no safe area to land. The tree¡¯s ¡°agitation¡± was impeding our rescue efforts. Within the argent whirlwind, the scout hugged tight to the maple¡¯s trunk. Each golden lance caused a pulse of heat, but the air around the badgers was becoming colder and colder. Already some of the mites lowest on the tree were sluggish and weak, the frost condensing on them and weighing them down. Some were so cold that they were unable to maintain connection to the swarm, losing cohesion and dissipating. I could feel the hivemind¡¯s fear as each dying mite carried away a bit of the whole¡¯s self. If too many were lost, the personality it maintained would be changed irreparably; a sort of death. The snikes kept up their pressure, their hardened crystal spikes unable to so much as dent the ice armor, but the distraction of the impact was causing the badgers to snarl and hiss at them, reducing the rate they took down the tree. Then a lucky bolt struck through the joint gap at the male badger¡¯s rear left hip, ripping straight through the hide, meat, and bone and impacting against the other side of the armor where it shattered into splinters. The fierce edges of the glass like splinters tore through the beast¡¯s flesh, blood pouring through the join as he thrashed at his leg. With a high pitched whine, he dragged himself away from the tree to give himself time to examine his wound. Of course he couldn¡¯t really manage that without releasing his armor. Caught between anger at the pests that injured him and the pain of his wound, he decided to take the intelligent road and retreat, hissing as he hobbled away from the tree. His partner, however, was now all the more angry. With a snarl of rage, she heaved herself up on her hind legs, turned toward the snike who had scored the lucky hit, and spat. The spray of steaming liquid froze the air around it as it flew, a visible vortex dropping in its wake. Quarrel rose swiftly away from the viscous mass, but felt itself dragged down as the spray passed below it. The disrupted air currents were causing a massive downdraft, and it took all of Quarrel¡¯s ability to avoid being slammed to the ground by it. The badger was right behind the spittle, charging at the space where Quarrel would have landed had it not righted itself. My snikes all rose swiftly, newly wary of their foe. The aciditos were now terrified, and I had to burn a massive amount of stamina to open the link to each one and press calm into their minds or they would have scattered. Their combat use may be limited in this engagement, but they would be vital to the retrieval efforts. The snikes had no limbs to carry the turnip, and would have a rough time landing even if they did. The snikes, however, seemed to come up with something like a plan while I was calming the little acid spouts. They started pouring spikes into the same spot on the badger¡¯s face, just above her left eye. The badger shook and danced to avoid the onslaught, but the snikes were designed to hit far smaller targets at far longer ranges. While the snikes weren¡¯t anywhere close to even chipping the armor, the badger had to be getting one banger of a headache from the constant impacts. At the height the snikes were firing from, there was little chance of another spittle spray reaching them. Nor did she try, instead attempting to dodge around the maple to hide from the crystal rain. When she pressed herself into the base of the tree to cover the snike¡¯s target, the next stage of their plan began. With the badger¡¯s face and head pressed against the tree, she couldn¡¯t see as Bolt spiraled down towards her. Careful to avoid the silicate shards and silver leaves, Bolt lined up its shot, and sprayed bile between the maple¡¯s trunk and the female badger¡¯s left side. The boiling liquid did nothing to the badger¡¯s glacial armor, but the bark of the tree started to whistle and dissolve. The tree didn¡¯t like that at all. In place of the thin golden spears, a massive golden sword blade thrust from the maple¡¯s withering trunk. With a horrid crash, it tore through the badger¡¯s already damaged left forelimb at the shoulder, severing the limb at the joint. With wild, pained eyes she ran away from the blackened tree as fast as her remaining limbs could carry her, the ice armor sublimating from her and leaving only a crystalline patch over the gaping amputation wound. It took awhile for the tree to calm after that. My snikes hovered around the tree¡¯s crown while the aciditos landed on the branches of a nearby oak. The spinning leaves eventually settled back onto their twigs, still seeming to blow in a breeze that didn¡¯t exist. Nothing else even came close to the battlefield; the steaming, frosted turf and thousands of crystal splinters weren¡¯t much of a welcome mat to the creatures of the forest. When everything was ready, I made sure that my aerial defense force brought back samples of the severed badger limb and the glowing, golden sap that left the maple¡¯s bark undamaged when it oozed over it. The whole event took less than half an hour. The battle itself, from the first claw smash to the female¡¯s retreat, had taken around four minutes. I marvelled at my ranged strikers, the speed at which they had defeated to massive and probably overleveled foes far outside of my highest expectations. Still, the fight had revealed a weakness in my force. Controlling the instinctive reactions of my brood consumed stamina when they were over one hundred meters; if the battle had gone on much longer, I would have run dry and there would have been no way for my creatures to plan and communicate. Dick didn¡¯t have nearly the range to act as a transceiver for their link, and even if he had they likely wouldn¡¯t have been able to borrow enough mental resources from him. While they couldn¡¯t use it to its fullest extent, all of my progeny offloaded some of their processing needs into the broodlink, where my mind picked it up, worked through it, and sent it back through the weaker large area network. What I needed was a tactician, smart enough to handle the planning needs of a fighting swarm while able to stay within a hundred meters of a moving battlefield. After searching through Matron¡¯s combat tagged genes, I found what I needed. A pseudo-scout with lockdown nets, it could hop large distances and hover for short durations. It was also a capable sub-commander, intelligent enough to tactically handle skirmishes on its own, and it could later be mutated into much more potent military roles if needed (though it was noted that none of its forms would be particularly competent at logistics or engineering.) Matron deposited the egg in the nursery, her little cleaning bats carrying it to an open nectar nipple. I idly wondered what sort of personality a tactician would hatch with; would it be aggressive? Paranoid? Demanding? Subservient? I looked forward to whatever my baby wanted to make of itself. I would have to wait and see in four hours. As my turnip collectors returned to our little settlement, so did the owls. I had the meat and sap samples loaded into one of my barnacle pores, where they were swept into a digestion vat to be turned into nectar. Flesh Tasted: Frosted Tip Badger New Fleshwarps are available! I was disappointed that the tree sap didn¡¯t unlock anything useful, but the new options would have to wait. ¡°Your minions have returned with the turnip,¡± the Blessed Oracle sent to me. My scout swarm, most of the mites it had sent returned by now, seemed to feel something from the Oracle¡¯s mental speech. I had to still it, as its curiosity wasn¡¯t worth annoying our guides. ¡°Yes, Blessed Oracle. How should I begin?¡± ¡°I will expand your mind, granting you knowledge of the spell,¡± she said. ¡°Most often, simply seeing the spell¡¯s sigil with one¡¯s own eyes would be enough to learn it, but in your case there are no eyes to see. This will take only a moment, do not resist.¡± I felt a pressure in my mind, like an intrusive thought that instinct demanded I reject. Repressing the imperative was very uncomfortable and difficult, like resisting the urge to writhe while being tickled or controlling one¡¯s diaphragm to stop a hiccup. Not that I could do either of those things in this form, but the point stood. The scout swarm¡¯s agitation at being held still was spreading through the broodlink, causing the rest of my brood to feel uncomfortable and aggressive. Not willing to lose my chance to gain a class, I forced a calm signal through the link, a sense of relaxation and lethargy radiating strongly through all of my children¡¯s minds. This seemed to pacify the scout swarm, and I hoped that it wouldn¡¯t get so upset in the future. Maybe having a fully sapient broodling was going to be more work than I expected. The Blessed Oracle finished the donation of knowledge, and I could see the steps needed to cast the spell more easily than any of my other memories. Apparently the Archmage Equansil didn¡¯t like repeating himself. With the turnip less than a meter from me, I willed my mana through the visualized spell sigil, and suddenly there were two turnips sitting side by side. The large roots were identical, and I was ecstatic. Skill: Spellcasting has reached level 1! ¡°Cast the spell four more times, and you will receive the class acquisition option,¡± Quonorol said, hopping up to the turnips. An instant of will, a puff of focus, and there were six identical turnips before me in a short row. Skill: Spellcasting has reached level 2! Class Unlocked! Would you like to become a Mage? (0/10 class slots filled) Yes, I thought to the sim¡¯s System. Class Acquired: Mage! Spells Learned: Ember Spray, Spark Jolt, Condense Water, Chisel Stone, Magical Hand! Level 4 Mage Reached! New Class Talent Point! New Class Levels! Attribute Adjustment Complete! Info: Self Stats I sent. Name: Nest Race: Star Seed Class: Mage Level: 4 Experience: 15/400 to next level Health: 46/46 +0.1/min Mana: 64/69 +.3/min Stamina: 39/280 +1/min (Info: Self Stats for more) Attributes Agility: 10 (0) Movement: 10 (0) Strength: 36 (0) Toughness: 26 Processing: 51 Organization: 48 Instinct: 39 (29) Charisma: 20 Skills Scan (8), Induce Fear (3), Unarmed Combat (4), Awareness (18), Fleshwarping (7), Spellcasting (2) Talents Broodlinked, Fleshwarper, Font of Nectar, Soulforger 1 Class Talent Point (Mage) (Info: Class Talents (Mage) for more information) Status Effects Senseless, Sessile, Fortress Shell (Info: Attribute, Talent, Skill, or Effect for more information) The changes to my resources, regeneration rates, and attributes were intriguing. I should have been keeping track to see what did what, but the basic rule of ¡°more levels means more power¡± was fairly obvious. Checking the mage class talents, I could see all sorts of useful and interesting ones, but there was one very obvious talent that I needed right away. Mage Class Talent: Gestureless Caster purchased! I felt the world blossom before me. With flight and sensing spells, I could move and see through my own power. Magical hand alone would allow me to do so much more, and further telekinetic spells were sure to open to me. Speaking through the wind, or mind to mind. Helping construct and gather with earth magics. Watering crops for nectar distillation. Helping our defenders with fire and lightning. Maybe even healing magics. ¡°Thank you, Blessed Oracle, Quonorol. Our colony owes you a debt.¡± The owls preened for a moment before the Blessed Oracle said ¡°we acknowledge your debt, and absolve you. Now, send your brood to gather weak enemies for you to slay. Time is short, and you need power. My husband and I will find a book of spells for you to learn from before the elf prince arrives. Take care.¡± With those instructions finished, they flew away again, fading rapidly into the shadows of the trees. My reservations at aggressive killing would have to be put on hold, apparently. Before I sent out a hunting party, I gave thought to naming the nameless. The build-rats seemed to take to the names Euclid, Archemides, Pythagoras, and Hypatia. The scout mite hivemind was a different issue, of course. After I gently explained to it that we couldn¡¯t name each of its hundreds of thousands of mites, it bounced from name to name. Its problem wasn¡¯t a dislike of any individual name, but rather the intense enthusiasm for every name. Eventually, I gave it a choice between two names. Otto, or Anna. It said it couldn¡¯t decide, so I gave it the option to be either, depending on what it preferred, as long as it answered to both names if needed. It agreed instantly, happy to have at least some mutability in its name. With all of that complete, I instructed the swarm to split into three groups and gave each a squad consisting of two pinecrabs and a snike. I kept back jade, Mica, and Topaz, ensuring that the colony would have a defensive screen if needed and that the lightning cage crabs were given more time to recover. I made sure that the teams would only grab predators; I figured that predatory animals would have higher levels, and I didn¡¯t want to kill anything that wasn¡¯t already aggressive. Once they were off, I directed the build-rats in their duties, had Dick transfer nectar between the nectar-shroom and the storage cyst, and considered what we could do to enhance the settlement. Time wore on, the hunters delivered two hundred and thirty experience in flammable wolves and snakes, and the hot lizard eventually returned to its rock. By noon, everything had fallen into a rhythm. One I was uncomfortable with, but at least we were safer¡­ Around noon, the chrysalis containing Jasper and the egg containing my tactician were both almost ready to open. I signalled the hunting parties to return, and my brood gathered in anticipation of their new and improved siblings. Except Sam and the flower crew, who were busy digging our moat and dumping the dirt behind our wall. It was Jasper who came out first. The purple chrysalis cracked slightly at the top, and from the crack emerged a massive amber blade. Swiftly cutting through the hardened silk, Jasper emerged a new arthropod in a flood of golden nectar. Its quills were gone, as were all the spikes and two of its claws. Its shell had shifted to a solid black, smooth and sleek. The missing claws had been replaced by translucent amber blades, two meters long and half a meter wide, two centimeters thick and flat on the top but tapering to a wicked edge along the bottom. The blade had no tip, rectangular instead of pointed. Its other two claws were wider and longer, coated on the inside with a sticky mucus. A mouthlike sphincter at the base of the claws held a long, bulbous tongue coated in the same yellowish white mucus, which could be projected up to eight meters to catch a foe and haul it back to Jasper¡¯s embrace, where it would rapidly be beheaded. The family welcomed it back, excited about their sibling¡¯s upgrade. It bubbled and drew its blades across each other, joy pouring into the link at its new status. Once all of the other pinecrabs got a chance to pinch Jasper¡¯s new blades and sleek shell, we all got back to the important task of waiting to greet the new baby. We didn¡¯t have to wait long. Minutes after Jasper pupated, the tactician form hatched from its egg. Sliding out of the nursery, a tall, thin quadruped landed gently. Four legs stood under a thin, extended oval of an abdomen with a pair of leaflike wing cases. Its thorax rose as a graceful, curved ¡°S¡± shape, with a triangular chest and shoulder region. It had a long, thin neck and a large, pyramidal head housing two sets of serrated mandibles, a mammalian mouth, and a single segmented eye complex with an iridescent hue. It had a pair of thick arms that dropped from its shoulder plates, rose back to nearly the same height after the pointed elbow, and dropped again into a pair of spinnerette studded needles. Its link to the brood seemed oddly weak, but its link to me was the strongest I¡¯d yet felt. ¡°Who is the commander of this force?¡± it sent, the mental voice soft and high. ¡°Me, I supposed.¡± ¡±Nest is!¡± Otto and I spoke simultaneously. The creature bowed to me, eye twinkling in the sunlight. ¡°Ah, a seed progenitor. I am quite happy to be working for one of your importance. Where is the primary colony from here? I will need to confer with their birthing masters; the force they granted you is pathetic and an insult to my master and our mission as a whole.¡± Taken aback, I took a moment to reply. ¡°This is the only colony I know of, and I¡¯m fairly sure we¡¯re the only settlement of our kind on the planet.¡± The mantis like creature went very still, no longer scanning the dirt backing our walls or the pinecrabs jostling each other. ¡°You have had no contact with any other Star Borne?¡± it asked, with no detectable emotion. ¡°Uh, yeah. I think we¡¯re it. I just woke up one day and we¡¯ve been building up from there,¡± I said, worried at her mannerisms. Still motionless, the mantid tactician seemed to take a moment to let my statement sink in. ¡°Muahahahahaha! First landing! I will rule everything!¡± it shouted through the link, glee and ambition pouring off of it in waves. The rest of the brood started to jump and dance. Those that had the limbs for it, at least. The pinecrabs bubbled, Francis the signal wasp whistled and buzzed, the aciditos and snikes flew figure eights, and Probe spun in a circle atop my shell. Matron seemed unimpressed. ¡°Hmm,¡± I sent, ¡°we¡¯re not really aiming to take over, I¡¯d rather we didn¡¯t upset the balance here. Also, I¡¯m not really handing over control of our colony, I¡¯m not sure what you think was happening here.¡± ¡°Oh, no!¡± the tactician sent, embarrassed, ¡°I didn¡¯t mean to imply that, sacred master! Many apologies. My meaning was that I would be most senior in your glorious military, and I just assumed¡­¡± ¡°Assumed?¡± I asked, curious now. The brood seemed to catch on to our calmer mood, and returned to simply examining my new child. ¡°Assumed¡­ that you¡¯d allow me to mutate to control the later leaders of your armies¡­¡± the tactician mantis sent demurely, scratching Jasper behind its uppermost right cleaver joint. ¡°Oh. Sure, there¡¯s no problem with that. There aren¡¯t many plans for expanding the defense force unless we need it, though.¡± Ducking its head, the tactician vibrated its wing case. ¡°Thank you, sacred progenitor. If I may be so bold as to suggest, we would most likely be served by a larger¡­ ¡®defense force¡¯. Our kin will most assuredly perish should any significant threat notice us.¡± ¡°Really?¡± I asked. ¡°Where are you getting this information?¡± It tilted its head at my shell. ¡°The ancestral archive. Surely one of your command vessels must¡­ have¡­¡± It glanced around. ¡°...You have no other command vessels.¡± ¡°Yeah, I didn¡¯t really feel a need to hatch any before now. The only problems we¡¯ve encountered so far have been wild animal and elf attacks. I decided to hatch you because maintaining a direct tactical link to a distant fight is draining.¡± ¡°...I see.¡± The tactician peered about itself. ¡°All of these emplacements are the result of our unenlightened kin¡¯s expertise? Impressive.¡± ¡°Yeah, Sam¡¯s great at the whole supervisor thing. Explain what you need, and you¡¯ll have it done.¡± Sam, feeling that I was conversing about it, sent a pulse of acknowledgement through its link from where it was directing the build-rats and the flower crew. ¡°Sam? The general landing construction symbiote is a Sam?¡± ¡°Yeah, all of my babies get names. Which reminds me, what do you want to be?¡± Seeming confused, it responded ¡°I am a first tier tactical node and restraint deployment platform.¡± ¡°Alright, but what do you want your name to be?¡± I asked patiently. ¡°I don¡¯t understand. Why would I need a name?¡± ¡°All of us have names,¡± I said, ¡°I¡¯m Nest, for example. We¡¯ve got Ralph and Sam, Matron and Dick, Francis and Probe, everyone has a name.¡± ¡°I see,¡± it said. ¡°I think¡­ may I be called Victoria?¡± ¡°Sure, Victoria¡¯s fine. You were saying something about our defenses being insufficient?¡± Rubbing its forelimbs together, Victoria nodded. ¡°We have far less military power than is recommended for a new landing colony. Even one without a focus on¡­ expansion. We should hatch several more combat focused bioconstructs. I would also suggest hatching enlightened breeding, supply, and manufacturing nodes, so that my sacred ancestor isn¡¯t required to directly control the unenlightened. It is¡­ unbecoming.¡± ¡°Wait, I¡¯m not supposed to guide my brood?¡± I asked, a bit insulted. ¡°No, sacred one!¡± Victoria said, aghast. ¡°I simply meant that the direct supervisory labors should be entrusted to lesser beings. Our archives are optimized for such things. We live only to serve your vision.¡± ¡°Ah, I think I understand,¡± I sent. ¡°Sapient children like yourself have memory stores for the types of tasks you¡¯ve been designed for. Alright, I think I see the value there. Don¡¯t be surprised if I have input, though, I think I¡¯ve had us prepping for this elf raid just fine so far.¡± The mantid tactician leaned toward me, eye focused directly on my shell. ¡°Preparing for what?¡± A Knight to Remember Victoria had something of a fit when I explained the information we had received about the elf raid to it. It all but demanded that I immediately direct the construction of another nursery and fill both of them with new guards, and with the colony managers it had described. We managed to fit all three managers and fifteen guards into the current nursery, and I was hesitant to build another just yet. The guards it recommended were designed as generalists, with six black scaled, vertebrae like tentacle limbs, each a meter long and tipped with clawed simian hands. A meter tall, half meter wide central torso shaped like a bird egg housed their organs and was split into two halves by large, serrated toothed mouths. A pair of stalks tipped with translucent globes acted as their visual, auditory, and olfactory sensors. Thin armor and flexible limbs made them quick, but vulnerable. They were also quick to incubate and consumed comparatively little nectar. Their most interesting aspect was the ability to secrete a clay like, waxy red gel that they could shape into numerous tools and weapons. Anything from spears to shields to shovels could be shaped from the sanguine substance, then hardened into a light, porous creation as hard as bronze. Victoria suggested that it take the burden of these children¡¯s links when they hatched. My children could apparently shift primary broodlink nodes to other management creatures, allowing the advisor to sense through and direct its less intelligent siblings. I tried to shift Bolt¡¯s link to Anna, but it couldn¡¯t hold the information torrent and the broodlink snapped back to me. Anna apparently enjoyed the experience, but found it very strange to be locked into a single viewpoint. The first manager that hatched was the supply supervisor. It was a fairly small and fast flying creature, a squirming mass of tentacles and dark scales with six iridescent, birdlike wings and a large and varied array of sensory apparati. It was intended to work between several close complexes and colonies, cataloging and optimizing the logistics of running each village. It had an overpowered transmission lobe that allowed it to relay data to a central authority without causing a drain on stamina. Its receiving cortex was of normal size, though, so two way links were still costly. The manufacturing and construction supervisor was a lithe quadruped with no head, a thin torso, and twelve mucosal eyestalks arranged in pairs along its black shelled body¡¯s length. It used the long proboscis that protruded from its front end to probe and repair structures. Light on its hooves, it could climb vertical glass surfaces with no issue, and jump ten meters in a single leap. It could use ground penetrating echolocation to decide on structural shapes and materials, was adept at guiding small scale sundries production, and had a good database of common alchemical preparations and enchanting glyphs, though we would need to gather rare reagents to use most of them. The breeding manager ended up being a winged orb fifteen centimeters tall with no features aside from its four dragonfly-like wings. With an amorphous main body, it was able to glow brightly green via a bioluminescent chemical in the capillary veins of its transparent epidermis. The whole creature was nearly invisible when not glowing, and the texture of its skin acted as a baffle to echolocation. Scentless, silent, and exothermic, it was basically untraceable when it wasn¡¯t glowing. The supervisory techniques within its archives were formulated to apportion the resources supplied by a logistics governor to the needs of the manufacturing and combat managers, then send back collated data and future growth predictions to the logistician. The construction supervisor wanted to be called Amari, the breeding manager was Harold, and the logistician would be Lain. The guards weren¡¯t fully sapient, and expressed little preference toward names. Victoria suggested that until they developed their latent personalities and could decide for themselves, they should be given temporary designators. As a group, we decided on the first fifteen letters of the ancient Greek alphabet, from Alpha through Omicron. If we decided to hatch more, we would extend the designation scheme through the rest of the letters, then move on to other alphabets. The hexadaunt guards were gregarious, playful children, and spent most of their free time roughhousing, sculpting, and investigating the colony and its surroundings. Apparently this was an intentional design choice, allowing them to grow through experience with their bodies and organic crafting materials, and to easily recognise the specifics of the area they were tasked to guard. Victoria spent some of its afternoon and early evening drilling the hexadaunts on solo and group tactics, first letting them try various tasks like charging, dodging, and holding positions, then showing them how to use those tricks together to defend the colony more effectively. The tactician also did some training with the pinecrabs, aciditos, and snikes, but that was more a matter of getting them used to specific actions than general training. For example, the pinecrabs were taught to march in formation and volley together on a cue. The snikes were taught to focus on smaller, faster targets before larger, slower ones. The aciditos were made to dive swiftly and bounce away from a target while releasing acid on the rebound when landing wasn¡¯t safe. Jasper was a bit of an outlier. Non-sapient, it was by far the strongest of any of my combat capable brood. It didn¡¯t really fit into the rest of the strategy, however. Victoria¡¯s best plan was to have Jasper target anything on the edges of an enemy force during a melee, picking off larger opponents while remaining somewhat apart from the main flow of battle. Its dark shell and lack of distraction organs meant that it would be useful as a command killer as well, as long as commanders could be identified. Jasper wasn¡¯t really capable of discerning that sort of thing by itself. One interesting development around the new arrivals was their type. Instead of ¡°abomination, minon,¡± they carried the designation of ¡°abomination, leader, vassal,¡± and were first level. When a minion¡¯s broodlink was transferred to one of them, the minion would drop to first level. Additionally, it seemed that the mite swarm Otto was an ¡°abomination, vassal¡± as well, without the leader type. This was both useful and harmful, as my increased level granted my children more health and stamina, but Victoria could hunt and level up much more quickly than I could. So that was what it set out to do. Victoria first gained the scan skill, brought it to level three, and then marched into the forest with five hexadaunts with shields and axes as back up. It made sure to scan each creature before approaching and to only attack creatures leveled five or below. With Otto (who also gained the scan skill) and Probe acting as scouts, the team was more than able to avoid the few higher leveled stags and elephant birds in the area. Victoria¡¯s combat technique consisted of trapping and then skewering its opponents. Deftly weaving its arms, it would knit a tethered net with its spinnerets and needle tipped arms, then hurl the sticky webbing at a target. Reeling the unfortunate beast in, it jabbed its needles lightning fast into the head or chest, trying to end the prey in a single strike. In the few cases where a doe or giant tree lizard fought back, Victoria would leap and dodge to one side, then pounce on the target from above. Only once did the hexadaunts need to get involved. When Victoria dodged away from one doe¡¯s hoof jabs, it landed on the web of a giant trap door spider. The nearly two meter long arachnid leapt from her burrow and tried to grab my mantid commander. Victoria managed to evade the grab, but with two fairly potent foes bearing down on it, the situation would have been difficult to salvage alone. Five heavily armed soldiers, however, changed the odds significantly. Wearing their shields on one arm, and wielding their massive axes in three, the hexadaunts charged from the undergrowth and slew both creatures before they could turn. ¡°Sacred Master Nest, I have gained the class Sergeant, due to commanding five fighters in combat,¡± Victoria sent. ¡°My toughness, processing, organization, instinct, and charisma have risen by two points each. I have a selection of talents available, would you like a list?¡± ¡°No, I trust you to make your own decisions. What do you think we¡¯ll need?¡± ¡°Emboldening Presence or Steadfast Positioning. I believe that Emboldening Presence would be best, as it is a general enhancement to damage given and resisted by combatants under my command, while Steadfast Positioning is only useful during defensive sieges.¡± ¡°Sounds great. Are you going to keep hunting through the night?¡± ¡°Yes, sacred master.¡± ¡°Alright, just keep us posted on anything you need.¡± ----- While Victoria was hunting, the rest of the leadership and I were planning the next phase of our defenses for the upcoming raid. Amari was going over the alchemic products we could concoct in the short time we had remaining. Weak healing potions and mild strength stimulants were cheap and simple to make, while salves of flame or frost resistance were more complex, but still doable. If we could take down another adult power hog, its lightning mana gland would allow us a small amount of a potent movement and agility boosting resinous incense. Harold and Lain were discussing the costs and benefits of producing another nectar tower, and how many more children we could afford to feed. If the spring didn¡¯t slow down, we could sustain three more nectar towers, or two nectar towers and up to two more tiny nurseries. The third option was to create one new nectar tower and a small nursery, but the growth times of the creatures born from a small nursery were long enough that we couldn¡¯t be sure they¡¯d be hatched in time for the raid. Unfortunate, really, because the thirty by thirty by thirty meter growth space could have allowed for a very strong baby.This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it The palisade was complete, and we were working on a deep escape tunnel. Harold and Louise had also successfully advocated for a second defensive structure around myself, on the grounds that none of them could establish broodlinks with the newly hatched, so the colony would be doomed if I were lost. I conceded the point, with the caveat that the escape first tunnel¡¯s entrance was built away from my position, so that the rest of the noncombatants in the brood would be less noticeable if they had to run from an unwinnable battle. Better that they have the chance to live out their lives in peace than forcing them to die protecting me. We also discussed building a hidden outpost elsewhere. Dick, or another nectar transfusion creature, could be made to mutate into an immobile colony node. It was decided that we would establish an underground or undersea base as soon as time permitted, and research was started into what nectar source might be best for such a base to function from. The hexadaunts were tasked with sculpting spears and atlatl to throw them with, in case additional ranged combat was needed. The marrow clay in the spears was supplemented with stones from around the spring¡¯s edge; this allowed for more weight at the point of impact. The hexadaunts carefully scraped the edges of their spear blades, sharpening them against the hardened lizard stone. Short wooden stakes were placed into the trench surrounding the palisade, and longer ones were being constructed to act as a dissuading fence beyond that. The towering build-rats were acting as lookouts when their adhesive mucus wasn¡¯t needed. Nothing large or dangerous approached the village for most of the night. However, about two hours before sun up Roscoe and Bolt spotted elfs in the woods, approaching the north-western wall of the palisade. Ten or so, though they were unsure of the exact numbers; the elfs were making a point of being stealthy. I sent a message to Victoria, telling it of the incoming group and directing it to return. It had ranged far, though, and would be returning from the west, so even if the battle was still ongoing when it got to us it would be most effective in a flanking attack. Francis was directed to warn the oncoming elfs that we would fire on them if they approached any closer. Their answer was a volley of arrows, several of which nearly struck the transparent wasp from the sky. It was able to dodge everything fairly well, as none of the shots were aimed perfectly. The elfs grouped up and ducked behind some trees, then one of their number who carried a crystalline spetum raised her weapon in one hand and tossed a powder over the group with the other. They then spread out and began moving toward us once again. I directed Pop and Bam to fire two shots each, targeting the treeline short of the elfen position. Screaming through the air, the paired shots arced a high, steep angle into the night sky, then lanced down to land in the brush and leaves beneath the canopy. Enormous cracking thuds and a scattered patter of stone and soil raining back to the ground followed. The elfs weren¡¯t dissuaded by the shots. Instead, the six visible wielders of hand to hand weapons started charging at our palisade and the four known archers launched arrows from their massive, vine strung bows on ballistic trajectories into the colony. The surface of the nectar mushroom stopped the majority of the shots, and the few that got through plinked off of my Fortress Scale and the shells of my defensive children. The moartoads launched fusillades of pollyrockets against the aggressors. The rapid fire explosions sprayed stone and dust against the palisade, but the elf archers kept up their shots. Somehow, the blasts were being deflected a few meters above their heads, skewing off into the forest behind them. There was a two meter dome of clear air that no shots or dust could penetrate around each of the elfs. Their melee fighters closed quickly with the trench before the wall, most carrying bronze axes or daggers in each hand. Two clear leaders carried massive, paddle like leaves as greatswords, each surrounded by a cloud of silver pollen drifting from the flowering pommels. Scan: Opposed roll failed, level up to try again! Apparently there was some sort of stealthing ability able to oppose our scan skills, which I wanted to learn more about. Hiding the brood¡¯s power, or lack thereof, would go far toward stopping further attacks like this if we survived the true raid. The spetum wielding mage reached the tree closest to our walls, planted her weapon into the ground by the spiked ferrule, then the elf drew a bean pod from the pouch at her waist and spat on it. She waved a green glowing right hand over the implement and began chanting. Hoping to stop whatever she was casting, I had the moartoads concentrate their shots around her, but she ignored the ineffective shots. The melee elfs seemed to be waiting at the edge of our trench, none willing to risk being the first to try themselves against our claws, I assumed. I was wrong. The elf mage finished her chanting, the green glow that had been building around her hands and torso suddenly swirling like smoke being drawn into the bean pod. She then cast it to the ground of the trench. Sprouting from the soil, thick green stalks wound along the earth, weaving a path through the brush to the elf mage¡¯s feet. Then they spiralled around the logs of the palisade, tendrils splitting the wood and tearing it aside to form a living green archway and stairs into our colony. The pinecrabs and hexadaunts rushed to fill the gap, but the elfs¡¯ hand-to-hand warriors poured into the breach. The first pair of elf fighters was stopped dead by the rage volleys of the pinecrabs. The elfs still standing on the beanstalk were protected by the clear globes, but the ones on the bare earth were struck by the spines and shards, with one unlucky attacker getting a spike in the eye. I had five of the hexadaunts hurl javelins into the two unprotected elfs, the spears striking through the head and throat of the northern one, and the thigh, chest, and gut of the other. Level 7 Elf Scout Defeated! + 7 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 4 Elf Scout Defeated! + 4 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 6 Elf Scout Defeated! + 6 XP (%10 due to minion kill) The two leaf wielding elfs were next, and they seemed unimpressed by the deaths of their fellows. They strode forward, the quills of the pinecrabs, javelins of the hexadaunts, and spikes of the snikes breaking upon and not penetrating their flawless skin. The taller, broader male spun his leaf greatsword with a flourish, bisecting Flint¡¯s upper right claw with virtually no effort. The pinecrab chattered and pulled back, but three of its siblings grabbed the elf by the arms and dragged him struggling into the colony. As soon as his feet left the vine stalk, the shimmering dome around him winked out. The female leaf wielder was more careful, thrusting from a plow stance, sword held at an angle pointing up from her hip line. This kept the pinecrabs at bay; none of my children wanted to lose appendages. I had the pinecrabs holding the male hold him where he would be visible to the female, directed a pair of hexadaunts to hold javelins to his neck and left armpit, then sent Francis in to negotiate again and reduced the volume of the pinecrab clicking. Melodious tones of violin like music accompanying its buzzing voice, I spoke through Francis. ¡°If you leave, we will release this male. We do not want to be your enemies.¡± The female shifted on her feet nervously, glancing back at the mage. The mage stepped forward on the vine, an imperious look on her face. ¡°What kingdom do you belong to, demon? Who is your summoner, and why are they not overseeing you?¡± she asked. ¡°We aren¡¯t demons! We¡¯re an independent family of peace lovers, we aren¡¯t from any kingdom, let alone one of your enemies.¡± The elfen mage spat at Francis, who dodged the spray and flew up out of reach. ¡°Demon or not, you¡¯re barbarian animals who need to be put down,¡± she said, raising her polearm. The other close combat elfs charged forward, except for the female greatsword wielder. She stood to the side, eyes on the male my children had captured. I had my pinecrabs pull him back while the hexadaunts engaged the fighters. Their spears clattered against the blades of their foes, while the mage cast a spell that wrapped the elfs¡¯ skins in thick viney armor. The spell seemed to require concentration to maintain it, but it made the swings of their blades much stronger and faster. My hexadaunts had to use three limbs to hold their blocking spears, and three more to brace themselves or risk being forced back. The strikes of their siblings weren¡¯t able to pierce the vines, which writhed and twisted to intercept each thrust. We needed to end the mage before anyone was injured or killed, but she was behind their lines and immune to our projectile attacks. Our only hope was to separate her from her defenders while she was occupied with the spell. Fortunately, we had the hero we needed. Jasper had skulked around the wall while the rest of us were distracted by the parley and the combat. From the ditch moat, it had found a position hidden by the gloom of night and occluded by the beanstalk bridge. Sighting in carefully with both claws, it launched its mucus coated tentacles from their sphincters with surprising force, two soft sucking noises and a spray of viscous organic glue following them. Both of the tentacles flew true, the bushy mass at their tips splatting against the mage¡¯s right arm and pelvis and rapidly cocooning the elf in dripping black flesh that glistened in the moonlight. Jasper tugged, and the tentacles reeled the mage in like a fishing line. Looming over the elf, my child seemed to glare down at the invader with pity, before lining up its great amber colored blades and sliding them crossways through her slender neck, cutting through armor and bone with a wet ¡®shinnk¡¯ sound. Level 18 Elf Greenspeaker Witch Defeated! + 36 XP (%10 due to minion kill) The vines covering the elf combatants withered to flakes and dust in moments. The bridging beanstalk turned black and started to rapidly rot beneath the elf swordswoman¡¯s feet. The shimmering domes around all of them popped like bubbles. This, of course, spelled the end for the rest of the combatants. The lesser melee fighters were swiftly impaled, their limbs spiked to the ground or removed by my pinecrabs and hexadaunts. The archers were headshot by my snikes, their stationary locations within the treeline making them easy targets. Level 12 Elf Archer Defeated! + 12 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 11 Elf Archer Defeated! + 11 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 9 Elf Archer Defeated! + 9 XP (%10 due to minion kill) Level 13 Elf Archer Defeated! + 13 XP (%10 due to minion kill) The living elfs were all dragged into the materials depot of our colony, where I had the hexadaunts secure them in place, the elfs kneeling with their ankles crossed and their arms behind their backs (those who still had all of their limbs, of course.) We then set about treating their wounds as best we could. I ensured that they were placed on a soft, gel like secretion of the build rats¡¯ make, something between wax and hair providing warmth. Now came the difficult task of interrogation. I wasn¡¯t looking forward to it.