They want to stay here? I suppose it could not hurt to have someone with actual hands here to help with work around here. Although, I have a feeling that Red might come back to exact revenge or something which is less than appealing. Especially since I am apparently capped out on my drones.

I can not even begin constructing a core to increase my drone limit yet and I doubt that GW-3N just so happened to know how to either. Not that it would matter since I doubt I have the required materials to make it from scratch. Maybe there are some more materials or a blueprint further down into the factory but that would require GW-3N to open the door.

Sighing to myself about how Red might pose a future annoyance, I tell my drone to give an affirmative answer to GW-3N that they can stay as long as they help out around the factory. The spider does this by chittering in their strange binary-like language which GW-3N seems to understand as she thanks the spider.

I then ordered the spider to get GW-3N’s attention, which they do by using their front legs to tug on GW-3N’s leg while emitting a beeping sound. GW-3N looked down curiously at my drone before realizing what they wanted as the spider in question began scratching at the door like a puppy who wanted in.

I chuckle internally at the thought of a spider the size of a puppy chasing its non-existent tail while GW-3N walks up to the door and grips the handle. Then the blue robot unceremoniously swings the door wide open which I began to peer into the newly revealed hallway. The walls were made of the same kind of metal-reinforced concrete that the other rooms were made of but unfortunately the hallway was devoid of any sources of lights.

This meant that anything farther than a half dozen feet away from the door was masked in a blanket of black nothingness which would make traversing here slightly annoying. This did not stop my five spiders from scuttling down into the dark without any hesitation, although I was not complaining since their joints glowed just bright enough to light up a couple feet in front of them which meant I could now see.

Soon my spiders arrived at the end of the hallway where they were met by a door on both sides. Above the doors was a sign denoting that the door on the left led to the storeroom and the other led to the staircase. GW-3N opened the door on the left which revealed a, still unlit, room filled with a number of shelves and crates along with the noises of something scurrying inside the room.

Peering into the other door, I could see two staircases which went up and down. Inspecting further, I saw that the stairs leading up had a bunch of collapsed rubble which blocked me from going any further. This left me with two choices, either to go into the store room or down the stairs.

Deciding to explore the first floor before going deeper into the factory, I ordered my drones to move into the room and check for what was making that scurrying noise. As they entered the room, they were met by more than a dozen small rat looking drones which were rummaging through one of the crates. Then, as if just noticing my drones, the rats stopped what they were doing and began growling.

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Then the rats jumped off the crate and charged my spiders who immediately braced themselves and prepared to strike back at their attackers. The two lines clashed against each other and it was immediately evident that my spiders had the upper hand against the much smaller rats even if they were outnumbered three to one.

The rat’s small bites and scratches did not seem to be strong enough to inflict much more than surface damage which was not the case for the spider bites which seemed to be able to disable or outright snap the rats in half. Their advantage was further pushed into victory as GW-3N decided to help out by stomping on one of the rats which caused the others to panic due to the fact that they had absolutely no chance against GW-3N.

This panic soon boiled over into full retreat which was swiftly taken advantage of by my spiders who used their front legs to grab the fleaing rats before they quickly ended them. And with that the ‘battle,’ if you could call it that, was over as the last of the rats were either executed or managed to run away fast enough to avoid the death sentence by the hands of my spiders. Looking upon the carnages, I could see that my spiders had taken out twelve of the fifteen or so rats which attacked them while only sustaining minimal damages in most cases.

The outlier was the spider who was fighting at the very end of the formation and thus had almost no support from their brothers in arms which had resulted in the rats somehow managing to cut something important which left one of their legs lying limp on the ground which was severely hampering their ability to move. Thankfully my spiders were able to patch them back up after a few minutes of repairs which was nice.

Floating over to some of the destroyed rats, I could see that they had dozens of tiny antennae all across their body along with two slightly larger radar dishes which replaced where their ears would have been. Then, as I was inspecting the corpse of a particularly intact corpse, a description screen appeared in front of me which displayed in formation on the rat drones which were apparently called ATR-S or All Terrain Reconnaissance Scouts.

The description stated that ATR-S were made to be cheap, mass produced, disposable scouts which could be sent in large quantities into urban areas and would act as miniature sensor beacons which would relay information to their allies. It also stated that their programming was exceptionally basic, not needing much more than orders to find an undisturbed corner where they could still transmit stuff, which meant that they took very little computing power to keep operating.

These traits came at a cost however as the ATR-S were incredibly fragile and were pitiful in combat due to the lack of any sort of protection or advanced weaponry. The only military application that they could be used for asides from simply scouting was to act as an early warning system when enemy units moved near them.

Having a few scouts could not hurt and the fact that they were cheap and did not take up too much bandwidth was further incentive to get at least a couple of them. With that taken care of, I was now free to begin snooping around in all of these crates which were sure to have at least a few goodies that I could use.

After a few minutes of having GW-3N open various crates and cataloging the contents of them, I eventually calculated that the crates possessed a decent amount of materials which would certainly be helpful whenever I found the blueprint for a core which unfortunately was not one of the things stored in the crates. Welp, time to continue the search.