Chapter 10: Finale!
Frontal Lobes
Surrounded by his scuttling entourage, Lucas slowly made his way down the tunnel into Deep Arach territory. The massively oversized Cave Arach acted as vanguard, checking ahead for threats. Lucas encountered no resistance, but a sense of foreboding grew as he descended. When he reached the opening of the Broodmother's pit he peeked over the edge and immediately entered Stealth. The Broodmother had hatched another three Neo Deep Arachs, apparently from its own Mana reserves since it had nothing to sacrifice.
It looked preoccupied, probably draining Mana to hatch another Arach. Its Mana pool and regeneration must be immense to hatch Arachs so fast. Even so, she must have drained her reserves by this point. She probably needed Mana to sustain her acid attacks. Apparently she didn't consider Lucas a big enough threat to conserve Mana to defend herself in combat. Lucas was happy to be underestimated. The Broodlings had gathered near, so he dropped Stealth and let a warrior’s hostility sweep through him and radiate from his Aura. The Bodyguard Cave Arach ran down the slope at incredible speed, almost in free fall. The little nuggets of hard shell scrambled forwards and tipped over the edge, tumbling down the rock face like an avalanche of walnuts. Lucas held on to the ledge, watching with apprehension.
The Broodmother was so focused on what she was doing that the Bodyguard Cave Arach had made it half the way down before she responded. Her Aura flashed with alarm, and the three Neo Deep Arach moved to intercept. They didn’t accomplish much as his huge Cave Arach barrelled into them. One of their Auras exploded on impact and the other two went flying.
The Broodmother suddenly lurched and a tremendous impact shook the cavern. Lucas almost slipped into the pit when the ground underneath him shook. The smell of broken rock and dust filled the cavern and the bodyguard Cave Arach’s Aura had vanished. The little nugget Broodlings, however, were now tumbling all over her. Some of them slid underneath and immediately grabbed hold of her tremendous abdomen, others getting knocked into various nooks of her carapace or resting on her back.
A great hissing sound came up from below as the acid gas was released. After a moment, several of the nugget’s Auras exploded. Probably the ones stuck on their back or otherwise unable to shelter in their armour. Most of them remained however, and began using their hooked feet to manoeuvre around her body, looking for places to insert their long fangs. Flashes of sadistic joy came from the nuggets underneath, apparently she wasn't well shielded from below. The gas stopped after only a moment, either she had run out of Mana or didn't want to start melting herself from prolonged exposure. Unable or unwilling to rely on her gas, she turned to her only other option.
The Broodmother started thrashing around at the bottom of her pit, ripping up tons of rock and making a noise so tremendous that shielding Lucas’ ears did not help one bit. The noise rattled through his entire body, threatening to shake him apart as he clung desperately to the rock floor. The sound stopped but the incredible vibration didn't, which meant his ear drums had been ripped. When the Broodmother finally stopped, he peered over the edge. Of the 20 nuggets Lucas had made, only 11 remained. They held on with belligerent stubbornness, pumping venom all the harder.
After a moment's rest the Broodmother started to thrash again, but the energy of it was much reduced. She was exhausting herself quickly, and probably starting to feel the effects of the venom. Once she grew weak enough, whatever muscles she used to keep the pressure on the acid chamber would loosen, letting out a huge amount of compressed acid that would melt her own underbelly. Once the thrashing stopped, only one more nugget had been dislodged.
The end was inevitable now, but would probably take a long time. The Broodmother would release an unimaginable amount of Mana when she died. If Lucas had something prepared it would be an excellent opportunity to accomplish something important, maybe the best opportunity he was going to get. After pondering this for a while, looking at the scene in the pit, Lucas came up with an idea.
He went back up to the stash of paralysed Cave Arachs, being greeted by the two little Broodlings he had left to guard them. He checked his Mana levels. Seeing that he had recovered 1, he attached his Regeneration Bracelet. He then got hold of two paralysed Cave Arachs and began dragging them back towards the pit. His ears recovered almost immediately, so he stashed the bracelet again. The Broodmother was thrashing again as he made his way down, but when he got to the pit she was motionless. Her Aura still burned with hostility and the nuggets were still pumping venom.
Lucas dumped the paralysed Arachs over the edge, and went to retrieve two more as they tumbled down to join the Broodmother. Slowly, over the course of several hours Lucas dragged every single paralysed Arach down to the pit, even the ones that were twitching and squirming. One of the Deep Arach had recovered enough to try spraying acid at him, resulting in a trail of hissing dribble behind them as he dragged it. By the time he had all of the paralysed Arachs in the pit, the Broodmother’s Aura had gone dull. She was still conscious but had lost the ability to fight back. His Broodlings continued to pump venom furiously. It was only a matter of time now before she lost control of the pressurised acid.
The pit was like a great tube. When his first batch of Broodlings had died down there their energy had become trapped by the shape, funnelling into the Broodmother for harvesting. If all the Arachs died down there, the energy from their Auras would have no place to go except up the length of the tube towards him. Under normal circumstances most of the energy released when an Aura exploded was wasted, as it blasted out in all directions. This would vastly increase the amount of Mana harvestable from each death. Lucas pulled out an egg and his Brood Nexus, opening his new design interface.
What to do with one incredibly tremendous influx of Mana? His first thought was to put a human brain into an Arach and change its shape to be more humanoid. But after mulling over this thought, he decided that was really just a sign he had grown very lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Another Broodmother to lay eggs for him sounded good. She could set up a Brood here and he could return every now and then to take some of her eggs. Was there anything even bigger he could hope for? This could be his best, or only, opportunity to accomplish something big. A familiar cold anger bubbled up, and he started thinking about weapons to kill the slavers, some kind of perfect avatar of vengeance.
Familiar now with the damage that anger had done to his soul, he dismissed it as too small, too petty. What did he really need? To find a way home?. Did he even have a home now that he had lost everyone he loved? Could it be possible that he regained his memories if he got back? If things only got worse in this world, having the option to go back seemed like the right choice. However, he couldn't hatch a portal home using a spider egg. He had no idea how to start finding a way home, but maybe he could make something to help him figure it out.
Lucas changed the spider in the interface into a Broodmother, which instantly set the cost to 50 Mana. He then shifted his focus to the Mana that coursed through his body to come up with an imprint of his brain, and fed that into the Nexus. The resulting spider had two brains. A tiny spider brain and a large human one. The increase in complexity blew up the Mana cost. That wasn't what he wanted anyway, having two brains implied having two personalities. He had to merge them.
That made things tricky. The brains fused in the interface when he pressed them together, but it was hard to predict what the result would be. From what Lucas understood about the human brain, it was divided loosely into two parts. At the rear was the ‘old brain’ that handled survival instincts and movements etc, and the front was the parts that handled rational enquiry and imagination etc. Leaving the ‘old brain’ parts as spider brain and adding on the frontal lobes from the human brain seemed to make sense. It would have all the instincts required to be a functional Arach but also have access to the formidable human intellect and ability to predict complex outcomes.
This still however wouldn't come close to making use of the amount of Mana Lucas expected to get. He had 39 Arachs. Each of these could be sacrificed for 8 Mana under normal circumstances. If the pit focused the Mana as expected maybe he could get 10 or 12 or more per Arach. That meant 400 or more Mana from the Arachs and whatever the Broodmother gave off. Deciding that might be twenty or so, he aimed to use 420 Mana in this design. He began fusing extra frontal lobes into the brain, layering them into each other over and over.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
Soon there was so much mass of brain matter that he had to relocate the creature's brain into its abdomen, swelling its size considerably. He hoped that the effect would be something like a multi-core processor for a computer, able to multitask great quantities of work. It would theoretically have the ability to process multiple threads of logic at once, and to cross reference them against each other in order to deduce new information. By the time the cost had reached 400 Mana he had 23 human brains worth of cerebral mass woven together into a single tremendous organ. An array of new support organs then became necessary to support the brain matter, extra hearts, lungs and an expanded vascular and nerve system, all adding to the tangled mess of biomass.
The Broodmother's default lifespan was about 100 years. He didn't want to wait a long time for it to do something useful, so he reduced it all the way down to 1 year. That reduced the base cost considerably, allowing him to go up to the equivalent of 39 human brains at a cost of 418 Mana.
‘Time to see if a giant spider with 39 brains can think of a way to get me home.’ This certainly wasn't what he would have imagined himself doing a few days ago, but, these were the tools he had to work with. With his design complete, Lucas sat with his legs over the edge of the pit and watched the scene below. The nuggets were still pumping venom into the Broodmother, but her Aura stubbornly held on to the last thread of consciousness. She was focused on him, hostile as ever, like she was refusing to die out of pure spite. After watching for a while longer, he began to hear a low hissing sound from below.
That was his signal, she had finally let go. Lucas Stood up by the edge of the pit and held out the Brood Nexus and his heavily modified egg. A sizzling sound was coming from below.
That was probably a pool of acid forming under the Broodmother that would boil her belly away. The nugget Broodlings under her belly had relocated onto her back but continued their work. He didn't have to wait long, the Broodmother went first. A tremendous explosion of energy released at the bottom of the pit. The energy burst, but having only one direction to flow, it formed into a whipping cyclone that shot up the pit and hit Lucas head on. It was far more powerful than he had imagined.
He was only able to suck a fraction of it into the Nexus, as if he was too small of a gateway for such vast quantities of power. As the concentrated energy continued to blast at him, a painful stretching sensation built, pushing against the limit of Mana he could channel at once. Whatever was ‘stretching’ it wasn't fast enough. As the flood of Mana turned into a torrent, the bottle-neck that limited the flow within him began to break.
Lucas thought he might be screaming but couldn't hear himself. The flood of power forcing its way through him generated a type of pain he could never have imagined. Just as he thought it might be reaching a plateau, the other Arachs in the pit began to dissolve in the acid. The force of the Mana concentrated exponentially, trapped in a narrow tunnel with no way out except through him. Fresh waves of power continued to build on top of each other, and his defences crumbled completely under the overwhelming force. Incomprehensible quantities of power tore through him, totally overwhelming his sense of self and leaving him feeling as helpless as a leaf in a cyclone.
Lucas felt sure he would explode as the power forced its way into every fibre of his being. Like trapped flood waters, the Mana within him forced open a set of structures and patterns that had existed only as potential. That potential, although improbable, became inescapable as it was the only possible remaining path for the energy to be released. The pressure forced into existence new patterns, a new path of least resistance, a new valve to release the pressure.
Lucas' consciousness began to smear out across the present, his experience of reality elongating as if time was being stretched out. Impossibly, he continued to experience the slowed moment he was in, even as time moved without him. The stretching reached a breaking point, but instead of breaking he split in two. What was him from a moment ago separated completely to form a duplicate mind. He found himself suddenly sharing his space and time with another ‘him’ who existed only a moment ago. It was only a thought, a consciousness with no body that floated in his Aura, given psychic form by his own Mana. He and his new duplicate mind had not even a split second to consider each other before it too was inundated with Mana, immediately stretched to its limit like he had been.
This effectively doubled the amount of Mana being channelled into the egg but it still wasn't enough. A cascade of new Arach Auras were exploding down in the pit, including all his Broodlings. The torrent of power continued to escalate violently. The way had already been opened now, a new pattern formed. When the pressure of the Mana within him built again to critical levels it simply resulted in a new duplicate to channel more power.
The pain was over now. The flow of Mana was pouring into the Nexus at a torrential rate. Lucas and four echoes of himself were capable of channelling the entire flood of Mana into the egg. There had been several popups but they were dismissed immediately. He looked at the egg. It had been totally overloaded with Mana, far more than he had planned for. The interface showed 879 Mana out of 420 required. He quickly altered the design in the only way that made sense, more brains. The flow of energy was coming to an end as he finished.
The Mana cost and the Mana available came to an equilibrium at 937. A gigantic, labyrinthine, twisted mass of an organ worth 76 brains pulsated in his design interface. The Cave Arach Broodmother design was bulbous by nature, but the tremendous mass that he had added to its abdomen had thrown its body proportions by the 76 brains, hugely expanded nerve and vascular system, and array of additional hearts required to support it.
He closed it and watched as the egg beside him grew until it filled almost the entire width of the cavern. The egg split and a tremendous amount of biological mass spilled out into the cavern. It didn't stop growing, but without room to expand it distended grotesquely unto the contours of the rock, completely plugging the path down into the Deep Arach Broodmother's hole. Lucas couldn't see it's form properly with only his Aura perception in the perfect darkness, but he was certain that it was stuck fast, its hopelessly insufficient legs would be able to do nothing more than writhe and scratch at the rock around it.
Its Aura was like nothing Lucas could have imagined. It was vast and empty, pure as crystal, except for a tiny part at the core which held all the Arach instincts. That was the little bit of spider brain he had left in the design. It was so dwarfed by the empty expanse of fresh consciousness that the Arach part might as well have been a pebble dropped into an ocean. The creature looked at him, and from that tiny core, a single thought radiated throughout the purity of a vast and utterly fresh mind.
‘Master.’
Definitions of shape and form suddenly shot through the Aura as its potent intellect sprang to life, forced to recognise its own existence for the very first time though utterly devoid of context. Lucas looked on in fascination as the implications of that single thought triggered an explosion of new realisations. The inner workings of its consciousness were laid bare, as every thought echoed in the purity of its vast and empty Aura. It delved into an introspection so deep that Lucas quickly met the limitations of his own intellect trying to follow the chain of realisations. Far beyond his comprehension it stretched, with only the three facts at its disposal; that it existed, that he existed, and that he was its master.
That was enough to start a chain reaction of deductive logic which exponentially expanded into a series of deep insights into the nature of reality. Its incomprehensible intellect pulled apart every implication and every rational conclusion in a vast expanding web of insight. Each conclusion was a catalyst for thousands more, like an expanding fractal of logic. Soon the web began to reach dead ends where, instead of a conclusion, a question was left that required new information.
This continued until every chain of logic ended in a question. It had exhausted every possible insight that could be reached with those three facts alone. The thing then turned to Lucas with an obvious and desperate hunger to know more. Lucas felt that it would glean, from any single thing he said or did, so much information that it would be sent spiralling into a storm of logic that could end up reverse engineering the fabric of reality.
Lucas tore his eyes away from it so he could think straight. What could he say to it? He was sure it would understand him, from the impressions of speech in his Aura. He turned to face the creature again, who was watching him with curiosity so intense that it resembled a desperate and fierce hunger.
“Um... find a way for me to get home.” He finally croaked out.
That simple sentence was a bewildering bombardment of new information that sent the beings' Aura spinning so wildly that just looking at it made him woozy. Implications began to multiply off each other exponentially, expanding in networks as it reeled from successive chains of profound realisations.
This had already been, by far and away, the most exhausting day of Lucas’s life. He hadn't slept in a long time and this was all just becoming a bit much. So, he decided to leave it to figure it out and went to find a place to have a nap.