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 ±0/min
Mana: 50/50 +.3/min
Stamina: 220/220 ±0/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.
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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.