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.
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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.”