Tom was sitting on the floor at the far end of the maze. It was a dead end of a particularly long offshoot. That meant the patrolling drones only rarely visited it. Coupled with camouflage and several silent alarms he left behind, he knew he could safely work in the man cave of his own spirit.
Juggling several ideas, he was looking for an optimal way of disposing of the drones. An overwhelming force was out of the question here - he would be the one getting overwhelmed with a straightforward approach. But thanks to [[Targeted Analysis]], he had a couple of good leads. Unlike the general [[Passive Analysis]], it wasn't optimized for efficiency but could drill down on specific information. He has killed enough drones to have plenty of spiritual leftovers to work with, but since he wasn't going anywhere, he took the time to deploy the passive [[Essence Funnel]]. Normally its function was to speed up the spirit cultivation, but Tom repurposed it into scouting ability. Whenever Essence abilities were used, inevitably, a residue would be left in the environment. Any individual scrap of Essence would contain minuscule information about its originator. Recombining the myriad of Essence motes into coherent information required fighting the entropy that tried to disperse them further. This meant spending the very Essence that [[Essence Funnel]] worked hard to gather. All in all, resource-wise, the Skill was a minimal net negative, but the information it yielded was very recent and therefore, valuable.
It was a bit of strain on Tom to keep all the individual skills going, but it was a welcome bit of exercise. His current abilities were a far cry from the time when two simple skills were enough to give him a killer headache. Granted, shifting his mind toward his spirit helped tremendously, but even then, there was a limit he didn't dare to cross. The rising Essence costs were one thing, but the insidious thing was escalating spirit damage. Not a thing he wanted to risk without a damn good reason. But if done in moderation, it would strengthen his spirit's ability to recuperate. This ability to repair the damage was an innate property of any spirit, only made stronger by the System. It could grow, however, and his System even tracked it with a numerical value.
Spirit regeneration 13.7
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Hours passed. The guardian drones calmed down. Tom's ideas were refined into concrete solutions.
The first ingredient would be tracking. Detailed analysis the Ral-Goth's instincts made clear several things. Among others: Ral-Goth were cowards as a species. In case the swarm was to face annihilation it would rapidly divide into several sub-swarms and try to escape. Such a dispersed swarm would be severely weakened, but making sure all of them were eliminated was the real challenge. Tom had several ideas, but ultimately most of them were limited in range or couldn't guarantee complete success. An individualized approach was his ultimate choice. Instead of a single method to track all of the drones, almost two hundred tiny crystals were assembled on the floor next to him. Each was surrounded by a miniature formation that slowly attuned the crystal inside. [[Induce Resonance]] was a surprisingly versatile ability, if on the slower side of things. Yet, given several hours, each and every drone was linked to a single crystal. Such a tracking device was fantastically specific, which naturally made it easy to work over a very long range. Even better, these crystals could be further grown as needed, raising the upper bound of the range practically without limit.
But how did Tom target individual drones? When did he learn there were exactly 213 remaining specimens?
That nugget of information was revealed once he discovered how the Ral-Goth communicated. As it turns out, the pheromone-like Essence that they used to mute the senses of their prey was merely an esoteric evolution of a more basic ability. Much like ants on Earth, they would spread the information via packets of Essence. Unlike with ants, the Essence packets were both encrypted and self-executing. To read the packet, individual drones would absorb them into their spirit. The very act of communication in the Ral-Goth swarm was indistinguishable from attacking the very spirit of other drones. In most human societies, yelling was considered rude on some level; here, even the tiniest of whispers was a form of mind control, if only a weak one.
However, there was no practical way for Tom to understand the messages being sent. His own spirit was too different from Ral-Goth, which increased the cost of understanding the messages beyond what he could reasonably spend. It was clearly a defensive feature developed by the species at some point in their evolution. But even the tiniest bit of directed analysis was enough to reveal some basic metadata about each message, like the sender's identity and how old it was.
Analysis of the residual messenger particles was laughably easy. Tom could even find some faint traces of the oldest messages sent, a little over six weeks old, when the swarm first descended into these tunnels and started their nest. Individual drones stopped transmitting as they got killed, which he verified based on his own track record. It was, in a way, a brilliant method of communication. Unlike mundane electromagnetic waves, the Essence motes didn't disperse immediately on their own, were much harder to block and offered limited persistence. Recent messages were found in higher concentrations and therefore held more weight. In contrast with ants' pheromones, it wasn't blocked by the walls and exchange of gases.
Tom would be stealing this method for his own use.
The last missing ingredient was a way to actually kill the individual drones. A straight confrontation would fail. Poisons were an option, but not a great one; the Ral-Goth had a fairly slow metabolism with weird machine-descendent pathways. Perhaps a dedicated poison professional would find a way, but Tom wasn't one. Collapsing the caves? Too risky. One by one ideas were drawn - and discarded. It wouldn't be too hard to cause enough damage that the swarm panicked, fractured and eventually fled. For example, there was a river nearby that could be redirected to flood the caves with the judicious use of explosives. It would be a total mess afterward, but that was sure to kill a healthy number of drones.
Yet that swarm-preserving panic response was a common problem. A sizeable contingent of drones was sure to escape the mayhem and relocate to several different and remote locations. He had the means to track them, sure, but Tom wasn't enthused with the idea of spending the next two months going after these pests.
The more he looked at the problem, the more fascinated he grew. It wasn't apparent at first sight, but despite the individualistic character of singular drones, the swarm instincts were an enormous part of the shared spiritual blueprint of Ral-Goth. It was a fantastically complex set of heuristics that guided their behavior of resource exploitation and survival.
Yet in those instincts, he realized, lay a trap. No heuristic is always correct. If you knew the mechanisms behind them - something that continued use of [[Targeted Analysis]] ensured Tom did - you could find a way to exploit them.
Ral-Goth had an answer even for that: survival of the swarm through the superiority of individuals. When shared instincts, communal consensus algorithms and exchanged information became suspect of being manipulated, Ral-Goth drones would invest in themselves. The swarm would spontaneously splinter despite the absence of a direct threat.
He realized that all he had to do was drive that reaction to the extreme.
Each drone for their own, paranoid, convinced that others were out to get him. Convinced that only they could save the swarm.
With a viable strategy in place, he got to work.
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D331B has dropped the most power-hungry stealth routines it was using. The passives should be enough in the current tactical situation. If it were alone or less protected, it would have surely kept them up - for days or weeks if necessary; the energy reserves backing up Tier 5s were vast. But it wasn't alone, and the interloper hadn't been seen for many hours. The telemetry from the Tier 4 guardian - BFB7, now dead - showed him to be rather weak physically. It didn't matter that he slew a couple of Tier 3s and a single Tier 4. The fact that it backed off after a single Tier 4 fight was a clear signal that it wasn't confident in challenging the entire swarm. The swarm consensus was strong: it was most likely a high-damage, low-resilience type. A fundamentally flawed archetype, yet one that many humanoids foolishly pursued. These "glass cannons," as they were called by their own kin, were certainly dangerous to individual drones but posed minimal risk to the survival of the swarm.
The heightened level of swarm activity would gradually wind down in an effort to preserve the energy. It was needed to nurture the next batch of drones, safely developing in the sanctum of their nest. Well-established calculations passed down in their core programming clearly delineated the optimum transition points between various phases of protection. A quiet, encrypted chatter between the drones continued to evolve the swarm consensus. For now, it held - while the appearance of a first noteworthy opponent on this plane brought a measure of chaos, it didn't cause a fracture that would split the swarm in two - or more - parts.
It did hasten such an event, but that was only natural for their species. As their environment grew more chaotic, including due to the growth of the swarm, it was inevitable that divergent behaviors would spontaneously appear in the network. They would cease to be a single swarm and become multiple. And there was no such thing as a "friendly swarm." The weaker swarm would naturally escape, trying to take as many resources as it could. Spreading their kind and claiming new territory.
D331B scanned the other Tier 5s in his vicinity. 6F141 and A961D appeared as stoic as he was, but there was tension in their spirits. There was no telling which way they would go when the time would come. The truth was, D331B didn't know itself. But somehow, while A961D felt neutral, B331B was sure 6F141 would be on the other side of the divide; there was simply something repulsive about that one, something unexplained by any of the analysis algorithms he routinely ran. But D331B wasn't disturbed by the feelings it couldn't explain. It was more than its algorithms; those were merely finite. It transcended its algorithms, an infinitely complex spirit, ruthlessly efficient, powerful and cunning. It felt the ever-increasing power of its core. The swarm consensus claimed it should stay at its power level, but it knew better. This new place was dangerous. The swarm needed a strong leader, or it could perish. It HAD to grow. It HAD to feed. Slowly, or the swarm would notice, but once it evolved to Tier 6... It would hold much higher voting power. Personal power, too. So much power... D331B almost vibrated, captivated by the vision of itself heading the swarm. Glorious, powerful...
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A bit of rest after honest work. Tom stretched, feeling his body release the tension. The plans were in motion. Now he had to wait.
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Heavily damaged, D331B moved through the caves. A bundle of eggs was secured inside a cavity of his body, safe under the carapace. Idly, it reviewed the recent events. It was much worse than it has thought possible. A veritable frenzy consumed its brood mates, surely a result of powerful berserker poison. D331B was clearly immune thanks to its superior constitution, yet others weren't as lucky. The hated 6F141 was, of course, affected; Tier 5 or not, its body wasn't as resilient. D331B could almost feel the bloodlust lurking within it, increasing with every minute. But 6F141 didn't expect the preemptive strike from D331B, as frenzied as it was. It didn't go down without a fight, of course, but in the end, it was weak. Almost laughably so for a Tier 5.
The attack from seemingly neutral A961D was a bigger shock, however. It must have been masking its disease somehow and chose to strike when D331B was distracted. The fight resulted in an uneasy draw, both combatants withdrawing to their respective tunnels. It pained D331B to retreat, but its own survival was, at this point, critical. It was possibly the last sane member of the swarm. It had to survive and regrow the swarm. Leaving the core of their nest, it snatched a few egg sacks from which a new swarm could be born.
Stalking the tunnels, it slowly moved towards one of the exits from the cave complex. Here and there, it had to fight the weaker drones. Tier 3s were usually a trivial matter unless they ganged up, which has happened twice so far. Tier 4s were a touch more work, and he was forced to consume one of the egg sacks for sustenance. It would slow the eventual growth of the swarm, but it was a price it was willing to pay to ensure it survived.
Soon, it would leave this place and find new hunting grounds. This plane was sure to have a bountiful harvest. It could feel the flowing wave of energy coming from the outside. A delicate scent of spiritual metals and high-tier alloys tickled its senses, coming from the direction of the exit. This was a new development. Was this some new resource discovered by the filthy Tier 3s and hidden from it? Almost unthinkable, but it was hard to deny. The bloodthirst, the frenzy, the betrayal. They were all infected by spiritual disease to a frightening degree.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
But D331B would be strong. It was the most powerful. It couldn't falter. It would use the vein of spiritual metals to regrow the swarm to be stronger than ever. It would reach Tier 6 itself.
With a speed that cracked the stone under its limbs, it rushed towards the exit.
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A rumble of the distant explosion echoed through the caves. Tom sighed. It was almost too easy. Once you knew which metaphorical buttons to press, the drones became hilariously unstable and easy to manipulate. They would lash out at each other, eat their young to wastefully replenish their strength and attempt to claim whatever resources they sensed, doing away with any pretense of stealth or caution.
Booby trapping the exists was the final touch for those lucky ones who managed to make it to the exit. Well, perhaps not so lucky.
Heavily wounded and panicked, the drones were easy pickings. Being ambush predators, they were ironically rather easily ambushed in turn.
Most were killed by their brethren anyway.
It was a bit wasteful to let them kill themselves, as most of the freed Essence dissipated, but Tom was doing great in absolute terms. A little contraption fashioned from remains of Ral-Goth drones and attuned with [[Induce Resonance]] towards the imprint of Ral-Goth as a species made a perfect foci of supercharged [[Essence Funnel]], feeding him a veritable river of Essence.
All the while, Tom haunted the tunnels, wiping out the monsters.
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"You can eat the dessert after you finish dinner", Tom's original mother used to say. There were no desserts in the orphanage where he was raised the second time.
Still, that saying came to him as he neared the heart of the nest. He was on his guard; while very few drones remained alive, one of the trackers was pointing at a single Ral-Goth in the center of the space. While the tracker didn't provide the Tier information, he was sure it was Tier 5. That meant the hardest fight was likely ahead of him still. The other Tier 5s he had fought so far were heavily injured, and he was the one to ambush them.
Boosting his spirit sensing, he scanned the space ahead of him, just around a bend in the tunnel. The information came back fuzzy. The walls were easy enough to make out, hard to penetrate with his senses and very clearly artificial. There were other things in the room, however, veritably screaming with energy and Essence to his senses, making him feel like he was staring at the sun. Multiple of them, actually.
These must be the resources the swarm has kept, as none of them felt like the drone. There were several spots in the room where it could be hiding. The core chamber was easily a hundred meters in diameter, after all. But the readouts from the tracking crystal, collected and processed over the course of the last few hours, were enough to triangulate its rough location. Of course, the readouts would be invalid if the beast were to move, but Ral-Goth loathed to move from their chosen spots unless they thought them compromised.
So unless the tracker provided him with faulty information, the elite drone should be on the very opposite side of the chamber, hanging off the vaulted ceiling of the chamber, somewhere near a third of its height.
Preparation would be the key in this fight. The first step was approaching the chamber from the correct side. It took Tom over an hour to find this particular entrance tunnel, minor as it was. The other three entrances were dangerously close to the hiding spot of the elite. That fact alone made it more likely that he got the elite's location right. If that wasn't the case, he was royally screwed.
Nothing for it. It was time to roll the dice. Whatever powers the Tier 5 had in store, Tom had his own tricks ready.
A grapefruit-sized ball of metal hovered above his right hand. It had a dark surface and felt incredibly heavy even to a casual spiritual scan. This was a little pet project Tom was working on recently. Originally, this was a regular piece of tungsten. Tungsten wasn't a common metal, especially in such a pure form. So naturally, he started experimenting when he found a bunch of unusual metal rods. What sort of advantages could it give to him?
The spear he carried was one such advantage, but it was outsourced. Ghard, one of the better blacksmiths back in the city, made it in exchange for a couple of the rods. It wasn't that fancy by the standards of regular warriors, but it was perfect for him. A handy enchantment fueled by regular mana could control the spear's weight. Another minor enchantment kept the tip strong and sharp, which was very handy in recent fights.
The ball, though? It was all Tom's work. Largely it was because of his curious nature and desire to learn about tiering up and enchantments. A secondary reason - one which was a convenient excuse for the time sink the project has become - was the need for secrecy. The spear was a bog-standard, boring thing. This? Well, it wasn't standard at all.
It carried only a minor enchantment, which dampened its reaction to the gravity fields it experienced. Combined with a light application of [[Magnetic field]], it was easy to move around remotely, which was crucial to the next step. Weaponizing it.
Stepping out of the mouth of the tunnel, Tom was as ready as he could be. He was fully submerged in his spirit, running at speeds far above his baseline. It took away his precious Essence, but he knew it was worth it. Tier 3s were faster than his mundane senses could track. Tier 4 required him to burn his boosting energy. A prepared Tier 5 springing an ambush? No way he would skimp on the resource spend.
It felt like an eternity in his mind before he made a whole step inside. From time to time, he nudged the spell hovering the ball. Regular spiritual scans took some effort to parse, but it wasn't overwhelming. By far, the most work was keeping up the spell framework he maintained about himself running. It wasn't really doing anything - merely circulating the mana around. Except that it had his entire mana pool invested in it, which made him light up like another miniature sun to any of the myriad senses that could pick up magic signatures. It was leaking mana like a sieve, too, losing a good one percent of it every second, making him spend the additional effort absorbing it back through his spirit.
It was bait. One that worked.
Finally, something happened. He picked up a shimmer of new energy signature right about the place he expected the elite to be in - perhaps five meters to the left if that. It was within the parameters. There were some inherent errors in measurements, which limited the spatial resolution he could achieve, but it wasn't half bad for a thing he hacked together in so little time.
Now, the race has started. He didn't know what kind of ability the elite would open with, but he'd rather not learn it at all.
He was more than ready. His mana pool sloshing around himself wasn't just bait, after all. The [[Freeform casting]] wasn't eating his Essence for no good reason.
With machine-like precision, he started to weave a ring of [[Magnetic field]]. Then another. And another. In the barest fraction of a second, a small handful of mana was spent on establishing a series of spells. It wasn't humanely possible to cast spells so quickly in normal circumstances. While the spirit was extremely fast by its nature, it simply took time to extract the mana from the mana core, which is why Tom made an effort to have the mana ready and prepared outside of it.
Twenty in total, each spell a small ring, slightly bigger than the tungsten ball itself. Stacked together, they extended less than a meter in total length. Optimizing various parameters took some work, but the results were satisfactory.
The firing framework was soon established. Ultimately, it was a simple concept, but its successful execution required utmost precision and control. His own, portable Gauss cannon.
The first ring accepted its portion of mana. It was the closest, making the transfer most efficient, so Tom pumped it with the biggest chunk of the energy. Ever so slowly, the ball started to move. Soon enough, the spell collapsed, the extreme amount of mana running through it eroding the spellform despite Tom's efforts. That was fine, however, as the next one became powered. Then the next. The ball was moving ever faster, and without his speed benefits, it would be impossible to catch up.
Soon enough, the last of the spell rings collapsed, and the ball was on its own.
It was a surreal sight to see it move across the room. With his current time frame, Tom was used to the seemingly frozen world. The skill activation on the other side of the chamber has barely changed.
The ball was happily ruining the usual stillness. It was white hot from the remnant mana, and the outer layer slowly evaporated, leaving a comet-like trail of hot metal particles behind. The air in the room wasn't having a great time either. The ball was punching a hole through it, a vacuum forming behind it. The shockwaves were already propagating, but they held a limited damage potential compared to the main projectile. All of it - it was magnificent.
Tom was a great fan of The Slow Mo Guys in his previous life. They would love his perspective now, he realized. Whatever camera they had couldn't possibly compare to observing things in real-time with your own senses as they happened.
In the end, he didn't learn what the Tier 5 had in stock for him. The ability fizzled, interrupted mid-activation. Its carapace was impressively hard as it fractured the ball on impact, yet it only worsened things. Like a dumdum round, it shredded the innards of the Rol-gath elite.
Overkill is the best kind of kill. Maybe I could hunt a dragon with this?
Defeated: Ral-Goth Swarm Elite. 32320 volatile essence captured (5% efficiency). Spirit chunks isolated, added to analysis queue (est. 8h 15m to process). New insights isolated (x5). Evolution paths unlocked (x3). Technique fragments received (multiple types, x3). Energy type discovered (x3). Research initiated...
Who said that glass cannons were weak?
A rebounding wall of shrapnel, some of it reflected from the surprisingly resilient walls, pulled Tom from his reverie. He had several options - the shrapnel was hardly an intelligent foe - but part of his own game was finding the minimal amount of resources to solve any given problem.
He still had [[Freeform casting]] going, which gave him an instinctive grasp of changes required in spellwork to change its behavior in desired ways. The good old [[Mana shield]] was the spell he was going to modify. The default mechanic of this classic depended on the caster, but typically it mimicked a sort of dense ballistic gel that would absorb a predetermined amount of damage before dissipating. At least, this is what happened with normal attacks, like another classic - fireball. In more extreme cases, things weren’t so simple. Extremely fast attacks? They would pierce the shield before its energy became exhausted because they moved faster than the shield could adapt. Elemental attacks? Neutral mana would work to block them, but the efficiency would increase by using the appropriate elemental mana. The possibilities were endless. Tom got to work.
His AI - a personal assistant he coded and which was running inside his spirit - helped him tag the pieces that had a real chance to hit him. That alone eliminated about 85% of the pieces. Of the remaining 15%, a good chunk would burn in the air. This would be a secondary danger - the heat wave hitting him - but adding a bit of silver-aspected mana to [[Mana shield]] would make it reflect the heat to a high degree. The primary issue was a few high-velocity pieces that, through sheer luck, maintained enough structural integrity to make it both ways through the room. With a flex of the technique, Tom cast the shield. He could simply thicken the shield enough to block the flying projectiles, but it shouldn't be necessary. Instead, he shifted the shield's properties away from ballistic gel and toward the hard, brittle glass. Only the biggest pieces - two or three, by his count - would truly damage it. The rest would bounce right off the extremely hard surface.
He would do better, he decided. Glass could be tempered. This required applying stress to the material to strengthen it. The shield shape was close to the standard disk but with a thickened center. With another flex, he modified the quickly solidifying spell structure. The outer parts were compressed while the core remained pliable for a fraction of a second longer. The spell solidified with tremendous stresses in its structure, the glass-like nature of energy preventing it from distributing the stresses. A recipe for disaster in most normal spells, it was the key to success in this particular application.
The physical analog Tom aimed for was known as Prince Rupert's Drop. A molten drop of glass rapidly quenched in the water had such immense internal stresses it shrugged off lesser forces. Such as being shot with a bullet.
Truth be told, Tom didn't quite know how well it would work. The shield felt sturdy enough that he had a safety margin, though.
With a few emergency backup plans in the back of his mind, he settled to wait for impact.
In the end, it was anticlimactic. Barely five percent of the shield's energy was consumed by the impacts. A whopping ten percent was spent on diverting the blistering hot wave of pressured air resulting from tungsten igniting in the air.
I should have added more silver-aspected mana for better heat-reflecting properties. Oh well, maybe next time.
Taking apart now useless mana shield, Tom reclaimed some of the unused mana. Most of it would dissipate into the air, wasted, but there was nothing for it. He would slowly refill his mana pool over the next hour or so. The data he got was very interesting though. Analysis was ongoing, and with luck, he should be able to fine-tune the required mana amount in the future to a much better degree.
Now for the best part of the delve...
Finally free from enemies, Tom started looting the nest's core with gusto.