A/N: I'm looking for someone who wants to help me edit/proofread and something for a cover. Also if you've any suggestions, don't hesitate to share. And as last, I truly need someone with a better naming sense than I have..... Please let me know if you're willing to help me!
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To prevent myself from getting bored while waiting, I decided to play a little game called Forced Evolution. I designed it myself. Pretty much it was just setting up several creatures and making them fight each other till death or till I get an interesting evolution.
To create sufficient room, I extended the shaft that connected the first and second floor, making it so that if one isn't able to fly, he'll just fall past the second floor to his death. Softly laughing I created a couple spikes of earth at the bottom of the pit, while making the room circular, with a diameter of 10 yards.
The spikes were only directly below the hole in the ceiling, which was in the exact centre of the room. Once again starting with the food sources of worms, flies and moths, I started to grin, a matchup taking shape in my thoughts.
Why would one ever set up a one versus one match, or even a one versus one versus one match. It's way more interesting to create small wars. It's way more chaos and thus way more fun to watch.
Setting up a hive for bullet ants, one for a certain string of worker ants called Pogonomyrmex maricopa, another for isles hornets and a last one for black widows. At first I would just let them settle in, manipulating their instincts with mana to prevent them from attacking each other.
The room itself was circular, giving them no corners. Instead, they all occupied exactly a quarter of the space, with their hives in the centre against the wall, having roughly 45° of their quarter to each side. Even though I keep saying hives, the black widows didn't exactly have a hive, more like a giant area covered with webs.
To help them slightly more I lodged out a few spikes from the walls and the ceiling. To give all the species the same starting point, I covered the whole room like that, occasional spikes coming up from the walls and ceiling.
It seems that the hornets also like this better, creating their hive between several spikes. Even though normally they would need more natural materials, I did help them all by giving them mana to create their living structures.
For the fun of it, I also added a [nest] and a [spawn] for mice in the exact centre on the floor between the spikes for piercing intruders and placed around fifteen bats. I warped the instincts of the bats so that they wouldn't normally leave this room and warped the instincts of all other animals to only attack the bats if they get preyed upon personally by the bats.
Happy with my stage, I watched them for a couple days, seeing if it was enough to already force some evolution. Sadly enough, the only thing that happened was that the bats died, not even from getting killed by their own prey, but because of the high amount of toxics and venoms their prey contained while being eaten.
Either way, it was time to loosen up their bounds and start my game.
Oh, it's wonderful, truly majestic! No evolution so far but this little war is the best! The moment I loosened the bounds, hell broke loose. The mice, being used to be preyed upon by four, former five different species, now suddenly had some breathing space. The black widows, having the worker ants on their left side, the bull ants on their right and the hornets across of them, were the first to expand their territory.
Being more of a solitary animal than the rest of them, being cramped into a space with a lot of their own wasn't truly a good thing. Their spread for more space however triggered the instincts of defending their hives from the mindhived creatures.
Having their territories invaded, the already aggressive natured animals, turned even more vicious. Swarming out of their respective hives, they swarmed the black widows unleashing their venomous bites and stings. However, this also signalled that the hives could attack each other, securing food and protecting the hive.
Watching gleefully, I watched as the war unfolded. The air was the domain of the hornets, perhaps later they would get obstructed by webs, but at this point, it was just too little time for the black widows to set them up. The bullet ants flooded out of their area to all sides, washing everything away in their path.
The thing was that both the hornets and spiders quickly learned that the sky was a way better place to be, at least they were the only ones who could hold themselves up. Even though the black widows didn't have time enough to make whole webs, just a thread or two to fall down from the ceiling or between to spikes to climb was very well possible.
The worker ants however were furiously fighting with the bullet ants, even though they were about twice to thrice as small on average. They did however posses a more potent poison. Due to their natural lower aggressiveness they mostly stayed inside of their territory, but inside of it nothing stopped them.
While slowing advance forward due to the sheer size and sacrifice, the bullet ants lost two of them at the very least for taking out one worker ant. While taking heavy losses on that side, they easily managed to overcome the black widows which had invaded their territory, overwhelming it by numbers, biting it to dead before it could even bite back.
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The hornets just dived on top of everything they saw, stinging it with all their might. Sometimes one got stuck by the few threads and bitten to their demise, other times they just died by being overwhelmed the moment they got close enough for an ant to rise up and grab them.
Soon the hornets, spiders and bullet ants learned to not engage fully with the worker ants, which on their turn only scavenged the remains of the dead, not bothering to fight. The mice were currently the same, at least scavenging their newfound food source instead of it being their predator.
The idea of combining them all into one force came slowly into my mind. Bullet ants as offensive ground troops, worker ants as support and defensive ground troops, the isles hornets as air troops and the black widows and spies, scouts and assassins. While a bit unrealistic as it stands, the possibility is there.
After a while it settled down, the new boundaries of territories being established as well as the predatory order. The spiders gave up on their own area, however infesting everything in return. Now while they had not their own racial territory, each had single black widow had now their own turf.
The bullet ants took over most of the side of the spiders, now striking 150° of the room, while the other 30° got added to the area of the worker ants. The hornets didn't increase their territory size, but they did expand their hive, taking up almost all of their wall, slowly building onto the ceiling.
Their hive, being greyish from colour, almost reached the three yard high ceiling, while only extending one yard outwards from the wall. The hive of both the ants were mounds. They were relatively short, only standing around a two foot high, but like hills they covered their respective whole area.
Their official prey, the mice and worms especially, had started to dig into the spikes and floor, trying to escape the immediate danger. Flies were now flowering with enough carcasses to feast upon and lay their eggs in.
There was still a fierce competition going on, as I liked it, but it was now more similar to natural conflicts rather than an actual war. I decided to add several fungi spores as well. Just the spores itself wouldn't really take a toll on me and at least there would be a greater biodiversity.
Having done this, I returned to my first little project, my Dungeon Lord. I had given it the chance to develop it's hivemind, which I now should be able to see. The bigger kind, the hiveworm and the smaller ones, the mutaworms as I decided to call them for now, until I thought of a better name, did now have a hivemind. I first called them parasitic, but they aren't truly that, more like mutualistic.
Slowly, taking into account the characteristics of the mutaworm, the hiveworm and the regular worm, I shaped the worm queen. Orbed, around a foot long and an inch thick. Also making it possible to give birth to all three of the kinds, while being able to breed with the hive- and regular worm. I set the mutaworms as unfertilized, while the hiveworm would be a fertilized version. To make this possible, I did create the option for the worm queen to just basically fertilize herself, which would could as "unfertilized".
Regular worms would be birthed from both unfertilized and fertilized eggs, but could be influenced to start growing by hormones the queen could give off. It all was only possible if she had enough nutrients to both sustain herself and the initial growth of the young.
The whole process took a large drain on me, having to adjust so much and tamper with the normal biological ways of the species, but it was needed. All done with my changes, I urged the queen to move to my Heart, to confirm the pact with her as a Dungeon Lord.
Once I felt her physical appearance coming closer to me, I sent out small strings of mana. These strings slowly dug into her, binding her to my will, while also giving me access to her consciousness and thus her senses.
Since she was the head of a hivemind, I suddenly gained a lot more information to process and work through. All the details of the earth to start with. Slowly getting used to this stream, I categorized it all, bundling it into the more three-dimensional view I had of my area. I certainly knew how the earth was for example, after all it was part of me, but even then it's difficult to distinguish between all the tiny differences.
This new view added to my own, completing it further.
I had to admit, my mind shuddered slightly by forming the bond, thinking back of when the same happened to me, being forced to obey a fairy. The difference was however that I did not prey on those who I contracted, rather I prey on those who aren't contracted to me.
I couldn't yet truly communicate with my new Dungeon Lord, but I was finally not alone anymore! It would be just a matter from time with both the regular mana and my personal mana feeding her before her mind started to develop into a slightly more sentient version
Celebrating my victory, I decided to ignore the soft whispers, after all it was a moment of celebration, not a moment to listen to the fluttering of wings and whatever moves around in my dungeon.