Zero’s antennae twitched, alarming pheromones waking her rapidly. She weakly stood, missing a few legs and…

‘What?’ She wondered. What… what was happening? What happened?

Corpses piled up around her; corpses she recognized. One, Nine, Twenty One, Seven-one… every single one of her subordinates, as well as a few she almost didn’t. It took a few seconds to remember… ‘Trapper, Protean and Harasser,’ She realized.

Rapidly, it all came back to her. The flood of third Stage Myrmekes had been enough to take down the three fourth Stage Myrmekes… but only four had lived. And… and she’d…

Her memories had to be faulty… she hadn’t…

That part of her mind stirred, pushing a perfect clarity onto the memories. They were real; impossibly, horribly real. She felt like she was reliving her past actions, but there was nothing she could do to change them.

One, Twenty, Three-one and Twelve… they’d wanted to know why she hadn’t helped; why she’d lied about protecting them. She’d started to answer, but the answer hurt. She’d done it for power; she’d done it to try to live up to the Queen’s expectations. She’d gotten them all killed because it was the easiest way forward. Rather than give them the horrible answer… she killed them. She remembered crushing One’s head in her Articulated Arm’s hands. She remembered weeping as she did. She remembered-

Post-traumatic stress disorder detected. 60% of Lower Queens demand death… overruled; Lower Queen Andromeda demands heavy sanitization of memories within 24 hours instead.

Relief flooded her, and then disgust at the relief. She so desperately wanted to flee from her actions, but she knew that she deserved to suffer their consequences. She-

No objections. Commencing…

∑

Zero’s antennae twitched, alarming pheromones waking her rapidly. She weakly stood, missing a few legs, and…

‘What?’ She wondered. What… what was happening? What happened?

Corpses piled up around her; corpses she recognized. One, Nine, Twenty One, Seven-one… every single one of her subordinates, as well as a few she didn’t. She could only tell that they were fourth stage Myrmekes…

‘Did they do this?’ She wondered. Without her support, they were probably plenty capable of killing all of her subordinates. Why couldn’t she remember anything? Was it another side effect of her weird ability to slide into a vastly superior mental state?

She managed to remember something after a minute; the message from the System about the Lower Queen’s intervention, and could almost recall what she’d been doing when it showed up. The closest thing to understanding what had happened in the cavern was a weak feeling of déjà vu as she looked around at the deaths, but that wasn’t nearly enough to figure out what had happened. With a bit of reluctance, she extracted herself from the pile of bodies she’d ended up buried in and looked at her Evolutionary Status.

Biomass: 11,203

Minimum requirements for fourth evolution met.

She… supposed there was no reason not to, once she got somewhere safe. Her sudden lack of subordinates was unfortunate now, as they wouldn’t be able to protect her as she evolved like she’d planned, but it’d end up working out, she was sure.

She started towards the tunnels, and was just about to leave the cavern when she realized…

‘This is Cavern 4, isn’t it? Did I end up going through with the plan to kill the trio? I guess I overestimated myself if it went so poorly.’ She thought. Her siege on Cavern 4 had only been a slight idea in her mind, last she remembered.

She shook her head. There was no point in investigating what had happened during the gap in her memory when she knew the outcome.

∑

Zero had taken a few minutes to dig out a relatively large hole in the sides of a tunnel, where she intended to evolve. All it required was the intent, and it began.

Fourth evolution has commenced.

Last time, the text had gone on for about half the time that she was throwing up goo, but this time, it was a single line without any fanfare. Was the evolution to the fifth stage inconsequential, unlike what her instincts had told her?

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She felt her core produce the familiarly wretched black goo, and she felt it wriggle through her body and into her stomach, where she threw it up onto the ground. Ten minutes later, the egg that the black goo had constructed was filled to the brim, and… nothing happened.

…Had she forgotten a message from the System about this or something? She moved a bit within the black goo, which felt strange. She quickly stopped that.

‘System? What’s going on?’ She tried to think aloud at it, knowing that she’d prompted it to do something a few times in the past. It didn’t respond this time, though.

A minute or so into it, the System finally came to life in her mind, and relief washed over her. Strangely, a bit of disgust at the relief propped up in her, but she banished the weird emotions to concentrate on the System.

The Myrmidon Control System has evolved. The delay in the evolution was caused by The Myrmidon Control System’s exhaustion from earlier actions; apologies.

‘What?’ She wondered, but it moved on before she could think on its words for too long.

The fourth evolution is different from the others; reaching the fifth Stage is a major turning point, and thus, you have far greater control over your form. Before we get to that, though, you must direct your Greater Path.

Direct your Greater Path. You are currently a Scout.

You were the first of the 23rd batch to reach the fourth Evolution, the first of the 23rd batch to gain the favor of Lower Queen Andromeda (Creator of Batch 23), the first of her pupae to [ETHERERROR] and have been granted the additional benefit: Custom-made Greater Paths (2)

! Lower-Greater Hybrid

! Ether-blessed Scout

Burst Scout

Enduring Scout

Greater Scout

Scout (Current)

Strategic Scout

Strategist

Despite the rather important System text, she was caught up on the weird way that the System was communicating. There were a lot of differences, but primarily, she was stunned by how much more personable it was acting and how much more helpful and descriptive it was.

Once she got over that, though, she truly started processing the text. The strange error thing interested her, and she was very interested in the fact that she was the first of Lower Queen Andromeda’s pupae to do whatever it was that she had done.

Finally, she moved on to the Greater Paths available to her… and it was pretty hard to ignore the very first option. She liked that her strange hybridized form from Rapid Regeneration had been recognized, and she was indescribably glad that the System’s text explained itself to her.

The Lower-Greater Hybrid Greater Path was relatively simple, but it left no room for doubt at what it would do; she would become even closer to a Greater Myrmeke, gaining infrequent access to their evolution options and greater wriggle room in her actions.

She almost chose it the second she saw it, but the second Custom-made Greater Path was enough to grab her attention away from the first.

Her head hurt when she concentrated on the very first word in its name. The system simultaneously wanted to tell her what it meant and really didn’t want to, like it was receiving conflicting orders or something. She kept pressing it, though, and eventually, it spat out a very vague answer.

Magic.

The answer came directly from the System, which was very not normal. Usually, when she concentrated on the System-made text, she simply gained an intuitive understanding of what the word meant… but rather than that, the System instead gave her a different word entirely; one that was much easier to understand.

She tried to clear her mind of all its many distractions and think clearly on what was happening. She’d wanted to know what Ether meant, and the System had told her an alternative word. She assumed they had similar meanings, and just put Magic in Ether’s place. Magic-blessed Scout sounded great, but she didn’t really know what that entailed. She’d gained a good understanding of the Lower-Greater Hybrid Greater Path by concentrating on the term in its entirety, but she couldn’t do that with Ether-blessed Scout because of the System’s strangeness with the word, and couldn’t do it with Magic-blessed Scout because that wasn’t the actual Greater Path.

Thus, she was left with only the individual words to make up the meaning, and ‘magic’ had a very vague meaning. Magic was the power to influence the world through supernatural means… but how? With what?

After several minutes of unrelenting and unhelpful thought, she gave up and looked at the other options. Burst Scout would make it so that she could burst with power at the cost of making her ability to endure even worse than it currently was. Useless.

Enduring Scout was the exact opposite; it would cause her body to lean away from raw power output and into its endurance.

Greater Scout was a straight upgrade to her current self, improving her in every aspect.

Strategic Scout would improve her mental capabilities and her physical abilities slightly.

Strategist would leave her body untouched and only improve her mental capabilities.

None of them seemed better than the first two, which made sense, since the first two had been made by the System specifically for her.

‘The System… it’s more personable and talkative now, isn’t it?’ She wondered. “Myrmidon Control System, what do you think?” She directed her conscious thoughts towards the System, which she was relatively used to doing in order to access a few of its features.

Shockingly, it responded.

Between Lower-Greater Hybrid, Burst Scout, Enduring Scout, Greater Scout, Scout, Strategic Scout and Strategist, Lower-Greater Hybrid offers the most benefits with the least downsides.

…She noted the distinct absence of one of the options, and decided to test the System a bit. “What about Ether-blessed Scout?”

A few seconds passed, and there was no response. The System really didn’t seem to like the Greater Path it had created. As she fell back into thought, she suddenly realized something; that she remembered seeing Ether mentioned before.

…the first of her pupae to [ETHERERROR] and have...

What the hell did [ETHERERROR] mean? She must have done something at some point that involved magic, she guessed. She was also the first of Lower Queen Andromeda’s Pupae to have ever done that before… so she guessed that she might have some sort of affinity towards magic.

That thought was almost enough to make her choose that as her Greater Path, but she quickly stopped herself. The System had custom-made both of them, meaning that she was equally suited to both… but one of them didn’t feel like hers.