“Wait,” Lila said, as they passed by the remains of the hive mind.

The Savant crouched down amidst the jellied ruins that had once been the aliens and started sifting through them with a few of her smaller limbs, much to Hiran’s dismay. Sure enough, she extracted several bundles of vein-like threads a few moments later.

“Let me guess,” he said, groaning inwardly. “Moon Circuit upgrades.”

“Correct,” she replied, tucking them away somewhere within her frock. “I believe I now have sufficient raw material to process the necessary components.”

“That’s… nice.” Hiran felt his gorge rising at the thought of having alien body parts integrated into his own flesh, but he focused his will and managed to fight down his nausea, if only just barely. “I suppose that’s better than needing to kill Enforcers and harvest their Circuitry to get upgrades.”

“I would not be so quick to say so, Hiran.” Lila stood up and turned to face him. “Materials extracted from Enforcers or other Starforged can be used in the fabrication of Circuitry upgrades that will bring you all the way to the Supreme Grade, assuming your Core is at that Stage as well. The materials I have just retrieved from these aliens are vastly inferior in quality. I can compensate for that through sheer quantity, but only to a certain extent. Even with ten or a hundred times the material I have now, I wouldn’t be able to fabricate upgrades for your Empyrean Circuits of the Moon beyond G-Grade.”

“I noticed you specifically mentioned my Moon Circuits. Does that mean the stuff you just picked up can’t be used to upgrade my Sun Circuits, even if my Core were now, say, F-Stage?”

Lila nodded. “The material I retrieved from the gazers and the hive mind is rich in neuro-connective minerals, which are a foundational component of any Starforged’s Empyrean Circuits of the Moon. Upgrading your Empyrean Circuits of the Sun will require different materials.”

“I suppose that makes sense. The hive mind and the gazers were… how would I put it? Ah, yes. More cerebral? More strategic? The clawers, stingers, rammers, and clingers were all about ripping and tearing.”

“Indeed. Those organisms are physically formidable thanks to their highly dense and efficient musculoskeletal structure, but your baseline Starforged physiology is already superior in every sense. There is nothing useful to extract from their carcasses.”

“What about those?” Hiran asked, pointing at a reaper’s corpse. “These ones are definitely on a different level compared to the others.”

“Interesting.” Lila walked over to the alien’s body and peered at it closely, her crimson lens whirring and clicking all the while. After a few moments, she turned back to Hiran. “Well done, Hiran. I do believe I can retrieve material from these organisms that can facilitate the fabrication of upgrades to your Empyrean Circuits of the Sun.”

“Great.” Hiran winced, kicking himself inwardly and wishing he’d never mentioned the reapers.

“However, that is a moot point,” Lila continued. “Your Empyrean Circuits of the Sun are already at G-Grade, an equivalent match for your G-Stage Samsara Core. There is no feasible amount of material I can extract from these organisms to fabricate an upgrade beyond that Circuitry Grade.”

“Ah, that’s disappointing,” Hiran said, trying to make his sigh of relief less obvious. “Is there anything else you want to look at here?”

“No,” Lila said, walking back to Hiran’s side. “Incidentally, I am running several tactical and strategic analyses, and their preliminary consensus is that these organisms, alien and unprecedented though they might be, are far from their full combat potential.”

“I agree.” Hiran nudged the limp and lifeless corpse of a clawer next to his feet. “It was a tiring fight, but I wouldn’t say that we were in any serious danger throughout it all. But if the hive mind had been a bit more cunning and smarter about things, we might have needed to withdraw, get Maxwell, and come back more heavily armed.”

“Smarter?” Lila cocked her head. Her crimson lens whirred and clicked. After a few moments, she spoke again. “When you used that word to describe the hive mind, I reran several of the same strategic and tactical analyses on the premise that the aliens were capable of intelligence. Most of them characterized the hive mind’s decisions as ones born of inexperience rather than a lack of intelligence and competence.”

“Yes, I think that’s a much better way to put it,” Hiran agreed. “The Aetheric density in their bodies suggests that this hive mind and all the others aren’t much older than a week, maybe ten days at most. If the hive mind had more time to grow, fight, and learn, I’m pretty sure it would be much more capable. And if that’s the case, then Madhya might be in much more trouble than we’d thought.”

“I see you have arrived at the same conjectures as I have, Hiran. Other hive minds have made their presence known on the planet, but they might not have been dealt with, given the data we have inferred from the Ashen Guild’s behavior so far.”

“That means that everyone on Madhya is in danger. Let’s give Bei Feng a call the moment we get out of here. He needs to pull every string he can to get us a meeting with the Ashen Guild’s leader. Failing that, I’m barging into their headquarters.”

“Forcing such a confrontation will be extremely counterproductive,” Lila pointed out. “The Ashen Guild works closely with the local authorities. In many ways, judging by the nature and number of contracts they have undertaken, they have become the authorities. Antagonizing them might alert the Enforcers to your presence.”

“You’re right.” Hiran grunted. “The last thing we need is someone like that Huntmaster fellow chasing after us. Actually, now that I think about it, he’s probably still chasing us at this very moment.”

“All the better reason to keep a low profile.” Lila twitched her black eye. “Perhaps it might be better not to contact the Ashen Guild’s leadership after all. We might have to tackle the threat of these aliens by ourselves.”

“We’ve got Maxwell, but I don’t know if the three of us will be enough,” Hiran said. “We’ll also need better weapons, armor, and ammunition, which will all need to be paid for, and yes, Bei Feng can probably help us out with that, but the more he does so, the more he will have a say in what we do, where we go, and, even what we say. I really don’t like that.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Your best means of revenue lie in the continual undertaking of mercenary contracts. Of course, we could try trading stocks or engaging in various forms of entrepreneurship… though you are uniquely unsuitable for all such endeavors.”

“I know.” Hiran chuckled ruefully and looked down at his ichor-stained hands. “I have never been much good for anything else except fighting and killing. It’s all I know, and I’m too damned old and tired to change.”

“Old?” Lila cocked her head again and gave Hiran a curious look. “I suppose for a mortal, you would be. Historical records state that you were a hundred and twelve Standard years old when you first met Keyi and left Mount Kataish. And after the Rebellion, you spent another hundred Standard years in the Abyss.”

“It felt much, much longer than that,” Hiran said quietly. “Anyway, we should get moving.”

They picked their way past the scattered remains of the hive mind and stepped through the hole in the wall. No automated lights flickered on to herald their approach, but Hiran’s Starforged eyes were capable of seeing perfectly in the dark. He exhaled through his teeth at what he saw: a winding tunnel dug right into the bedrock that led further downward.

Lila ignited a lamp mounted to one of her limbs then, filling the tunnel with harsh, white light. She swept a metal tube with flashing red lights briefly through the fetid air. “I connected remotely to Chaoswing just now and conducted a seismographic scan with the ship’s sensors. This tunnel is roughly a hundred feet long and leads to an underground cavern with an approximate width of two thousand feet, an approximate length of three thousand feet, and a ceiling that is just under sixty feet tall. There are zero lifesigns in the tunnel and cavern.”

Hiran nodded. He didn’t sense any more Aether concentrations either.

They made their way briskly down the tunnel and arrived at the cavern in under a minute. It was a tremendously large space, as Lila had said, but it was also a charnel pit, piled with alien corpses.

“These aren’t like any of the ones we’ve seen,” Hiran said, walking into the cavern. His boots inevitably squelched a white, multi-legged corpse the size of a small dog, splattering its viscera all over the immobile bodies of its kin. He took a closer look at the creatures stacked nearly knee-high across the cavern’s rock floor.

Their bodies were made up of multiple segments, each of them sporting a pair of legs jutting from either of their flanks. Their maws were roughly as large as Hiran’s fist and filled with concentric rows of small, sharp teeth.

“Some of them have distended stomachs.” Lila flipped one of the dead aliens over and cut its belly open with a blade-tipped limb. Half-digested chitin and meat oozed from the slit. The Savant prodded at the organic mess with one of her limbs, before straightening her posture and sweeping her gaze over the rest of the cavern. “Conducting analysis…”

Hiran did the same, taking note of the multitude of holes in the cavern’s walls and ceilings. They were all of different sizes, which meant that they’d been made by different alien creatures. And there were several dozen dead clawers, stingers, and buzzers here as well, strewn across their smaller kin. There were also many dead gazers. He spotted a somewhat humanoid silhouette amidst the charnel expanse. That’s a reaper. It’s dead. But where did they come from?

“Analysis complete.” Lila started walking to the far end of the cavern, and Hiran followed her. The radiance of her lamp pushed back the darkness, before finally falling upon the dozens of massive, bulbous growths of alien flesh leaning against the rock wall. Organic tubes ran from the bases of the growths across the floor until they disappeared into the midst of a lake of acrid, bubbling liquid.

Hiran saw a reaper’s corpse at the base of a growth. It had emerged halfway through a sphincter-like orifice before perishing. He cycled a small amount of Aether into his Moon Circuits and focused his thoughts. Sure enough, things fell into place for him within a few minutes.

“Those white bug things go around everywhere, eating people and any dead aliens,” he said. “Then they come back and vomit their meals into that acid pool over there. The pool digests the meat and feeds it into these sac-like things, which then pump out more aliens.”

“Well done, Hiran.” Lila said, the corner of her mouth twitching in the Savant’s equivalent of a smile. “You are putting your Empyrean Circuits of the Moon to good use. As a result, your analysis is largely correct, save for one small detail. The smaller aliens do not vomit their meals into the digestion pool. They throw themselves into it, to be digested entirely alongside what they have eaten.”

“I guess we’ve found out what happened to the people who used to live in this habitation block,” Hiran said grimly. “We can’t let this happen to anyone else. We have to stop these aliens.”

Lila looked at a cluster of holes on a nearby wall. “Scans show that those tunnels lead half a mile further underground, before spreading out and away from this building. Was this hive mind seeking to expand its territory? Or perhaps it was trying to seek out and rendezvous with others of its kind.”

“Let’s say two hive minds come into contact with one another.” Hiran folded his arms across his chest and furrowed his brow in thought. “What would happen? Would they partner up and have their hordes fight alongside one another? Or worse, would one eat the other and become more knowledgeable and experienced? Or would they just start fighting?”

“None of the three possibilities you mentioned are implausible. But even the third poses a severe threat to Madhya. Hive minds at war will be ravenous for biomass, and they will spare no effort in acquiring said biomass from any and all of the mortals within their reach.”

“The hive mind we fought was inexperienced, but it was still very dangerous. Two or more hive minds working together will be even more so, but the worst will be a hive mind that has consumed others of its kind, either with or without force.”

“The current situation begs the question of how organisms that are obviously from beyond the known galaxy ended up planetside on Madhya, one of the Ghandarna Empire’s prime worlds,” Lila added. “Did they enter alongside the foreign ships that land by the tens of thousands on a daily basis? Or did they somehow get past the plasma ring encapsulating the Ghandarna system and then circumvent the Starforged fleets?”

“We’re not going to find out by staying here,” Hiran said. “We’ll exit through the ground floor and have Chaoswing pick us up from there.”

“That is possible. The nearby streets are wide enough for the ship to land. Once we are onboard, I will call Scholar Bei Feng.”

“He might be at home, where we’ll be heading anyway. But yes, I guess it doesn’t hurt to contact him as quickly as we can.”

They made their way back to the filtration plant and climbed the maintenance ladder to the lowest main floor. From there, it was a hefty hike up fifty-six floors of stairs to the habitation block’s ground floor lobby.

Hiran’s Starforged physiology wasn’t even the least bit taxed, but Lila was sagging slightly by the time they crested the final flight of stairs. The Savant maintained her stoic demeanor throughout the ordeal though, and she’d waved Hiran away when he offered to carry her twenty floors ago, claiming with a slight wheeze that the climb had been good conditioning for her organic systems, especially their respiratory and circulatory components.

Crossing the lobby, Hiran pushed open the synthsteel doors of the building’s main entrance and strode out into sunlight and fresh air. He took a deep breath, savoring the latter and the comparative absence of the alien stench that had suffused the habitation block’s interior.

Lila walked up to stand by his side, her shotguns held out and at the ready. “What’s this?”

“A bunch of idiots who don’t know just how badly I’m going to beat them,” Hiran said, waving his hand in a sweeping gesture that encompassed the fifty or so mercenaries standing in front of him, all of them with their blades drawn and guns leveled at his head.