They were twelve constructs all in all, moving as a unit. Half of them started carrying the corpses back to their master’s domain, while the others formed a circle around them.

Of course, my spiders wouldn’t have a chance against an organized pack. The only reason they had won so far was due to far superior numbers, being able to surround the construct and strike from the back before restraining it. In anything but overwhelming force, the construct's superior fangs and shell would be unbeatable.

I had to arm and armour my forces, and quickly.

Returning to the rapidly decomposing centipede, I set to studying the make of its mandibles and carapace. They were incredibly sharp and durable, the former looking like glass or cut diamond, while the latter was like polished rock. And indeed, their structure was incredibly similar. Similar, but not the same. Both were growing in visible layers, radiating from small pores on the skin. These pores seemed to have grown the materials, but their structure was too damaged to reveal anything about the how of it.

Though, no two were destroyed the same way. So, if I studied enough of them, I might be able to reconstruct a functioning one.

It was a slow and tedious task, requiring enough of my attention I couldn’t maintain any workings in the meantime, but it worked. Whenever I found a new piece of intact structure, I copied it into one gland where I was gathering them all together, like the world's most intricate puzzle. But in the end I did manage to assemble it all.

I still had no clue how it worked, but I could replicate it in one of my spiders and see what happened. I repeated the same process for the mandibles as well, and then turned my attention back to my cave as a whole.

I was greeted by bloody slaughter. It was almost as bad as after my cataclysmic mistake. Almost all of my newly raised spiders were gone. I should probably have removed the command to attack the enemy on sight. Now only the pack that had helped me catch the centipede remained. Of the various other denizens, only scattered remains were left. The lizards had fared worst of all, as I hadn’t even managed to recover their population before this new offensive.

Right now, there were two large packs still roaming my cave, searching for ever scarcer prey. I’d have to strike back soon. First, I’d have to find a new clutch of spider eggs. There was little chance these roaming constructs had left any carcasses for my spiders to lay their brood in, so I immediately went to check the last remaining pack. And true enough, there were two females carrying eggs. I set to work immediately. First, testing my theory. Focusing on a singular egg, I tried to implement the glands for shell and mandible into the tiny spiderling as it grew.

First I had to remove the normal shell and mandibles, though. The first spider died, bleeding out in the process. The second died soon after, as I hadn’t managed to properly seal wounds. The third made it through that stage. With it, I set to integrating the glands in such a pattern that the shield and claws would form properly. It was intricate work, and I had to stop the growth process multiple times to rework their positions, referencing the centipede’s corpse each time. Number three died as its body rejected the foreign intrusion. On the fourth one, I tried coaxing the spider’s own body into building the glands themselves. It was an unusual way to work in, and number four didn’t survive long. But by number six, I had found out how to send the spider’s body instructions similar to how I did their adult counterparts.

Number six finally survived till the hatching. It burrowed into its mother as their kind was wont to do, and I watched as it grew. I would have liked to turn my attention away, but I needed to make sure my alterations worked.

Soon, the shell and claws started growing out. The claws formed dagger-like protrusions, while the shell uniformly covered the spider’s body. The material started out slightly viscous, moulding itself to the body, but then grew solid. Everything seemed fine for a heart crushingly long time. Both the shell and the claws were developing nicely. The former a nice, opal-like layer, the latter growing out as little nubs. But then the spider stiffened up and stopped moving. It was the shell. When the material was freshly produced, it was slightly viscous, so it could spread over the body evenly before hardening out. However, that led to it clogging up the joints until any movement became impossible.

I reduced the number of glands around the joint areas of number seven and let it run wild to observe. This time, everything seemed fine. The shell around the joints was thin enough for the spider’s movements to break through a newly developing layer, and afterwards the movement of shell against shell smoothed away any offending parts. As it grew, number seven started to devour the shell of its mother as well, and then it began grinding little pebbles to dust with its mandibles and consuming that. Apparently it needed the material for its developing shell.

Soon enough, it grew to an impressive adult specimen. While still, it looked like a small pile of stones, and even in movement it was hard to make out. I didn’t expect this camouflage to help against the crystal constructs though. The increased durability would likely be very helpful, however. Only the claws were a problem. They grew out as round, smooth rods, blunt as it got. I didn’t know whether the centipede had had the same problem, or this was somehow a failure of my construction, but the problem was resolved rather easily. All I had to do was order the spider to sharpen its mandibles against one another, and soon they were like wicked little daggers. The sound of crystalline blade against blade was rather unnerving, almost like a blade of steel being sharpened but with an ethereal ring to it, and soon the cave would be filled with it.

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I immediately set to applying the same changes to the rest of the spider eggs, sending a few of the pack out to hunt slugs and bugs for the little spiders to feed on. Their populations were dangerously low, true, but I could raise them up after this war was won. As I repeated the same working again and again, the familiar ease set in, the magic doing much of the work on its own as long as I kept a part of my mind concentrated on the task. I used my freed up concentration to raise a new batch of slugs simultaneously to the spiders. The little army I was raising would require much food. The one good thing about these slugs was that there were always eggs around somewhere.

With my attention split like that, I didn’t have much left to pay attention to my garden. Though I could tell there were two groups of constructs roaming at the moment. They were slowly closing in on something else. Something living, smaller than a lizard. A fight ensued, though I caught a general flurry of movement, and then the life was snuffed out. I was just about to turn my attention elsewhere when I noticed the pack set off again, but not towards their crystal realm. Before, they had always carried their catch back for their master to consume. But not any more, it seemed.

This was interesting enough for me to leave the slug eggs be and concentrate on this pack of constructs. It was immediately evident they had been changed from when I’d last seen them. They were all still spiders, but I could make out three distinct forms between them.

Most of them, seven of these twelve, had become smaller. They were flitting about and around the group, combing through the area as they were passing through. They never strayed too far, though, before turning back to the group and searching in a new direction. Four of them were large behemoths, their bodies bulbous and easily three times the size of the smaller ones. Their blades had become imposing scythes, large enough to cut one of my spiders in two. They were travelling in formation around the last of the pack. A spider almost like the original ones, but with an engorged abdomen filled with a swirling storm of magic. This one had its teeth buried into their latest victim, sucking every last bit of magic out.

So that was why they no longer needed to return after every kill.

It also presented me with valuable targets to strike at. Though, I might need to develop some more intelligent tactics than the spider’s instinctual surrounding and overwhelming.

The Lizards' ability to phase through matter would likely be very useful, if I could bring up their population to a fighting state.

I turned my attention back to the slugs. If I wanted to raise two species for fighting, then my need for a stable food supply only grew that much more for it.

While I split my attention between that and the growing spiders, I lost another four creatures to the roaming packs, and a third entered my territory. As soon as the slugs hatched, I turned my attention away. They could grow the rest of the way on their own. Then, I set to finding a batch of lizard eggs. There still weren’t any. Then back to my last plan, finding a breeding pair and going on from there. It took some doing, but eventually I found two adolescents of the right gender, both raised by me. They sadly were on the opposite ends of the cave, so I’d have to guide them through the patrolling constructs. On their way, I subtly enhanced their growth speed, feeding them with newly hatched slugs.

It was arduous, guiding the lizards through burrows and dense foliage. I didn’t dare to move them at anything but a crawl, for fear of guiding them into an unnoticed scout and having too little time to react. It was a hard task, focussing on five different targets at once while maintaining the working on the spiders, and I stopped trying when I almost slipped up. I hadn’t noticed a pack suddenly changing direction and almost intersecting with the male’s path. I only escaped the situation by ordering it to become mist and escape into a nearby pond.

Afterwards, I redoubled my caution. Apparently that trick used a lot of the lizard’s stored magic. Channelling more magic into it by hand only helped so much, as the lizard first had to convert it to something it could use. Similar to how I converted natural magic through my core into the steadily growing aura filling the cave.

Some further careful manoeuvring finally saw the two lizards finally unite. I settled them down in an overgrown rock crack and kept guiding more insects to them to fuel their growth. After that, I gave the order to get to it, and the two of them did. Quickening the growth of the eggs inside the lizard was almost as easy as quickening them outside of it, so I kept that working in the back of my head and returned my attention to the spider army. The pack had moved on while I wasn’t paying attention, avoiding the crystalline hunters without help. It seemed they had learned to fear them while my attentions had been consumed uncovering the secrets to the centipede’s armour.

Now, I looked at the fruits of that labour. Three dozen spiders had survived into adulthood, all now bearing the thick, rocky shells and glistening fangs I had given them. The sound of fang being dragged against fang as they continually sharpened their blades filled the rocky outcropping on which they had gathered.

I set aside there pairs, ordering to hide from the patrolling constructs and multiply while I took the rest of them to war.