While Austin was busy building up his basic industry. He started construction on a larger scale assembly Bay. These bays could assemble larger components that were printed by the smaller ones. Which would be the first step to building the far larger facilities needed for nanobot construction. The irony of which was not lost on him.

Sofia was currently walking through the forest, unfortunately they had had two scares with a wolf, but Austins beetle had been quick enough to take them down. Au-Austin had gathered up as many of the small patches of herbs Sofia had missed as he could detect. Even so his bots limited storage capacity was quickly filling up. It wouldn't be long before he'd have to start handing them off to Sophia to store in her bag.

Sofia had been handed an old timey basket like backpack to fill with herbs. The basket was rather large and had to be padded so she could wear it comfortably. As it was almost as big as she was and she had to toss whatever she found up into it. By the time the two of them finally decided to return to the village the sun was already setting. Sofia hadn't managed to fill the entirety of the basket but with the surprise of what his beetle had been able to gather it was close. Which was almost surprising for the entire village. It usually took a group of gatherers to fill an entire basket like this. The fact that a single girl and her strange beetle creature had managed to do it made it no less impressive.

The next morning Sophia went to meet up with the village mage Catherine to try and improve her limited magical capabilities. Unlike Catherine who was from an actual city with more than one mage to mentor under. So, she was able to study under a variety of different spell crafts tell she was old enough to earn enough to pay to go to a lesser but still no less respected magical Academy. Where is she finally found her niche that later ended with her becoming the village mage of a small no name town on the edge of Duke vine wells territory. The only reason Vine well even wanted a settlement out here was because this area was one of the best places to find healing herbs in his territory. He had made several attempts to set up proper plantations but had met with mixed results. So small gatherer villages like theirs were used instead. The village was made up of a few dozen gatherers, a single blacksmith. A local guard funded by the Duke himself so the locals kids could earn some extra coin for their families. Because farming was impossible in these lands as well. It also kept the town safe with a small hoard of young but not necessarily well trained guards. There were also two woodworkers, Sophia’s mother the tailor and a general crafters family that handle just about everything else. In total the village population hovered somewhere around the mid sixties depending on birth, deaths, people leaving to find their fortune or work or so on. So long as they kept a relatively steady supply of herbs and medicines for Duke Vine wells tribute each year, they were pretty much left alone. This year they might have a bit of an issue meeting that demand. At least that's what Sophia believed at first with all the monsters. Though with her new companion maybe not, she wasn't quite sure just yet.

Sofia was trying to pay attention to her lessons and did her best to perform the task given to her. They weren’t hard per say just complicated. It seemed like everything Catherine wanted her to do had dozens of steps. And while she could perform each step when she was walked through it. Trying to do so on her own or perform them as a whole task was a lot harder than she expected. The closest sheet had gotten to so far was a very simple spell to purify water. Sofia lacked any direct elemental affinity, but she was instructed to at least learn the basics of each of the elements. As it was often the more advanced or more diverse magic types that used these fundamentals as a template to build upon. She could purify water, but it always came out boiling for some reason.

Catherine would have suspected she had a fire elemental affinity because of this, if it wasn't for the fact her attempts at generating fire made sparks closer to lightning or just heated an object up until it exploded. If she had any fire affinity conjuring a simple flame would be like dropping a match to oiled kindling. Despite this nothing she tried worked right even when Catherine used herself as a focus much to the mage’s confusion. She claimed Sophia’s Mana was strange inactive it rose and fell like a wave. Active it spiked and fell almost like lightning but focused it could be almost as steady and accurate as earth and then there was just this weird nature of putting out more energy than it should. Fire would shoot off sparks or ZAPs of lightning would sputter, and shimmer water would boil, and earth would come out as glass for some reason.

Catherine had seen actual glass mages before. Some of the temples they could make were absolutely beyond description in their beauty. But this was not glass magic, this was earth magic it wasn't just pure glass either bits of it almost looked like it was trying to form crystals or gemstones. One crystal Sophia had actually made by accident had exploded. The only thing Sophia seemed to be having an easy time with was communicating with things. At first Catherine just thought it was animals Sophia could communicate with. That was until she picked up her staff. It been a gift from her mentor while a relatively simple magical tool so long as it was fed mana it could continuously cast a spell for the user. Mind you it was just a continuous process if you ordered it to make water it would just continue to make water. If you wanted to make ice you would have no control over how the ice grew if you let the staff take over. It would just continued whatever task it was given well magically speaking at least. It had no greater control other than to make it do what it had originally been told to do a useful little trinket for monotonous work but not much. But that's where things got weird while Sophia herself could not cast even the most basic spells without odd events happening even with the aid of a traditional magic focus. But if Catherine cast a spell with her staff and then handed it off to Sophia not only could she easily power it but control it. Most of the time mages had a hard time entwining their mana together usually they would have to use complex spell setups for runic engravings to have multiple mages cast the same spell. Sophia strange mana seemed to bypass that in its entirety if that wasn't strange enough, she could still control the magic despite the staff continuing to autocast the spell. Where Catherine could order a magical flame to go forward or rise into the air, she could not stop it or change its direction once her staff took over. Sophia instead could completely manipulate it, despite not having originally cast the spell. Which was only something mage’s who specialized in dispelling powerful magics like curses or enchantments and only after years of careful training could do. The fact the girl had to make physical contact with the source of the magic seemingly being the only downside was astonishing to her. And then there was that beetle, it was a dead zone to her eyes.

If Catherine focused, she could see the magic around her. A trick picked up by most new mages at some point. However, some could see or even hear more than others. Some are even able to understand huge amounts of data from it. Catherine, however, was never so skilled but even she could get a basic understanding of how strong something was magically speaking just by feeling it out. And the Beatle made no sense to her the few times she had seen it act. When it consumed the leaves and made medicine, when it did its strange blue light and the one time, she'd seen its stinger she detected no magic but something else. The only way she could describe it was like sucking on a copper piece that's strange taste at the back of your mouth when you do so. She had once gotten struck by a lightning spell in a duel and it had left that taste in her mouth for almost a week. But this was far fainter, only a brief hint followed by a faint buzzing sensation that was until it began to empty out the leaves stored within its shell. She had managed to get close enough to get a good look at what was within its shell, it had some strange bluish black material folded up within it almost like wings? It had those two strange metallic arms, it's Stinger and a bunch of small orbs. She would have thought they were eggs, but she sensed no life from them at all almost like the beetle itself. Except without all its armor in the way she finally felt its energy as it flowed through the creature. It was more contained and simultaneously more violent than any mana she had felt before and tugged at a small corner at the back of her mind. She had felt something similar once a long time ago when she was learning about the very basics of magic. Back then she had been exposed to several different types of magic to try and gage her affinity and she could swear she had felt a very similar sensation before. Catherine sighed she would just have to wait till after spring when she could take Sophia to the city to get properly tested to figure out this strange affinity. It would certainly bother her tell then she just wished she could figure out why Sophia was having such a hard time with her teaching or.

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She was suddenly pulled from her thoughts by a Thunderclap in the distance the weather had been strange lately. A storm had been building to the east for a week now it just seemed to have stopped there. If it would have rained it would have run down in the valley, so it hadn't rained yet. The storm just seemed to sit there brewing. If she was more spiritualistic like a shaman or a witch, she might say it was an omen of something.

Austin watched the girls having their lessons the one that produced the weird energy signature had apparently taken an interest in the girl he had rescued. He had been recording their lessons, gathering information as best he could on the weird energy the two were producing. Day by day the young girl seemed to produce a tiny amount more of this energy where before he probably would have missed it his background radiation now, he could at least track her because of her energy signature. Though if she passed a particularly thick wall or too many people were close to her it would seem to vanish. Where the older woman Catherine or Catherina if his translation software was close to right. He could easily detect her no matter where she was in the village.

Austin had been letting his translation software run in the background. Due to his damage state, it was taking up nearly six percent of this processing power. He really needed to get to work on building a new core and servers. But that was a problem he still didn't have the industrial capacity to fulfill. He could brute force the problem and well, it would cost him a lot of resources and a lot of space. He just needed nanites to make some of the more complex components. So, the sooner he can get a proper construction facility up and running. The sooner he could begin repairing himself as for the time being he can make do even if he was at less than one fourth of his original processing power.

Me-mean while the first of his improved aquatic drones began to explore the aquifer and flooded Ant tunnels while another of his dragonfly drones began to explore the caverns below. Lastly was his beetle bot currently it was going around hunting those annoying wolves or following the girl. He still hadn't figured out her name yet Sophie so sassafras he knew it started with an S and either an O or an A. But he hadn't figured out the rest of it yet. The translation software needed more data points he had planted a few of the hidden microphones around the village but there simply weren't very many large gathering places. The tavern did some business, but it wasn't a lot. It only had five tables and the most he'd ever seen there was less than ten people there. The barracks for the guards had far more people living there but most of the time when someone showed up, they were either drunk or exhausted and passed out. So, there was actually very little conversation. His dragonfly like drones and beetle were two of his best sources of audio recordings because they can somewhat get close to the people walking around. Unfortunately, he needed the bots to constantly leave the village to hunt down what he assumed was enemy scouts.

Austin didn't understand how and he very much wanted to know how but the beetles, the bats, the wolves and apparently a giant octopus creature he had found in a pond as well as a few giant frogs and a horde of spiders. Which he was trying to figure out how to exterminate without firebombing a section of the forest. We're all seemingly being controlled by something. They weren't behaving like wild animals on top of that they were actively hunting those that acted like normal animals. And the truly scary part was all these things were acting in coordination with one another. If that wasn't scary enough, he had only this morning spotted a small family of what he thought at first was a strange deer until he realized they were bigger than horses and systematically clearing an area of all its foliage. The creatures were obese to say the least they never stopped eating and when one dropped dead presumably eating itself to death one of the strange wolf like creatures dragged it off off. He tried to get close but those weird bat like creatures chased his dragonfly drone off. So, if he was understanding this properly someone was not only controlling these creatures but had created biological harvesting machines that were slowly working their way through the forest and surrounding areas. He hadn’t seen anything taking a munch on any of the trees yet but the area where he had seen the deer like creatures had a quarter of a mile completely stripped of vegetation. Whatever this was it probably saw the villagers as an active threat which is why it kept performing probing attacks on their defenses. Yes, the villagers weren't actively hunting the creatures of the forest especially after the last attack left them with more than enough meat for them to use. The fact that a fortified even non hostile location we're situated somewhere near them was a perceived threat. No-now that he thought about it these monsters were acting a lot like the ants, he had been fighting and that gave Austin some ideas.

Austin gathered up a few of the Ant corpses he had set aside to melt their shells down and a few corpses of the wolf like creatures and toss them into a pile closer to where he had observed ants emerging from underground. He perched one of his dragonflies above the mound and waited as he continued working on his production systems.

As soon as he was sure he had enough resource blanks set aside that he could print two small forges he began the process of disassembling the semi active one he still had. Technically the entire smeltery was a grand total of twenty four forges smelters printers and so on. But he wasn't taking any risks especially since he had to mix and match a lot to get the system working in its current beat up state. Where at one point in time it had been meant to work like a conveyor belt. Where chunks of material when in one end resource blanks or even simple fabricated parts came out the other. Now he had to use his tractor beam ants to remove items from each machine and carefully install them in the next. Leading to a lot of tedious labor and a seventh of his processing power to just keep the entire room running somewhat without issue. It was slow, it was annoying, it was overly complicated which is primarily why he was constructing from the blanks he had in storage and not relying on his forges. But now he could finally start assembling new forges. As they were only waiting on the larger fabrication bays to make the components for the nanobots he could begin using his smaller bays in conjunction with the pre-existing parts from the old forges to set up new ones. He was getting so close to having a functioning be it small industrial complex.

Austin was pulled from watching his various progression bars by the first of the ants finding his little offering. If Austin could smile, he would be as more and more ants poured out of the tunnels. He’d have to keep a close eye on them, but it looked like if he was lucky, he may have just started a war. It wouldn't be the first time he used twisted politics to his own benefit. He would have smirked if he could as the biggest pain in his metaphorical ass started hunting the second biggest pain in his metaphorical ass. It was times like this he wished he could eat some popcorn. If his old crew were to be believed it would probably be really good right now.