* Congratulations: Your Potency has increased from 2 to 3

* Congratulations: Your Mastery has increased from 2 to 3

At least their recent failures with the Briar Bear had come with some benefit. They felt their Swarm growing stronger and that manipulating it took less mental effort than before. Still, the Swarm left the fragment minds to manage the continued efforts to suborn the rest of the Forest while the collective focused on their recent failure.

They had acted rashly after having experienced the anguish of death and with the arrogance of having never failed before. It was a sour thing to admit, but they felt that insight emanate from somewhere inside of them. A monster like that should have been approached with more care, the bees and the zombies could have potentially held it down. Instead, they had chosen to only attack in one way each time.

Enemies should be approached with more care in the future, and they should accept that a multipronged approach would be more worthwhile than relying on singular tactics. This would be important to keep in mind in the future as the Swarm would encounter more enemies and challenges. According to the fragment minds and the exploration that the collective had undertaken into the various memories of their collection, indicated that the Forests had many monsters and threats hidden among the trees.

They had learned to improve their tactics when trying to increase the Swarm. For example, one of their most recent discoveries was combining Infection with Toxic Spores. Releasing a cloud of toxic spores with infection channeled into it, over a grassy field lead to several deer being infected after eating said grass hours later. This could be used on water as well, and the Swarm had recently been able to infect 6 river trouts.

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Said trouts were now dedicated to releasing toxic spores in the streams they were now occupying. All life has to drink after all and given enough time, animals would drink water containing the spores. The Swarm had grown so efficient in their efforts to convert the Forest that in time it would receive new influxes of memory at every passing moment.

However, the key issue was that the Swarm lacked capable soldiers. The Juggernaut Spider was and remained their most powerful weapon. It could casually overtake packs of animals and even lesser monsters without causing too much damage. The Fungal-Floral Network served its purpose to truly subjugate the entire forest through the Mycorrhizal network, and through it siphon of resources from the forest to use as biomass while at the same time converting more plants. The Honey Bees were the perfect assassins and biomass converters, but they could only be controlled effectively in groups.

The Fungal Zombies, on the other hand, had their uses but ultimately they were the most flawed Units they had. Memory examination and observing the various Fungal Zombies since the defeat of the strike team had revealed a glaring issue. They were all lesser than their regular counterparts, the Fungal birds were far more clumsy in the air, the Zombie predators lacked all of the natural instincts for hunting and their experience with moving through the forest. Prey animals lacked their natural caution and responsiveness.

They would need to find a way to either improve the zombies beyond their rather limited state at present, or find a way to create more unique units. Patience was important, but now the Swarm wanted to rid itself of failure so it would not have experience the humiliation of what the Briar Bear had put them through again.