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Chapter 5: First Subjects

Lia pinned the rat to the ground with her mandibles and let the “nest” material flow. Once the rat was about half-covered, it stopped struggling entirely, letting the rest of it be covered with the material.

Once it was fully encased, Lia let a drop of her venom fall onto the rat, and the “nest” material hardened, creating a shell around the rat. And then, to her surprise, a window popped up in front of her.

Based on your abilities and the abilities of Fearful Rat, the following options are available for conversion. Please pick one:

Lesser Swarm Drone:
The Swarm Drone is an all-purpose worker, the backbone of any swarm. It does not have much combat potential, but instead excels in doing menial tasks such as moving resources from one place to another or processing resources into “nest” material. Coordinates especially well with other Swarm Drones.

Lesser Swarm Cannon Fodder:
Swarm Cannon Fodder is just that; a body on the battlefield dedicated to taking hits and keeping attention away from other, more important combatants. Has high HP and decent defenses, but lacks offensive power.

Lesser Swarm Burrower:
The Swarm Burrower is specialized in digging and converting earth and stone to “nest” material, allowing for the creation of sturdier dwellings. Lacks combat potential, and is inefficient at converting organic matter to “nest” material.

She hadn’t been expecting options. Perhaps, in the future, she would be able to specially tailor her conversions, but for now she was satisfied with what she had. Cannon fodder was…probably out, not until she could build up more.

Of course, when she was able to get five or six going, that would be great for keeping attention off of her, but she was guessing that each goblin she killed would take down one or two cannon fodders, and she just didn’t have the luxury of that, not yet.

So that left drone and burrower. Both were tempting in their own ways; burrower would allow her to start setting up a space of her own, but drone would let her do something about all those corpses that were building up.

Well…one could lead to the other. If she was able to hollow out a space near those bodies, she could just drag them herself, no problem. And it wasn’t like she was required to stick to one, either, if she found another rat, she could just make both.

Right, that sounded like a plan. While this rat was converting, she’d find another and get it converting too. So, she got this rat converting into a burrower, consumed another of the corpses to get it processing into “nest” material, and set off in search of another rat.

She really needed to find a better name for it than “nest” material. It was becoming increasingly clear to her that that name was a temporary one given to her by Analysis, so it was up to her to find something more permanent.

The stuff was…vaguely similar to wax, and it kind of reminded her of modeling clay, so…modeling wax? Yeah, that was good enough for now, and it was certainly better than “nest” material.

While she was busy ruminating over that, she kept flicking Presence Detection on and off, and, eventually, she found another rat. The moment she sensed it, she ran at it at full tilt, lunging forward and grabbing it with her mandibles. Like before, the modeling wax began to flow, and soon the rat was covered in a thin layer of the stuff.

She dripped some venom onto the rat, got it converting into a drone, and began to set off towards the first rat, to check on its progress. When she was about halfway there, however, a window appeared, and she stopped to see what it said.

You have converted Fearful Rat into a Lesser Swarm Burrower (Rat)! You gain 2 EXP!

And…suddenly, she could feel something in the back of her mind, the presence of a mind not her own.

No, that wasn’t right. The mind was definitely hers, at least in a sense, but it wasn’t the one that was currently doing the thinking. It…it had to be that of her swarm. She couldn’t actually use any of her burrower’s senses or even tell exactly what it was thinking, but it was still feeding information to her nonetheless.

She could tell that it was safe, that there was food near it, that it wasn’t doing anything, and that it was waiting for orders. So, she reached out with a tentative mental push, asking for a burrow to be dug out, somewhere to bring those bodies.

It was an odd sensation. She didn’t actually tell her burrower what to do, but instead more…set out a task that needed doing, and then some sort of process automatically chose that burrower to complete the task. She felt like she could tell a specific member of her swarm what to do if she wanted, but it also felt like that was something that was unnecessary unless the automatic process did something she really didn’t like.

You have gained the Skill Swarm Progenitor!
You have gained 6 Skills this evolution! Further Skills will require much more practice to obtain!

Swarm Progenitor

Level 1: 0/1000 EXP

Swarm Progenitor provides the wielder all the required tools to run their very own swarm!
Level 1: Provides a task manager that will automatically assign tasks to members of the swarm. Intelligence of the task manager is based on the intelligence of the user, but is increased by a small portion of the intelligence of each new swarm member.
*Swarm not included

Already?! She had done barely anything with her swarm, and it had given her that Skill. She had certainly done less with her swarm than, say, flying, and she hadn’t gotten a Skill for that. Doing stuff with the swarm must have counted as giving more ‘practice’ than flying did. Did that mean it was easier for her to gain Skills that were more directly related to what her race was supposed to do? That would make sense, right?

Analysis has leveled up!

Analysis

Level 3: 13/400 EXP

Helps the user draw conclusions on a situation.
Level 1: For 10 Mana, helps the user by supplying relevant information the user knows or once knew and may have been forgotten.
Level 2: For 20 Mana, provides the user information that could reasonably be obtained by deduction using information the user knows or once knew.
Level 3: For 30 Mana, provides the user information that could reasonably be obtained by deduction using information he user knows or once knew and information the user does not know that could be easily learned.
Kowalski?

Oh, that probably meant that she had guessed correctly. And that new level of Analysis was sounding quite nice, but it also used all of the Mana she had just to use it once. Hopefully, once she evolved, she’d have enough Mana to put that to better use than she was now.

But that was later, right now she was curious about what the new member of her swarm looked like. So, she resumed her trek, and soon found herself back where she had left the first rat. In place of the cocoon there was a rat-like…thing. It would look like a rat, were it not for the much larger claws it was using to tear into the ground and the huge set of insectoid mandibles that were used to crush any rocks it encountered.

Lia’s old self would probably have found the thing repulsive, but her current self had no such feelings. It was built to perform its duty, and there was nothing disgusting about that. Furthermore, her instincts were telling her that, should it do well enough, she would be able to make it into something more…aesthetically pleasing.

Once she herself had grown strong enough, anyway. As things stood now, she had very little control over how something looked.

She examined the burrower for a few moments more, noting that the wound she had created by biting it had completely vanished, meaning that converting something at least partially healed it. That was good to know, she could…probably bring things close to death and not have them instantly die as soon as they finished converting.

You have converted Fearful Rat into a Lesser Swarm Drone (Rat)! You gain 2 EXP!

Oh, and, now that she was thinking about it, converting the rats had actually given her experience, unlike killing one, which meant that, if she wanted, she could probably evolve by just converting rats.

That would take forever, though. Unlike killing them, she had to expend resources to convert a rat, and it would take…she paused, checking her status.

Name: Lia Mios
Race: Young Lesser Swarm Battlemaster
Level: 5/7, 14/40 EXP, 2.5 Blood Money
HP: 47/47	Stamina: 47/47		Mana: 30/30
Strength: 22	Defense: 22		Dexterity: 20
Magic: 6	Magic Defense: 8		Mental Fortitude: 25
Title: Conqueror of Death
You have died and lived to tell the tale. Your life signature becomes undetectable by effects that only search for living or undead creatures, though you may still be sensed by effects that sense both. Provides immunity to instant-kill effects, and any blow that would bring you to 0 HP instead brings you to 1 if you had more than 1 HP.
Titles: List truncated. Open ‘Titles” for more.		Skills: List truncated. Open “Skills” for more.

Yeah, it would take at least fifty more rats, and that seemed like something of a waste when she could just…kill two or three goblins and get a similar amount of experience.

That seemed doable. She’d just have to nip in and out like she did with the first goblin, and then she’d be good. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could even convert one, and she’d finally have something that would be a reasonable help in combat.

So, she set her new drone to helping out the burrower and began to make her way towards the marketplace once again. And, after a few minutes, she encountered her first patrol.

To her horror, there were two goblins instead of one, and one of them had a lantern. There was no way she could take on two at once, especially not when they could actually see. In that case, she just had to wait this one out and find a less well-prepared patrol, so she hunkered down on a wall and activated Active Camouflage, praying that they didn’t spot her.

She kept a careful eye on her Stamina, and deactivated Active Camouflage once it looked like she was about to run out. Fortunately, by that time, the patrol was well past the stall she was hiding in, and it seemed that she was in the clear.

Spiderclimb and Active Camouflage have leveled up!

Spiderclimb

Level 5: 67/600 EXP

Allows the user to stick to walls and ceilings.
Level 1: Costs 0.5 Stamina per second.
Level 2: Costs 0.4 Stamina per second.
Level 3: Costs 0.3 Stamina per second.
Level 4: Costs 0.2 Stamina per second.
Level 5: Costs 0.1 Stamina per second.
Puts the crawly in your creepy.

Active Camouflage

Level 3: 284/400 EXP

Helps the user stay hidden.
Level 1: For 1 Stamina per second, the user appears somewhat similarly colored to objects near them. This effect is visual only and only affects the vision of creatures other than the user.
Level 2: For 1 Stamina per second, the user appears similarly colored to objects near them. This effect is visual only and only affects the vision of creatures other than the user.
Level 3: For 1 Stamina per second, the user becomes the same color as the most common color within 10 centimeters. This effect is visual only, and the user may choose to be affected.
Not the greatest when moving, though

Ah, that was why her leg had suddenly seemed to become brown halfway through her hiding. She had become able to perceive what color she looked like to other things. She waited for the lantern’s light to fade before she crept out of her hiding spot and resumed her search for a lone goblin.

She didn’t find one. She did, however, find several more patrols like the first. Not only were there now more patrols, each of them had more goblins. The goblins had realized that something was killing their own in this section of the market, and had responded by increasing security.

That was not good. She had only three real options at this point; first, forge deeper into the market and hope patrols got lighter. She didn’t really want to do that, though. Even if patrols did get lighter and she managed to kill a goblin, she’d have to make her way back through this part of the market while dodging goblins that were actively looking for her, and that felt needlessly risky.

Second, abandon the market for now and try other places. She didn’t want to do that either, both because it felt like giving up and because she had no assurance that things wouldn’t immediately become as bad as they were here, and then she’d have to deal with multiple areas being on high alert at the same time.

So, that left the third option; figure out some way to deal with a two-goblin patrol. If she was lucky, she’d only need to do that once, and then she’d be able to evolve and hopefully wouldn’t run into this conundrum again.

Right. Time to take stock, then. Presence Detection, Active Camouflage, and Spiderclimb had all leveled up while she was searching. Spiderclimb had become free to use, Active Camouflage had made it so her skin changed to be the two most common nearby colors in a stereotypical ‘camouflage’ pattern, and Presence Detection had just had a range increase and Stamina cost decrease.

Aside from that, she had obtained Blood Money from the goblin she had killed before, and she had yet to check the Dimension of Discounts. But that would be…unwise to do in the marketplace, since it cost seventy five percent of her Stamina and Mana to do so, and she didn’t want to leave herself basically defenseless if something chanced upon her.

Fortunately, getting out of the marketplace was as easy as always, and she was able to find her swarm without too much trouble. The burrow she had set them to making was growing…large. It already would easily fit the three of them inside, and her swarm didn’t seem to be slowing down.

She sat some distance outside of the entrance to avoid getting in their way, and checked the Dimension of Discounts.

Welcome to the Dimension of Discounts! Here we have everything you could dream of and more, all in an affordable package! All we ask for is the blood of your enemies!

…

Well, it seems you can’t afford anything in our catalogue at the moment! I’m sorry to see that, but since you’re a first time shopper, I’ll give you a no-interest loan of 7.5 Blood Money! If you choose to accept, the next 7.5 Blood Money you earn will automatically be used to pay off this loan, but I can assure you it’s well worth it! An item from us might turn the tides of battle!
Do you accept?

Lia accepted. No interest was no interest, and she wasn’t about to turn that offer down. Hopefully the Dimension of Discounts would have something good in it, enough to let her win at least one fight with two goblins.

Wonderful! I’ve added the Blood Money to your account. I’ve also taken the liberty of giving your situation a quick look, may I suggest one of the following items?

DD-Brand Mechanical Noisemaker (10 BM):
This ball of machinery may look useless, but throw it on the ground and listen to the cacophony it makes! Guaranteed to ruin the focus of anyone and everyone within earshot! _{*Earplugs sold separately.}

DD-Brand Monster Bait (10 BM):
Place this down and watch as every non-swarm monster within 5 meters drops whatever they’re doing and attempts to eat this!_{*DD not responsible for the actions of monsters who are finished eating.}

DD-Brand Pouch Sand (5 BM):
A small pouch of perfectly ordinary sand…or so it would seem! When tossed into the air, this sand seeks the face of whatever it is tossed at! Watch your enemies cry out in confusion as their eyes are suddenly filled with sand! _{*Keep out of reach of children age 3 or younger.}

Lia considered her options. The noisemaker was out, since that would draw the attention of everything nearby, and she didn’t really have a good way of throwing the pouch sand, so the bait seemed like her best bet. Could she poison it using her venom? Venom wasn’t necessarily toxic when ingested, but it could definitely hurt.

Actually…she waited a moment for her Mana to regen, then activated Analysis level one, asking about her venom.

Your venom is both poison and venom. Your venom does not deal damage when used as poison, but exhibits its other effects for a much longer period of time than when used as venom.

Perfect, the bait it was.

Thank you for your purchase, come again soon!

And now, she just had to poison it, and bait out one of the goblins with it. Hopefully, it would be smooth sailing from there.