Swarming Sovereignty

The first of the waiting windows seemed to be a message from the Dimension of Discounts, while the others were about Skills she had gained or leveled up. To begin with, she took a look at the one from the Dimension of Discounts.

…Wait, higher-ups? She felt like it wasn’t talking about Amelia, so…were there actual people behind the Dimension of Discounts? How did Amelia…

No, best not to question it. She wasn’t going to find an answer, and it would just make her head hurt. Instead, she checked out the other windows. Blood Money had leveled up, increasing the efficiency of conversion from 5% to 10%, and Power Attack had gained a level as well, but the only interesting level up was Dimension of Discounts.

That left three windows, one announcing that she had gained Skills and two that contained those Skills.

Lia frowned internally. She didn’t have more brains or processing centers…did she? Well…there was one if you counted the “task manager” Swarm Progenitor gave, but where were the other nine?

She paused, then looked behind her. A member of the Rat Aristocracy was usually made of multiple rats, but she wasn’t. Still, her tail was knotted and had severed ends coming out of it like it had once been connected to multiple rats. And, once she lifted it and counted the ends, the number came out to nine, not including the main end attached to her body.

Interesting. It seemed those still counted as extra processing power for the sake of Skills. Were there any other neat Skills she could gain by utilizing that? She was beginning to wish she had paid better attention in her class on monster Skills.

Though…maybe there was a textbook lying around somewhere? It would really be handy to have a list of potential Skills she could try and get, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete list. After all, it was highly unlikely any Skills related to her swarm would appear there, and there would no doubt be many more uncommon Skills left out for the sake of space.

Light was suddenly cast across the area as the lightborn emerged from its cocoon. Lia turned to face it, only to take a reflexive step back as she beheld the monstrosity in front of her.

It was…kind of like a goblin, but only in shape and size. The wrought iron of the lantern had melded with the goblin’s body, streaks of the metal running across it like veins. The lightborn’s head and face were much the same as the goblins it had been based on, but those eyes…

There were two pits where the eyes should have been, filled with dim flames that flickered as the lightborn surveyed its surroundings. But those weren’t the most striking thing about the creature. No, that went to its torso.

In place of the stomach, the lightborn had a metallic cavity, much like the one lanterns held their candles in. And, like many of those types of lanterns, there was a large hood that could be shut to block the light.

Most of the armor that the goblins had been wearing had been repurposed as leather coverings that were melded into its skin, and it held a club in each hand.

Lia commanded it to shut the lid, and the light it was giving off dimmed until only its face was illuminated by the fire in in its eyes. Lia hesitated for a moment more before she opened up its status.

Well, that status certainly didn’t disappoint. Could she check out that Skill…?

That was…pretty good. It was a ranged attack, and even though it only dealt “minor” damage for the time being, the lightborn had pretty decent Magic and, while it wasn’t as bad as their Mental Fortitude, goblins weren’t exactly known for Magic Defense either.

And, what was more important, she had something that had hands now! She could have the lightborn open doors or drag bodies or…hold things! And, since it did everything she asked and she could mentally command it, it was only slightly worse than not having hands herself!

Her first job for those hands was to have them drag the half-eaten carcass of the last goblin back to the burrow. She wanted the blood on the ground to be the only sign that goblins had been killed there, and even more than that she wanted to use it to replenish her stock of modeling wax. Filling up all the foot soldiers had taken quite a toll on her stores, and that corpse alone would more than make up for it.

So, she led her swarm back to the burrow, which had become quite a bit larger since she was last inside. There were two more rooms now, one of which was dedicated to storing modeling wax, and the other to storing corpses that needed processing.

Fortunately, Lia had thought ahead and had made the burrow taller than it needed to be. The lightborn had to duck a little to get inside, but was able to fit through without too much issue. Lia hesitated for a moment, then commanded it to fill whatever organ held the modeling wax with the remainder of her stores.

With that out of the way, she began her trek back towards the bazaar, ready to make another raid. She decided that she’d only try and convert one goblin from each patrol for a little bit, both to allow her to build up more modeling wax and to help build up a store of weapons and armor instead of converting them with each goblin. She was hoping that she would be able to use them to make unique varieties of rats to help fill out her army.

They reached the bazaar, and Lia once again began to search for a patrol. She had to go a little past her usual hunting grounds this time, having cleared the patrol that usually went by there, but she was able to find another one relatively quickly regardless.

She used Magic Multitarget (mental) to make all three hungry at once, two ends of her tail perking up while she did. The Skill actually wasn’t incredibly useful with this magic, since innate magic was cast nearly instantly and the Mana cost was only somewhat less than just casting the magic three times and she wasn’t planning on using other magic, but it would serve to give the Skill experience, so it was probably worth it.

Once the goblins were eating the grass again, she had her swarm approach, then let the lightborn fire to start things off. The darkness was pierced by the hood of the lantern opening and a small gout of fire leaping out and striking the nearest goblin. It screeched in pain, lurching back as the foot soldiers swarmed it and bit it to death.

Lia focused on the second, and it looked like the battle was about to play out identically to the first, but when the third goblin reached for one of the foot soldiers, the lightborn hit it with fire, forcing it back.

Lia finished taking out the second goblin, and turned to the third. The lightborn was keeping it at bay with fire, and the swarm was able to disable it and cover it with modeling wax without too much issue.

What was an issue was the yells of goblins she could hear, yells that were getting closer by the second. Fortunately, it seemed that there were only two patrols close enough to hear and come to this patrol’s aid, but the fact that they had heard anything at all was unfortunate.

She would have to take care in the future to not hit with such a big attack right away, the goblins seemed to otherwise forego alerting others when they were starving, probably so they could keep all the prey for themselves.

Right, time to make a decision. Now that she had numbers on her side, she felt much more confident taking on two patrols at once, especially after she had seen how well her swarm took care of just one.

Yes, she could do this. She ordered the lightborn to coat the lantern with modeling wax and put it with the cocoon, which she then set to converting into another lightborn. She had wanted to keep the lanterns for experimenting with rats, but right now she needed some quick firepower, and another tanky ranged attacker would be perfect, even if it wasn’t as high level as the other lightborn.

She took a moment to take stock of her situation. She had leveled up once again, and was close enough to another that the conversion of the goblin would likely get her there. Conversions generally took around two or three minutes, and judging based on the volume of the approaching yells, she guessed the goblins would be upon her in a minute to a minute and a half.

That actually worked out pretty well. It meant that she could count on a mid-battle refill of her resources, so she could unload her magic on the goblins to start with, if she so chose. For now she’d just make them hungry again; making them stronger and more willing to fight is not something she wanted, and unless things went south and she needed it to escape, she didn’t want to make them run in fear, either.

They would just report back to whatever their chieftain was, and things would only get worse from there. The goblins were acting under the assumption that there was something dangerous currently, but they had no concrete knowledge of what it was. She didn’t want to give them that knowledge.

The light of the first patrol rounded the bend. Lia waited until they were within range, then hit them all with hunger. Their movements slowed somewhat, became even less refined than they already were, but the goblins kept running. They knew there was something to fight up ahead, and that meant something to eat, even if that something ended up being the corpses of their compatriots.

Lia set her swarm to fighting them while she kept an eye out for the second patrol. She was briefly aware of the lightborn opening fire and the goblins screeching in pain, and then her attention was torn away by the arrival of the second patrol, coming from the other end of the path.

She once again waited until they were in range so she could hit them with hunger, then looked back to see how the first battle was going. She was somewhat dismayed to find that each of the goblins had taken out one of her foot soldiers, but one goblin was dead, one of them was critically wounded with blood fountaining out of its mouth, and the other was distracted by chewing the corpse of the foot soldier it had killed with its club, and was not putting up a great fight.

Lia dashed in and finished off the wounded goblin, feeling the level up restore her Mana as she did. The swarm was able to disable that last goblin just as the three newcomers reached them, and Lia commanded them to focus fire on one of the ones with a club. The lightborn hit it with a lance of fire, and Lia used that moment to run in and land a solid bite on its ankle.

It swatted down at her with a club, but it was still reeling from the fire and its aim was totally off, allowing Lia to easily duck out of the way. The swarm reached it then, and were able to finish it off with no trouble whatsoever.

Trouble from it, anyway. The other goblin with a club was able to smash one of the soldiers, and the one with a lantern grabbed one and tried to eat it alive. And, like every other goblin that tried that, it got its tongue bitten off for the trouble.

And from there the fight was pretty much over. The goblin that had its tongue bitten off was no threat, so she ordered it be taken alive, and around that time the other lightborn finished converting and helped the swarm subdue the remaining goblin.

She got the goblins half-covered in modeling wax, so they stopped struggling, then heaved a sigh of relief. She had lost five foot soldiers, yes, but they had been expendable. And, from their sacrifice, she would be able to convert three more goblins, a not-insignificant boost to her capabilities.

She had the two lightborn consume the corpses of the fallen foot soldiers, to both recoup the modeling wax that was inside those drones and to convert their bodies into modeling wax, just to get all that she could out of them.

The remaining foot soldiers ate about half of one of the goblin bodies, and they were able to get the half-covered goblins fully covered shortly thereafter. Lia made one a drone, so that her workers had something with the benefit of hands, and then converted the other two into foot soldiers. She needed some more durable front-liners to keep her enemies distracted from the squishier rats.

After the goblins were finished converting, she’d get to work transporting the corpses to her burrow, but, for now, it was time to take a breath and reassess her situation, starting with checking what the battle had done for her Skills.

Fighterman481

So, the whole converting items with creatures thing was something that I sort of came up with on the fly. I had an idea and ran with it and I'm fairly happy as to how it turned out.

I also had a hard time trying to decide how many casualties Lia should have taken in said skirmish. I felt that, as things stood, it was both too many and too little, since on one hand the goblins were debuffed and there was a coordinated swarm working to take them down, but on the other the average stats of the goblins were way higher than the average foot soldier and there were a fair number of them.

So, I chose to leave it as it was and not think about it too much.

Next time we'll be...probably forging deeper into goblin territory, so look forward to it!

And, as always, thanks for reading!