Antelligent Design

33. The Grind of Battle

The Marsh Expanse is teeming with monsters and the constant roar of battle. I have a ton of Biomass I need to collect and a whole host of Skills to grind. With Tiny and Crinis by my side, I’m perfectly confident wading into the Expanse to battle.

Monsters are fighting in every tree, on every mound of earth and inside every tepid pool of marsh water. The three of us barrel in and attack everything we can see. Tiny is in his element, smashing his fists in every direction, his massive hands thumping and grabbing monsters the moment they fall within his reach. His incredible punches hit with the force of a solid truck, and smaller beasts are sent flying out, slamming into trees and splashing into the water. Tiny hoots and bellows his rage and joy.

With her Mana detection sense, Crinis is a menace. No longer reliant on the sense of touch or forced to reach in every direction to locate foes before she can apply her damage, the little death ball lashes out with precision. Her tentacles are a web of movement, latching onto monsters and binding them before they can blink.

Once a creature is entangled by her limbs, it’s already over. Inevitably, more tentacles wind around arms, legs and torsos before she twists and tears, her barbs extending and rending them apart. Those monsters unfortunate enough to get too close, seeking to attack her spherical main body, find an even more unfortunate fate. They’re snatched up by tentacles that suddenly unfold from her form and are forced into her gaping maw, wherein her frightening teeth gnash and disintegrate them.

For my part, I am intent on training my Skills. Both of my sub-brains are engaged in maintaining a Mind Magic transformer and casting mental spells. This involves forming a Mind Bridge with the foe and utilising it to send magical constructs that essentially detonate in their mind as false stimuli. With my sub-brains and main mind engaged in this activity, I keep my physical fighting simple.

Bites, bites and more bites. Shattering Bite is a higher Level than my other two Bite Skills—Splintering Chomp and Shredding Bite—so the latter two are what I focus on. With my mandibles infused with Mana from my core, my mandibles transform into engines of destruction that these newly spawned monsters are unable to stand up to.

In this manner, we spend several hours battling to our hearts’ content until we emerge from the Expanse and stumble back into the shortcut. Battered, bruised but satisfied, the three of us clear out the monsters in the shortcut before collapsing in a heap and taking a quick break. We have battled hard, eaten as much as we could, and our relentless focus on our Skills have reaped dividends.

[How’d you go, Tiny?] I enquire of my ape companion.

[I punch good!] he declares, flexing his arms.

[Yes, but did you manage to improve your Skills?] I ask, exasperated.

He nods, thrusting one fist into the air. [Punch better now!]

Fair enough. I’m not going to get much more definitive information than that by asking.

[How about you, Crinis? All things on the up and up?]

[Yes, Master] she responds, clearly pleased with herself. [I am quite satisfied with my Skill progression. I believe I’ll be more useful than ever before.]

[You don’t really have to worry about how useful you are…] I try to tell her. [It isn’t like you’ll ever be left behind or anything…]

[No!] she states definitively. [As pets we must be useful to our master! It would be disgraceful if I wasn’t able to carry my own weight. I’ll work even harder to make sure I won’t be useless!]

Geez, you’re far from useless. I almost feel bad that I can’t defeat monsters much faster than my own pets. I suppose if I were to start dropping Gravity Bombs everywhere, I’d rack up experience faster, but the unintended side effects of casting that spell are what worries me. For example, accidentally getting myself caught in the blast.

Well, luckily the food I’ve consumed has been able to net me a considerable hoard of Biomass. Gwehehehehe. My stomach upgrades are paying dividends, giving more points per feed, and my expanded stomach is allowing me to fit more in! A perfect marriage of mutations if ever there was one. And now that I’ve accrued the necessary sixty-five points, it’s time to fuse them. Let’s do this!

[Would you like to upgrade Expanded Discerning Stomach to +15? This will cost 65 Biomass.]

[At this level, you may choose to combine your mutations or emphasise one. Which will you select?]

Fuse those bad-boys, let’s do thiiiiis!

HAGACK! HAP! HOOGAPALAP!

It’s fine. I’m cool. No, I’m not! Stupid freakin’ itch! I need a breather.

After a little rest, rotating who’s on guard to keep the spawning monsters out of our hair, we saddle up and cut our way back into the Expanse for the second round.

This Expanse really has some interesting monsters in it. More of those stupid hippo-turtles have appeared, along with some monster types I hadn’t seen much. A few scraggly looking ape-things. A plant that looked like it had been crossed with a mosquito took a chunk out of Tiny before we even realised it was there. With a long, ludicrously pointy, needle-like barb emerging from its centre, it was menacing enough. We didn’t expect it would be able to extend that needle out on a supple vine. Certainly not at speeds like that!

Before we could blink, Tiny had a massive needle stuck straight into his leg, and judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t enjoying it much. Fortunately, we were able to snap off the needle and destroy the plant before too much damage was done. But the fact that Tiny doesn’t have a decent health recovery mechanism continues to worry me. His evolutions are pointedly driven in the direction of glass cannon. He has immense strength and some natural toughness, but can’t recover from damage very well.

His leg is bleeding profusely, so we decide to halt our hunt and retreat up one of the larger mangroves. Nestled there in the branches, we take a moment to breathe, eat a little Biomass to recover our strength, and I go looking for aphids. Just like ants have done for thousands of years, I want to exploit the smaller bugs for the syrupy sweet Biomass they provide in exchange for not eating them. If the colony were able to control them and farm Biomass here in this Expanse, then another reliable source of Biomass would be unlocked for the colony. Fuelling our expansion and the growth of the workers.

Only now am I starting to appreciate the double-natured demand of the colony for Biomass. Not only do we need it for the population growth of the family, we also need it to meet my ideal of each individual worker being as strong as they can reasonably be. I myself have spent hundreds of Biomass points to get as strong as I am. I know not every ant could hope to do the same. Having every member of the colony reach +10 in their mutations is an ambitious goal, but not an unreachable one.

The aphids themselves are still up there, performing whatever alchemical wizardry they do to extract nutrition from these fat, fleshy leaves and convert it into Biomass. The smaller aphids are roughly basketball-sized, whilst the larger ones are about the size of a Labrador. Round, chubby-looking beetles with a long prod for a mouth with which they stab the trees to extract sap. Their thin spindly legs and long antennae make them look somewhat like an overweight ant. As opposed to myself, a proud Formica ant, the aphids are green, helping them blend into the leaves.

I activate my Mana Sense and carefully scan my way through the aphids. There are a couple who meet my needs. Good. I was worried none of them would have cores. Let’s see if I can get friendly with a few of these aphids and perform a little Core Surgery.