A few minutes later, she wakes up to see all of us looming over her and jumps to her feet.
“Ah! What’s wrong?”
“Just waiting to greet you upon awakening,” I tell her. “Nothing suspicious at all.”
She doesn’t appear convinced, and her scent definitely marks her as suspicious of me, but I pay it no mind, taking this moment to examine her a little more closely to get a few clues as to how her evolution has gone. She hasn’t increased in size all that much, which obviously means she either invested heavily in mental stats or organs. Considering her origins as a champion of the species, she has a boosted stat baseline to begin with, so I’d be intrigued to see what path she went down.
“You’ve now become a tier three monster,” I congratulate her. “How does it feel?”
“Good! I think… There’s still a few things I need to get used to… This change was more severe than the last one…”
She keeps lifting her legs and shifting her body from side to side, unaccustomed to her current size and strength.
“Considering you went from a hatchling to a hatchling last time, this is obviously going to have a greater impact on you. I can already see you didn’t choose any of the normal templates of the nine castes, so I assume you were able to find a few things that caught your interest?”
She nods.
“I did. I think I’ll be able to grow along these lines and serve the Colony in a way that is unique to myself!”
“Interesting… You wouldn’t mind me taking a look then, would you?”
“What?”
“It’s a Skill that I have,” I explain. “I can use it to look at your status in much the same way you can. I won’t use it without your permission, but it would make it a lot easier for me to teach you if I knew exactly what I was working with.”
She goes still for a moment before agreeing, and I rest my antennae against her carapace, activating Core Crafting. When I filter through the onslaught of data and arrive at the status window, what I see is surprising in several ways.
Name: ‘Hatchling’
Leveclass="underline" 1 (Special) (III)
Might: 35
Toughness: 30
Cunning: 30
Wilclass="underline" 30
HP: 60/60
MP: 0/70
Skills:
Digging Level 3 (I); Acid Shot Level 3 (I); Grip Level 4 (I); Crushing Bite Level 3 (II); Dash Level 4 (I); Exo-Skeleton Defence Level 1 (I); Stamina Level 1 (I)
Mutations:
Reactive Exo-skeleton +10; Draining Mandibles +10; Gripping Legs +10; Weave Focused Eyes +10; Mana Sensitive Antennae +10; Sizzling Acid Gland +10; Bottomless Discerning Stomach +10; Improved Pheromone Language Gland +10; Focused Mana Core Lattice; Dungeon Oracle
Species: Juvenile Seer (Formica)
Skill Points: 10
Biomass: 6
“You’ve got some stuff here that I’ve never seen before…”
“Hehehehehe,” she chuckles to herself.
The lattice is something I’ve previously looked at, essentially a crystal weave that attaches to the core itself to produce an effect. In this case, it’ll make her more attuned to Mana in the purest sense. But this Dungeon Oracle… An organ that references the Dungeon itself? Is that a good or bad thing? Then there’s her stats. An interesting mix that’s fairly even, but when your mental stats are on par with your physical, it means you went hard on beefing up the brain.
Even so, her numbers are a little lower than mine when I reached tier three, which seems odd, since I didn’t have the benefit of a special evolution the first time around, nor did I have the bonus from max mutations. Which means she must have dumped evolutionary energy, a lot of it, into something else. Which is likely to be one of those fancy organs… It’s an unusual decision…
“I decided I want to be able to know as much as possible about everything!” the hatchling declares. “Whether that information is hidden with Mana or through the Dungeon itself, I’ll find it! There’s no secret I won’t be able to find, no puzzle I won’t be able to crack!”
I regard the still-small ant before me as she stares back confidently.
“You’re a clever one, aren’t you?” I ask her.
“The cleverest!” she beams.
“I suppose I ought to give you a name, then.”
“A name?”
“Hmmm… How about Brilliant?”
“Brilliant? As in, incredibly clever? I like it!”
“Don’t think your work is over, though,” I tell her. “Your hard work has only just begun. You want to solve the mysteries the Colony still grapples with? With pathetic Skill Levels like yours? You are absolutely dreaming. Not to mention, to graduate from the Academy, ants have to reach tier four nowadays, so you still have a long way to go!”
“How am I supposed to train my Skills when you won’t let me fight!”
“First things first, we train Dash and Exo-Skeleton Defence. Safety over everything. Then comes the basics of magic, Mana Manipulation and Mana Sight. Only after we’ve gotten each of those to rank three are we going to work on raising your basic offensive Skills. Besides, judging by your stats, you’ll be using magic to attack far more than your mandibles.”
“Well… that’s true.”
“Alright then! I guess it’s time for me to pass you on to your next instructor!”
She perks up at that, though tries to hide it.
“Oh! But that’s such a shame, senior. You’ve taught me so much already. It’ll be a shame to leave your company…”
“Not to worry! You won’t be. This is just for training Dash and Exo-Skeleton Defence. If you work hard, you’ll get some Levels in Stamina as well.”
Brilliant looks up at me blankly and I can’t help but grin on the inside.
[Crinis? Make her run.]
[Yes, Master!]
108. Poking our Noses in
It takes a few days, but we make it down here. The remnants of the wave are still visible in Mana levels and spawn rates that are higher than they otherwise would be, but the never-ending streams of monsters bursting from the tunnel walls have now ended, which is nice.
To be honest, though, the spawn rates and Mana levels have never really returned to what they were when I was born. If I had to hazard a guess, after the first wave, the Mana level never dropped back down to what it would normally be, and this time is likely to be the same.
Are we going to experience a series of waves that will push the Mana level higher each time? Is that a normal sort of thing? I doubt it. Whatever is going on doesn’t appear to be what would be considered part of the ‘normal’ cycle of Mana in the Dungeon. I can’t decide if this is going to be a good thing or not. The higher spawn rates and frequent waves are only going to push the Colony forward at an accelerated rate, so long as we remain strong enough to protect ourselves.
[You guys ready for this?] I ask my gathered friends.
[Ready, Master!] Crinis assures me.
[I am alwayssss ready to take!]