A Hive of Bone and Chitin [A Biomancy and Hivemind Litrpg Adventure]

Light flickered. It was not before me and neither was it at the sides. It just was. The light kept flickering, changing form and then reverting to what it had been. A cyclical pattern. That's all the world was, just that light in the darkness. The flickering continued for a moment longer, or maybe an eternity longer but eventually it stopped.

It took me a while to realize what I was experiencing were system notifications.

\\\\Hivemother's Superego is now level 56!

As I watched, the light flickered once again.

\\\\Hivemother's Superego is now level 57!

Interesting. What could possibly be straining my mind so much? I briefly wondered. A part of me noticed that I was oddly unconcerned about it. I think that was supposed to be bad. How fascinating.

\\\\Hivemother's Superego is now level 58!

And now I was panicking.

I wish I could say what the first thing I noticed was. I couldn't because the other two streams of my thought, each usually handling a separate piece of my swarm, were mobilized to join the first in trying to make sense of what I was, well, sensing. They weren't different copies of me or anything, just an autonomous separate stream of consciousness echoing in a shared mind — skill-granted multitasking — whenever I focused on them, each examining the same problem from a different angle. What I had become. I didn't, no couldn't, even come close to realizing the full extent of what this aspect had gained. So many changes that were so dramatically alien to every facet of my identity I had subconsciously held on to. I could, however, identify which loss I felt first.

For a regular abled human, it would be something like the loss of sight, but I was already not using my own eyes by then. It was absurd, silly, even stupid how much humans relied on sight even when they knew it was being deceived. The loss I felt was different. I didn't have proprioception as I was used to it anymore. Every human had a constant awareness of how their body was situated in space, every limb in its place and every motion accounted for. That was normal. Now, I had been for the better part of recent years, in chronic pain and that had instilled in me a certain awareness of how my body was at all times, of every ache and every tensed muscle and if I thought about it, how fabric rubbed against my skin, how the wind caressed it. That was all gone. Instead there was sand. Grains of it, rough and sharp, rubbing against itself. It was not painful but it was also not comfortable.

With some effort, I managed to cast out some of myself outside to see that I was safely entombed in my bone armor. It was bloated and cracked but still retained most of its integrity. Subjective time was frozen by Hivemother's Superego thankfully so the assassin hadn't killed anyone, yet that was. Not that I wasn't glad about that, I was, I absolutely was but unfortunately I couldn't see what had exactly changed in me because of the armor. I had yet to experience the migraine using the Planning Phase part of my skill tended to cause but it would come eventually, I knew.

\\\\Hivemother's Superego is now level 59!

Another level up and I could finally get a handle on my brain enough to have the common sense to check my status.

Swarm Aspect didn't actually change my race for class factors so it was the same. My Acuity, Willpower, Perception, and Attunement were normal, counting the stacking boosts from both my aspects. Around a 75% increase. But everything else? Those were abnormal. They were much higher.

Strength: 113 (1*14932934)

91 strength was what Medea had, not counting the buff proximity to me added to that number. And Vespia was weird as she used the stats of her species multiplied by the number of them reinforcing her host in addition to that the host started with. Or something like that. The status screen was not exactly forthcoming about how it calculated anything. Even understanding how it was determined for elvenoids had taken decades of research. But in any case, it was much lower than Medea's. My strength shouldn't be that high. But it was, and so were my Celerity and Vitality. And the numbers in parentheses were just nonsensical. 1 multiplied by almost 15 million did not equate to 113 in any world, this one or Earth.

I unfroze time for a split second to do four things: activating Bloodrage to push my stats even higher, feeling around with my biomancy, and taking over Selene to prepare to cast the largest and slowest instance of a familiar spell I had ever used. I refroze time again and thought, now very aware that my brain was no longer a singular organ but 15 million chittering things bound to a single will.

Back in my old world, the smallest kind of arthropod to still exist was just 0.1 millimeters, smaller than most people would be able to see with the naked eye but still gigantic compared to some other organisms. While what I was was not a collection of something quite that small, whatever collective of creatures I had become were much smaller than Vespia and her kin individually. They didn't have any shared appearance. Some looked like smaller even more heavily armored versions of Medea, others vaguely resembled a more aggressive Vespia, many were combinations of the two, but all of them were broken in some way, missing parts, violating bilateral symmetry, some even had five legs spaced like a starfish's. It was almost like they had been improperly copied from a template. If I thought of them as cells in a body then there was a particular condition that fit the profile of what I was seeing.

Anatomist and Fauna Archive activated in unison and I understood. Medea could change its DNA and rapidly create new cells to adapt, Vespia could treat its kind as mere unexpressed cells in a shared organism and so use them to repair damage and form organs in a host it parasitized until its total annihilation. They were not compatible, they could not coexist without tearing each other apart. They each perceived the other mechanism as a hostile action. Spider-scorpions would trigger an immune response against something that could not be crushed and Chaos-Warped Hawk Wasps couldn't overwhelm an immune system that could adapt at those rates. It would be the worst autoimmune disease ever. It was not merely the limiter stopping me before. And it was not just those two that broke it.

It was something else, the Amphisbaena venom that Medea had integrated when we had first joined the Poisoner's Emporium. The venom that didn't work like anything I knew on Earth, it was not a neurotoxin or a hemotoxin or anything like that. It was a venom that caused rapid tumor formation in the victim at rates so fast as to boil them from the inside. I was not some new insect that had never existed prior. No, something like that would have a name in the system, even the mosquito variant that I had created had been named. The system had thrown up an error because I had not combined them at all.

I had not turned into some new insect. I had become independent, thinking cancer.

The ramifications of that were interesting but the throb of a forming migraine brought me back to the present. I had a fight to survive. I checked my aspect status again to identify skills that I wouldn't need but there was no point. Skills regarding their unique biology from both of them had joined with each other, consolidating into one singular passive called ERROR. This was just for this specific combination of aspects, I couldn't even tell which aspect hosted the skill, but I was not complaining.

Time unfroze and my Suit of Bones fell away (cancer-bugs chitin counted as being close enough to bone for my skills already so it would only slow me down), as the red haze of Bloodrage burned. Then the Earthen Shell of Medea activated on top of that, the obsidian turning red under the haze. Biomancy made a portion of me just dedicated to producing blood for mana: I was pleasantly happy to see that my swarm proximity buff was in effect and further boosted that. Then, I considered casting Blood Shield but gave up when I realized I would have to cast it on every organism individually. I rushed towards my target in a swarm of blazing red. It was not the iron user, not Fahria, nor Agitjin or Medea or Vespia. My target was whatever pulp remained of Hufgir. I had Blood Fortification that could use blood to temporarily buff my stats but it was not my primary reason for going after his remains. He had a harmonic skill, and probably support skills to enhance it. Harmonic skills grew in power with the number of simultaneous users it had. Even if each user was much weaker than Hufgir, almost comically so, I still had about 15 million of them.

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Fahria stared her death in the eye, the Great Ancestor's blood roiling and demanding that the Assassin's head be put on a pike for daring to come after her. A part of her wondered which of her cousins was responsible but it didn't matter, it would be impossible to trace. The assassin waited for a few moments after delivering his ultimatum, face hidden by iron. She saw herself reflected on it and she noted that her half burned face didn't betray the resignation she felt. Not fear. Fear was not something she felt, ever really. Even when she should, it refused to stir. Still, she pretended to feel it when necessary. It was not necessary now.

She often wondered if she was broken in a way that no one else in her lineage was. She was sure that most of her family didn't get the urge to slowly strangle one of the few people they would call a friend either.

She was brought out of her musings when the man in iron stirred. Time's up. The man cocked his head, somehow finding it amusing that no had decided to walk away.

"Very well."

Then something changed. A howling streak of red rushed towards them and… beyond then to where the bulk of Hufgir's remains soaked the ground. There was something about the redness that prickled at her, like she was in grave danger. It was wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

A lesser woman would have flinched but she faced it and nothing. It parted around her. As the redness passed her, Fahria saw that the redness was composed of countless insects, some looking like Medea and others like the wasp. All glowing with the eye-searing red. She heard clicking that almost sounded like words.

Ahead of her, the man in iron swatted and waved around panels of the metal to ward off the redness until he realized that the red was not attacking. Fahria could have tried to escape but without mana, there was practically no point. Either the assassin would catch up to her or somehow, he would be defeated before then. Still, she limped to create some distance. A chance, however miniscule, was a chance after all. A flash of light made her turn back to the scene unfolding before her.

Hundreds of purple chains held down the man in iron, brighter than any chain she had seen Hufgir and Varni produce, and a layer of that same purple energy covered him, preventing him from turning back to iron dust.

The redness flickered with specks of purple and whirled in the air before solidifying. A hulking figure, vaguely elvenoid, thirteen feet tall and almost as wide, all muscle, lumbered out, trailing a black club seemingly fashioned out of a spinal cord taller than the man in one of its four hands. One elephantine foot fell heavily, then another, and then another. The thing had four legs and a tail that had a foot midway down its length. It was when she saw the hunched, plated, and spiked back with yet another set of arms did she realize that she was hasty in her judgment. It was not that elvenoid after all.

Deep red striated muscles covered the bulk of its form with no skin to speak of. No, it was not muscle, she noted. It was just countless tiny plates of chitin that moved in accordance with the flexing of the muscles underneath. The red haze cleared to reveal a leering skull-like face with hollow red eye sockets. Horns emerged from the skull and tusks from the elongated mouth. A thick crest of black chitin emerged from the head and equally thick plates covered its shoulders, back, chest, joints, and the outer facing sides of limbs.

The bone club rose as the monster gripped it in two hands. It crashed like thunder against the man in iron and he went flying.

The creature turned back into a flying cloud of red and gave chase.

Unbeknownst to almost everyone, a lone red insect had flown towards Medea's spawn. It had landed almost gently, carefully and the spider-scorpion it touched burned red before dissipating into a cloud of cancerous insectoids. The redness touched others and they too turned red.

Elsewhere, Medea unfurled into a mass of tendrils.

Despite being caught off-guard earlier, the assassin was good. It took almost all of my focus to confine him to a single form despite his attempts to break free.

The harmonic skill was not bad but not enough to crush that wretch, and even worse, it was not mental like psionics or something so my swarm beyond the cancer-bugs didn't get it. Still, it was a flexible force field thingy and that was good enough for me.

Tens of spinning iron serpents tore through my body and thousands of bugs died, far too quickly for regeneration to fix them. Still, it was biomass for me to recycle. Purple energy sparked and I physically pushed the serpents into a knot. They exploded a moment later but I was already away by then and the odd piece of shrapnel simply bounced off of my body.

I reformed into the shape I called Titan above the assassin and smashed into him hard enough to make a small crater. The chest of iron buckled and cracked, I couldn't use my acid without releasing Harmonic Amethyst but blunt force could be transferred with ease. A punch from a fist that grew twice as large as it had been before extra biomass moved to it, and the assassin below me groaned. Another punch and something cracked. I kept pummeling him until blades of iron raced to cut me to pieces. I turned to being a cloud to avoid them.

That was a mistake.

Several fans of iron whirled to my left and my right. The suction tore away a significant number of my cancer-bugs and ground them to powder.

'Two million down.' Just like that. Harmonic Amethyst dulled for a moment. That was enough. The assassin broke out and reformed above me with an enormous lance of iron. I saw with tiny eyes littered across my form as iron snapped into place. He plummeted downwards and I braced myself. Couldn't risk transforming, not when the fans were still functional.

The lance pierced my back and despite myself, I roared. It had torn away a chunk of 'flesh' and the fan made quick work of it. A few hundred thousands gone. No matter, I would gain it back eventually.

Still, I reached towards my back with oversized arms and grabbed the pest. Amethyst snapped around him and I brought him before me. It wouldn't work forever, not like it had, but I could do some damage. I grabbed each of his limbs with a hand, suspending him in mid-air before me. A knee rose swiftly to kick him as hard as possible between his legs and I pulled. Pulled his limbs apart and pushed my knee up, willing it to go through him like butter. I wanted to rip him in two, bathe in his blood before turning his pathetic existence into a breeding ground for… Superego shut down whatever that was about and I focused on the fight before me

He grunted in pain and I felt laughter escaping my lips. Blood Fortification had always pushed me a bit towards madness and Bloodrage was even worse, but I didn't really care. If not for Superego, I wouldn't even be rational right now. If succumbing to the madness of blood was the only alternative to death then I choose life and madness.

Blades, lances, and spinning serpents of iron all punctured my back and arms but I ignored them. I had to end it now. I ignored as my mass flew into the fans with each new injury and I lost another million.

Eventually the loss of numbers weakened the skill enough for him to break out. He didn't attack me directly again. Fine. If that was how he wanted to make it then I would oblige. I jumped using my powerful legs towards the nearest fan and punched it hard enough to make it bend 90 degrees. Grabbing both sides of the fan that was trying to repair itself, I tore it in two and threw the pieces at another as hard as I could.

Lances just as large as the last one fell on me from above and this time, I was ready for them. Glowing purple met dull grey and they were redirected around me. Once again I had been baited.

I had let my guard down, and several massive iron balls exploded below me. Five million down. I was now at half of what I had started with, and with that diminished number, came greater clarity over my mind. I was being stupid. I had been stupid and the assassin had been whittling me down because of it.

Time froze again. New plan. While I was still churning out more cancer-bugs (I needed a better name than that or ERROR) and getting hold of more biomass would help, I had to prioritize. If I saw any more of those fans forming then I had to destroy them immediately. If I felt that I wanted to indulge in moronic fantasies about bathing in blood or whatever, I was compromised and should take a step back. Time resumed and I went after the closest remaining fan, creating sheets of purple to keep the iron dust in the air from settling on me and then turning into a problem. I needn't have bothered. Iron cords like the ones that had restrained me before erupted from the ground as I tried to swat them away. They wrapped around my legs and I was trapped again. Or maybe not, I could still use biomancy to shapechange, it was not as efficient as turning into a cloud but it was functional. How many things did I forget to do because of that blood madness?

My legs turned into thin strands that slipped past the cords and then reformed. And so I continued. The fan went down and then another and another until none remained. I had lost another million from the assassin's attacks but now I was free to…

The timer ran out on Swarm Aspect. Immediately I reactivated Suit of Bones but it was too late.

"Got you now." Iron screeched as a voice hissed in triumph. I was done. I couldn't even move, my very body was threatening to rip itself apart. If I deactivated the armor now, I knew my organs and guts would come spilling forth from the regression. I thought I had estimated the timing perfectly and I would be done before the skill went on cooldown. I was mistaken. I was fucked.

Then a tendril of flesh wrapped around my legs and yanked me back. Varni, Agitjin, Fahria, and I raced through the air before landing in a heap on Medea. The tendrils wrapped around us and plunged us into darkness.

Far away, in my new apartment, Selene flapped her wings as I finally finished what I was casting.

"Summon Swarm" My lips barely moved, but it was enough.

And we tumbled through a yellow portal as a man screamed in fury.