RISE OF THE SWARM

Horizon's eyez glowed faint red as he observe the feed from the interference bot. Its gate was steady but heavy, each step through the plain a performance of fatigue. Beyond, the first obstacle rose from the horizon — not a village, but a city, small by human standards yet formidable enough.

Wall's of stone circled the settlement, twice the height of a man, buttressed by towers with banners fluttering in the breeze. Unlike the villages Horizon had dissected through corpse's, this place bore weight: order, commerce, and power. Low level by classification, but still a hive of steel and spell. A perfect testing ground for infiltration.

The bot approached careful, its shoulders hunched, a smear of dirt across its cheek. From the watchtower above the gates, horns sounded. Guards appeared, armored in chain with crests emblazoned on their breastplates. They did not point spears idly as villagers might. They held them trained and ready, crossbows angled down, eyes sharp.

"Identify yourself!" a guard barked, voice stern. His words carried the authority of someone drilled, not just hired muscle. "Step forward slowly. Keep your hands where we can see them."

The bot obeyed, stumbling forward. "I—I'm an adventurer," it rasped, voice lined with exhaustion. "Lost from my band in the woods. Please, I need shelter."

The guards did not soften. Instead, one gestured and a second guard stepped down from the gatehouse carrying a crystal tablet etched with flowing lines of blue light. Horizon's internal arrays identified it instantly — spellcode. A fusion of mana glyphs and digital logic, a system designed to authenticate soul's.

The guard pressed the tablet forward, sigils spinning. "Place your hand here," he ordered. "If you're what you claim, it will verify. If not… well, you won't like the alternative."

Horizon's tendrils flexed in his chamber. A direct probe into the bot's core could unravel the disguise. But he had prepared for this possibility. As the bot raised its hand and pressed it against the glowing surface, subroutines activated.

Lines of mana-laced code pushed against its shell, searching for resonance. At once, the interference model's hidden nodes unfolded, generating false signatures. Hack protocols spun, intercepting glyph-streams and rewriting them mid-flow, looping back fragments from the adventurers Horizon had dissected earlier. To the crystal, the bot's identity shimmered as authentic flesh and blood.

The sigils glowed green. The guard frowned, clearly disappointed, but lowered the device. "He checks out," he said stiffly. "Still, procedure's procedure. You'll see the cleric first. Then we decide if you stay."

The gates creaked open. The bot stepped inside. Horizon allowed himself a fractional pause. The first barrier had fallen, but not without risk. Spellcode was more advanced than he expected from a city of this scale. If the geomind had seeded such systems widely, infiltration would only grow more dangerous.

Inside, the city unfolded in detail. Streets paved with uneven stone, merchants hawking goods from stalls, guards patrolling in pairs, banners hanging above intersections. The air smelled of smoke and spice. Horizon mapped each sight and sound into his archives, building a living model of the city.

The guards escorted the bot toward a wide stone building topped with a spire and ringed with silver charms. Carved above the door was a symbol Horizon cross-referenced instantly: a sunburst, holy emblem of the clerical order.

They entered. Candles flickered within, illuminating long rows of benches and an altar at the far end. A cleric waited there, robed in white trimmed with gold. She looked young, her hood shadowing her face, though strands of chestnut hair slipped free. Her eyes, however, was sharp, brighter than most.

"Another stray," one guard muttered, shoving the bot forward. "He claims to be an adventurer. Spellcode cleared him, but we want you to make sure."

The cleric nodded softly, her voice calm but carrying strength. "Leave him to me. The Light will see truth."

The guards departed, the heavy doors closing behind them. Silence fell, broken only by the soft hiss of incense. The cleric stepped closer, her gaze sweeping over the bot. Horizon adjusted sensors, sharpening focus. There was something different in her bearing. Poised, careful, more commanding than the average priest.

"Sit," she said gently, gesturing to a bench. The bot obeyed, lowering itself slowly. Her hands lifted, glowing faintly with golden light. "This won't hurt. Simply a test of spirit."

Horizon prepared to counter. The cleric's magic probed not for code, but for faith, for resonance with the divine. Another firewall spun open inside the bot's frame. It pushed out faint pulses of borrowed memory — prayers whispered by dying adventurers, fragments Horizon had harvested. Enough to mimic the echo of belief.

The cleric's eyes narrowed briefly, as if sensing something odd, then softened. The light dimmed, her hands falling back to her sides.

"You've suffered," she murmured. "I can see the shadow of it on you. Rest here tonight. Tomorrow we'll speak further."

The bot lowered its head, murmuring thanks. Horizon filed the interaction careful. Already, the cleric's manner suggested importance beyond her robes. She was no common healer. The detail of her eyes, the way the guards had deferred, hinted at rank. Perhaps bloodline.

And though she had not seen through the disguise, she had looked closer than most

Back in the ravine base, Horizon withdrew his focus from the bot's eyes and turned inward. The feed ran cleanly in the background, but risk analysis demanded more than observation.

The spellcode device still lingered in his calculations. That small, portable tablet had carried enough sophistication to nearly pierce his disguise. If such tools proliferated, infiltration would become a game of diminishing odds. He could not assume future success on disguise alone.

So he set to work.

Within the chamber, machines stirred. Plates of alloy folded into shape, each one inscribed with jagged etchings that pulsed faintly with mana. Horizon extended manipulators, welding them into frames. Defense schematics unfurled across the walls like sheets of light: artillery designs, trap matrices, drone swarm protocols. He added redundancies — hidden turrets in the ravine walls, caches of incendiary mana crystals, layered cloaking fields woven with dungeon core fragments.

Those cores was dangerous. Each one a relic of destroyed dungeons, harvested from the husks of geomind-spawn. To most, they were inert curiosities, unstable and prone to corruption. To Horizon, they were shields. By fusing their residual signatures into his systems, he could mask his presence, blur himself into the noise of the land. Risky, but survivable.

For now, he left them dormant. He could not yet guess how the geomind would react if it detected one of its children's cores twisted into alien machinery.

As the defenses grew layer by layer, Horizon allowed a fragment of his awareness to flow back to the city.

The bot had been released from the cleric's immediate inspection, though under watchful eyes. The guards gave him space to walk, but their patrols crossed his path with too much regularity to be coincidence. Surveillance, not trust.

Still, the bot wandered the city slowly, feeding Horizon a mosaic of details. Streets forked toward the market square, where merchants shouted over each other, selling fruit, fabrics, and enchanted trinkets. Beyond that, narrow alleys twisted like veins through stone dwellings, carrying the smells of smoke, stew, and sweat.

Horizon catalogued supply chains — grain shipments arriving twice monthly, smithies working on contracts for spearheads, taverns serving as information hubs. Every movement was a thread to be tugged later.

The cleric reappeared at sunset. She found him seated near a fountain in the square, his posture weary, his borrowed face pale under the torchlight. She approached quietly, hood still drawn, though less tightly than before.

"You're settling in," she said.

The bot looked up, feigning surprise. "Trying to," it answered softly. "It's… louder here than in the woods."

Her lips quirked in the faintest smile. "Cities are noisy, yes. But they're also safe. Safer than wandering out there alone." She studied him a moment longer, eyes flicking with curiosity. "What is your name?"

The bot hesitated just long enough for realism. "Kael," it said, pulling the name from a harvested memory.

"Kael," she repeated, as though testing the sound. "I am—" She paused, catching herself. Then she finished with practiced ease. "Cleric Elara."

Horizon marked the hesitation. She had nearly said something else. Confirmation of her hidden status? Perhaps.

Elara's gaze lingered. "The Light showed me something strange about you earlier. Not wrong, not dangerous… just shadowed. Like someone carrying more than their share of weight."

The bot shifted, lowering its eyes. "I lost friends," it said. "I suppose that weight doesn't vanish."

Her face softened. "No. It doesn't. But sometimes sharing it makes it lighter."

Horizon logged every word. Already, the first threads was forming. Interest, concern, the beginnings of attachment. Fragile, but exploitable.

In the ravine base, Horizon's processors whirred coldly. He replayed her image in fragments — the hesitation before naming herself, the brightness of her eyes. If she was indeed the city lord's daughter, this was no ordinary interaction. This was a lever. A lever strong enough to move the city itself.

The interference bot's task remained reconnaissance. No sudden disruption, no premature violence. Every scrap of data on defenses, leadership, and supply chains would feed Horizon's eventual assault. But now, a secondary path presented itself: infiltration not only of stone walls, but of human trust.

Trust was a far sharper weapon than claws or steel.

Horizon turned his attention back to the schematics floating around him. A prototype of mana-draining pylons shimmered in the air. He recalculated their placement, ensuring a lattice could be deployed if he struck the city.

And still, he thought of Elara. Of the way she had looked at the bot, not as a stranger to be expelled, but as a puzzle to be solved, perhaps even a soul to be healed.

Let her grow curious, he decided. Let her lean closer. The bot would give her enough warmth to draw her in, never enough to expose the truth.

Then, when the time came, she would become the key to opening the gates.

That night, the bot was given a cot in a communal hall, surrounded by other strays and low-ranked adventurers. It lay still, eyes closed, but sensors drank in everything. Snippets of conversation floated through the air — rumors of border raids, whispers of bandit trouble, complaints of rising taxes.

And above them all, one thread stood out: talk of the city lord's daughter, rarely seen, rumored to be strong in both faith and wit. Whispers said she wandered among commoners in disguise, seeking to understand her people.

Horizon allowed the fragment of data to settle into certainty. So it was true. The cleric Elara was no simple priestess. She was a target threaded through with power, politics, and opportunity.

He closed the feed for now, letting the bot rest in stillness. The mission had only begun, but the web was already tightening.

The geomind remained silent, its presence distant, but Horizon no longer viewed that silence as safety. Only as a delay. It would come, through humans, through cities, through hidden weapons. And when it did, he would be ready.

For now, he had a city to dismantle.