Swarming Sovereignty

Lia once again woke up in that extremely comfortable bed, feeling refreshed and more…able.

“Have a good nap?” Amelia asked. “Come look at yourself, you’re looking…better, I guess.”

Lia got off of the bed and walked over to where the mirror had been. She looked much the same as she had before her evolution, just…glossier. She was a bit bigger, and there were the beginnings of some sort of chitinous plating covering her, providing the glossiness she had noticed.

“Your stats should be looking different, go ahead and open them up for me. Is getting your evolution again going to be as easy as it was last time? I don’t know how many levels you need to evolve.”

Lia hesitated. Level three wasn’t that much higher than level two, but she probably wouldn’t be able to get it off of one rat like she did last time. Levels tended to require much more EXP than the last, but still, even babies were level three, so it was…probably still easy enough.

She tapped just outside of the green square, causing Amelia to frown. “Are you feeling OK? That’s not the green square.”

Lia tapped the green square.

“You know?”

Another tap.

“Hm. So, are you saying it’s not as easy but still pretty easy?”

Lia, relieved that Amelia seemed to understand what she was trying to say, tapped the green square again.

“I see. Go ahead and tap out what level you need to evolve, I have more rats.”

Lie tapped three times, and Amelia smiled. “Ah, you’re right, that really isn’t that bad. Seems like Battlemaster is a bit more ‘advanced’ than just regular Swarm Queen. I wonder how that line will compare to Matriarch?” She seemed to be almost talking to herself as she reached down and pulled out two more bundled rats.

“Here you are.” She said, opening the tank’s lid and throwing them in. “If my calculations are right that should still be enough to get to level three. You might get less experience from these things due to being of a more advanced race, but it doesn’t seem significantly more advanced so…yeah.”

Well, good to know she could still hop paths, though she wasn’t sure if that would hold when she evolved past her larval stage. As she was going to black out again and didn’t want to make Amelia move her again, she scampered back onto her bed, and chose to evolve into a Young Lesser Swarm Battlemaster.

Lia woke up in that same comfortable bed once again. No, that wasn’t right. She was in a different comfortable bed, she could tell because the glass walls of her tank were gone. And now that she was looking, everything was a fair bit smaller than it had been, which could only mean that she had gotten bigger. And, to her slight surprise, there was a window in front of her.

Amelia, less gigantic now but still much larger than Lia, bent down and patted Lia’s head. “Nice work. You should be in your first real race now. Go ahead and check your stats, they should actually be kind of decent now. Though, I must warn you, it seems that monsters have their stats reset to the ‘base’ for their new race when they evolve, so there’s a good chance you end up slightly weaker when you evolve. Make sure you always do it in a safe place, alright?”

That was a given, seeing as how she blacked out whenever she did. She wasn’t about to go and try it in the middle of combat or anything, but she supposed she could try and…stock up on things to kill before an evolution. Maybe she’d get access to some form of webbing? That’d make things convenient for sure. But that was something to worry about later, she wanted to see her stats.

That was a fair bit better than before. She was probably capable of taking out some low level monsters by herself now.

“So, do you think you can fight low level monsters on your own now, or would you rather evolve one more time? Tap once if you think you can, twice if you want to evolve.”

Evolving again was pretty tempting, but she decided that was a foolish choice. She would much rather get used to her new body by fighting things that didn’t pose a huge threat. It would be slower, yes, but she was sure it would turn out better in the long run. So, she tapped once, giving Amelia her best determined look.

Amelia smiled, nodding. “Perfect. Well, before I explain how things are going to be, let’s let you look at yourself and get you fed, shall we?” She grabbed the mirror Lia had used to look at herself previously, placing it on the floor so Lia could once again get a feel for what she looked like.

Much like her previous evolution, she looked pretty similar to how she had before, just bigger and glossier. This time, however, the size increase was substantial – she was guessing she more than doubled in size, going from the size of Amelia’s palm to the size of a dinner plate. Furthermore, the carapace plating had grown to cover most of her body, and her wings had shifted to lie underneath the carapace most of the time, only coming out when they were in use.

Amelia gently dropped a small piece of steak in front of Lia, stealing her attention away from her appearance. And it was then that Lia realized she was hungry. No, not hungry…ravenous. She tore into the meat, barely pausing to let her mandibles chew it into something easier to swallow.

Once she was done, Amelia gave her another smile. “So, here’s how things are going to go.” She said once she was sure she had Lia’s full attention. “I’ve prepared a couple of training dungeons for you. Hopefully those should take you from where you are now into something that can handle mid-rank adventurers. Once you’re there, I’m going to teleport us out into the wilderness near a couple of undiscovered dungeons, I’ll get integrated into your swarm, and then we’ll amass power until we can start bringing the good word to civilization.”

“The good word” was not the phrase Lia would have used for adding people to her swarm, but she was planning to be the one doing said adding, so she wasn’t going to complain about wording.

“Unfortunately, this training is going to be rough. I’m sorry, but there really just isn’t any way around it. You have to get used to things without me holding your hand somehow, and if you don’t then you’re going to end up in trouble because of it. So, let’s talk about how things are going to work. First and most importantly, if you get killed, then I have to resurrect you in a fresh body like the one you first woke up in, so…try not to die. It’s really gonna set us back if you do.

“Second, food, water, and shelter. I’ve placed feeding stations around that give you cooked food and drinks, but if you want to use those, you have to earn them. There’s a tougher-than-normal monster guarding them, and, like in nature, they’re places monsters rely on to live. You’ll have to defend them from interlopers. Until you’re strong enough, I recommend just eating the corpses of what you kill if you get hungry, and other water sources if you’re thirsty. Hopefully it shouldn’t come to that, but we’ll see. Actually…”

Amelia uttered an analysis spell, looking over Lia’s stats. “Hmm. Actually, you’ll probably want to evolve at least once more before you take on one of those guardians but if you push yourself you can probably evolve and make it before you get too hungry. Anyway, once you’re going to want to build up a safe area. The area where I teleport you in will be safe until after your first evolution, but from then on, you’re gonna have to make your own place.

“And finally, your objectives. I’ve got four bosses in ‘important’ areas of each of the dungeons. You need to defeat each of them before you have access to a ‘main’ boss, and after defeating that the dungeon is considered ‘clear’. I’m thinking you’ll want to evolve at least twice more before you have a decent shot at the four bosses, and probably once beyond that as well as having built up a decent swarm before you take the main boss on. Once you’ve cleared the dungeon, I’ll teleport you back here, your swarm to a holding area, and then we’ll chat again. Sound good?”

Lia tapped her agreement, and Amelia smiled. “Perfect. Let’s get started, then. There’s a magic circle behind me, please step inside and we’ll get going.”

And, now that she was looking, there was a magic circle. A dizzyingly complex array of spellwork that Lia couldn’t even begin to follow was laid out behind Amelia, a small area in the center devoid of runes designating where she was to stand. She scuttled over to the area, and Amelia bent down, gave her one last pat on the head, and activated the circle.

There was a lurch and a momentary loss of sensation, and then the environment around her coalesced into a large, open hallway of sorts. Lia would recognize the overly extravagant architecture and rows of portraits of rather boring-looking people anywhere – this was the main office on her old school campus.

Well, that made things simpler, now that she knew this was a perfect recreation, she could guess at the locations of the bosses and probably even some of the food and water dispensers. There was almost certainly a boss in her dorm, and the headmaster’s office probably had one too. As for the others… there was likely one in her old homeroom classroom, and then there was probably one in the school’s stadium and one in the observatory.

Those sounded like the locations like what Amelia would have considered important, a mix of actually important locations and places where the two had spent a lot of time together. As for food…there was probably food in most of the building’s cafeterias and the bazaar outside, which meant those were a priority target. The moment she got stronger, she was going to take over one of the smaller buildings in its entirety and make it into a safe space for her to retreat to.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have any way of building up her swarm yet, which meant she didn’t have any way of making minions to secure a location for her, so she would be vulnerable while evolving. Well, at least after the first evolution, anyway, this place was apparently safe until then.

So, she figured it was high time she took stock of her abilities. She couldn’t speak and her legs were no proper substitute for hands, so magic was out of the question without some sort of Skill, but her physical abilities were something of an unknown.

She began an experimental flight and found that she was much more capable than she had been before evolving. Still, she was off-balance while flying, not quite yet used to the erratic nature of it all. She’d have to spend time practicing if she wanted to actually be able to use it as anything other than a getaway tool, but she felt confident that she would, eventually, be able to get the hang of it.

Still, she was a spider…thing now, so did that mean she was able to walk on walls? She wasn’t sure the mechanism by which spiders did that or if she would even have it, but it was definitely worth a shot.

She scuttled over to the nearest wall, and hesitantly put her front few feet on the wall, willing them to stick.

Lia stared at the window in shock. That was not how this worked; you didn’t just…get Skills for trying something. They came when you got them from scrolls or leveled up your Class, not from just…practicing.

Wait, she didn’t have a Class now.  And the window mentioned having learned one Skill this evolution, with more being harder to get now? So, instead of getting them via Class, it seemed to be tied to evolution and she had something of a choice about what to get now?

She might have just made a huge mistake. She wasn’t sure how much harder getting the next Skill would be, and she would much rather have gotten a passive one related to flying or survival instead. Climbing walls seemed…redundant when she could just fly up to where she was going.

Lia sighed internally. What was done was done, there was no use thinking about the what ifs when she couldn’t change it. She’d just have to be more careful next evolution. For now, it was time to get a feel for what the monsters in this dungeon were like, and hopefully get a few levels in the process.

Fighterman481

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention it, but there won't be discord notifications for these first ten chapters, just to avoid spam. Expect them ~5-6 PM MST, though.

Anyway, this chapter is really an extension of chapter 1, so...nothing really else to say. As always, thanks for reading!