Disclaimer: So little science here. So little. The solar eclipse was cool though. Also, don't own it.
Fun fact: Abathur's design was originally much more spider like. It involved him weaving webs of essence, manipulating it as literal strands. The developer said he wanted something "Spidery and spindly".
(This is a really redundant message considering the transitions are literally just the word transition in bold and in parentheses.)
Catalyst
"'Follow the spiders', he said. Why would we want to go anywhere near spiders? I vote we head back right now, ok?" Ron trailed off on his rant, watching the trees around him nervously. The trees were growing increasingly covered with webs, and Abathur almost thought he saw numerous eyes peering through the gaps.
"Do you have a better idea, Ron?" Harry asked. "I trust Hagrid. If he told us to do this, there must be a reason."
Abathur wasn't as certain of the hybrids knowledge, nor did he care. He was too focused on the threads on the trees. As they passed one, he rubbed his hand against it, attempting to pull a sample of the substance off the bark. Instead his hand got stuck in it. Abathur frowned, repeatedly pulling on the web to no effect. Eventually, the bark gave before the thread, ripping a section off the tree trunk. Abathur started production of corrosive substances on his skin at the affected area, before turning again to follow Harry and Ron. He could get a sample later.
"All I'm saying is, we've followed the spiders to a creepy woods, and maybe the lesson Hagrid wanted us to learn is to stay out of the woods. Abathur, back me up here," Ron turned to him in an agitated state, clearly in distress
"Investigation not complete. More information to gain. Retreat, inadvisable," Abathur replied, still watching the space between the trees. There was something there, and Abathur wasn't quite sure what.
Ron looked between the two, seeing he was outnumbered. "Alright," Ron said, shoulders slumping momentarily. "But the second we find something, we're heading straight-,"
The trees fell away at the last few steps, revealing webs covering every surface. Thousands of eyes in groups of eight locked onto the human children that had dared enter their colony. A thousand mandibles clicked in hunger, as the acromantulas lowered themselves on their webs.
"Hagrid?" A wizened voice asked. "Is that you?"
"We're friends of Hagrid's," Harry replied.
"Well, that's interesting," The voice said. The web in front of the trio distorted and stretched. "Hagrid hasn't sent manlings to our hollow before." A number of legs stretched out from the tangle of webs, pulling a massive hairy body behind it. It was a spider. A giant spider.
It was all Abathur could do to stop himself from grinning maniacally. A colony of excellent predators, large enough to be a threat to any creature, easy to convert, in close proximity. It was as near perfect as was possible. Assuming his survival of course. Even as the terrans and the spider talked, the other arachnids moved to surround them.
Abathur could recognize the tactic. Distract the prey with tasty bait, while removing all hope of escape. The food never saw it coming, not when the Hive did the same, nor when the Swarm. Even terrans and protoss fell to the tactic more often than not. The trap would be sprung soon.
"Harry. Ron. Recommend leaving. Now," Abathur stated. If he came into the woods with them, and left without, that would cause all sorts of questions.
"Oh, you can't leave now," The elder arachnid stated. "I may not let my children have Hagrid, but I can hardly stop them when such fresh meat comes to us."
The acromantula took this as a signal to strike. Hesitantly at first, they advanced. Then the first jumped directly at Abathur, fangs poised to bite deep. Abathur just managed to catch the fangs before they reached his head, and even then would have been impaled if he hadn't telekinetically held it back. He could feel it pushing against him, and it was winning. The spider was strong, more so than it should be for regular muscle. Abathur redirected the spider, sending it flying past to his right. Harry and Ron faced similar challenges. Harry managed to knock one aside with his pack, while Ron simply ran while pushing aside the spiders.
Still, it was obvious they would be overrun before long. There were simply too many, and the acromantulas had greater mobility. Well, by all rights he should have been dead years ago. The Hive would live on, and so would the Swarm, wherever it was. Abathur was expendable. The zerg would survive.
Abathur continued fighting off the acromantulas as best he could, distracting them onto the terrans whenever he could. Occasionally, he crushed a brain, or split an artery, killing the victim. But it was never enough Escape was getting closer and closer, but Abathur knew they would be overrun far before that. Or they would have been, if not for the hovering terran vehicle.
Abathur didn't know where the vehicle came from, and he didn't care. It provided escape, and that was enough. As he looked back through the forest of trees, Abathur felt the minds of the acromantula horde fading. They had almost succeeded in killing him. That alone proved their efficiency. They would be part of the Swarm. Their essence was his. The acromantulas simply didn't know it yet.
(Transition)
Abathur had learned his lesson from the previous year. Never go on a random adventure head-first, especially when you had no idea why it was occurring, who was involved, or why he should care about any of it in the first place. It worked when you had a massive army of extremely well-designed, highly efficient, combat organisms, not so much when you didn't. Of course, that didn't mean he couldn't reap the rewards anyway.
So, when the humans were seeking him in a panic, seeking aid for rescuing another from a basilisk, Abathur hid. He hid from them, and then, when they abandoned the pursuit, he followed them to the waste facility, watched as they opened the passage. When they and the... even after a year, he wasn't really sure what role the adult blond terran served. Maybe he served as an emergency food source? He appeared to serve no other significant function. The terrans didn't typically act as cannibals, but they may make an exception in his case.
Regardless, Abathur entered the tunnel after the terrans. He would let them rescue their sister, and slay the creature, or die in the process. Either way would leave essence for him, either from the dead terrans, with their psionics, or the basilisk. Either would work, and he could always get the other later, whatever the outcome. Both would likely have many uses.
He was a passive observer for the events of the chamber, hidden from the rest. The adult terran was reduced to a gibbering mess, presumably for easier consumption. Ron and Harry moved in farther, shadowed by Abathur. He watched as they confronted the psionic construct. Abathur was glad to note that his suspicions had been warranted, it appeared ghosts were actually capable of harm. He watched as the basilisk appeared, long and scaly, overflowing with essence. Elder creatures were always best for essence, they had so much more variety, not to mention their age was proof of survivability.
As the ignited avian flew through the air and struck at its foes eyes, Abathur watched. As the snake was slain with steel, and the ghost was slain with venom, Abathur watched. When the fire bird carried the living away, Abathur stopped watching. He acted. After waiting a few minutes to confirm that they were gone, Abathur walked to the Basilisk. Dead, of course. Perhaps having it alive was a bit too much to ask for.
Abathur started with the scales. Working his way into the sword wound at the top of the head, he dug his nails under the skin, peeling it off. The scales were disassembled, one after the other popped into Abathurs mouth. The armor was promising, providing far more protection than the meagre troll skin. Psionic dispersion as well, powerful trait. He would have to integrate it as soon as convenient.
Next came the muscles exposed beneath the skin. They were strong, as was required by the creatures shape, but otherwise nothing special. They tore easily under his fingers. Little time was spent there before he moved lower, to the mouth.
The fangs were the first feature to meet his inspections. They broke off easily enough, but the bone and the connecting tissue wasn't what Abathur was interested in. With a flex of muscle and mind, the fang cracked open lengthwise. Inside,some venom remained within, but no means of production. Abathur wasn't willing to taste such a powerful venom, not with a mostly terran shell he was reliant on.
He extended his fingers, growing the unremarkable carapace adorning them into longer, more effective claws. He slashed along the jawline of the serpent, exposing the large glands connecting to the remaining teeth. They were methodically dissected, each part consumed in turn. When he was done, Abathur immediately set his glands held within his forearms to reproduce the toxin. It was highly corrosive and highly toxic, an ideal mixture with few remedies. He would have to keep it, even if there were a few areas to improve on.
Next, came the eyes. They were ruined, damaged beyond use, if not beyond repair. He could revive the basilisk, but that would take too much time, too many resources and raise too many questions. Better to harvest its essence for use at a later date. He plucked one scarred eye out of the skull and closed his teeth around it. He had to stop mid-chew. It was glorious, everything he could have hoped for. Structures for generating psionics, structures for focusing, redirecting, emitting it, and all of the essence wrapped up in one, single sphere. It was far beyond his means of replicating at this point. He'd need generations of experimentation to get anywhere near a workable replica, and the creatures of the Hive were far too simple for it. Besides that, some sections remained incomprehensible, one appeared to just be a conduit twisted into random shapes. The basilisk's eye was powerful, immensely so, but not immediately.
Abathur took the second eye and swallowing it whole, preserving it within himself. It was never a bad thing to save a sample for later. A quick scan of the corpse showed nothing else particularly interesting. He went back to the tunnel, climbing back in and pulling himself up the length. The harpoons made convenient leverage on the particularly slippery or steep sections. Within a few minutes, Abathur was out of the tunnel, with more essence and more ideas.
(Transition)
The Hive had largely been left to fend for itself, after the Mind had grown the first Queen, and infested the first colony. They had adapted, grown, expanded and infested according to the orders of the Queens, the Hive built, breed and died according to their desires. This time was different.
The Mind delivered its orders directly to the forces here, altering and improving them as they moved through the night to the objective. The hive ants moved up the tree trunk, swarming over the bark, nearly covering it. The Mind was taking no chances, despite the relative ease of this operation.
There was hunger in the Mind, and it leaked into its forces. Many creatures between them and the target were devoured, a stray beetle being stripped of legs, and left immobile to bring back to the colonies later. A distracted fly was stripped of wings and flesh, and still the Hive advanced. Eventually, they reached the target, a brown spider hanging on a web of its own design, suspended in midair, far from the Hive's reach. A simple obstacle to overcome. If the spider would not come to them on its own, they would force it to.
The soldiers formed chains of themselves around the web, clinging to each others legs and jaws to stretch to various points on the web. The chains of ants reached the anchor points of the web, each end of the chain linking to the bark or a spoke of the web. As one, the Hive severed the web from the tree. The spider was suspended by the ants, who moved their structures around, encircling the spider in its own trap. The spider panicked, desperately trying to escape the strands wrapping around it. It was a futile effort. Even if it had escaped, it had nowhere to go but to the Hive. The immobilized arachnid moved closer and closer to the swarm clustered at the base of the chains.
The spider was pulled to the bark, and the ants swarmed over it. The spider lashed out, its mandibles catching an unlucky insects head, pushing venom into its brain. The ant fell, and the spider looked for another victim. It didn't take much effort. The Hive forces were covering the spider, biting into its joints and body, anchoring themselves as their paralytic venom rushed into the spider. The spider fought valiantly, taking down another Hive soldier before the venom took effect. One moment it was moving, thrashing against its attackers, the next, it fell still. Not dead, but still. The ants moved in to devour the prey, but stopped as an almost palpable mental pulse fell over, keeping them from moving in.
Calmer, a harvester moved to each of the spiders limbs, grabbing and lifting the arachnid. More moved under the body, getting additional holds and supports. The warriors encircled the harvesters, providing an escort as the Hive moved back down the trunk, stopping here and there to pick up the food. The nearest colony was not far, and it took barely an hour to deliver the payload to the resident Queen. Behind her eyes, the Mind watched the spider as the Queen burrowed it in a pile of biomass, and sprayed a green mist.
In a few hours, the new Queen awoke, walking out of the cocoon on eight legs. The Mind felt it, the fangs filled with venom, the abdomen swelling with various fluids ready to ensnare, its brain full of patterns and designs. It sent the genome to the various colonies with instructions for more and more. Soon the Spider Queens were everywhere, spinning and weaving, growing, breeding, covering the forest with their webs. The Hive had grown by one strain, and it was already hungry for more.
The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout
Down came the ants and chased the spider out
Out came the Mind and stopped all of the pain
And now that little spider serves the Hive's eternal reign
Spiders: Equally dynamic as ants, spiders are typically solitary predators that catch prey with the use of webs, venom, and ambushes, with a variety of structures and tactics. The typical strategy of most spiders is to weave a nearly invisible web of extraordinarily strong material, in some cases ten times as strong as Kevlar, which are covered with droplets of stretchy, electrically charged materials, then lie in wait on it. When a small insect or bird flies too close, the web springs to it, trapping it, and sending vibrations through the thread to alert the spider, which rushes to the disturbance and wraps the victim in additional thread. Once the prey is trapped, the spider injects venom into the prey, liquefying it, and slurping it up. In some cases, the spider simply leaves the prey/soup in the impromptu cocoon, saving it for later. While this is the basic strategy, the details can vary. Sometimes the webs span across a river. Some spiders live in giant communities, their webs covering entire trees. Sometimes the web lasts for years. One kind of spider even weaves the web underwater, capturing air and fish it uses to live. Others forgo webs altogether, instead directly leaping around 40 times their body length onto their prey and injecting venom. Spiders are diverse, inventive, deadly, and never more than ten feet away. Have fun sleeping tonight.