Alien Evolution System

by Stayrr

Consume and evolve to become the strongest. The Collector, an alien warrior on a mission to absorb all life, transmigrates to a world of fantasy and magic. However, a battle with a god forces it to begin its journey as nothing more than a weak grub. Used to fighting against spaceships and machines, the Collector must now navigate its strange new world where instead of dealing wi

3. 61

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Furio listened to the monster.

An intelligent monster.

Not a familiar, then, for they had no free wills, especially if they were constructed from the ground up.

At the same time, the presence of this creature, this thing seemed so improbable. It seemed at face value to be like a daemon, and yet, it was a monster.

Daemons were not monsters; they did not have presences like this. They were of the Common races, or they used to be, before their kind rebelled.

No matter how daemons looked or how reviled they were, they were not monsters.

Furio heard a heavy body part dirt and leaves as it slithered towards him.

The creature's six eyes gazed at him with palpable disdain this time, though not an emotion so strong it would interfere with its decision making.

It was more the kind of disdain anyone would have for a cockroach, something far, far beneath them.

Disgusting enough to evoke a reaction, not an emotion.

This…this was a monster, there was no doubt about it. It stared down at Furio with an intent common across monster kind: hunger.

No doubt, it had taken countless Common lives already.

From the very beginning, monsters had always been against the Common races and the gods. A dichotomy marked across two entire millennia, ever since the Convergence, maybe more time than that.

There was no overlap between them.

No monster would ever ally with a daemon. No daemon would ever consort with a monster.

But did that matter in the end?

What mattered was that right now, right here, this monster had hurt Emi, and Furio was not going to stop until it was dead, no matter what it cost.

"You can think. You can speak," said Furio. He smiled to himself as he charged up magical energy around him, coalescing it around one of the blades sheathed at his back.

A broad, rectangular-shaped blade. "Good.

Then you'll understand me when I say I'm going to make you pay for the lives you've stolen."

"Stolen?" The monster observed Furio and clicked the mandibles poised on the sides of its smooth helmet of carapace. "I have granted your kind and their meager existences greater purpose, regardless of the resistance they levy against me.

But you will not understand. None of your unevolved kind will. Only in consumption shall you truly grasp what you lack."

As the monster began to move, Furio activated Yeolgu, one of his five coreforged blades.

The rectangular blade, a dadao as it was called in the realm of Xin where it was forged with the core of a Shaker-fish, unleashed its signature ability of calling upon the fish's own power of shaking the very earth itself.

Tremors began to echo from the blade, and the rectangular clay sheath containing it shattered, revealing the a thick, heavyset brown blade lined with plate-like scales.

The scales all shook rapidly, generating countless powerful shockwaves.

Furio gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

Yeolgu needed a channeling point to unleash its destructive area of effect shockwaves. He usually struck it into the ground to shatter the earth or swung the bat-like sword into monsters, blowing them apart from the inside out.

But Furio was completely immobilized right now.

That left him with only one point of contact to channel Yeolgu: himself.

Using his own body as a conduit, he let the powerful shockwaves pass through him, traveling into his feet where they blew apart the earth in great, seismic booms.

Countless cracks wreathed his metalweave clothing.

The emblem on his shoulder emblazoned with four stars tore apart, the shining gold of the stars shattered into faint particles the Darkwoods swallowed up in an instant.

The rest of the sheaths tied to Furio's back shattered as well, unleashing all of his weapons at once.

This was a genuine, localized earthquake, and the range extended far past Furio himself.

Cracks lined the ground around him as dirt rose up in huge geysers. When the shockwaves roamed past the webbing covering Furio, the mass amounts of silk shook for a second before splitting apart all at once.

The monster halted its charge, escaping blowback from the shockwaves and slithering backwards, eyeing Furio.

Furio coughed up blood as he struggled to keep himself standing.

Around his wrench floated the three weapons that were on his back: Stella the monster-killing flail, Yeolgu the earth-shaking blade, and Edepu the sickle sword of the winds.

He could still fight.

With Flow as an origin, years of training, and an abundance of natural talent, he had managed to do what was seemingly impossible: flow the shockwaves of damage through his body, passing it perfectly through him and into the ground.

This was {Dispersal}, an advanced technique that only five-star adventurers and above began to learn, but Furio managed an imperfect version through sheer desperation and natural talent.

Still, imperfect was imperfect.

Furio felt pain burning through his entire body, sheathing every inch of him in red hot heat that told him he was breaking down.

There were micro-tears across almost all his muscles. Some small fractures in various bones. Internal bleeding.

Furio's vision blurred as he felt blood pour from his nose. Thank the gods he did not suffer from a concussion.

At the edge of his hazy vision, he felt the immense presence of the monster disappear.

Reacting on pure survival instinct, he tapped his wrench.

He had shot Fulmi into the forest to distract the monster, and now it came back to the wrench still screaming, covered in a sphere of destructive electricity.

The monster immediately sensed the approach of the weapon and leaped into the air with a push of its tail, purple lining its form as it pushed itself back with telekinetic force, dodging over Fulmi and landing with acrobatic grace on the forest floor.

Fulmi slotted back into Furio's wrench, and the dagger stopped its activation, the lightning fading as its segments closed and twisted on itself. It would take some time before it could be activated again.

He de-slotted Fulmi, and the dagger started to float around the wrench in an orbit, joining its brethren.

Furio slotted in Stella, jamming the wrench into the head of the flail; a star-shaped construct with its four pointed, fang-like ends wrapped around an orb of gleaming light. The light of a firefly.

"You inflict great damage upon your innards in order for a mere chance to move," said the monster as it clicked its mandibles, slithering around Furio and analyzing him.

Furio was ready to react at any given moment's notice to react against the monster if it attacked, and the monster knew this.

It simply took this small amount of time sizing him up to say what it wished. "Perhaps in some small measure, my initial assessment of your worth was miscalculated. There is yet chance for you to prove your worth.

In this small purchase of freedom bought at the cost of your body, what will you choose? To fight? Or to flee?"

"Run? What a sick joke." Furio spat out blood and righted himself, getting his breathing under control and flowing his mana around him through {Accel}.

Using {Accel} and constantly pumping mana through his body would drain his reserves, but if he did not use {Accel} right now to keep his damaged moving with the help of mana flow, he would stop moving entirely.

At least with {Accel}, even if he had limited time, he could still use it to fight.

He steadied his wrench, Stella's star head now hanging from its end with a golden chain of solidified light. Three other weapons orbited the wrench, ready to be shot out at a moment's notice.

Flambe was still out in the woods, pinning the daemon girl down. He would keep it there for now.

And beyond his weapons, his will still stood strong and sharp. He shouted as blood spattered from each of his enunciations.

"I…I am Furio Nil, four-star adventurer, and though I myself have no family name to speak of, I swear by all the families you threaten that I will slay you!"

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The monster clicked its mandibles, nodding in some kind of warped appreciation before it focused on Stella, almost as if beckoning Furio to show what the weapon could do.

With that, Furio took the initiative.

He powered up Stella, and the light emanating from its core shone intensely bright, easily overpowering the Darkwoods and shining the light of what seemed like the sun for the first time in centuries in the shadowy forest.

He began to rotate his wrench, swinging the flail head rapidly around him.

The head blurred into a comet-like streak of gold, and every single insect in the vicinity moved away in primordial fear, for Stella was crafted from a relative of the Shinchu, a millennial beast hailing from Xin that deviated from other monsters in that it existed only to devour other monsters.

It was said that the Shinchu, a monstrous moth the size of a mountain, would consume five thousand monsters in the morning, then five thousand more at night.

But Furio did not have the means to possess a coreforged weapon from a true millennial beast.

No, this was from a much weaker relative, a firefly variant, and yet, it was still powerful enough to put down even B-ranked monsters.

For monsters grew stronger with age.

The older they were, the more they feasted and grew and the more their primal density accumulated.

Stella completely circumvented that defense, dealing exponentially more damage the higher a monster's age and primal density was.

And there was no doubt about this: this monster must have possessed a great degree of primal density and age.

Intelligence was one of the main markers of a strong, aged beast, and Furio could tell from its speech and its eyes, those ever moving, ever analyzing eyes, that this thing was highly intelligent.

One strike from Stella, and this monster would blow apart from the inside out.

Furio swung the flail at the monster, and the golden chain clinked and rattled as the shining flail head soared out.

The monster evaded, using {Accel} of its own to enhance its movements.

Furio could not believe this.

{Accel} was nothing special. One of the first and most basic mana forms out there.

Even monsters could use it to a degree as it was highly intuitive to just push mana into the body to boost power, but it was in the basics where technique showed the greatest differences.

The gap in efficiency between the {Accel} of a master martial artist and a beginner was like that between the dirt and the sky.

And there was no doubt about this, even with a red origin of Chaos, a mana affinity that was hard to keep under consistent control, this monster's {Accel} with its smooth, controlled form, the stability of the flickering red aura that wrapped so evenly around the monster's musclebound figure, reached the level of a veteran fighter.

Furio swallowed down his disbelief and sped up his own {Accel}, manipulating the wrench with the slightest of movements to push the flail head up or down, tracking the monster.

With each rotation of the flail around himself, it sped up, and by now, the power-

A Darkwood tree trunk, a massive thing that must have had a diameter approaching five meters, groaned as the flail cut straight through it as if it had never existed at all, slicing the thing apart and collapsing it.

Countless insects on the forest floor burned apart, exploding as the mere light of Stella, not even the head itself, grazed them.

But the monster kept up with Furio's top speed.

Furio eyed the monster intently, with every passing moment marked by the whoosh of the flail and the clink of its chain spinning around him and lashing out at the monster, aiming at the head or heart with precision.

The monster evaded with expert movements.

It craned its body to the side to avoid overhead blows.

It flattened itself to the ground to dodge decapitating sweeps.

It slithered low and punched itself off the ground to escape swings meant to slice off its tail, and then in the very same moment, shrunk its muscles and twirled in the air to dodge another strike meant to try and strike it in mid-air when it was supposed to be less maneuverable.

All movements boosted with {Accel}, and the movements themselves were fundamentally efficient and masterful.

Despite this thing being a monster, the movements, they reminded Furio of a martial artist.

A master of a craft.

An artisan.

As a martial artist himself, Furio had to quell a sense of pure admiration, to shove down a repulsive notion that he was witnessing art unfolding before his eyes painted up by a body monstrous and inhuman - a body that was never meant to practice martial arts.

In just three seconds, Furio had attacked nearly thirty times, slicing down three enormous trees and carving out countless lines of burning gold on the forest floor, but the monster remained unscathed.

Furio assessed the monster.

It did not waste mana by expending it out of its body in the form of a {Sense Aura} to try and predict Stella's trajectories.

It instead seemed to have another way of superhumanly predicting the flail's movements, allowing it to focus its mana solely on empowering its body.

What it was, Furio did not know, but he just needed one strike, and he was willing to sacrifice anything to get that one blow in.

He turned up his {Accel} even higher.

Blood poured from his mouth, nose, and even eyes, and every single one of his damaged muscles and bones creaked as they pushed themselves beyond their limits.

There was no point saving anything now: he would tire out before the monster did, and when he could no longer keep up this speed, the monster would have a chance to move in and strike.

The monster sensed the immediate shift in Furio's output. Both of its arms flashed purple as it stared at the incoming head of the flail.

Furio knew what this was. A Sapian force attack. Force Hold. He smiled.

He knew it would not work.

The monster seemingly did not know this, but coreforged weapons were almost like Ethera constructs – they were extensions of their wielder's own body.

The mana that flowed from the wielder flowed too into the coreforged weapons, and so any direct attempted manipulation on them was highly ineffective.

And at Furio's current speed that reached beyond his limits, even one wasted movement meant the monster would suffer a hit.

Furio suppressed the urge to keep his burning, bloody eyes from blinking as he saw the shining flail slam into the creature's armored chest.

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A flash of brilliant light accompanied by the crack of impact. Stella's four jagged, golden teeth broke into the monstrosity's heavily armored chest. All the spikes of carapace protruding from the area shattered and flew apart from the impact.

But Furio knew something was off from the moment the flail had hit; he was experienced enough to tell from the simple feel of the blow that it was too shallow, the sound of the strike strong but still far duller than it should have been.

"No-," Furio's grey eyes widened as he saw a thick circle of red encasing the monster's chest, directly covering its heart. It had used the martial art {Guard}, condensing the mana it circulated throughout its body with {Accel} into that single point in a mere instant.

A transition like that from free flow to sudden concentration required years and years of practice, and even then, you would be hard pressed to find anybody except from the upper star adventurers who could make transitions as quickly as that.

But at the very least, the monster was still injured.

Stella generated power with its activation and rotations, and by now, it was easily strong enough to smash through the monster's carapace with sheer physical power alone.

The white plating had cracked and split apart at the heart, even beneath the dense layer of protective mana and the purple personal Sapian shielding.

Bright red, raw pectoral muscles lined with streaks of white lay underneath, bleeding from force that tore a few of those powerful strands of muscles apart.

Furio waited for a moment.

Stella's light had touched that open wound. If all went well, then the creature's own longevity and primal density would work against it, and the flesh would start to bubble up, rupture, and blow apart-

But no such thing happened.

"I see," said the monster instead, observing as some of its raw, exposed flesh shuddered before a few blood vessels popped and muscle fibers tore further.

But nothing close to a major wound.

Then, its eyes settled on Stella, the flail head already moving back to Furio, but slower this time, having lost much momentum because of his surprise.

Furio yanked back on his wrench, pulling Stella back faster.

Too late.

The monster immediately learned.

Both its arms flashed purple, and instead of trying to put a Force Hold on Stella itself, it instead willed up a mound of dirt from the ground.

The dirt hit the chain with an impact that forced Stella to stop flying back and angle sharply downwards, slamming into the ground and blasting out a crater of dirt as several insects nearby blew apart from its light.

Furio adjusted as well, swiveling his wrench to the side to free the flail head, but the monster was already upon it.

With a single swipe, it severed the flail head from its supporting golden chains, and in another instant, Furio saw Stella, crafted personally by his great master, a coreforged weapon of a rarity that almost nobody in his star rank could match, disappear into the monster's mouth.

The shining light of Stella faded in an instant as the monster swallowed the flail head.

"This…is quite nourishing. Unlike anything I have sampled before-," said the monster.

It paused, as if to speak again, but then light shone strongly from within its stomach, lighting up its insides through its flesh and carapace and revealing the silhouette of three different hearts.

Was Stella's light still working? Destroying the monster from within?

No, Furio could tell that the light was dimming by the moment, the creature was frozen only in digesting the mass amount of power stored within Stella.

Instinctively, Furio knew that this monster had to be stopped here.

No matter what.

It did not have primal density yet, but it would gain more and more as time passed. At a certain point, no sorcerer would be able to deal with it using god-given magics.

It grew stronger from everything it consumed. At a certain point, no adventurer would be able to deal with it.

The gods themselves would fall before it if it was not stopped now.

Furio had gone through fifty six successful hunts in his life as an adventurer, many of those of a threat ranking beyond what he was supposed to deal with.

But he knew that every single one of those hunts, every single struggle he faced and overcame, was to make him stronger for this very moment.

To kill this monster before it killed everything else.

Furio tore Stella's chain off from his wrench and slotted in Yeolgu. The square blade vibrated faintly, still having enough stored power for two more activations.

Kill the monster before it could move again.

Furio roared as green lit up his body in a strong {Accel}, empowering him as he leaped forwards with Yeolgu raised overhead.

There were vital points every adventurer knew to strike. The brain, if a monster had one, and then its cores.

This monster possessed three hearts.

Three cores.

Destroying any single one would not immediately defeat it.

Striking the head was best.

With Yeolgu, Furio would smash the monstrosity's head and channel shockwaves internally, bursting the rest of the hearts.

The shockwaves directly countered any form of armor-plating, scales, or carapace, resonating off the hard surfaces and back through the body.

Furio batted down at the monster's head. Yeolgu's scales opened up and shimmered as the length of the blade crashed into the helmeted head with an explosive impact.

The initial blow itself was strong enough to put in deep cracks lining the monster's head, but not enough to punch through by itself to the brain.

The shockwaves, though – they traveled in mass amounts throughout the creature, shaking its enormous bulk in rapid vibrations.

The carapace began to crack, and the claws on its body, seemingly far more brittle than its shell, all shattered.

Soon enough, the creature would break apart completely with its insides boiled from the energy of shockwaves echoing within.

Furio saw the monster inexplicably move even with shockwaves rattling it, its brawny arm reaching out and grabbing one of his arms. The enormous hand wrapped around the whole length of his forearm, and he knew what was going to happen.

Furio let go of his wrench and kicked it behind him as he felt the monster rip his arm straight from the socket.

The monster reached out again, this time to grab his torso, but he tethered himself to his wrench, pulling himself quickly out of range.

Just like how he could push and pull his swords around his wrench, he too could act as a conduit point for it, though he was the only living, non-metallic body that this worked on.

As Furio flew in the air, he saw the monster take his arm and devour it in one gulp.

He grit his teeth and willed mana to condense around his empty arm socket. The muscles around the area, aided with the flow of mana, swelled up and tightened, fusing almost together to stop the mass bleeding.

Furio could not understand how the creature managed to weather through Yeolgu's tremors, but soon found the answer.

He saw the earth under the monster splitting apart, quaking as the shockwaves transferred from its body to the ground as an aura of red circulated around it.

{Dispersal}. An advanced martial arts technique. But how did the creature know how to use this?

All it had done was seen Furio use it once.

Was that truly all it needed to replicate something Furio had needed the entire summation of his years of training, talent, and breaking his own limits to muster up?

"I see," said the monster as it clicked its mandibles. "In manipulating the flow of your mana throughout your body such that it matches the physical properties of the shockwaves traveling through them, you are able to guide them out of your body.

In this manner, you may even be able to circulate electric currents harmlessly. Your device that is capable of generating such electricity thus is also rendered useless against me.

But no matter. I now understand that these tools of yours are fashioned from the essence of physical specimen.

They will now be mine.

You have proven your worth adequately. It is now time to be consumed."

Furio hung onto his wrench in the air, suspended in tethered orbit as it was with the two swords near it.

He thought about giving up. But he was far too deep into this fight to do that. And it was not just Emi and Vera, the fate of all Common life rested upon his shoulders.

And he still had one ace up his sleeve.

For now, he needed to make distance.

Yeolgu was slotted into it and Fulmi orbited it. But like the beast had said, Fulmi was useless against it now if it had mastered {Dispersal} to the extent that it could minimize damage from Yeolgu.

Furio tapped Fulmi with the wrench, imparting a magnetic push on it that sent it flying fifty meters away – the maximum range of the tether. He then raised an index finger to tap his wrench, making it pull towards Fulmi.

Like this, he could semi-replicate the effects of flying, and though it was fast, the flight patterns were predictable, following his magnetic tethers that all had linear paths.

No doubt, the monster would pick up on this.

But all he needed to do was get out of this forest, out of any potential interference getting in the way between himself and this monster when he used the most powerful ability in his entire arsenal, one utterly unique to him and his Ethera: the Resonance Break.

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Furio braced himself for impact as he flew upwards and smashed through the Darkwood trees, his trained, superhuman muscles and the mana encasing them allowing him to break through branches and bugs.

In the next moment, he was out in the open air, above the treeline.

Furio stopped flying when his wrench neared Fulmi, around twenty meters above the treetops.

He knew this was not going to be enough, and his suspicions were confirmed when he heard the shadowy leaves under him rustle.

With a practiced series of motions, Furio tapped Fulmi with his wrench again, bidding it to fly backwards, out into the clearing where there were no trees, no large, sturdy bodies to interfere with the Resonance Break.

Then, he used his index finger to tap the wrench while gripping it, sending him flying towards Fulmi.

Right in the nick of time.

The monster's enormous form smashed through the trees, huge, enormous daemonic wings unfurled to its sides, the wingspan of clawed, bat-like wings almost as large as the monstrosity itself.

With a gust of wind blowing behind it, the monster just barely missed swiping at Furio as he flew backwards.

Furio knew that in terms of speed, this makeshift flight could match or even exceed the creature's own flight speed.

After all, he shot his blades out like bullets, and when he pulled himself to them, he was treated as a projectile and became just as fast.

A half second later, Furio stopped abruptly again by Fulmi, fifty meters away.

Furio gritted his teeth as he condensed mana into his body. The sudden stop from bullet-like velocity to a standstill would have probably killed the ordinary man with whiplash, but he had trained his body to deal with this.

He glanced down – open, grassy ground. Swarms of insects, yes, but they were weak enough that they did not matter if they got caught in the Resonance Break. The Darkwood trees, though, were a different matter.

His eyes widened. The beast was already upon him, its enormous, plated fist drawn back and ready to smash his head clean off.

Furio reacted by grabbing the wrench and having it treat himself like a projectile, shooting himself straight down into the ground.

As a blur of movement, he flew right down, smashing into the ground with an impact that shattered the earth beneath his mana-infused legs and boots. Small insects around the landing zone flew up and broke apart from the force.

This monster was an adept flyer and easily in control of its body to such a degree that it could compensate for Furio's faster flight speed by predicting his linear movement patterns and moving before he did.

Furio knew the monster would be upon him again in the next moment. He gripped his wrench and tapped it with a finger, calling back Flambe from all the way back in the forest.

Powering even more mana into his legs, he used {Dash} and shifted five or so meters backwards in an instant, burning up grass and skidding across dirt with the high-speed movement.

The monster slammed into where Furio had been like a red and purple lined meteorite, blasting apart a crater twice the size Furio had made. Even the larger insects broke apart with the shockwave of force, their body parts and legs and shells all flying in the guts and debris-littered air.

The monster adjusted its sight to Furio, specifically at his legs, and he knew he had to make this work soon. If the beast could learn advanced martial arts techniques with just one or two demonstrations, it would know how to {Dash} very soon.

But Flambe was already here, the flaming, super-heated blade ready to slice into the monster's back while it was distracted by Furio. In conjunction with this, Furio tapped Edepu with his wrench, and the sickle sword shot out while lined with winds that sharpened its edge.

A two-pronged attack.

But without even turning around, the monster swiveled to the side at the very last moment before the blades pierced its heart, dodging both blades completely. In the very same motion, before Flambe or Edepu could return to Furio, the monster had grabbed the blades by the handles with three of its fingers on either hand.

The monster cracked open its toothy maw and swallowed the blades whole.

It oddly reminded Furio of when he walked the streets of the nearest town, Dwarka, it was, where he had seen street performers called Dervishes do tricks like swallowing blades and breathing flame.

And all of those streets full of performers and laughing children would be soaked in blood if Furio did not act now. He knew that the monster might spend some time digesting the coreforged blade, and so he took this moment to aim his wrench at the beast's center.

Furio activated Yeolgu again, its earthen scales rattling along each other and drumming up vibrations once more and shot it out to the monster's side, missing it so that it could not grab the blade.

The rattling sword shot straight into the thick of the forest, lost.

This left Furio only with Fulmi, a dagger not meant for close combat whose activation was useless because the monster could use {Dispersal} to vent out the lightning.

But all of this was according to Furio's plans. He could not have the monster grabbing Yeolgu. That blade had to be behind it.

"I have miscalculated the degree of your injuries if your aim is degraded to this degree," said the monster as it slithered towards Furio, slower this time, almost savoring his last moments. "Let me sense.

An erratic heartbeat, severe subconjunctival hemorrhaging that dyes your eyes red, and minor inefficiencies in movement indicative of no less than twenty-two minor fractures and extensive tearing in almost all major muscles bodies."

The beast clicked its mandibles, its six eyes staring down at Furio's panting, armless, bloody, and broken body. "Yet, you have mustered up a battle that has done well in smoothing over your grave insult of deeming me a mere 'familiar.'

I shall grant you consideration within the Collective. Consider it a great honor, degenerated human,"

Furio felt his body grow heavy. So very heavy as the last dregs of his mana faded from {Accel}.

The beast talking about his injuries made him feel them even more, and he knew that once his mana completely faded, he would stop moving entirely, maybe even just die when the adrenaline also abandoned him.

He still had enough strength for this, though. Thank the gods it did not cost any mana.

He held the wrench out towards the monster with a trembling arm.

"Bringing back the blade you ejected?" said the monster. "Such a primitive strategy did not amount to anything when you attempted it with the heat-generating blade. Yet, you-,"

A white light flashed from the wrench head. Sudden cracks lined the entire length of the wrench as a sound like shattering bone echoed through the air. Furio smiled, his teeth dyed red in his blood.

This was a nigh-instantaneous attack.

Using the magnetic tether the wrench had with his five weapons, Furio could activate Resonance Break, destroying both the wrench and a magical weapon to channel extremely destructive force through the tether linking the two.

A last-ditch attack as it sacrificed Furio's Ethera, and that would take three days or more to recover.

But days did not matter here.

It was just this moment that mattered.

A beam of white light shot out from the head of the wrench with a metallic ring as it began disintegrating, and so too would a beam have shot out from Yeolgu far away. Both beams sped towards each other, and in between, the monster would break apart.

"No," whispered Furio under his breath.

Somehow, the monster had sensed something wrong at the very last moment and had used {Dash} to push itself into the air.

Furio watched as the beam of light screamed with constantly fluxing metallic rings in front of him, missing his target entirely.

But then he saw…a portal? A small, circular, rainbow lined portal in the center of the raging beam.

Then, in the next second, another portal emerged above the monster and angled down towards its heart.

The beam shot out from that portal.

The moment the monster saw the portal, it must have understood what was to happen, and it twisted its body. The beam struck true, but instead of blowing apart its heart, it instead smashed through its left side.

The carapace cracked and bent as the beam struck, but not enough-

Furio screamed as he saw the attack work.

He willed the beam with as much power as he could, and his wrench shattered and disintegrated entirely in an instant, a final, powerful burst of light blasting apart through the monster's entire carapace layer and then shooting straight through the enormous, armored body, reconnecting with Yeolgu in the forest for half a second more before the magical weapon disintegrated with the wrench.

The light faded, leaving the Darkwoods and night to blanket the scene in shadow once more.

The monster fell to the ground with a heavy crash, kicking up a cloud of dirt around it.

Furio fell to his knees, completely spent, his entire body on the verge of just breaking apart.

Where had the portal come from? What- he knew what it was, it was, it was, but no, she had left, he knew it.

Vera's form materialized beside Furio, holding him.

"No…," whispered Furio. He coughed but still managed to get his words out. "No! You have to leave!"

"Even if we missed that beast's heart, a wound that size punching right through it will have it bleeding out or crippled," said Vera.

She grimaced as she saw Furio's missing arm, and she knelt down at slung his remaining arm over her shoulder, supporting him.

"No…why?" said Furio. His vision blurred as his mana faded, and the blood loss hit him, delirium starting to tug at the edges of his mind. "Why did you come back?"

"I never really left, my love," said Vera. "I used the short portal to move away, but I was not going to truly run and abandon you. I stayed in the area, at the edge of the battle, and I used [Mirror Sight] to track you.

When I saw what you were going for near the end, I knew I could help you without holding you back, so I came here.

Now, my love, just wait. I would want nothing more than to take you away from here this very moment with a short portal, but you are too injured to be on your own.

Just a little while, my love, hold on for a little bit, take deep breaths, try to flow your mana evenly and stop the bleeding, and then I can long portal you to the safe zone."

Vera stopped as she heard clicking from behind her. A distinctive clicking unlike that of the insects around them.

No, the insects had fled, leaving them alone in a patch of empty dirt and grass for they had sensed it before she had.

The monster was still alive.

"An injury of this caliber-," Vera turned to meet the voice.

A squall of wind rushed up from where the monster had landed, its raging red aura flickering high above it, lighting the area blood-red, and where that chaotic light stretched, every single insect fled, sensing the wrath of a higher predator.

"Is the gravest I have borne upon this primitive rock so far," said the monstrosity as he stared at Vera and Furio.

An empty hole the size of a human head sizzled from its left chest, blood pooling liberally from it, but the monster did not fall. "Was it like this? That emergency medical procedure the male specimen utilized to stem hemorrhaging from your arm?"

The monster raised a hand to its eyes, as if anlayzing it, and then shaped its red aura into the hand, swirling it, condensing it, and then slammed its palm into the hole gaping from its chest.

"Yes, this was precisely it," said the monster. It uncovered its hand.

"W-what?" stammered Vera.

Muscle began to swell and surge from the wound, stemming all bleeding and fusing the hole shut.

"But an incomplete procedure. Now to compensate for the loss of blood vessels and critical bone structures," continued the monster. The aura raging red around its body turned purple.

Gleaming purple outlines started to streak around the mass of muscle sealing the wound, forming into the shapes of veins and parts of ribs that must have been lost from the blow.

"Utilizing Sapia to create artificial internal body structures. The cost: a continual loss of mana. Yet, worthy of removing compromised combat capacity due to injury," noted the monstrosity.

"Out," said Furio. He pushed himself off from Vera, standing in front of her shakily. He had no weapons anymore. Only Fulmi, and that did not even work.

He had no energy to shout now as he trudged towards the monster's towering form. "Short portal yourself out again. Run this time. Run like you mean it.

This thing…grows stronger. Everytime it eats. Soon, nobody will beat it.

Tell the Adventurer's League.

Go."

Furio's eyes widened as he felt something jab into his back. He turned to see Vera had stabbed him with a dwarven syringe. The green liquid within it drained into him, and he felt temporary mana flow throughout his body.

"This…maybe I can stall for thirty seconds. Enough time for you. Go," said Furio. Yes, this was enough for her to escape if she short portaled herself out right now and used even shorter range teleportations like [Blink] as often as possible.

"That wasn't for me," said Vera.

Furio felt her hands on his bare, bleeding back. They were soft. Warm. He felt her lips on his neck, and as the monster moved, before he could even look back at her again, she had short portaled him out.

To the thick of the Darkwoods.

Two hundred meters away from the battle – the maximum range for an instantaneous short portal.

"No…no…no," Furio started to turn back to the clearing. If he used enough of the temporary booster mana, he could get back there in time, he could-

He shook his head, blood-tinged tears welling up from his eyes. No, she had wanted him to run with this last spurt of power.

It was the hardest decision of his life, and in a second that felt like it lasted an eternity, he decided to turn around.

And run.

The Collector clicked its mandibles in rising irritation exacerbated by its unbound emotion and the trigger of desire.

Or to be more specific, desire unfulfilled.

It looked down at the human female specimen craning her neck up at it, taking a shaky step back.

Pitiful.

The stench of fear, a scent that evoked the strongest sense of detest possible from the Collector, reeked from her.

Not at all like the male specimen who emanated only the scent and pressure of the fight.

The Collector had allowed the specimen to show his worth, and he provided ample challenge to exercise the Collector's desire for battle, not to mention the acquisition of several new valuable genetic material specimen from his weapons.

But above all, the Collector had desired the male specimen's core, to devour him wholly as a means of honoring his willingness to stand and fight through a battered body and the oppressive knowledge of facing a superior enemy.

Now, however, this female specimen had doomed the worthier male to the ignoble fate of fleeing like prey.

The Collector sensed the female specimen move, and with a quick flick of her wrist, withdrew a shard of red crystal from a small ripple in space, tossing it at the Collector.

Before it struck the Collector, the crystal exploded into a swirling pillar of fire.

The Collector did take damage from this attack, though it was highly minimized due to its Sapian shielding.

Mana Level: 400390%

Sapian abilities were heavily taxing in their mana usage.

This included the makeshift bones and blood flow the Collector simulated in its injury. That alone would cost approximately 5% of its total mana every single minute.

But devouring the male specimen's weapons, so immensely rich with mana as they were, had overloaded the Collector by converting their excess spirit roots into pure energy.

This energy, the Collector's current form could not stabilize for long, and it deteriorated by the minute. Yet, while it was active, the Collector's combat capability would rise by 170%.

The Collector possessed great power in the moment, but it was on a timer, and within this timer, it could no longer afford to revel in another battle for its desire.

It had to finish its mission. Yet, it did desire something from this female.

"I will hold you back," began the female human as she stepped back again, moving to withdraw something more. "I-,"

The Collector disappeared in a burst of crackling red as it pumped mana into its tail and used {Dash}, It stopped when its fist had torn right through the female's chest, her heart still beating in its enormous hand.

The female's eyes widened as she coughed up a spurt of blood.

Then, she grew still. Limp. Dead.

The Collector held that heart gently, taking care not to crush it. It withdrew its arm from her body with the slick sound of blood and organs squelching against its carapace.

The corpse fell forwards, a growing pattern of blood forming in the ground around her.

The Collector beheld the heart, this core, seeing rainbow colored mana infused within it.

This female specimen had certainly vexed the Collector with her capacity to interface with some degree of hyperspace.

From the color and appearance of circuitry whenever she utilized magic, it would appear that this hyperspace accessibility was regulated by a 'god' of some kind.

In other words, the Collector would not utilize it through ordinary consumption, for that would mean not only bowing to a deity, but also to allow access within itself to some foreign presence. A risk it would not take.

But this ability truly was useful, and the Collector channeled the thrall's trigger for Greed, amplifying its desire.

Flashes of blue permeated the Collector's red aura, and it prepared itself to utilize bone binding.

To be sure, the Collector had utilized bone binding before in the fight with the human male, but only within its own bones.

The thrall could channel power from its bones to turn itself into mist, but the Collector was different. Channeling power through its bones only created more power.

Raw, destructive power in the form of shockwaves that accentuated its physical movements or, if analyzed further and focused, allow the Collector more ranged combat capabilities in the form of generating pulverizing, pressurized air through its punches.

Bone binding something else was different.

More difficult.

Would require the entirety of the specimen's skeletal structure intact, as well as the core itself. Involved taking all the roots from within the flesh and bones, infusing them into the core, and then infusing the core into a leftover bone.

The process would take several hours. The thrall itself with its horrendously undeveloped brain must have spent entire days working on a single bone binding operation.

The Collector did not have that time. But if its calculations were correct, then it would have assistance.

'I-I'm back!' came the female daemon's voice as she hovered to the Collector.

The heat-generating blade had pierced through her shoulder, disabling it nearly entirely, but the wound had cauterized, minimizing the chances for infection.

And, as the Collector noted from her movements as she floated to its side, her exceptional pain tolerance rendered her almost fully functional.

Good. Her functionality was needed, as was her superb magical sensitivity that rivaled even that of the Collector's, even exceeding it had she been undamaged.

'You…you're injured,' said the daemon as she stared at the muscle and Sapia constructs covering the hole in the Collector's chest. 'But…you've managed to seal a wound like this so easily and…and using Sapia like this…I…I've never seen the like of it, didn't think it would be possible.'

She cocked her head, nodding to herself. 'But…now that I see it, it seems reasonable. Simple. I…I see now.'

Her thel reached to the Collector, and when the spike touched the thin layer of Sapian shielding around the Collector, their psionic auras merged again in a tether.

Through this, the daemon closed her eyes, taking care of the cost of creating and circulating the Sapia-construct bones and blood vessels.

The Collector clicked its mandibles.

This would minimize continual mana loss. And with this specimen to assist it, the time to complete this bone binding procedure also drastically reduced.

Estimated time of completion, provided the female specimen was as effective as calculated: 10 minutes.

"I require your assistance," said the Collector.

'Y-yes!' said the daemon as she perked up, wanting to be useful.

The Collector knelt down by the female human's corpse, holding the heart over her. The female daemon stared at the mangled corpse without a shred of pity in her eyes, just a sense of curiosity.

"First, I shall remove any potential interference." The Collector sensed insects swarming around it, and though they still feared the Collector, if its mana diverted into something other than a display of power, the lowly insectoids might well have attempted to interfere.

The Collector opened its maw and activated its pyrocatalytic glands, sending out a torrent of white-blue flame that turned any insect it touched into ashes within a second.

Rotating its head, the Collector created a ring of flame far enough away from itself to grant it time for this procedure.

"I will engage in a procedure meant to circulate the spirit roots imbued within this specimen's flesh and bones into this core," said the Collector. "Once the core has compacted the roots within itself and stabilized, I will then once more compact the core into a bone, imbuing the osseous matter with the condensed core and roots."

'Wow…it's…it's like something I've read about. A…twin-forge procedure, except instead of using monster roots and cores, you're using a human's,' nodded the daemon girl in understanding. 'I…I have some knowledge in doing something like this.

Thorian, my old teacher, he-he knew how to coreforge a little, and he taught me the basics, and…this sounds just like it.'

She cocked her head and put a hand to her chin in thought. 'But…but we need something that can touch the roots. Tear them from the flesh. Something…something spiritual.

In a forge, that would be a soul-shear, but-,' She looked around. 'We don't have one.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles. It took its free hand and focused, channeling the thrall's bone binding powers. Thin lines of blue wrapped around its fingers before spooling out from the fingertips in threads with hooked tips.

"I sense these are close approximations to this tool you classify as a 'soul-shear'," said the Collector.

'Oh-ooh,' said the daemon in wonder. 'I…I had never seen bone binding shears. They…they say that northern goblins had this power passed onto them from Facestealers, monsters of legend.'

"Another specimen that seems interesting to consume. Yet, a species that too will assimilate into the Collective when it dawns." The Collector clicked its mandibles. "I sense you are familiar with this procedure to great degree.

You will assist me in removing the roots from this deceased specimen's flesh."

The daemon female nodded, using Sapia to move the five bone binding shears on the Collector hand.

"I will now open this core manually and prepare it to receive an influx of roots. As I do this, you will place the roots within." The Collector ever so slightly dug its fingertips into the heart, sending the soul-shears within, willing them to move through the cardiovascular organ.

Blue light shone from within the heart, coloring the red a pale, icy shade as the flesh and blood organ started to grow pale and freeze over, preserving it.

The daemon acted with precision. She hovered a hand over the body, and the five soul shears on the Collector's other hand fell into the body.

There was no physical sign of entry as the hooked threads sank into the skin.

The threads instead phased through, and when they came back out, smaller bundles of threads, some colored green, some a faint shade of rainbow, emerged attached to the hooked ends of the blue threads.

Where the threads emerged, the flesh grew pale, cold, and shriveled, as if it had been frozen away for years.

These threads, the daemon willed up into the frozen heart, entwining them in an ever-growing ball of wound up spirit roots.

"I see," said the Collector. "You are not targeting single roots, but areas where they intersect greatest, allowing you to withdraw dozens of threads at once."

'I…I've got the hang on this, yes,' said the daemon. She bit her lip in nervousness. 'But…but this will take some time. Maybe…maybe an hour?'

"You do not do well to underestimate my processing capabilities. The rate of your removal in this procedure is notable. Yet, can be greatly assisted."

The Collector sprouted its six arakka arms from its back, and six ghostly blue shears unspooled from their tips.

The Collector could faintly sense the daemon's intent, where she wanted to enter and pick at, and knowing this, it assisted her, the six spider legs on its back rushing in and out of the corpse at breakneck pace.

In the end, the Collector and the daemon finished the entire procedure in a time span just shy of five minutes.

Report chapter

The Collector gazed upon the heart in its hand. It had grown so pale that it had become a purplish shade of white, and it felt cold and stiff to the touch, almost brittle.

Visible through the icy flesh was a ball of glowing green and rainbow light – the summation of all the spirit roots wound up and condensed within.

"It is now time to transfer this into a suitable osseous vessel. The 'thrall' utilized a skull, and I sense that it is most apt in being able to contain the most data." The Collector looked down at the human female's corpse.

With all the roots and core from it retrieved, the corpse had almost completely shriveled up, as if desiccated from centuries of frozen storage. The skin had withered down into pale wrinkles that barely clung onto the bones, leaving the clothes surrounding them to be baggy and oversized.

There were no facial features distinguishable anymore, and the specimen's hair had decayed away into nothingness.

A quick analysis of her clothes indicated nothing of note worth to consume nor material for its Metalloglottic ossifier.

It looked at the patch with three gold stars stitched on it. So this was a three-starred adventurer.

The Collector had far evolved past her means.

Her tricks, the trinkets she stored away and withdrew as weapons, they certainly would have dealt grievous wounds to the Collector in its prior metamorphosis levels.

And now, a four-star adventurer proved to be nothing but a minor challenge. If the entire group of adventurers had faced the Collector head on, even somehow gotten a surprise advantage on it, then the Collector calculated that they potentially possessed a 58% chance of defeating it.

But in picking them off one by one, the Collector had assured its victory, even granting it margins of error to toy with the four-star adventurer a little, drawing out perspective for his strength.

And with this information, the Collector understood-

The Collector was beginning to outpace the strength of these mortals faster than their tiering system could keep up with it.

Good.

It seemed that each successive star rank indicated nearly exponentially greater strength between them. However, with the assistance of magic, the Collector's growth too would only become more varied and more pronounced.

It clicked its mandibles in consideration of the heights of strength it could achieve until it dampened these emotions in understanding that if it was successful in letting the Collective dawn upon this world, none of that would matter.

Then what was the point of this? The Collector stared at the heart in its hand.

It knew from the beginning that this procedure meant nothing if the Collective successfully dawned, and taking this female specimen's magic would not aid the Collector in direct combat.

For bone binding was highly limited.

Even if the Collector compacted the entirety of the female's essence into a bone such as the skull, it would only allow it to manifest a single ability, a single spell, and it had determined the capacity to interface with a hyperspace storage was the most efficient and practical in the long run.

But what if there was no long run?

No, the Collector had to create contingencies. As it had always done. As it would continue to do until its mission was completed.

That it could even think like this, with what it perceived as something beginning to resemble doubt, was sickening.

The Collector cupped the female corpse's dried head and popped it from her spine.

Utilizing Sapia, it tore the flesh from the skull, and there was no resistance to the Collector's manipulations anymore now that there were no roots nor life within the body.

"Now you will assist me in transferring the roots into the structure of this skull," said the Collector.

'I-I'm sorry,' began the female daemon.

The Collector clicked its mandibles as it sensed the daemon fall down to the ground, onto her knees, and began to dry heave, her breathing deep and her eyes wide in panic.

"I sense signs of great mental distress through this psionic tether between us, and with it, the accompaniment of physiological distress," said the Collector. "This is compromising your functions."

'I-I know…,' said the daemon. She glanced at the corpse in short glimpses before she turned away, wincing. 'At first…I was just so curious, so happy to see new things like soul shears and bone binding, but…but when I started to go into the body and pick at it and pull things from it…it just hit me…memories…all of it- it's so very much like what they did to me.

The shining man. With the shiny strings - pick at my skin and peel it, take chunks from me, then put everything back together-I-I-,'

"Your mental and physiological signs of distress are only growing more severe. Yet, I have analyzed the nature of this tether between us. I will now mitigate these signs of distress," said the Collector.

The daemon widened her eyes, not in panic, but in surprise. She breathed in easier. 'You-you shared a feeling with me…this feeling…it's calm. The kind of calm you always have.'

"I have merely allowed you to sense in some small measure the mental state of the Collective unbound by excess emotion. This, you perceive as 'calm'.

I sense that with this treatment, your mental state has returned to stable functioning.

Now, assist me in this procedure," said the Collector, bringing the skull closer to the daemon.

"So…so that is what the...the Collective is like," said the daemon with a wondering nod. She looked at the skull with determination. "Okay, let's do it."

A few minutes later, and the Collector stared down at the skull. The curves and outline of its structure flashed with a faint rainbow light. The second forging process was quite similar to the first one.

The core - the heart - essentially acted as a preserving space where the roots could be gathered for in normal circumstances, the roots would expire with the corpse.

But by freezing the heart into a magical stasis, the roots too could be preserved.

Inside the heart, the roots would also absorb the essence of the core.

Then, the Collector and daemon had unspooled the wound-up root threads and lined them across the structure of the skull, imbuing the bone with both the roots and the core.

However, because roots and cores reacted flexibly only with living stimuli and because the bone was no living matter, the skull could store only but a few spells: a smattering of snapshots of magic frozen within the skull.

In this way, spells were stored within the bone, and the bone was what casted and brought forth the magic at little to no cost to the Collector.

First, however, the Collector had to now ascertain whether it was safe to utilize the magic imbued in this skull.

Certainly, from the thrall, it seemed there were no risks to it, for it utilized magic stolen from tinkerers with no discernable risk to itself.

Yet, this was different, for it involved warp-based capabilities.

It was possible that whatever hyperspace this skull linked to was under another entity's dominion, some 'god', and that would prove troublesome.

The Collector used its psionic-sensitive capabilities to sense the nature of the warp-based power inherent within the skull.

For psionic power and warp capability were intrinsically linked together; a fact that allowed the Collective Hivemind with its enormous psionic processing power harvested from countless life forms to generate its own large-scale warp gates.

It saw and felt psionic threads wriggling from the skull, anchored constantly to a hyperspace, and in analyzing that space -

It clicked its mandibles in understanding. This form of hyperspace was essentially a limited space dedicated to single individuals.

In this case, the female specimen, and now, the Collector if it so desired. Trinkets and tools left by the female specimen still remained here.

Further analysis of this space. Sweeping scan for any psionic tethers to other hyperspaces or entities.

None.

And the warp-sensing that the Collective imbued within the Collector, even in its limited processing power, was extensive.

More than extensive enough to give the Collector confidence that the hyperspace this skull linked to was its distinct, separate space. This kind of space for storage which would be useful in preserving certain biological and mineral specimens.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. Its thought process and warp-sensing had taken up the span of merely a few seconds. The ring of flames it had generated before to ward away insects flickered closer, their heat palpable now.

Just in time.

The Collector took the skull and devoured it, assimilating it into its metalloglottic ossifier where in its next adaptation, it could manifest the bound bone into its own biological structure to have a constantly available, regenerative source of hyperspace storage.

*New metalloglottic ossifier sample obtained*

--Lightstone

--Runewood

--Bone Binding Skull

The Collector turned its head down to the daemon girl who looked up at him with wondering eyes, looking forward to what the next thing they would do would be in almost childish expectation.

"I will now enter this 'dungeon'. Continue your assistance in maintaining the integrity of the temporary Sapian structures I have erected to support my wound." The Collector unfurled its daemon wings. "You will be able to sense my intent in combat. You are primarily to support my own usages of Sapia.

If your mind is capable of keeping up with the rest of my combat processing, then exercise judgement in assisting me, though if there is the slightest shred of doubt that you will hinder me, do not act at all."

'I-I got it!' said the daemon, nodding to herself and the Collector. 'I…I won't disappoint you.'

"'Disappoint' is an emotion I have sensed only in dealing with tinkerers and challengers that had the potential to rise against me and yet failed or fled. I will not feel 'disappointment' in your failings, merely an adjustment of calculations to compensate," said the Collector.

It clicked its mandibles and beat down with its wings while pushing with magic-infused power with its tail, soaring high into the air.

Like this, it would avoid the sea of inferior insectoid specimen below from blocking its path.

In the air, the Collector could perceive the dungeon in the distance. A circular pit emanating with a faint blue glow – the only strong glow remaining now in the Darkwoods - and began its flight to its next and potentially final destination.

Report chapter

The Collector batted its wings and tucked in its arms and arakka legs, becoming an aerodynamic, serpentine missile of carapace and flesh as it rode the winds it shot out behind it.

The carapace on its face slotted over in one smooth layer reminiscent of a pilot's helmet, and its purple and yellow eyes shone brightly as they homed in on the ever-nearing dungeon entrance.

No discernable form of defensive force around the pit itself, merely a throng of insectoids that provided no challenge to the Collector. No defensive fortifications either that barred entry.

Yet, as the Collector hovered over the dungeon with Sapian force, it sensed the invisible psionic threads of manipulated space around the dungeon.

The pit itself was shaped almost like a maw, lined with teeth comprised of mundane stone protruding from its circumference while within the pit, the blue light glowing within formed an even and unbroken layer.

The light seemed to flux in between phosphorescence and a fluid state, shimmering and waving in equal measures in a surface that the Collector was unable to sense through with physical senses alone.

In other words, this was essentially a miniature warp gate of its own leading into an entirely different pocket of hyperspace.

'There's…there's the entrance point,' remarked the daemon as she squinted her eyes, trying to take in the blue glow of the dungeon from elevated altitude. 'And…and from the amount of mana distortion in the area, there's maybe…maybe two layers?'

The daemon further explained. 'Dungeons…dungeons, whether they're bound or unbound, have layers, but unbound ones usually have fewer. I think…I think bound ones had an average of five layers? While it's not uncommon to see unbound ones with just one layer.'

"Layers? Clarify this term," said the Collector.

'Dungeons are…are like their own little realms, kind of. Very tiny realms. And inside them, there are layers, each layer being a kind of, ah, a kind of separate space. All the spaces are completely separate from each other except from transit points that link them together.'

"I see. And presumably, these transit points lead successively down to a central point that determines the greater functioning of this 'dungeon'," said the Collector.

'Yes…yes that's right, I think. Usually, bosses are at the bottom,' said the daemon.

"And any vessel capable of interfacing with warp-travel would also possess a high probability of existing within this central point." The Collector clicked its mandibles.

Two layers. Two gates to travel through.

The danger in this dungeon was largely unknown, but the Collector could sense that the amount of magical energy fluxing from the dungeon itself was not too threatening.

A formidable amount, but none that would indicate a life-threatening presence.

'And…and you're right in sensing the dungeon. The quantity of mana coming from a dungeon entrance probably shows how dangerous it is, though there's always exceptions,' said the daemon. 'But…but I don't know much of what those exceptions are. Haven't read that far.'

The Collector made a mental note that the current flux of magical energy and psionic forces before it corresponded to a dungeon with two layers. Extrapolating further calculations and points of comparison would allow the Collector soon to determine the dimensions of a dungeon accurately soon.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. It could not always plan ahead nor know truly everything that occurred in the future. The dungeon was a source of many unknowns, but within, its mission lay, and time was sensitive.

What separated the Collector from more inefficient organisms was its capacity to adapt and react with unparalleled efficiency. It would rely on this trait now as it snaked its body down to face the dungeon, then flapped its wings to send it hurtling down.

When the Collector neared the layer of fluxing blue mana and psionic energy, it halted its movement, knowing that momentum in movement could be transferred and keeping it was risky when it knew not what kind of environment it would be transported to.

The moment the Collector hit the layer of blue, its surroundings seamlessly shifted into a completely different scene. It felt a momentary sense of warp-travel based nausea wave over its body before it righted its internal bodily processes.

The Collector immediately analyzed its surroundings. This area was subterranean, though presumably not deep enough to prevent oxygen flow from circulating.

Specifically, the area the Collector was in was a massive tunnel stretching far behind and in front of it, presumably linking into a much larger network of tunnels similar to it as well.

The dimensions of the tunnel were quite large, easily capable of housing the Collector, indicating that creatures of similar size could inhabit the area.

The tunnel was not dark. It was lined with lightstones embedded in the tunnel walls that gave off dull, spectral glows of various shades. Aside from that, not notable.

The roofs of the tunnels had tinkering signatures on them. Lightstones that jutted out from them noticeably, and unlike those embedded in the walls, these ones were all of a uniform color of blue.

Likely, a means to demarcate the tunnels for the inhabitants within.

'I…I don't know where to go,' said the daemon as she looked forwards, then backwards where the tunnel stretched out at both ends. 'Hm…'

An ordinary group of humans venturing into this area would have found immediate confusion in determining where to go now, forwards or backwards, but the Collector possessed an extreme degree of psionic sensitivity, and it knew immediately the general direction of the nearest mass of psionic tendrils or, in other words, the next transit point.

The Collector slithered around and went backwards at full speed, wreaths of red mana trailing behind it as its sleek body well suited to roaming the even grounds of these tunnels.

'Oh…I guess you already know,' said the daemon as she looked down.

'Do not waste time and mental resources upon yourself. Focus merely on your surroundings and in assisting my abilities,' projected the Collector.

'You're right,' said the daemon with a decisive nod.

It did not take long before the Collector noticed anomalies. As it rushed through the tunnel, knowing exactly which paths to take when they branched, it could sense that there were traps inlaid throughout this area.

Pressure-sensitive stones to trigger traps, burrowed insects (none worth consuming), and so on, but though the Collector did avoid them in precaution, it noted that they did not seem interested in activating against it.

Likely because the Collector possessed the thrall's core. This isolated shard of hyperspace recognized the Collector as a part of it as a 'warper' and therefore did not act against it.

There were also no inhabitants other than the insects locked in a burrowed stasis, meaning there was no real challenge against the Collector.

This reprieve did not last long, however.

When the Collector after ten minutes sensed it neared the first transit point, the lightstones lighting the tunnels shut down, their light fading away.

The Collector clicked its mandibles but did not stop. Something was manually manipulating the lair's functionings. Likely, the goblin lord.

As if to confirm the Collector's thoughts, it sensed the ground rumbling as it slithered down into a hole leading into another tunnel, this one angling steeply downwards.

The hole above the Collector closed up with a sudden emergence of packed earth.

The Collector's sensitive hair stood on end as it sensed an enormous presence barreling towards it. Judging by the relatively monotonous locomotion, not a living being. A rolling object.

It looked backwards to see a massive boulder almost filling up the whole tunnel nearing it, using the steep angle to gain momentum to try and crush the Collector.

'Should I use Sapia?' said the daemon as her eyes widened at the rapidly approaching stone.

'No. Sapia utilizes mana at a degree several times the expenditure caused from physical augmentation. I will deal with this,' said the Collector.

Red bands of mana coiled around the Collector's arms as it stood upright, digging its tail into the dirt like an anchor. A dozen meters before the boulder even touched the Collector, it began to punch into the air in front of it.

Bone binding drew out or placed power in the bones. In the case of the user itself, bone binding could be used to generate specific magical effects at the cost of straining their bones with excessive usage.

In the thrall's case, this was the mist form ability.

In the Collector's case, this was raw, destructive shockwave force.

As the Collector's fists shot out in front of it like machine gun fire, blasts of condensed, fist-shaped waves of energy surged out, slamming into the boulder.

Fist-shaped indentations cracked into the surface of the boulder, slowing the boulder down and breaking apart its structural integrity at key weak points until finally, when it neared the Collector's striking range, one single direct punch into the center of its mass both stopped and shattered the oversized rock.

The Collector clicked its mandibles as it saw steaming heat rise from its knuckles. "Now there is resistance.

But I welcome it. I can sense that it is possible for you, the specimen known as a 'Goblin Lord', to perceive my location from wherever you hide.

If it is such that you may perceive my words, too, then know that in cowering away, your death will not be painless, nor shall you find honor within the Collective."

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The Collector sped through the winding maze of tunnels, moving so quickly that even when it did trigger burrowed insects to arise to the surface, by the time they had unborrwed, the Collector was too far ahead of them to catch up.

Its movements snaked along the whole breadth of the tunnel, its serpentine body maintaining enough speed to move on the ceilings or sides to avoid traps when needed.

Eventually, the goblin lord adapted, unburrowing huge hordes of insects in advance. Some of these, the smaller and weaker ones, the Collector could completely brute force its way through by putting its armored shoulder forwards like a battering ram and then activating instantaneous high-speed movement with its mana, smashing through entire crowds and leaving a trail of flying legs and innards in its wake.

But as the Collector went deeper, the insects became larger.

Giant insects of various kinds almost on par with the assassin bugbrute, but at the Collector's current metamorphosis level, even those specimen were of little worth.

These, the Collector just evaded, outmaneuvering them by sliding across the ceiling or snaking past them with quick movement. Better not to waste mana at this point for specimen that had no genetic specialties aside from merely being overgrown.

Fifteen minutes of further travel yielded the next notable obstacle. The Collector stopped in front of a massive set of double stone doors fused together at the center with a thin line of glowing blue magic.

Connecting and locking the doors shut was an elaborately shaped keyhole.

The Collector clicked its mandibles.

Sensing the durability of the stone doors indicated it was a mana-infused structure of exceptional durability, easily capable of withstanding several barrages from the Collector without breaking apart.

Highly resistant to magical manipulation as well such as Sapia due to the strong flow of mana shutting out external interference.

Inefficient to waste time brute forcing it.

'This…this, hm,' said the daemon as her tiny form floated in front of it, scrutinizing the keyhole. 'I…I don't sense any mana scanning features. It won't check for a magical signature. We…we just need something shaped like the key.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles, nearing its head to the keyhole. Its six eyes analyzed the shape of the keyhole, then it tapped a finger to the edges of the keyhole, allowing its sensitive hairs to feel the vibrations echoing within.

Analyzing shape. Structure. Patterns.

Analysis concluded.

The Collector pointed both arms to the ground, and they flashed purple. A chunk of rock emerged outlined in the same purple, and the Collector went to work.

The rock broke apart at the edges, forming quickly into a mold that first approximated the shape of the hypothetical key, and then chipped away in fine-tune detail, carving itself into the exact dimensions of the object to pinpoint accuracy.

'Wow…,' said the daemon as she stared at the key. 'It…it looks so nice, too. I…I didn't know you were an artist as well.'

"Evolution is artistry at its highest form, and this mind and body have been shaped by the Collective – herald of the ultimate evolutionary process. All that I do is akin to what you tinkerers perceive as 'art'." The Collector willed the key into the keyhole, and then turned it.

With a heavy, rumbling click, the key slotted in, and the stone doors began to open slowly, the two slabs of rock drawing backwards with the same magical energy that kept them there.

The Collector squeezed itself through when the gap was large enough and found itself inside a much wider space. An entire cavern that must have been approximately one hundred and fifty meters in diameter.

There was plenty of lighting here coming from large lightstone formations on the ceiling, and the lighting here was not turned off. Water gurgled from a sizable basin at the end, a small waterfall from the ceiling gurgling into it and filling it up.

Racks of black and blue weapons, volcanite and everfrost respectively, stood to the side, as did piles of fruits that dropped down from vine growths overhead.

The fruits used to be laid out in large piles, but now they were scattered about, some half-eaten, and the weapons themselves were in disarray, some strewn across the ground as if left in a hurry.

An area for the goblins to rest and arm themselves, it seemed.

Recently vacated, however.

Beside the stream, there stood a swirling mass of glowing blue energy tendrils – the transit point to the next layer.

That there were no goblins remaining here indicated that the entire force had been defeated. Most likely by the group of adventurers the Collector had dealt with beforehand.

Good. The Collector would take some samples of the weapons, assess the fruits for special properties, and then move on.

The Collector slithered forward a few meters, and when it did so, the stone doors behind it closed rapidly with a resounding crash. The lighstone crystals overhead glowed an aggressive red.

The Collector felt tremors under its feet for a split second before its hairs picked up on movement. It stepped to the side, and a brown spike emerged from where the Collector had been.

The spike was nearly as tall as the Collector and composed of carapace and covered in barbs to prevent removal when it pierced flesh.

More movement underneath. The Collector side-stepped another spike, then another, and then it pushed off with its tail and hovered in the air with its wings.

The spikes did not extend out towards it.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. So, there were insectoid specimen under the ground that guarded this area, shooting out powerful spines based on movement it detected on the surface.

Judging from the size of the spines, these insectoids were of the same class as the Assassin Bugbrute.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. As it was in the air now, it was impossible for these creatures to touch it. But they were quick, capable of moving even burrowed – an adaptation that would be useful for the Collector.

The Collector focused its senses, honing them with mana, and then landed upon the earth once more. Not a second later, and a spine emerged.

The Collector side-stepped it and before the spine could withdraw back into the dirt, grabbed it.

With a flap of its wings, the Collector surged upwards, and with a massive heave of strength, pulled the subterannean insect out of the ground. The insect was a fat, oval shaped bug with huge pincer-like jaws and holes in its carapace to project spikes from.

From the movement of the spines, they seemed to be flexible and could be extended to great lengths and broken off.

Notably, the specimen also semed to possess the means to rapidly rotate itself while closing its jaws to mimic a drill, allowing it to easily move through dirt.

The insectoid specimen resisted, ten slots on its back opening up to try and shoot out spines. The Collector flew up and slammed the creature into one of the lightstone crystal formations before it could, skewering it there and killing it.

The Collector ripped off its six legs, consuming them and making sure it devoured enough to gain an accurate genetic sample.

*Biomass gained (10)*

Biomass Level: 260/100

*Root consumption limited reached*

*Genetic material gained*

Stored Genetic Material:

-Black Ant

-Deer

-Black Hobgoblin

-Human

-Lesser Oni

-Frostborn Hobgoblin

-Horse

-Lesser Greatcentipede

-Lesser Greatbeetle

-Spitting Greatbeetle

-Leafblade Insect

-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall

-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]

-Flametongue Salamander

-Windcutter Wildcat

-Shockstripe Eel

-Shaker Fish

-Firefly Shinchu

-Lurker *NEW*

Mana Level: 330%360%

However, the Collector did not consume the rest of the specimen. Instead, it took out its right hand and made a fist, unsheathing the assassin bugbrute proboscis.

There were cracks all across the proboscis from the shockwave-based attack the four-star adventurer had inflicted on the Collector, but it was still usable because it had been sheathed for that battle, escaping the brunt of the attack unlike the monomolecular claws which had all shattered due to their brittle structure.

The Collector stabbed the skewered insect with the bugbrute venom, expending mana to create its magically enhanced toxins. The lurker squirmed and twitched involuntarily as the venom hijacked its nervous system.

Then, the Collector's thel raised in the air, hovering over the bug as it began to program the corpse. The other insect specimen were too slow to keep up with the Collector, nor were they especially useful, and maintaining programming expended mana every second.

But these specimens, these lurkers, were far more useful, able to roughly keep up in speed with the Collector's travel and also form a secondary, hidden means of attack.

'I see…with what you put into it, you can use Sapia to control it, even when our Sapia isn't meant for controlling,' said the daemon. She closed her eyes and raised her thel as well, aiding the Collector.

The Collector clicked its mandibles, finishing the programming in a few seconds. With that complete, the Collector detached the lurker from the ceiling and dropped it back into the hole it had been pulled from.

There were more lurkers in the area. Probably around two more judging from the frequency and angle of spines that emerged to attack the Collector.

Expectedly, the other lurkers did not attack their companion. A fatal error. In the next moment, the other two lurkers emerged up to the surface, their wriggling bodies skewered by spines.

The Collector stabbed their heads with the bugbrute proboscis as well, programming them to follow it and attack any hostile presences moving against it.

The two lurkers fell to the ground as the spines skewering them withdrew, and the burrowed lurker joined its brethren on the surface. The Collector picked up the legless specimen to carry it while the other two skittered behind, following the Collector.

Samples.

The Collector assessed the fruits by the water basin. Mundane fruits that possessed no special qualities. Above, the vines that produced them also seemed mundane, special only because of the magical energy in the dungeon enhancing them.

Consuming them would yield nothing. Instead, it devoured samples of volcanite and everfrost, storing them for later in its Metalloglottic ossifier.

*New metalloglottic ossifier samples obtained*

--Lightstone

--Runewood

--Bone Binding Skull

--Volcanite *NEW*

--Everforst *NEW*

With these samples procured, the Collector moved on, heading to the transit point and the second layer.

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Touching the transit point immediately shifted the Collector to what was presumably the next layer. The psionic signature of the warp gate was much nearer now.

Good.

An indication that the Collector was on the correct path.

It assessed its surroundings.

The sights of tinkering were strong here. The ground on the tunnel paths were carved out to an even surface shingled with layers of smooth stone that reflected the blue light from lightstones above.

Significantly more developed than the prior tunnels.

The tunnels themselves were different, shaped in even circles that indicated that they were artificially carved from the earth. There were no presences of insectoids either, and as the Collector followed the psionic trail again, it noted that there were not even traps lining these paths.

This was a level of development that escaped the grasp of goblin civilization.

Stoneworking and the creation of artificial tunnels indicated as much.

And, when the Collector came upon a small cavern dotted with mattings of cloth that formed beds, it realized this must have been a living quarters for the goblins.

Though, with the culled goblin populace, this layer of the dungeon became nothing more than a deserted labyrinth.

The Collector could smell the scent of goblins, however, and they had been here recently. None of them possessed the scent of more developed and stronger kinds. The scents all belonged to smaller goblin or females.

No challenges. No scents or signs of a specimen from a higher civilization.

The Collector exited the cavern, and in short time unopposed by any traps or insectoids, neared the second transit point.

Slipping down a series of holes through various tunnels led down into a bottom-most cavern far larger than the one housing the first transit point.

This area was not developed at all, the ground a cracked, patchy and uneven surface and the cavern ceiling lined with rough stalactites of lightstone crystals.

Under their ghostly blue light, the Collector first spotted four statues fashioned in the shape of a goblin.

Yet, different. These goblin visages possessed long tusks and four arms. They were also almost as tall as the Collector, though whether this was in artistic exaggeration or accurate representation, the Collector could not ascertain.

The statues stood with swords of stone in their arms, frozen in images of threatening battle stances, and they stood between the Collector and double stone door: the same kind as that which housed the first transit point.

However, no light of magic reinforced the doors, instead, the light flowed through the statues.

The moment the Collector analyzed that the magic in this area flowed in concentrated amounts to the statues, the stone goblins moved with clattering and groaning movements, piles of dust silted in the crevices of their muscles and bodies falling off in small clouds.

'Natural golems,' remarked the daemon, a sense of fear tinging her words. 'Strong ones, too. And because they're natural, they have no cores, they...they have to be completely destroyed.

Can...can you fight them?'

The Collector clicked its mandibles as it took in the daemon's words.

Then it was a waste of time to try and smash and hack these things to pieces.

A brief sensing of the golems showed that magical energy flowed through them, empowering their movements, and this too prevented foreign magical manipulation via Sapia.

Far more efficient to evade them and smash through the stone doors.

The Collector used {Dash}, zipping past the first two golems, but the third one reacted, charging at the Collector at considerable speed and using two of its arms to swipe axes at the Collector.

The Collector swerved back, and the axes crashed into the ground, smashing the stone and lining cracks of impact across them.

Considerable strength. Respectable speed.

In terms of raw physicals, the golems possessed approximately 65% of the Collector's stats while it utilized magic.

The Collector could easily deal with one by itself. Even four at once was an ordeal the Collector calculated a 98% chance of succeeding against.

But it would prove to be a time-consuming process involving dodging and picking apart at the golems one by one, with more rushed combat greatly reducing success rates.

No need to deal with this now, not when the Collector was so close to its mission.

The psionic threads the Collector perceived were strong now, indicating that past the second transit point would lead almost directly on top of the warp gate.

The Collector powered more mana into its tail and further empowered its muscles, engaging its coilboosters. The tail itself curled around in a spring-like shape, all the muscles stretching and swelling before hyper condensing in an instant, packing as much potential energy as possible.

It was then that the lurkers following the Collector acted.

Spines shot from the ground, piercing through the bodies of the four golems and holding them in place.

Very briefly, however, as these stone constructs did not possess vitals, and they would easily be able to snap the spines to set themselves free in but a single moment, likely even killing the lurkers by pulling them from the ground as well.

For the golems were formidable. In scaling comparison, the four-starred adventurer would have faced significant difficulty in dealing with them all at once, and he would have made short work of the lurkers if he could reach them.

But a single moment was all the Collector needed.

Its coiled tail unfurled, and the Collector shot forwards like a red-wreathed bullet, slipping right past the third golem.

The fourth golem could barely react to the Collector and lunged with its swords to try and intercept it.

The Collector swiveled its body and used Sapia on itself to change its trajectory and simply evaded it before placing its shoulder forward and slamming into the double stone doors.

The stone shattered, the doors crumbling apart in an ear-splitting impact as if a demolitions charge had been set off.

Beyond the doors was a narrow tunnel, a corridor almost fifty meters across that led out into the next transit point. The sounds of rock scraping against itself echoed behind as the golems rushed to catch up.

The Collector slithered through the shattered doors and then put power into its fists.

It twisted its body to face to the ceiling and then as it moved, unleashed an unending barrage of rapidfire punches, using bone binding on its knuckles and forearm to generate further shockwaves that split apart the ceiling, causing the corridor to cave in.

The Collector leaped out the last stretch of the corridor, sensing with its sensitive hairs adaptation the rapid movement of countless pieces of rubble and debris falling on the golems as they tried to pursue it, trapping them completely.

Shrieks and screams assaulted the Collector's auditory systems, and it turned to see a horde of goblins before it, all of them packed in front of the portal of the second transit point. Many small goblins and female hobgoblins of red and white shades stood against the Collector, shakily wielding weapons of Everfrost and Volcanite against it.

Hobgoblin infants lay crying at some of the female's arms, while the smaller goblin infant young, smaller and more misshapen, gurgled on the floor.

The Collector briefly analyzed them. Eighteen female hobgoblins.

The rest, the smaller goblins and the infants, did not matter at all.

The goblin lord's voice resounded from the portal, echoing across the walls of the cavern.

"Hold and fight! All of you!"

The words had a power to them, a magical power, and the crowd of goblin kind stood stronger against the Collector, their mouths twisting into snarls where before fear had tainted the majority.

Some of the mothers dropped their infants to engage in the fight, and even the infants tried to craw against the Collector, all senses of self-preservation erased with raw hostility.

'Dominus,' said the daemon. 'Magical control of the mind. Although, from what I can tell by hearing it, sensing the flow of magic in it, it only works on goblins.'

'What…what do we do?' asked the daemon. 'I…I can see it now. The reason why your Sapia and stinger did not work before.

They…they were already under dominus.'

'Then these specimens are useless,' said the Collector. 'I will do what is efficient.'

"If you desire to face me, then you will have to kill all of them. All the women and children," said the goblin lord, its voice growling, and yet, the Collector could sense a strong hint of desperation underneath.

"Kill all of them?" said the Collector. "That is unnecessary."

"What?" came the goblin lord's voice. The goblin lord likely did not believe this would work on the Collector.

The goblin lord had exhausted its options, and when pressured, it would still resort to this method regardless.

Such an act spoke volumes of its cowardice.

It was no true warrior.

Such was the nature of these positions of rulership, these social constructions that created hierarchies among the tinkerers.

Unlike the hierarchies of the Collective where all served the Great Purpose with equal devotion, social hierarchies of the tinkerers often bred weak and self-destructive emotions among those they christened with higher titles.

Hence, the plague of tyranny that often resurfaced among tinkering kinds regardless of their efforts to stem it.

Yet, the Collector had found this dungeon in some way an interesting challenge.

To be certain, this 'dungeon' was quite well-defended.

It would have been even more greatly defended had the more combat-capable hobgoblins not been eliminated beforehand.

A group of humans, 'adventurers', presumably, attempting to reach down into these depths would have found countless struggles against them.

Clusters of insectoids unburrowing to strike them. Countless pressure-triggered traps. The requirement of a key to access the first transit point.

Lurkers guarding the first transit point. Had the hobgoblins been alive, then a veritable army opposing them on the second layer.

Powerful golems at the bottom.

And now, this: one final attempt to appeal to emotions of compassion.

The Collector could sense that two of the lurkers had expired trying to hold back the golems, but one of them made its way towards the Collector.

Soon, it would join the Collector in battle.

Approximate time for it to reach the Collector again: one minute and twenty seconds. The Collector would utilize this delay to its advantage.

The Collector put its shoulder forwards again, the spikes in its carapace sticking out, and charged mana into its body and tail.

It utilized {Dash} again, shoulder bashing in a straight line through the entire crowd of goblins, killing infants, smaller goblins, females, it did not matter.

The force of the charge blew back the goblins that the Collector did not directly touch, sending them tripping to the sides or, if they were infants, crushing their fragile forms outright.

The Collector did not kill all of them. It was inefficient to waste time in eliminating them all when it could simply charge through the ones in its way.

It stopped in front of the next transit point, and as a rain of blood, torn flesh, limbs, and skin fell from above from its charge, reached out a hand to touch the portal.

The environment around the Collector shifted as it entered the third and final layer.

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Zoll sat atop his throne of carved rock, the crest of his lordship – two tusks stacked atop each other – etched into the smooth rock and studded with lightstone crystals to shine upon a symbol that none knew anymore in this age.

The royal robes wrapped around his muscled green skin and mail armor waved as if drawn up by some wind, but here, in the innermost layer of the dungeon, there should not have been any such draft.

Winding tendrils of root-like light trickled up from the base of his throne, running up the length of stone and attaching to his body, letting him connect with the dungeon and see the strange monstrosity wreaking havoc upon his realm.

Realm?

Zoll felt his fingers grip into the armrests of his throne.

This was no true realm. Just a poor shade of what he once had.

Once, a thousand years ago, Thoktal stood in this realm, this realm that the humans desecrated by naming 'Terra' in their own tongue as if they and the races that joined the Common Body owned it.

Thoktal was the kingdom of the goblins, the many skinned people as they were once known.

Its people proudly bore skins that changed shades to suit the diverse weathers of the far flung reaches in their land: A symbol of their ever expanding territory that covered frozen wastes, deserts, and forests.

Yet now, though the many-skinned people were still called goblins, that term had fallen from noble consideration into a word that evoked disgust and weakness among all.

But could Zoll truly blame them?

Once, there were no bloodlines lesser than the hobgoblins.

Now, there were heavily degenerated, dirt-eating, dirt-crawling goblins that were small and insignificant. A degeneration that arose from the extermination of higher goblin bloodlines, forcing them to turn into small creatures that hid in the dark like rats.

All this, because Thoktal would not join the Common Body.

Zoll gnashed his teeth and lost himself in reminiscence, into the past he still lived in.

The goblins had fought with the gods and all other races against the dragons first in the Draconomachy, and then again when the titans arose from the World Dungeons in the titanomachy.

But once the gods had established their supremacy, they rewarded the goblins with but one single ultimatum: join the Common Body or perish.

Thoktal refused. The king and all thirty lords, Zoll included, had been unanimously agreed on maintaining pride in their supremacy.

Thoktal fell.

Zoll still remembered hiding in his keep, in this very same throne room, as his forces outside broke against the might of Hwara, the great earth goddess. He remembered the sensation of falling as his keep fell into a great fissure in the earth, and then, when the earth closed back around him, the sensation of sleep.

A sleep he thought had been the end, but not so.

A long slumber. One where he relived the endless cycle of battle and defeat against the goddess.

And in the end of that dream, a voice.

A gentle, soothing voice. But its message was anything but: kill the humans on Terra. Kill the gods.

Zoll was more than happy to oblige.

Thus, he had awoken.

A center piece to this small realm, this dungeon, the throne room of his keep still somehow preserved against the movement of space and the passage of time.

Thus, he acted on his vengeance. Vengeance that had festered for centuries of nightmares.

But how ridiculous it was, thought Zoll as he saw the monstrosity moving so easily past the first layer.

How ridiculous it was, this whole ordeal.

What could Zoll do against the might of the gods? Against the Common Body kingdoms and empires that had had a millennium to gain strength?

What could he do when he called upon his kin and found only the most degenerate of bloodlines coming to his aid? Once, he commanded ten thousand strong, now, he could barely muster over a hundred goblins to his side for none even knew of his name.

Thoktal was gone, erased from history, and all her children scattered among the realms as glorified pests that had lost their culture and ways.

What could he do with that?

Still, Zoll could never let go of his vengeance. It had been etched into him for so very long, and once, there was a time when he had a more level head, but all he wanted to do now was hurt and kill.

Terrorize the humans. Burn their civilization down. Because that was what the voice had told him, and he knew not why, but he had to, for he knew at some deep level that if he disobeyed that voice, this second chance at life would be ripped from him.

He was a phantom. An ancient relic torn from time by a higher force. At any given moment, that higher force could toss him away and let him rot where he was supposed to.

And now, Zoll had all his forces wiped out by an adventuring party, and his throne room itself would come under attack against this…thing.

He would die here without ever even having stepped a foot in a human settlement.

Without ever even having killed one human life to pay for the endless misery they and the Common Body had inflicted upon his own.

Should he stop here?

Zoll's breathing stilled, some measure of his old calm returning to him. There were still women and children of the hob bloodline still here. They could scatter and renew themselves.

The degenerates, he did not care of.

Kill the humans. Kill the gods.

The voice.

Zoll's eyes opened up, their red pupils straining as blood vessels flowered out into the whites of his eyes.

No, he had to do everything he could to kill them all. And though he did not know if this monstrosity was of the Common Body, he knew that the daemon with it was, and that alone was enough for him to act and use everything he had at his disposal.

The women, the children, he would use them all. No matter what it would take, no matter the desperation or cowardice.

Zoll grabbed his greatsword from the side of his throne, his fingers clasping over two tusk shards jutting out from its pommel. At the touch, the hum and glow of blue magical energy arose around the tusks.

And when the monster and daemon inevitably came here, Zoll would fight them too to the last breath. To death and the beyond.

The Collector found itself warped to a smaller area than before.

A single room, not a mass of tunnels and paths like before. Circular in design and one hundred meters in diameter. Strong stench of tinkering civilization. An even, tiled stone floor.

Walls that rose thirty meters high and carved with visages of crowned goblins. On the ceiling, lightstone crystal formations shaped into a circle with two tusks within emanated light that perfectly emulated the sun.

At the center of this room, precisely fifty meters away, a green skinned, red eyed goblin stood atop a throne. Behind it, on the other end, a sizable pond swirled with rainbow colored waters.

This, the Collector could perceive as the warp gate with every single psionic tether converging their lengths into that single space.

"So, you've arrived, monster," said the goblin.

The Collector briefly analyzed the goblin specimen.

Sensing the specimen with mana infused into the Collector's ocular systems indicated that the flow of mana in this area swirled around the specimen.

This was the singularity point, the 'boss' of this dungeon.

Attempting to gauge the amount of mana the goblin could utilize was difficult for it seemed that so long as it was in this space, by the throne in particular, its magical energy was enhanced and constantly replenished at staggering rates.

But the goblin itself was unremarkable physically.

Roughly of the same size and build as a champion, though less trained as a fighter. There were no signs of physical battle upon its body. No scars. No wearing and tearing. Even the way it breathed and moved was less efficient than the red-skinned goblin champion.

In terms of equipment, the goblin did not seem overwhelmingly armed as the four-star adventurer had been.

Rings of metal linked together to form defensive garments lined its chest and legs, and though they hummed with magical energy, they did not possess nearly the same output as the weapons from the four-star adventurer.

A headpiece, a crown, of gold and jewels sat atop its head, but it did not possess any magical signature.

Red robes wreathed its body, and these seemed woven more for ceremonial display than combat purpose, but a distinctive lack of heat surrounding them indicated heat-resistant properties of some sort, likely magically enhanced.

Would potentially render pyrocatalytic glands less effective.

The weapon at its side, a chunk of sharpened metal, a 'sword' almost as large the goblin itself, possessed a formidable amount of magical energy seething within it comparable to or even exceeding that possessed by the weapons of the four-star adventurer.

"Daemonic monster that dares to trespass upon my throne-," began the goblin.

The Collector wasted no time before engaging its muscles and blasting off with {Dash}, attempting to disable this creature while it wasted time babbling away.

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This would not be so easy, however.

The Collector saw as the last moment, before its fist could smash the goblin lord's head into pieces, its greatsword reacted independently of its owner.

The twin tusks at the pommel disintegrated in a flash of blue light, and a shockwave of magical energy sent the Collector skidding backwards as it used its tail to stop itself from flying back into the wall.

A cloud of blue magical energy arose around the goblin, obscuring visuals, but the Collector sensed movement with its sensitive hairs.

Something much larger than the goblin lord leaped to the Collector, and it could sense its dimensions as being almost exactly equal to the goblin golems from before.

The Collector swerved its body back, dodging a blow from another four-armed goblin.

This time, the Collector could see that this four-armed specimen was not a construct of stone. It was composed of flesh, blood and muscle.

Green skin and red eyes like the lord. Long tusks that jutted out from its mouth. A build almost as large as the Collector with comparable, if only slightly inferior muscle mass.

It was dressed only in a ragged tunic and loincloth inscribed with letters of a language the Collector was unfamiliar with, but none of the fabrics possessed any magical energy signatures.

The goblin specimen thus moved only with its own raw physical stats. It looked up at the Collector and then charged, blue magical energy wreathing its movements.

The Collector put up its carapaced arms and blocked a combo of four punches. Each punch echoed out huge booms of impact, imparting small cracks into the carapace.

The Collector lashed out with its tail, sweeping the goblin off its feet before punching straight down, aiming to splatter the specimen's head into the ground.

The goblin specimen reacted with expert agility, kicking out its leg into the ground to send it flying back to dodge the Collector's punch before flipping in the air to right itself on its feet. The Collector halted its punch before it shattered stone and clicked its mandibles as it saw the four-armed goblin specimen make distance, eyeing the Collector.

Though not with any real intelligence.

Tendrils wriggled from the four-armed specimen's back. This was under the goblin lord's control, and presumably like the modified champions, enhanced so that it regenerated infinitely provided the lord possessed enough mana, and by the throne, the lord had plenty of the resource.

Had the Collector not evolved its shock absorbent longchain chitinous sublayer for its carapace, there was no doubt that the goblin specimen's blows would have significantly compromised the structural integrity of the Collector's carapace.

The sub-adaptation reduced those blows to what were moderate bruises, however. Still damage far more notable than any blunt force blows the Collector had taken previously.

The Collector's durability had always been far ahead of its physical stats, allowing it to take risks when it wished to with minimized danger to itself, but never before had it truly required itself to take strong blows.

Perhaps this would be the first time.

The Collector clicked its mandibles in rising desire for battle but stemmed it as it calculated a means to end this battle quickly. Its goal was right there beyond the throne, right in front of it.

No more room for error.

The goblin lord's raspy laughter echoed through the throne room. "That is not all! Come, my twin goblin elites, you who have given up your bodies and entombed yourselves into my blade as my eternal royal guard."

The Collector watched as the cloud of blue magical energy dispersed as another goblin specimen, an elite as the lord called it, leaped into the air, joining the other one's side in facing the Collector.

'Goblin…goblin elites?' said the daemon in palpable panic. 'These…these are legendary monsters. Last recorded being seen maybe…maybe eight hundred years ago?'

'No matter. Age alone does not indicate any evolutionary specialty. I will neutralize these specimens,' said the Collector.

'How will you do it? They…they seem almost as strong as you,' said the daemon.

'Do not concern yourself for me. Focus your mental resources on aiding my movements and Sapia applications,' said the Collector.

The Collector clicked its mandibles as it slithered in circular movement, sizing up the elites as they too sized the Collector up.

A quick calculation.

The stone golems possessed sixty-five percent of the Collector's combat capability.

These elites were stronger for they could properly channel mana through their forms and moved with an efficiency that indicated martial competency.

Each one reached up to eighty five percent of the Collector's combat capability.

Two together would overwhelm the Collector over time, though with the Collector's efficient processing capacity, they would need to engage the Collector in an extended brawl to wear its defenses down.

Yet, the Collector could not engage in a war of attrition. These elites were likely highly regenerative due to the lord's powers. Attempting hit and run tactics was possible, but risky, for the elites were fast enough to catch up to the Collector's higher end speeds.

The lord did not move from his throne, likely requiring its magical energy to sustain these elites.

Outside of this throne room, the lord likely would never even have been able to unleash these formidable specimens. Perhaps a degenerated version of them. But here, in the heart of his domain, he was strongest.

Knowing this information, the Collector formulated a strategy. It made note of the exact coordinates of where it had warped into this room.

Estimated time of arrival for the one remaining lurker under the Collector's control: one minute and twenty seconds.

"Attack, my elites! Bring me their horned daemon heads!" shouted the lord. "I will have them adorn my throne as the first to fall to my war!

The two elites charged at the Collector with extreme speed, their four arms closed in fists ready to pummel the Collector.

The Collector powered mana into its tail and leaped into the air with it, unfurling its wings.

The twin elites skidded to a stop, driving up piles of rock as they halted their formidable momentum before they stared up at the Collector.

Then they reacted. They leaped a dozen meters onto the wall of the throne room, smashing craters with their feet into it as they readied to use the wall as a surface to leap up to the Collector.

The Collector knew they were more than strong and acrobatic enough to reach it. This flight was merely to gain temporary distance.

'Projectiles,' said the Collector, processing its intent to the daemon.

'Got it!'

The Collector and the daemon flashed purple before shards of lightstone crystal from above broke apart.

Six chunks of crystal rotated around the Collector.

'Spin. Then Force Push. If I do not maintain this, you shall in my stead,' said the Collector.

This would be highly mana intensive, but it would expend everything it had to close out this mission.

The daemon closed her eyes as she powered her own formidable magical energy into the Collector.

The lightstone crystals rotated in rapid, shining orbit around the Collector for a single second.

The moment the twin elites leaped off the wall to reach the Collector, the Collector fired the crystals with Force Push assisted by the deamon to the defenseless goblin lord.

Mana Level: 300%270%

The lord's eyes widened. Both elites flipped in mid-air, ceasing their attack on the Collector and immediately redirecting themselves to the lord to protect him.

A second too late.

The six crystals smashed into the lord's direction, but he had managed in the very last nick of time to hide behind his throne, though not fast enough. One of his arms dangled by his side, shredded apart at the elbow by a high-velocity crystal.

The lord growled in pain as he hunched behind the throne. He pointed at an elite. "You, guard me." Then a finger to the other elite. "You, kill them!"

The Collector clicked its mandibles, seeing the lord act as it predicted.

'Maintain a constant barrage. Expend your mana to the very last drop,' said the Collector.

'I'll…I'll do my best,' came the daemon's response with a quick nod.

Another series of six crystals broke off from the ceiling, rotating once to gain speed around the Collector before shooting out to the goblin lord.

The elite guarding it was fast and dexterous enough with its broad body and many limbs to guard against them all, but as long as the Collector kept up this suppressive fire, one of the elites would permanently be out of commission.

The other elite leaped into the wall, then punted off of it to reach the Collector. The Collector's right arm faced the elite as it soared towards it, and the daemon mirrored the Collector's movements with her own smaller arm.

Mana Level: 270%250%

Both arms flashed in a synchronized Force Push. The goblin elite hammered into the ground with a resonating crash, blasting out a humanoid shaped crater around it.

Without even a half-second worth of delay, the elite leaped out from the crater, flipping in the air to right itself on its feet, then leaped back up at the Collector.

The elite felt no pain. Had no free will. And it regenerated all damage, any scars and cuts from the fall smoothing over in an instant.

Meanwhile, projectiles constantly rained down from above to the goblin lord, and the other elite scrambled to keep defending the lord as he hunkered down underneath the elite's larger body, holding his great sword above his head as an extra shield as piles of shattered rock and crystal fell all around him.

'Maintain suppressive fire,' said the Collector to the daemon as it dealt with the elite. It could feel the daemon's assent through their psionic link.

The Collector used Force Push again, but this time, the elite reacted. It performed a maneuver the Collector had not seen before.

By putting magical energy in a blue sheathe around its feet, it created a temporary platform to jump off of, avoiding the linear pushing energy. It twirled in the air, landing on its feet on the ceiling, and then leaped off of that to reach the Collector.

The Collector could easily out-maneuver the elite in the air, however.

It flapped its wings down, avoiding the elite's aerial charge, and then reached out with its hands to grab the elite's legs as it soared above it.

With a flip of its wings and Sapia boosted movement, the Collector rotated rapidly once in the air to generate momentum before slamming the elite straight into the crystal ceiling.

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Crystals shattered and parted in a rainfall of sunlight-colored shards as the elite crashed into the tusk-shaped crystals.

Meanwhile, the daemon girl continued to fire projectiles down on the lord, preventing the other elite from aiding. Her lips quivered and sweat formed at her forehead. Her skin grew even paler.

She was straining herself, but the Collector calculated she possessed enough mana reserves to hold on.

The Collector pointed its right hand at the elite and used Force Push, driving the elite even further and deeper into the ceiling. With a crushing motion of its fingers, the Collector finally used both push and pull to compact the crystals surrounding the elite into a ball to imprison and crush it.

This would not hold it long, however.

The Collector calculated that this temporary prison would not last even more than a second.

Not enough time for the Collector to deal with the elite guarding the lord below, even when it was distracted against the daemon female's constant barrages of projectiles. Not for a lack of combat capacity on the female specimen's part.

These projectiles might have been less powerful than the Collector's, but they were no less accurate – a testament to the daemon's mastery in perceiving the flow of magic.

The Collector could sense the lurker's psionic profile close to it now and determined that the lurker was two seconds from warping in.

The elite would be delayed enough for the Collector's method of attack to work.

The Collector flew down towards the lord and the elite guarding him, but did not land right on top of them.

Instead, it hovered in the air above them with Sapian force.

At this moment, the crystals above shattered as the imprisoned elite broke free with a burst of strength, ready to leap back down to defend its lord.

The Collector opened its maw and engaged the biotrigger for its pyrocatalytic glands.

The trigger clicked into place at the back of its mouth, and a moment later, the reactive chemicals shot forth, scraping against the trigger into a torrent of blue-white flame that washed over the throne, completely enshrouding the elite and lord in blazing chemical fire.

First, an initial attempt to end this battle now.

'Assist me in utilizing Sapia to encase the targets within the flames,' said the Collector to the daemon.

The daemon nodded weakly but bit her lip and roused strength to herself. Her whole body trembled at this point, nearing the limits of her stamina.

Both their bodies flashed purple, and then the raging swirl of flames surrounding the goblin lord glowed with a purple outline before their chaotic flow came under control, swirling in controlled manner in a spherical formation encased around the lord and his guarding elite in an attempt to maximize heat exposure, chemical damage, oxygen loss, and, if this did not work, remove visibility and overwhelm the senses.

The elite from the ceiling slammed down towards the Collector, but the Collector predicted the movement and flapped its wings once, sending itself backwards and evading the elite's downward punch.

The elite crashed into the ground on a knee, cracking the stone before it aimed itself again at the Collector.

The Sapia sphere containing the flames shattered as the elite guarding the lord broke it apart with a powerful punch, and the flames escaped outwards, revealing the elite with flames wrapped all around it, flesh melting from it and regenerating together in a continual cycle of destruction and growth.

The throne was covered in fire, and though the stone melted, the mana-infused roots in its structure did not decay with the stone. The roots still floated in the air, releasing mana that continued to empower the lord.

As for the lord himself, he was wrapped up in his cloak, his hunched form coughing.

When he exposed his face, it showed severe signs of burning. Blisters, charred flesh, and red eyes blinded from exposure to the flame.

But the robes around it had provided just heat resistant enough to allow it to survive.

The lord staggered to a stand behind his elite, his breathing raspy and rattling due to chemical burns, but he was sturdy enough keep himself alive.

Or, rather, as the Collector observed with mana-infused ocular systems, the lord was essentially on life support granted by the remnants of the throne. The mana in the area flowed into him, granting him a moderate regenerative factor.

And now, as the elite from the ceiling charged the Collector again, there would be no chance to unleash another barrage of flame.

But that did not matter. The lurker had entered this layer and burrowed unnoticed due to the flames cutting off the goblin lord's vision and senses.

This was all the Collector needed, and it had precisely timed its flame attack just so that the lurker could enter at the right time.

All the Collector would have to do now would be to knock down the incoming elite for just 1.55 seconds: the amount of time for the lurker to get into position and finalize the Collector's battle plans.

The elite sprinted towards the Collector, its legs blurring with speed as its four arms cocked back for a series of punches. It would be difficult to quickly disable this elite without also taking a hit, noted the Collector.

A necessary sacrifice and a calculated risk. A single strike should not severely damage the Collector.

But what if the hit it had to take did not have to compromise its functions at all?

The Collector evaded the first three punches but delayed itself to get struck by the fourth blow.

The fourth punch slammed horizontally right into the Collector's face with an initial crack of severe impact. Had the blow been properly applied, the Collector calculated it would have faced a sixty eight percent chance of near death with concussive force applied to its brain.

Yet, the Collector had calculated the trajectory and speed of this blow and thought to utilize it to its advantage.

The elite had used its full body weight to land that blow, falling for the Collector's feint and mistakenly believing the Collector slow enough to fully strike with a lethal head blow.

This in turn left the elite wide open to a counter.

The Collector utilized the technique the four-star adventurer used to disperse shockwaves from his body but modified it with its processing power.

In applying that technique to a smaller and more focused scale, the Collector essentially diverted the impact of the blow to its face.

Approximately 70% of the damage was mitigated, and the punch's formidable force, instead of hammering right into the Collector's face and damaging its brain, flowed freely throughout its entire body without harming it.

Instead, the Collector simply followed the currents of this powerful force traveling across its body, spinning around rapidly in a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and smashing the elite's skull with a powerful backhand that was essentially comprised of the force of the elite's own hit with the Collector's strength added on to it.

A perfect counter, essentially. A counter that started the very moment the hostile party's own strike ended without a single fraction of a second's worth of delay.

The Collector did not know it, but had any trained martial artist witnessed its movements, they would have most certainly marveled at an almost perfect performance of a Heavenly Technique known as the {Returning Wind}, the performance of which would have granted any normal humanoid more than enough recognition to start their own school of martial arts.

The elite's skull caved in with a deep fist imprint as it flew back almost a dozen meters in the air, landing flat on its back as a limp mess while its mangled brain scrambled to regenerate, pieces of skull and pulped pink brain matter growing back.

The regeneration was quick, however, fast enough that the Collector would not have enough time to reach the lord and deal with the elite guarding it.

But the Collector did not need to. All it needed was time for this. It leaped into the air unopposed, pre-emptively getting a head start.

The lord's blinded eyes went wide as it coughed up blood. A lurker spine protruded from its chest, skewering its heart out of its body. That heart, the core, was what interfaced with this dungeon, and it would now be the Collector's.

The spine rapidly extended outwards into the air towards the Collector's general direction. The elite guarding the lord jumped to try and retrieve the heart, but it could not beat the Collector's head start.

The Collector met the extended spine in the air, opened its maw, and gobbled up the lord's heart.

Had either elite not been disabled, one of them would have certainly intercepted it.

But now, the Collector watched as the elites crumbled away into dust in a sudden instant, twin clouds of ash flowing back into the lord's greatsword and building back up into the two tusks decorating its pommel.

The Collector reveled in its victory as it landed beside the burning and melting throne.

The magical energy swirling around the broken symbol of authority flowed into the Collector, restoring its wounds and recognizing it as the new 'boss' of this lair.

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The Collector stepped across the burning throne to the goblin lord's corpse. The once mighty and proud lord was on his knees, his figure hunched over as blood streamed from a hole in his heartless chest.

His crown fell from his head as he slumped over further, clattering onto the stone floor before stopping by the flame-wreathed throne.

The crown flickered and melted, the soft gold bubbling as it slowly oozed into a viscous liquid state. The crown, a symbol of authority vested unto the lord by his fellow tinkerers, and yet, at its base state, was it not no more than a mere decoration?

An accessory fashioned from minerals and alloys that held no inherent worth to it.

Something gaudy that purported hollow strength. Much like the lord himself.

The Collector clicked its mandibles as it began to tear the lord's corpse apart, devouring it.

*Biomass gained (30)*

Biomass Level: 290/100

*Spirit roots consumed. Root consumption limited reached*

*Genetic material gained*

Stored Genetic Material:

-Black Ant

-Deer

-Black Hobgoblin

-Human

-Lesser Oni

-Frostborn Hobgoblin

-Horse

-Lesser Greatcentipede

-Lesser Greatbeetle

-Spitting Greatbeetle

-Leafblade Insect

-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall

-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]

-Flametongue Salamander

-Windcutter Wildcat

-Shockstripe Eel

-Shaker Fish

-Firefly Shinchu

-Lurker

-Goblin Lord [Core] *NEW*

Mana Level: 120%180%

*Metalloglottic ossifier samples obtained [MAX*

--Lightstone

--Runewood

--Bone Binding Skull

--Volcanite

--Everfrost

--Threefold Iron [Scrapped]

--Ermine Robes [Scrapped]

The Collector also consumed with the goblin lord the ores and robes that it wore. The ore was called 'threefold iron', it seemed, and here, the Collector recognized a new functioning of its evolutionary system.

Beforehand, the evolutionary system had classified organic material into categories based on their general bodily structures, and through these, the Collector could sift through and recognize them.

However, it did not truly know what these creatures were called by the native denizens of this world.

After its sudden metamorphosis that developed its magical capabilities, the Collector could begin to understand the information in a context more relevant to this world, allowing it to know the names of whatever it devoured.

Curiously, this seemed to extend even to metal alloys, granting the Collector enough information to hypothesize that the iron ring-weave the lord wore operated on a tier system.

Now that the Collector had consumed the iron, it could initiate a more thorough analysis of the material. Its structure had been folded three times as its name would indicate, and each time, the shattered remnants of a mana crystal had been folded into the ore.

This granted the ore a durability far exceeding that of ordinary iron, though at the same time, simply imbuing the iron with raw mana did not change its inherent properties, it merely enhanced them.

It seemed that attempting to enhance those properties with ordinary living mana would yield not yield similar results.

In conclusion: the iron was largely useless to the Collector. It was significantly less durable than its carapace and far less useful in utility because at its base, it was simply iron.

The robes, too, had been comprised of ordinary fiber weave and red dye, only granted its fireproofing through an imbued magical spell that did not carry over into the properties of the fibers themselves.

In other words, the Collector could not utilize it, nor would it even if it could considering it already possessed the goblin champion's Blessing of Mount Oe. This provided a fireproofing ability far beyond the means of the robes.

Both samples, the Collector therefore purged from its ossifier, for the organ could only hold five samples within it for extended periods of time.

The fibers and metals broke down into base components that flowed into the Collector's bloodstream, dissolving out through its spiracles later.

With additional metamorphosis levels, the ossifier would increase its capacity, but this was the Collector's limit for now. It would have to cycle through the most useful samples to it.

All in all, a disappointing haul from the goblin lord's equipment, though certainly its biological and magical traits such as its core and abilities were of note worth.

The lord possessed an Inhera called Higher Calling that allowed it to control goblin kind with his voice and force their evolutionary growth with his touch, but this power was limited only to goblins.

The Collector did not deem the ability especially useful in a purely combat sense considering that the average power of the goblin species was so low.

Even should the Collector encounter an entire commune of goblins, empower them and bend them to its will, they would all be annihilated by an adventurer of four-stars and above. In extracting information from goblin specimen, however, this was quite useful.

The abilities were also notable in the fact that they were potentially the first set of abilities the Collector could assume that in some measure could mimic the larger scale manipulative adaptations of Infestor and Dominator Collector strains.

And not all the goblins were groveling weaklings.

First, the champion, and now, the elites-

The Collector looked to the side of the throne where the goblin lord's greatsword lay on the floor.

Its eyes analyzed the twin tusks protruding from its pommel.

The elites had been an exceptional challenge. One that the Collector had enjoyed to quite some degree. Theoretically, if there was a champion of enough strength and the Collector both bent it to its will and forced it to undergo evolution, an elite could be produced.

Though the chances of a champion specimen surviving such a process was low.

The Collector picked up the greatsword by the handle, and in its hands, it looked almost like a normal short sword.

The blade was comprised of a black metal that possessed a surface that seemed to constantly ripple like water.

Though the metal itself was not notably durable, the Collector could sense exceptional capacity for the metal to interact with magical energy.

'Wow…,' said the daemon as she floated down to the sword. She stepped to the ground and stopped herself from collapsing due to mounting exhaustion, rubbing her eyes with her hand. 'look at the surface. It looks like murky, black waters. No mistake about it: that's…that's Abyssium.

So called because it's mined from the depths of one of the world dungeons. The Abyss.

They say that in its murkiest depths, sanity grows just as thin as light and breath.

With it…all types of Dominus magic grow much stronger.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles in understanding as it finished analyzing the blade. This metal, this Abyssium, would do well as an ossifier sample. The Collector used its regrown monomolecular claws to scythe off a chunk of the blade and tossed it into its mouth.

*New metalloglottic ossifier sample obtained [MAX*

--Lightstone [Scrapped]

--Runewood

--Bone Binding Skull

--Volcanite

--Everfrost

--Abyssium

It then beheld the tusks again.

This magical energy signature, it was familiar with.

The tusks were bone binding constructs. However, they were of a capacity and quality that drastically exceeded what the hobgoblin thrall's core was capable of.

Even the Collector could never hope to reach the level of bone binding utilized to create these tusks, for the Collector could make the processes it took from consumed species more efficient, more varied, but it could not truly increase their natural limits by significant margins.

Where the thrall's bone binding allowed the storage of one spell into a bone, the bone binding that went into this tusk allowed for an entire living being to be stored within it.

'This sword…it's old. Very old. It would be considered a rare treasure today,' said the daemon with a nod, appraising the blade. 'And…and it's soulbound, probably to that big goblin lord.

I…I am surprised you can even hold the sword without it just...breaking apart.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles. "I have consumed the goblin specimen that declared itself a 'lord'. In doing so, I have assimilated its psionic signature and genetic material.

These alone should be sufficient to bypass most biological encryption factors.'

'Hm…it's…it's very strange,' said the daemon as she cocked her head. 'Almost…almost like you have his soul in you. No…no, that's not possible. No living being can ever have more than one soul in them.'

"The boundaries of limitations that you set upon the backwards organisms of this world do not apply to me," said the Collector as it raised the greatsword to its eyes. It could sense that by flowing in magical energy to the blade, it could activate the tusks.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. Though the Collector possessed a shard of the goblin lord's essence within it, enough to have the dungeon recognize it as a 'boss' to heal its wounds, this connection was incomplete.

The Collector could not interface with the dungeon to see through it or manipulate it. Likely, it would have to slot in the lord's core or perhaps even go further and take its form for that.

This would extend also to the greatsword and the tusks. The elites within the tusks obeyed the lord, but would they obey the Collector?

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'Are…are you sure?' said the daemon, sensing the Collector's intent. She stared nervously at the twin tusks, still remembering how powerful the elites were.

"I have calculated the risk. It is minimal," said the Collector.

Regardless, the Collector desired a sample of one of the elites even now, if only in honor of the formidable showing they had provided against the Collector.

The risk was also indeed minimal. The Collector was nearly fully regenerated due to the effects of the throne, and it could choose to only manifest one elite. Even if one elite went wild against it, the Collector could easily dispatch it in a one-on-one duel.

Thus, the Collector materialized the elite.

A single tusk shattered in a cloud of blue as a shockwave of energy burst forth. The elite materialized from this cloud, and its musclebound body and blank face stared at the Collector with jittery movements, wavering between standing still and immediate hostility.

Not complete control. But enough.

It seemed that without the lord's direct presence, the elite did not possess the mutation that took the form of tendrils upon its back. Likely, this meant it did not possess any regenerative properties anymore.

Any wounds the Collector inflicted upon the elite specimen would remain permanent unless it assumed the lord's form and core.

The Collector desired to preserve the specimen to large degree for the Collector intended to consume the tusks whole, entering them as full samples into its ossifier so that it could regrow them in their whole state on its body.

Later, when the Collector entered its evolutionary cocoon, it would be able to manifest the tusks on its own body, granting it access to two powerful units. Provided, of course, the Collector assumed the lord's core and genes.

The Collector swiped down with its regrown monomolecular claws at one of the elite's hands, severing it.

The elite reacted minimally, though it did inch forwards in a slight sign of heightened aggression.

Nevertheless, it did not fully move in a manner capable of inducing harm to the Collector

The Collector devoured the large hand.

*Biomass gained (10)*

Biomass Level: 300/100

*Genetic material obtained*

Stored Genetic Material:

-Black Ant

-Deer

-Black Hobgoblin

-Human

-Lesser Oni

-Frostborn Hobgoblin

-Horse

-Lesser Greatcentipede

-Lesser Greatbeetle

-Spitting Greatbeetle

-Leafblade Insect

-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall

-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]

-Flametongue Salamander

-Windcutter Wildcat

-Shockstripe Eel

-Shaker Fish

-Firefly Shinchu

-Lurker

-Goblin Lord [Core]

-Goblin Elite

Curious.

The Collector noted that the goblin elite did not show up with a [Core] within its system.

Organisms that utilized cores actively with triggers and emotions showed up with the [Core] category, and these, the Collector had to create entirely new hearts to house.

But in specimen that possessed magical abilities that were simply a natural part of them, they did not appear in the [Core] category despite also technically possessing cores of their own.

This was due to a difference in how the magical powers in the two specimen types worked.

Those under the [Core] category were usually intelligent species and humanoids that actively required the circulation of emotions to channel their cores.

The other specimen, however, known among the humanoids as 'monsters', did not require any trigger to activate their cores to engage their magical powers. Such powers were simply ingrained in them, as part and parcel to them as were their jaws or claws.

This type of naturally inherent magic was classified by both the system and the tinkerers as Primal Magic. Incidentally, specimen that possessed primal magic would also enhance the Collector's Primal Density whereas [Core] specimen provided no growth to the attribute at all.

Thus, attempting to assume the powers of a [Core] was more resource intensive for to fully access the full range of their capabilities, the Collector had to slot in their cores while it could simply naturally access the primal magic of mystical monsters.

This meant that the goblin elite were less tinkerer, less a common humanoid, and far more a monster.

Perhaps a quality that had to do with the fact that the elite specimen were of an age far bygone, indicating that the goblin species as a whole had progressively degenerated from natural creatures to tinkerers, weakening their raw strength greatly.

Even more of a reason to honor the elites into the Collective. The Collector cut off the tusks from the greatsword's pommel and devoured them also.

*Metalloglottic ossifier sample obtained*

--Runewood [Scrapped]

--Bone Binding Skull

--Volcanite

--Everfrost

--Abyssium

--Burial Tusks *NEW*

The Collector discarded the runewood from its ossifier for though it could amplify magical energy, the degree of amplification was not impressive, and the durability of the wood left much to be desired.

The burial tusks would be far more useful. Perhaps worth an entire adaptation on their own.

The Collector clicked its mandibles and stretched its muscles, reveling in its spoils of war.

It had obtained five exceptional genetic templates from the four-starred adventurer and his weapons.

The bone binding skull would allow the Collector a storage space that would only become more and more valuable as time progressed and the Collector obtained finer spoils from its victories.

It now had useful ossifier samples it could incorporate within itself. The Collector, for now, could only manifest small amounts of whatever sample its ossifier stored, making it highly impractical for armoring itself.

But it only needed to tip its thel in abyssium to vastly enhance the dominus-type magical influence the Collector could project.

And then these burial tusks.

Already, the elites within them, should the Collector decide to assume the goblin lord's core to control them, would provide exceptional combat units to assist the Collector. In terms of raw physical stats, it would be like three copies of the Collector bearing down on an enemy.

Regardless of the threats the Collector would face in the future, it possessed now a multitude of capabilities to deal with them.

The daemon female specimen slumped down to the floor, her shaky legs giving out under her. She stared down at her trembling legs with almost wondering eyes.

'I…I'm so sorry I can't keep up,' she said. She blinked, hard.

It was evident that the inefficiencies of her backwards evolutionary form had taken their toll on her, though this also due to the fact her musculature had largely atrophied from extended periods of time under restricted movement and malnourishment.

She had compensated for the deterioration of her physical abilities due to increasing hunger, thirst, and muscular fatigue through Sapia.

But now that she had exhausted through her mana reserves, the full brunt of both mental and physical exhaustion assailed her.

Her mana reserves were formidable ones, certainly, but not easily replenished like the Collector's own, and it would take her much time and rest to build herself back up to relatively efficient operating capacity.

The Collector weighed whether she would prove to be a continued useful asset.

She certainly was a wellspring of knowledge that the Collector could easily tap into, and she now proved that she was more than capable of applying herself in the throes of battle, greatly assisting the Collector's Sapia.

But these benefits would have to weigh against her physical limitations.

The Collector would have to provide sustenance for her.

Warmth and shelter for her in environments she could not handle with the fragility of her form.

Her need to slumber would delay or encumber the Collector even if it carried her.

Yet, thinking of these limitations and the future they would apply to made the Collector realize it had, for but a few seconds, put its prime mission to the back of its head.

The spoils of its victory had distracted its mind, and the prospect of surviving and growing ever stronger had taken hold of its attention away from the purpose it was created for.

Heresy again.

And yet, the Collector could not deny that this feeling…this feeling that the daemon had called 'disappointment' began to formulate in small measures within the Collector.

Disappointment that what it had fought for and earned would all be meaningless.

No, never meaningless.

All of this had been for the Grand Purpose.

The dawning of the Collective.

From the very beginning, from the moment the Collector had entered this atmosphere to fight one of the gods to when it crawled on the dirt as a grub to now, all of it had been for the same purpose.

This, the Collector assured itself of.

The Collector clicked its mandibles and moved past the female daemon, for if the Collector was now successful in contacting the Collective, she would no longer matter.

There would only be complete assimilation.

The daemon female specimen looked at the Collector as it slithered away, trying to will herself to float to it, but she no longer had the mana nor the physical strength. Instead, she floated for just a second before crashing back onto the ground again, gritting her teeth with heavy breaths.

She whimpered as she found herself unable to move and follow the Collector.

The Collector neared the edge of the swirling, rainbow-colored waters.

Yes, this was it. A tremendous amount of psionic power emanated from here.

Not comparable to a true warp gate but possessing of enough power for the Collector to send out a proper signal to the Collective.

The Collector stared at the moving, shimmering water for a split second of hesitation.

A second that mattered.

All of its sensitive hairs stood on end as the Collector felt an intense, almost oppressively heavy presence approaching.

A magical presence. A crackling sound echoed from the other end of the room, indicating another being had warped in, and as it did so, this presence only intensified.

Never before had the Collector ever felt its survival instincts calling to it so strongly.

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An immediate infusion of light radiated throughout the throne room. Brilliant light that shone magnitudes brighter than the artificial sunlight produced from the lightstone crystals above.

All that light, light that was bespeckled with glittering speckles of gold, centralized like a mandorla around a single, humanoid figure.

The Collector did not even have time to turn to this figure's direction, and when it barely began to perceive the humanoid's form, the specimen was already upon the Collector.

In a blinding flash of gold-infused light, the specimen crossed the one hundred meters from one end of the throne room to where the Collector was in the span of a single instant.

The specimen's long, lanky punched forearm deep into the Collector's back, punching straight through the hyperalloy carapace, longchain chitinous sublayer, and ultrafiber muscle all as if there had been no resistance at all.

The Collector registered severe damage. Not damage targeted to its vitals, however as if the humanoid was intentionally keeping the Collector alive.

This close, with the humanoid's arm sunk into the Collector, it could clearly perceive its physical attributes, as well as an intensive aura of heat and the crushing weight of concentrated mana.

The humanoid was almost half the size of the Collector but still managed to raise the Collector up with one arm like it was weightless. One hundred and eighty five centimeters tall. Leanly muscled build wrapped up in a black bodysuit that extended all the way around the specimen's head before it seemingly fused into a golden mask spiked at the ends in the visage of sunlight rays.

The mask completely covered the specimen's face, leaving but the eyes open, and these were not truly human, shining like orbs of sunlight with no visible pupils.

A large, loose white mantle with golden feather trimming covered much of the humanoid's shoulders and chest. A waistcloth made of the same pure white material and feathered trimming covered its lower body, and golden, segmented greaves ran up from its feet to its shins.

The humanoid possessed a naturally exceptional amount of magical energy, but notably intensive magical energy concentrated around its forearms.

Specifically, at the glove-like structure covering them.

Golden segments wrapped around its fingers, their tips ending in sharp points like claws. Running from the five segments capping its fingers were five particularly phosphorescent, thin golden lines that ran up its knuckles through the curve of its black covered arms and ending as they attached to its ivory white shoulder pauldrons.

The humanoid's aura of magical energy emitted slight circulations of wind pressure around it, lifting up its mantle for a second.

On its chest, where its heart was, there was etched the outline of a sun shaped sigil with nine points that shone strongly gold against the black of the bodysuit.

And in the center of that solar outline, there was the numeral IX.

"Why do you run, my lovely creature?" said the humanoid. He cocked his head ever so slightly as his eyes landed on the Collector's horns. "My dear child of night?"

The Collector twisted its body as much as it could with an arm driven into the center of its back. To reach the humanoid, it dislocated its arm, bending it at unnatural backwards angle to swipe at the humanoid with monomolecular claws.

This humanoid was powerful beyond measure.

Several dozens of leagues beyond anything the Collector had encountered, even the four-star adventurer and the elites.

To the Collector's current capacity to sense mana, the humanoid might as well have had immeasurable strength.

But monomolecular claws split matter on the atomic level. No amount of durability would resist it. Not even the god the Collector had faced.

The humanoid swayed his head back, dodging the swipe. The humanoid shook his head once before four feathery wings comprised entirely of golden energy materialized to his sides.

In the next instant, the humanoid flew up to the ceiling at staggering speeds, slamming the Collector into the lightstone crystals above face first with intense impact that generated a shockwave of force.

The Collector utilized {Dispersal}, getting the general timing of this humanoid's exceptional speed to dissolve the shock of the blow.

The Collector felt carapace all around its head and chest shatter deeply even through {Dispersal}, but had it not utilized {Dispersal}, it calculated an eighty eight percent chance of suffering a near fatal wound to its brain.

"Oh, marvelous! Superb!" exclaimed the humanoid as he sensed the Collector still living. He swiveled to the side, tossing the Collector into the ground, far from the pond of hyperspace waters.

The Collector shot downwards like a meteorite, and it braced for impact, using {Dispersal} again as it gouged out an enormous crater into the ground, large chunks of shattered stone flying off from it from the impact.

The Collector felt damage wrack the entirety of its body.

Utilizing {Dispersal} was more difficult against this humanoid for he possessed enormous physical stats that far out stripped the Collector. {Dispersal} required perfect timing, and though the Collector possessed vast processing capabilities, approximating the humanoid's speed and strength was still challenging.

The Collector could still mitigate a vast majority of damage from an impact, but if the timing was even slightly more off and the dispersal incomplete, then transferring shockwaves of strong impact throughout the body imperfectly could cause severe internal damage.

And {Dispersal} was the direct opposite of {Guard} which concentrated defensive mana, meaning the Collector could not utilize both at once.

{Guard} was easier to use, more straightforward as a defense, but had less potential to mitigate as much damage.

And here, if the Collector did not take the risk to use {Dispersal}, it calculated a ninety nine percent chance of having died already. {Guard} would not nearly have been enough to fend against the humanoid's overwhelming raw stats.

"To think there would be another beautiful little night child here! To think I may bring the salvation of the sun to not one, but two shadow crawlers!" The humanoid shouted to the ceiling; his arms raised up as if in praise.

With a jarring switch in gear, the humanoid became calm again, dropping his arms to his side. He floated slowly down, pointing his masked gaze to the female daemon specimen.

"But do not be jealous, my dear, for know that it is you that I have been searching for," said the humanoid as he neared the female daemon.

The Collector stood to a knee, taking in breaths and circulating a {Flow} of mana around its body to compensate for damage accrued to its muscles and bones while the humanoid distracted himself with the daemon.

The daemon specimen tried her best to crawl away from the humanoid with one arm and severe fatigue.

She stared up at the shining humanoid with complete and abject fear, but there was not just fear there, there was recognition.

"You remember me, my lovely child, you do!" The humanoid grew excited with a shiver, and then in a split second almost teleported right atop the daemon, putting a greaved foot down on her stomach and pinning her to the hard floor.

The female daemon squirmed as the foot, almost as large as her entire, small child's waist, pressed down and slowly crushed her.

"All those nights we spend together, oh, I remember them so fondly. You must too, I know. I treated you with so much love, more love than any other wayward night child.

You must remember it, no? How I etched my love deeply into you," said the humanoid as he ran a hand across his chest slowly, as if in ecstatic remembrance.

The female daemon shuddered and squirmed again.

The Collector assessed the situation while the humanoid distracted himself.

The humanoid was not operating to his maximum combat capacity. To what degree the humanoid restrained itself, the Collector could not accurately determine for the humanoid was simply that far above the Collector.

But there was one thing the Collector knew: it had witnessed this type of magical energy before.

From the very beginning. When it had fought the enormous being of light on this world's atmosphere. The magical energy signatures were not exactly the same, but they approximated similar enough frequencies that the correlation was unmistakable.

Of course, compared to that being of light, this humanoid was nothing. Infinitely weaker.

But to the Collector now, he was leagues more powerful. A nigh unbeatable enemy.

Was this the higher end of strength upon this world? The Collector had not banked on encountering such a powerful foe this early on in its conquest.

It had calculated and determined from the amount of resistance it was facing that it was yet to have been discovered on a large scale. Its assessment of the world had determined that this planet's defenses were not yet wary of the Collector.

And, judging from the humanoid's reaction, they still did not truly know of the Collector's presence.

No, the humanoid was only after the female daemon specimen, but what was she that she merited such an extreme and formidable response?

There was no point in conjecture. The Collector geared its mental processes to the fight. To its mission.

The Collector knew it could not win in any engagement against this humanoid aside from infinitesimally improbable outcomes.

It had already suffered enough damage to compromise its combat capability to sixty four percent.

All six of its recently regrown arakka legs were completely shattered. Its wings were severely damaged, making flight untenable.

But all the Collector had to do was reach the hyperspace waters and interface with it to fulfill its mission.

Contact the Collective. Initiate a Dawning.

With the force of a thousand Collectors bearing down on this planet, nothing would survive. This humanoid's incessant rambling would turn to screams in quick order.

And all that required a simple touch, one single moment.

The Collector took one of its monomolecular claws and snapped it from the base.

While the humanoid distracted himself with the daemon, the Collector discreetly used its still barely functional spinneret to attach a thin tether of silk to the claw's shattered base.

The Collector slithered upright, eyeing first the humanoid who stood directly in the way of the Collector and the hyperspace waters, and then to the hyperspace waters, assessing a potential means to escape this predicament.

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The shining humanoid continued to exercise his strength over the female daemon specimen.

"Oh…oh, someone else has shown you their love," said the humanoid as he hunched over, inspecting the daemon specimen's handless arm.

She gasped breathlessly as the humanoid pressed his weight down on her chest, spit starting to drool from her forcibly opened, tongueless mouth.

With a gentle, caring touch completely in contrast with the brutal force he put on her chest, he stroked her clear forehead. "And you have lost your brand.

The mark that was proof of your salvation from the ignoble darkness. You were broken and worthless as all your kind are, but with my love and with that mark, you regained some of your dignity.

Why did you throw it away? Oh, my dear, why?"

The humanoid shook his head several times with deep, exaggerated sways. His masked face settled upon the stump of her handless arm. "I will break you down and make you whole again, I promise you, I promise you with all my heart and love."

He pointed a golden claw-tipped finger at the daemon female's arm, and then with a swift flick of his finger, completely severed the arm at the shoulder with a clean cut.

The Collector's sensitive ocular systems could perceive that a faint thread of gold had unspooled from the humanoid's finger in an instant, and this thread was sharp and quick enough to immediately sever a limb while also being covered in an intensive field of heat that instantly cauterized the daemon's wound.

Flesh sizzled and burned as the daemon could only widen her eyes at the sudden pain while the humanoid's foot was still pressed into her stomach, stopping her tongueless mouth from even gasping.

The humanoid flicked his finger up, and the golden thread tied around the severed arm and brought it to his face. It seemed the thread could move independently from how the humanoid's fingers actually manipulated it.

The humanoid grasped the arm in his hand and then with his other hand, carefully raised only the most lower edge of his mask, baring his mouth.

But from even this small display of facial features, much was notable. His skin was pale and scarred beyond measure to the point where discolored, warped scar tissue was the majority and normal smooth skin a rarity.

His lips were cracked and twisted in odd angles from burns and scars, and his teeth were sharp, far sharper than any ordinary humanoid's, looking much more like those of a canid beast's. He brought the stump of the arm to his mouth and bit down on it, his teeth crunching through flesh and bone with ease.

"Ahh," exclaimed the humanoid in highly audible ecstasy as he chewed and sloshed the flesh and broken down bone between his cheeks before swallowing it with a large, exaggerated gulp.

His tongue, an unnaturally long sliver of deeply red flesh dotted with aberrant, tumorous growths, swept along his lips and chin, lapping up blood. "The taste of a night child. The taste of evil. How I long for it so.

And you, my dear, have the most wondrous taste of them all. Among all your kind that I have split apart and sampled, you, you, oh, none have ever matched your taste."

The humanoid chomped down on the arm, speaking in gurgles between ravenous mouthfuls as saliva and blood drooled down from his chin. "You…you are pathetically worthless, all your kind are, for they were born without light to cause nothing but misery and evil.

But-but among the paladins of Judica, among even the Nine Rays, I alone truly know the taste of evil. No, those fools curse me behind their backs for my ways, I know it, but they are ignorant.

They too believe your kind, my lovely night child, are worthless. And I once was in great agreement until I became Warden, and after all those years branding and tearing apart, I came to know that your kind are not bereft of value.

You are worthless were it not for your taste and how wondrously seductive it is.

Taste that they do not know and would never even begin to think of sampling. All they do is turn their noses up and close their hearts and kill and burn.

But it is not hate that brings forth your taste. Hate drives the simpletons to kill your kind and simply be done with it.

No, it is slow, passionate love that will truly bring worth to you, to your taste."

The humanoid let his foot off the female as he convulsed in shivers of joy.

Before the daemon could draw even a single breath, the humanoid brought his foot down again, this time on the daemon female's one remaining hand.

A grinding crunch resounded through the air as the humanoid ground his foot, crushing the hand into a pulp and squishing it into the stone. "Love like this!"

The daemon girl squirmed and shuddered, convulsing on the ground in futile resistance.

The humanoid crammed the rest of the arm into his mouth and then stomped on the daemon girl's foot now, crushing it into a bloody and bone shard filled pulp. "Or this! Pain is love, and only in pain does your taste truly come through!

The whole lot of you are utterly worthless maggots crawling in the darkness, but in taste, you are exquisite, and it is only this love that brings this taste forth.

Hate brings only quick and painless deaths, but where is the worth in that? Death is so cold and so final, why would anyone desire that? No, it is only in eternal pain that you have taste, and it is only in your taste that you have value."

The daemon girl grew still, her wide eyes starting to flit down as likely shock and blood loss overtook her. Her heavy and erratic breathing grew calmer and quieter.

"No, no, do not leave me, my lovely night child," said the humanoid as he put his mask back on and stared down at the female daemon with gleaming golden eyes.

He stiffened up and grew serious and still with a jarring transition. "Though it does not matter much. My jailers are outside this dungeon. They will restore you yet. Come, let us go home, back to where you belong."

The humanoid dropped down to a knee and slung the bloody body of the female daemon over his shoulder, and in this moment, the Collector initiated its own movements.

The Collector blasted forwards with as much speed as it could muster, engaging its mana into a {Dash} while activating its coilboosters.

But it had sustained too much damage, compromising its movement speed by thirty five percent.

This delay was enough for the Collector to stop three meters away from the water's edge, caught again by the humanoid.

Not by the humanoid's physical form, however.

The Collector saw as five golden threads bound its upper body, entwining around it in burning lines that sank through its carapace, but not so hot that they melted straight through its body. The heat was being regulated.

The five threads extended two dozen meters from the humanoid's hand, unspooling from his fingertips.

"Ah…I almost forgot about you. Another night child. You, too, will come with me. I have never seen a night child like you, but perhaps, with my love, you will taste just as exquisite as my dearest here." The humanoid nodded gently down to the daemon female's figure. "Stay strong, my dear. I will take your friend and soon, we will all be back home."

The Collector's arms were bound to its side, but its hands were not. It curled up the finger with the arakka thread attached to it.

From behind the humanoid, a thread of arakka silk string, grown so thin it was barely visible, pulled taut, reeling back towards the Collector.

At the end of this string was a monomolecular edge claw, and with Sapia, the Collector guided the claw right to the humanoid's head.

The humanoid reacted with superb senses. He had been thoroughly distracted in immersing himself in the female daemon's flesh, missing the thin thread, but now he adjusted, immediately thrusting his other arm out to intercept the claw.

The claw pierced straight through the humanoid's gauntleted and immensely durable hand, slicing out through the other side of his hand and gaining rapid distance to his head.

An aura of gold flashed from the humanoid's head, and as soon as the waves of gold hit the claw, it disintegrated, melting away under heat so intense it turned the brittle material into ash in an instant.

The Collector knew that there was a strong chance that the humanoid would evade this attack.

Thus, while the humanoid distracted himself dealing with the claw, the Collector took that time to act.

Using Sapia, the Collector snapped off another of its brittle claws and levitated it up, slicing off all five threads binding it, for in trying to capture the Collector alive, these threads had regulated their heat down to levels that would not immediately destroy the claws when it came into contact with them.

Now free, the Collector reached into the dimensional waters, its hand slipping in and causing darkness to fill up its vision as it began interfacing with the hyperspace-accessible liquid.

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The Collector entered into a state of consciousness that was simply that: consciousness. Consciousness in its barest, purest form: the psionic profile. In this state, the Collector could perceive in even greater detail the psionic tethers that swirled within the dimensional waters.

If there had to be an equivalent to conventional ocular systems, then the Collector would have described the experience as being in the center of a whirlpool of rippling, shining rainbow currents, and lining those currents were psionic tethers: bright white, root-like protrusions that floated up, breaching the surface of the waters and connecting to the material world.

This space where the Collector's psionic profile inhabited independent of its physical body was called a Simulacra.

A lesser point in hyperspace meant for creating lower range warp gates.

By analyzing a specific psionic tether, the Collector could perceive where it led to, and following that would allow for a warp to that very location.

But the scope and processing power of these waters, this Simulacra, was minute.

A brief analysis of the tethers showed that they reached out only to specific points within this world and its realms, though notably, there were only five independent realms the Collector could sense these tethers linked to.

The Collector did not require this. It needed to establish a link beyond this world, to the far flung reaches of space where the Collective awaited its call.

Like all Collector units, the Collector possessed a Dawning Protocol imbued in its psionic profile specifically for this purpose.

Psionic power was based off the mind's ability to interact with space and time. If a sufficiently intelligent lifeform conceptualized their star, then though their physical forms remained anchored to their terrestrial space, their minds, their psionic profiles, had crossed light years to perceive that solar body.

This conceptualization was not merely an image constructed from neurochemical reactions within a processing organ.

No, there was something inherent within it that was beyond that, beyond even flesh, and this power, psionics as it was labeled, possessed an origin that eluded even the Collective.

Of course, unless in extremely rare cases, biological lifeforms did not possess the processing power to have their minds, their latent psionic energy, manifest any tangible phenomena. Even in the cases they did, it was in minor manipulations of space.

Pushing and pulling. Infiltrating other psionic profiles. Nothing nearing the level of warp travel.

Yet with warp-sensitive points that led into Simulacra, minor 'holes' in space whose ripples reached far around them, it was possible for a sufficiently advanced psionic profile to envision a space, and then connect with the Simulacra to manifest access to that place so long as the Simulacra's ripples encompassed the area.

In this case, this Simulacra reached only to specific points in this world.

But the Collective was perhaps the only lifeform in the universe that understood the Simulacra, hyperspace, and psionic power to such a degree that it could access further into the Simulacra and utilize it as a jumping point to reach deeper into the ultimate hyperspace nexus: the Tesseract.

All Simulacra were simply sub-points of the Tesseract: byproducts of its greater spatial ripples.

Within the hyper-spatial, extradimensional Tesseract whose great ripples encompassed the entire known universe, it was possible in theory to reach any point in conceivable space, potentially even beyond it to a great beyond past the known reaches of the universe.

Thus, the Collective believed psionic power and the Tesseract the greatest means to avoid the inevitable decay of the universe, though as of now, even the Collective's enormous processing power could only grasp the smallest percentage of the Tesseract.

Yet, the Collector, though it was simply a shard of the Collective, had programmed within its psionic profile a specific protocol, the Dawning Protocol, that allowed it to manifest a specific psionic programming from that allowed it to access the Tesseract when it entered any Simulacra such as the one it found itself in now.

The Collector did not have nearly enough processing power on its own to navigate the Tesseract, but the Dawning Protocol imbued within its psionic profile provided first a means to interface with any Simulacra to reach deep hyperspace and then input exact coordinates to the Collective and a means to generate a signal to contact them.

The first part of the Dawning Protocol, the Collector exercised now.

All the white tendrils in the rainbow waters bent and started to latch onto the Collector, and in the next instant, the Collector predicted these psionic tethers would essentially 'catapult' the Collector's psionic profile into the Tesseract.

The rainbow waters faded away in an instant, but what the Collector perceived was no Tesseract.

The Tesseract was an extradimensional space that did not truly have any geometric form completely perceivable to an organic lifeform, but to the Collector's limited psionic profile, it should have manifested in a form of four-dimensional cube.

Countless cubes linked within each other in constantly shifting spatial dimensions filled with white lines that represented points in space.

But this was entirely different.

The Collector's psionic profile found itself within an infinitely expansive mass of overlapping circular planes, the outlines of these shifting and rippling planes shaded in bright iridescent rainbow and curled like roots.

An entirely foreign hyperspace. One that the Collector did not even have the slightest beginning of an understanding in how to navigate.

Would the second part of its Dawning Protocol, the signal to the Collective, even work here?

What was this space in the first place? Did not the Tesseract encompass the entirety of the known universe?

The Collector could not comprehend this, and its perception of this hyperspace was extremely hazy, the seemingly infinite series of constantly overlapping circular planes flickering and blurring, making them even more difficult to analyze.

The dimensional waters of the dungeon, the Simulacra, did not possess adequate processing power to clearly allow the Collector to interact with this hyperspace.

But beyond this issue lay the fact that this hyperspace was beyond the Collector's programming.

It was only through the Dawning Protocol imbued within it that it could navigate the Simulacra and hyperspace, allowing it to make decisions that would have taken absolutely no time at all relative to its physical form.

Yet, here, in this utterly foreign hyperspace?

The Dawning Protocol would have immediately allowed the Collector to pinpoint the Collective's coordinates to send a psionic signal to, but here, the Collector had to manually navigate this infinitely complex hyperspace.

And because the Dawning Protocol could not assist the Collector, it drastically reduced its processing power, which also meant that the Collector could no longer guarantee that it was navigating this space in a timespan equivalent to a single instant to its physical form.

This, during a time where every single second meant the Collector's potential death at the hands of the humanoid.

Already, in simply beginning to conceptualize this hyperspace, several seconds might have passed to the Collector's physical body.

Perhaps even more time. It was impossible to tell.

It was an improbability of high degree that the Collector's physical form remained intact. But it could not continue to push these boundaries of probability much longer.

The Collector had to make a decision now.

"Oh, my dear, my love, what has your new friend done?" exclaimed the warden as he stared down at his hand.

Five golden severed threads spooled back into his gloves, and his flashing gold eyes flickered as he hung his head low.

"My dearest Ambrosian Arms severed like this…why, that is a sin that even I, with my boundless love for your filthy kind, cannot forgive." A pause.

"Krala, my dear," said the warden as he switched his gaze, eyeing the daemon child staring listlessly up to the shining cavern ceiling. "You have a name. So must your friend. Tell me, what is it?"

Krala's tongue-less mouth gaped open like that of a beached fish's as her vision blurred and focused in erratic intervals, focusing only on the lightstone crystals above, at their hazy sunny light.

"You must tell me," said the warden. "I love your kind, I do. That is why when I have finished tasting any one of you, I always remember your names, etch them into my heart with the great flavor they give me. I need to know this one's name before he dies."

Krala could barely hear the warden's words. They drifted into her ears as if in slow motion, garbled like they had traveled through water to reach her.

"Ah, right, I tore out your sinful tongue long ago," said the warden with a nonchalant, remembering shrug. "And I suppose you are too tired of being loved to speak to me in any case."

The warden looked over to the strange new daemon, one unlike he had ever seen before, but in the end, that did not matter. All of them were his to be loved no matter what. No matter how small or big. Old or young. Even infants that could barely crawl possessed quite the exquisite taste.

It was an awful tragedy that he would only be able to taste this night child raw, without love marinating its flesh, but alas, even he in his boundless love could not forgive anyone from harming his Ambrosian Arms.

The daemon's large figure was hunched over the dimensional waters of the dungeon. The warden had feared that perhaps it might have warped out, but it instead strangely remained frozen.

"I will ask him personally," said the warden as he floated over to the new daemon, his four golden wings of energy shining by his sides.

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When the warden flew off, Krala's vision suddenly darkened.

She thought maybe she was slipping into the dark place, the place where people all went when they died, but no, that was not it. She could still see the lightstone crystals and their shine above.

They were just dimmer because the warden's own light had been just that bright.

Krala breathed again. Her body always seized up whenever the warden came near her.

At first, when she first went into the tower with the shiny men and the shining warden, it had not been like that, but after…after the hurt, thousands and thousands of times hurting whenever he came near, whenever he spoke, she, her body just ended up like this when he was here.

Worthless. Useless.

Those two words had been engraved into her body and mind over and over and over again, and even though the pain, she got used to with some time, those words, she never did.

Even now, she was frozen up. She could not move. She could almost feel the blood pooling out from her hand and her foot, and she knew soon, her body would grow cold, and she would go to the dark place, but even then, she could not move.

But…but she had to.

Unlike her, that one was not useless.

Or worthless.

Unlike her, that one was not meant to exist only to bring misery and pain and suffering to everyone else. She called him that one because she knew in spending time with him that he did not like to be called a monster or a beast, but he had never really told her what he was.

That one was going to bring the Collective where there were no more differences and hate and love that did nothing but hurt.

Her vision stopped blurring.

She grit her teeth and tried to roll to her side and stand up, but she only ended up on her stomach, her breathing tightened against the cold stone floor. She had no hands to lift herself up with, nor did she have the physical strength.

All she could do was weakly look up and watch the warden put a hand on that one's back. A gentle touch, but she knew well more than anyone that that gentle touch, that love, would lead to pain and hurt.

She roused herself up, a weak, flickering purple aura covering her body, and her small, bloody, and broken figure started to float upwards, her arms and legs dangling limp and trickling little streams of blood that pattered on the cracked stone.

Almost no more mana. Nausea started to well up in her stomach, her vision shook again, but she kept going, kept floating. She neared the warden, his bright light, and she remembered the pain and hurt and froze, but…but she just closed her eyes and kept going.

Eventuall, she felt the warden's heat, and…and…

And what could she do?

She had no mana for Sapia. Even if she did, she could never have hurt the warden.

Why was she so worthless? So useless?

She hovered behind the warden, uncertain, and she knew for certain the warden knew she was there, he just did not care. He did not believe she would ever be able to raise the will to harm him.

And maybe, maybe just a day ago, that would have been true. But now, now she had to try and fight, because even if she were worthless, that one was not, and at the very least, her worthless self could be part of something better than her.

She shook her head and bit down on the warden's arm. Her teeth chipped as they tried to bite down on impossibly hard and dense flesh.

"Oh, my dear, you…have you lost your fear?" said the warden. He stiffened up, demeanor shifting into blatant hostility as his lean muscles tensed and his masked face swiveled to face Krala.

He took his immediate attention off of that one and slapped Krala away from his arm.

She fell straight down to the ground in a crumpled heap, her cheek burst and blood pouring through her tiny teeth. She did not feel much pain, just a tiny pinprick, and she knew she was getting cold and numb and reaching the dark place.

"You reject my love?" said the warden as he stood over her. "After all these years accepting it? Why?

Why? Tell me, why? Do you not know that my love is the only thing that gives you value? Without my love granting you exquisite taste, you are nothing.

A completely worthless speck of dust that worms around in the dark where no living thing should. You think you have any worth aside from your taste? Do you?

Do you not remember? Why you came to under my embrace? You were abandoned as a child because your kind sinned against the Common Body and waged war.

The reason your old teacher, that heretical sorcerer, was purged was because of you, and he believed in you so very much. Your greed and selfishness killed him.

All you do is cause pain and misery for all around you. You have no right to exist on this world, to breathe the very same air we do.

You are nothing. Do you understand me?" The warden knelt to Krala's limp body and placed his masked face close to her ear, his hand stroking strands of dirty blood-soaked hair away from her forehead.

Suddenly, he shouted in her ear. "NOTHING!"

The sudden powerful shout sent powerful force crashing through her ears, and she felt the warmth of blood trickle out from them as her hearing completely faded.

Her brain rattled and her ears whined and her body got number as she widened her eyes and gaped open her mouth, staring up only at the sunny ceiling again.

In the corner of her vision, the warden shook his head at her and walked away.

All her senses were taken from her. The world was soundless. Her touch was numbing. Her sight was shaking blurring, mixing the colors and shapes in front of her all into one nauseating slurry.

She closed her eyes to blink.

It was hard to open them again.

But that made sense. It made sense she could not even do something as simple as blinking. She was nothing. She was worthless.

She knew the warden was right. He told her again and again she lived only to make others suffer and feel pain and misery, and she knew he was right, because for so long, all she wanted to do was see others hurt like her.

She was not good. She was not nice.

She was not anything.

Mother would have been disappointed in her. She was always nice, even if it was hard to remember her.

Why was it, though? She would have liked to remember mother. Even just her face. But it was so hard. All she could remember was mother leaving her, and that was it.

But she could not blame her mother. After all, she was worthless. Her existence had no meaning but to cause pain and suffering. Mother probably knew that and threw her away.

Even then, she wanted to remember-

Remember…

Remember…

She remembered-

Krala clung tight to her mother's side as her mother flew through the air, purple trails of magical energy moving her this way and that. The air was hot. Almost burning, and Krala went into a coughing fit, burying her face into her mother's chest.

"Just a little more, my dearest moon," said mother, her voice ever so strong and calm at the same time. Her body was warm, comfortably warm unlike the hot air everywhere which cracked Krala's lips and singed the tips of her hair.

The flickering and crackling of fires raged everywhere below. Krala was scared, but even then, she was still curious. She looked up.

The eternal moon shone above, one half of it pale and silver and the other half drenched in angry red.

Then she looked down.

A vast landscape of cracked earth filled with twisting spires of stone, canyons, and rock formations that floated in haphazard patterns everywhere, defying gravity. This was Zerul, the home she had forgotten, the ream of the daemons and vampyrs.

There was fire everywhere.

Krala was high up enough where the fires looked like a red coat of shimmering hairs covering the rocky ground.

Like Kerberus' fiery hair. She wondered why mother did not take Kerberus with them. She missed him and his wagging tail and always happy eyes already.

She had told him to stay in the room and that she would be back soon. She strained her eyes and found far away, almost a black dot now, the big house she lived in.

A castle, people said it was.

There was fire on there too.

Bright lights of many different colors shone everywhere with the fire. Greens and reds and yellows and blues.

Then, all of a sudden, it was like the world had turned white.

Krala saw as a huge burst of light swallowed up her home and everything around it. She closed her eyes from the blinding light.

A gust of strong wind buffeted mother, rocking Krala, and she hunkered down, holding her mother's waist tight.

Force traveled through Krala, rattling her very bones, and she whimpered in fear. The sound of the earth rumbling made her feel uneasy, like the whole world was about collapse.

When Krala opened her eyes again, she saw the black dot of the castle again, but this time, it floated in the air atop an enormous crater larger than some of the canyons below.

"Another zero-bomb," whispered mother under her breath as she righted herself in the air. Krala balled her mother's robes in her fists in worry.

Mother only ever talked to herself when she needed to think hard about something important.

"All seven courts disabled. Six out of seven dukes dead. Castle shielding down now. Only a matter of time before they get to him and the collapse begins," said mother.

Her purple eyes narrowed as her thel, almost as long as her own body, wrapped around Krala, holding her tight before it linked with her own thel. "How much time do I have? Three minutes? No, two. Have to go now, while they're distracted with him.

Have to go faster. Airspace won't be free for much longer."

Mother put a soft hand to Krala's head. "My moon, hold to me tight. You might get dizzy."

"Where are we going, mother? Will…will we come back for Kerberus?" said Krala.

"Hmm." Mother's body tensed up for a second, like she was thinking about something bad, before she relaxed. "Mother is taking you some place safe and far away. Kerberus…he's a good boy.

He will wait for you. We can't take him now, but maybe, when you're big enough, you can come back and take him."

Krala nodded, feeling mother's calm infuse into her through their link.

Mother started to fly downwards, her wings flapping once, launching her through a series of ash clouds as she headed to the ground. Mother was fast. Very fast to the point where Krala could only see dizzying blurs of color and feel the wind scream and whistle around her when mother flew.

But mother stopped abruptly soon.

"Curse the gods above," muttered mother, and Krala looked up to see her face twisted in rage. Krala was not afraid.

Mother got angry at other people a lot, but never, ever at Krala. She followed mother's gaze downwards, and her eyes widened in wonder.

"Wow," said Krala in curiosity.

There were…there were so many things here she had only seen in her picture books.

A huge floating ball of metal and circuits floating on tails of fiery engine exhaust. A dwarven gunship. Krala had read about them just a bit. She was just six, but she knew that the gunships could hold over five hundred people, and that they could beat up strong monsters all by themselves.

Beside it, a tree just as large floated in the air. A dozen rings of varying shining lights surrounded the tree, making it float. Krala also knew this. It was a faerie skytree. But she had not gotten to learn about the faeries much yet: that was for next week's lesson.

But…but what were these things all doing here, in Zerul where nobody usually ever visited?

"All flight-capable sorcerers are to be part of the aerial assault against the daemon king's castle," came a projected male voice from the gunship. Several huge barrels dotting the metal sphere groaned as they pointed to mother and Krala. "Identify yourself."

Krala knew these things, cannons, she remembered they were, were very dangerous and meant to hurt and kill monsters, so why were they aimed at her?

"Mother-," she began in worry.

"Calm, my moon, calm," said mother, and Krala nodded, almost dozing off as calm filled her mind.

Before she could feel sleep fully overtake her, she heard mother whispering to herself.

"One C-class gunship with, hm, let's say two compromised engines, judging by their sputtering. One evergreen skytree with forty, no fifty faeries managing it. All of them weak." Mother nodded to herself and Krala caught a glimpse of her pale face under her hood before she fell asleep.

Mother's mouth was bared open in a half-smile, long fangs protruding in menacing anticipation.

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Krala woke up in her mother's arms, and she could no longer feel the whistle of winds buffeting her.

But everything was so much hotter. She coughed as she took in air that felt like it burned her insides.

"Easy breaths, my moon. Calm. You are unused to the air outside the palace, and all the destruction has driven up ash and mold that has made it even worse. But you are strong, you can handle it. Calm," said mother.

Krala felt calm flow into her again, and she nodded.

She looked down and realized they were on the ground now. She looked up at her mother's smiling, gentle face, and behind her, far in the sky, there were huge chunks of broken metal wreathed with crackling electricity and big shards of wood floating in the air.

And…and Krala thought she could see bodies between the debris, but before she could begin to make them out, mother blocked her view with her face and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

"We are here, my moon," said mother, and when she drew back, there were small tears lining the sides of her amethyst eyes. "Just a little more."

A little more until what? Krala wanted to ask this, but she still felt so tired, and before she could rouse herself, mother moved again.

Mother floated just a little bit above the ground as she passed under an arch of rock. She put her sandaled, clawed feet down on the shadow the arch casted, atop a large growth of glowing black fungal matter, and the matter parted to reveal a deep pit.

They floated down the pit, in complete and utter darkness, until mother's body jolted as she landed on solid ground.

Krala saw in the darkness ahead a seemingly unending tunnel, but that distance shortened quickly as mother flew forwards at high speeds.

Mother stopped a minute later in front a tall human man built wide and sturdy like a boulder.

It was the very first time Krala had ever seen a human, and she widened her eyes in wonder.

He was wrapped up in robes very much like mother's.

While mother's robes were black, the man's was brown like the dirt and speckled with a patch with six stars on it, matching his grizzled, dirt-caked and bearded face.

Despite how scary he looked, Krala could see his eyes were sad. Very sad as they looked down at mother.

"Thorian," said mother with a nod as she brought Krala down to the ground. "Say hello, little moon."

Krala nodded and waddled up to Thorian, not even reaching his knee, and bowed her head politely.

"Hello," she said, feeling shy and nervous. Was this the right thing to say to humans?

"She has not heard of me?" said Thorian to mother. A hint of disappointment leeched into his voice.

"Of course, she has. You think I wouldn't let her know about my boneheaded partner in the Order?" said mother.

"Those were…better times," said Thorian. He knelt down and put a rough, hard hand on Krala's head, and she recoiled backwards because it felt like a brick was scraping her head.

She hid behind mother.

"She's just shy. She loves new people and new things," said mother. "But she hasn't talked to anyone that doesn't look like her. It might take some time for her to adjust and talk to others, but I know you of all people can teach her that. Sometimes, I think you talk too much."

Mother paused. "Though I suppose we have not talked face to face in how many years is it?"

"Ten years. Not since the Red Night," said Thorian. He shook his head and trembled, his cracked lip quivering.

Mother walked forwards and embraced Thorian, patting his broad back once before pulling away. "Don't go crying on me like this. It truly does not suit those muscles and looks of yours. Come now."

"Khalanna, do you…you do not have to do this. You are a decorated sorcerer with eight rings: one of few Zeniths across all the realms. Your knowledge and power could rival the Ascended.

If you explain to them like you explained to me that you were being controlled, no, that all the daemons were being controlled, then would they not grant you lenience?"

Mother pointed to Thorian's head. "Your hair is thinning and graying."

"Khalanna, please, be serious-," began Thorian.

"That means you are old. Both of us are nearing sixty, even though time may show its marks far slower on my kind," said mother. "You and I both know from experience that Common Life does not easily forgive and forget.

The Red Night slaughtered countless millions across all Common Realms. Even Aetheria itself came under attack.

My kind will never be forgiven." Mother sighed, but then nodded down to Krala with a smile. "But she is blameless and miraculously unmarked. And she is mine.

At the very least, I want her to have a happy life resembling something normal."

"You can still come with me," said Thorian. "That mark of yours, I swear I can find a way to erase it."

Mother put a finger to her forehead, where a black crescent moon mark lay etched. The same that was on most of the important people mother talked to back in the castle.

"I am a genius among geniuses, I will not shy away from acknowledging my skills," said mother. "But this, even I cannot find a means to remove. It is divine magic from a Gatekeeper – there is hardly anything that can touch this.

The best even I could do was sever my will partially from it so that I was no longer under the thrall of Kinthas.

But it is already pre-ordained. When Kinthas falls, so do the marked. You know this. You have always known it. I told you from the very beginning, the very first time I reached out to you to plan this a year ago."

"I have some sway with the Sorcerer's Order now, Khalanna, I can make something work with you. With you and me, I know it," said Thorian. "I am privy to the higher plannings among the Order.

This full-scale invasion may seem like vengeful retaliation, and I do acknowledge there is much vengeance among the armies, but we ultimately are not here to destroy Kinthas.

I am sure you have thought about this too. Kinthas is a Gatekeeper. Without him managing one of the Five Origin Gates, the world will fall out of balance. We are here to capture him alive, and then we are to capture at the very least one of you from the origin-touched royal bloodlines."

Thorian pointed a big finger to mother. "Like you. I can have them keep you alive. You daughter, too, and then we can remove the mark."

"Thorian, you know this is idiotic," said mother. Her words were harsh, but her tone was soft. "Kinthas is king of daemons, lord of the seven courts, Gatekeeper of Chaos, and wielder of Duskfall.

And he is completely and utterly insane.

You think he will ever submit willingly? You think the Common Realms can afford to try to keep him alive?

Five realms. Five world's worth of military might. The full might of the Sorcerer's Order with eleven Zeniths among them. The Adventurer's League including the vast majority of their seven to ten star adventurers. The Ascended. And even the aid of the avatars from the twelve gods of the Protectorate.

All of this against Kinthas in his full manifest with the curse of Undeath fueling him." Mother shrugged. "The odds are five to one in favor of Kinthas, I should say."

"Solarion is with us," said Thorian. "And he is also in his full manifest. Wielding also the Dawnrise.

With the shielding around the castle down, Solarion should now be making his move.

We have time, Khalanna, time to decide."

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"Then the odds are simply even," said mother. "Tell me, Thorian, say that Kinthas is captured and restrained. Say that Krala and I do come under the Common Authority.

What happens then? My people have already been excised from the Common Body. We may as well be monsters. We will be slowly exterminated.

They may treat me with dignity, but in the end, I will become nothing more than breeding stock popping out more origin bearers capable of taking Kinthas's place as Gatekeeper.

And you know Aetheria will make sure that any new Gatekeeper of Chaos will now be groomed and controlled such that they will never rebel again. Or ever think for themselves.

And who do you think would be the most suitable Gatekeeper? The most innocent mind to mold?"

Mother looked down to Krala and shook her head. "Krala will have any choice in her life completely stripped from her as the gods force her to be nothing more than a battery for their games.

Is this truly what you desire for us?"

"No, it is not, I-," Thorian grit his teeth and shook his head. He slammed his fist against the tunnel wall in frustration, shattering the rock clean. "I just want you to live, Khalanna. I just want you to live. That is all I have ever wanted.

I should never have let you go back to Zerul.

I-I should have told you how I felt back then, and I should have kept you with me."

"You know that would not have worked between us," said mother. She put a hand to Thorian's roughened cheek, and the large man leaned into the touch with closed eyes.

Krala stood by her mother's legs ever more confused, unable to process what she was hearing.

She had not the slightest clue what they talked about, only that it was very serious, and by the emotions she could feel from mother, she could feel a pit forming in her stomach as she expected something bad to happen.

A sudden crash.

Light filled the tunnel behind them, and Krala leaped behind mother.

Mother turned around, fangs bared and eyes alight with power. Thorian too tensed up and balled his great fists.

Under a pile of falling rubble, a shining man knelt. He had the helmet and legwear of a knight, but the rest of his muscled and scarred body was bare. Six golden wings of energy shone from his sides as he stood up.

Around his heart was a golden nine-pointed sun sigil with the numeral IV imprinted within it.

"Survivors, eh?" said the shining man. He spoke with enthusiasm leeching his every word. "But you will live no more! For it is I, Exousia come to bring the light of justice to you all!"

The shining man struck a pose, flexing his muscles as he stood up ramrod straight and thrust his arms to the sky.

Mother did not waste time. She put one hand forwards, and then the other until both hands touched together. They flashed purple.

"Ultima Force 1: Infinity," she chanted.

Space distorted around the shining man's chest, and in an instant, he was gone, pushed away until he reached the end of the tunnel, and then, he smashed through even further, his brawny figure used as a battering ram to drill through solid rock.

Krala did not even have the time to blink before the man was completely gone. The hole he had drilled drilled through was outlined with shining, heat-wave curled molten orange.

"That should send him out close to the upper atmosphere," said mother with a deep sigh, her hands trembling from slight exertion. "But he is an Upper Ray. That alone will not do him in. He will be back."

"An Upper Ray...," Thorian blinked. "How did he know we were even here?"

"Likely chance," said mother. "You said it yourself.

Solarion is here with his full manifest. A battle between two full manifest Gatekeepers is so far beyond the scope of anything below that all the other forces probably withdrew, the Rays included.

Likely to pick off any survivors or runners. And what better place to target than one with active warp energy readings? I placed several warp crystals as decoys throughout the realm, but the Rays are fast.

And it looks like we got unlucky."

Mother turned to Thorian. "You stand no chance against Ray Four or even any of the Lower Rays.

You cannot be spotted again, either, lest you be executed for consorting with us.

There is no more time now.

The warp crystal I hid is at the end of the tunnel. One time use, so you do not have to worry about anyone following.

Go, Thorian, and take her."

Thorian nodded with urgency and knelt down, reaching his big hand out to Krala.

Krala shrunk away, scared.

Thorian stopped and shook his head as he saw Krala's fear. "I-I don't know if I can do this, Khalanna. I have never raised a child before. Without you, I can't-,"

Mother put a hand on Thorian's shoulder. "Of all the things to worry about now, you choose your potential parenting skills?"

Mother smiled. "You have a good heart, Thorian. That is all you need. And you will not be alone. I will be with you."

Mother knelt to Krala's level and picked her up. "Because some part of me will always be with her."

Krala watched in panic as mother held her out to Thorian, and she clung to her mother's arms, grabbing her robes right.

"Calm, little moon, calm," said mother, and Krala felt calm.

But the moment Thorian took her in his large, rough and uncomfortable arms, she began to panic again.

"I-, where am I going? Mother, I-I don't want to go! Not with him!" Krala squirmed in Thorian's hands, kicking his brick-like chest to no avail.

"Hush, child. Your mother is right. We must go," said Thorian as he started to move away from mother, but Krala kept squirming as she stared at mother's receding back. "Why? Did…did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong with me?

Mother, I promise I'll fix it. I'll be good, I promise!"

Mother turned around again and came to Krala's side, and for a moment Krala was hopeful.

"You are going to use Primordial Magic?" said Thorian as he looked down to mother's arms. Both her arms were covered in shadowy, flickering lines.

"To kill an Upper Ray, I must. And I might as well use Chaos before the gate closes or gets taken over," said mother.

She put a hand to Krala's cheek.

"My little moon, there is nothing wrong with you. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise," said mother. She put her thel to Krala's, and Krala felt calm and sleepiness wash over her. "Mother has to go now, and I wish I could be there for you, I do with all my heart and all my love, but I have to stay.

Thorian will take care of you. Make sure to listen to him. He will be good to you, that, I can promise. And look-," Mother raised her arms up to Krala's dozing eyes. She looked at the pretty pattern of shadowy lines running up and down her pale skin.

"You have these too. We are born with it. This is proof you are special. Born special and destined for greatness. When you get big like me, you will be strong, I know it.

For now, mother will be putting you to sleep and sealing your memories, but that is not because mother hates you.

It is because mother knows you love her very much, and that if you keep remembering her, it will only hurt more. It will also seal your power and keep you hidden from bad people.

When you get older, my little moon, when you are ready, that power will be yours again, and by staying here, I want to give you the opportunity to have a choice in how you use it.

When the time comes you do remember me, I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me."

Krala could barely hear her mother at this point, and before she dozed off into complete sleep, she felt mother's warm lips on her forehead.

"Goodbye."

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Read Alien Evolution System Chapter 81 - The Choice To Fight online for free - AllNovelFull

Krala coughed as her eyes opened again, her squared black pupils widening nearly to circles. She…she remembered.

The strongest thing she felt right now was the memory of her mother's warm hold, and that was enough to push away the numbness and cold that had creeped into her.

She could feel her body again, feel her mind think again and her sight steady, and she held onto that warmth, that embrace, with all her might and love because she knew that if she did not, it would fade away like an ember in a gust, and when that fire died, she would go to do the dark place.

But she could not go to the dark place. Not now, not yet, even if it meant that with the cold and numb gone, she could start feeling the hurt again. Hurt everywhere. On her one remaining arm and its pulped hand, her mangled foot, bruised chest, bruised everything, and broken ears.

She was broken everywhere, even more than before, but she…she was still strong, she knew it now, because mother never lied, and mother had never rejected her.

With a wheezing breath, she willed herself up with Sapia.

A purple aura wreathed her tiny, bleeding body and floated her up, jerking her down every so often as the aura flickered and her mind and mana struggled to keep up. She weakly raised her head up to look back up at that one and the shining warden.

"Oh…you are coming back," said the warden. "All this, for your dear friend? Boring, my dear, quite boring. It would have been far better to your taste for you to have tried running in fear with that broken body of yours.

I would dare to say that perhaps your taste has decayed too much for me to enjoy now, but we shall see soon."

The warden knew that the daemon could no longer hear, so he waved her towards him with eager gestures of his gold-tipped fingers. "For now, come, come! Witness as my love blooms once more!

And know this, my love, if your taste is unworthy of my palate, this too shall be your fate!"

Krala could not hear anything he said, but she knew he was saying something. Telling her she was broken, probably.

Worthless.

As she inched forwards, the shining man's light grew brighter and brighter, and with it, the memories of pain and hurt came, but this time, she did not look away, even when it was hard.

Because…because she knew now that she was not worthless. It did not matter what the shining man said, what anyone said.

All her life, she had doubted whether anyone had wanted her, but that was gone now.

She was strong, mother had said so. She could feel the power starting to swell through her body.

She had the power to change this situation in front of her. All she had to do was take the choice to fight.

But even knowing she had strength, power, she still wavered as she drew nearer and nearer to the shining man's uncaring form. That light, it reminded her of the hurt, how it had taken control from her and her body.

She still made her choice. To fight like she was meant to.

Now more than ever, she felt and valued those words from that one. Those words were enough to let her choose.

She squinted, bit her lip, held her breath because even a breath at this point took up too much energy, and kept moving forwards, always…forwards.

Still, she was so far away.

No, she was not far, she was just a few meters from the shining man, his light almost blinding her, but she was just so slow and so hurt.

She watched as the shining man slammed his hand into that one's back.

The shining man shuddered in joy before retrieving a blood-slicked arm with a large, beating heart resting atop his flat palm, raising the organ up to the sky and staring at it with utterly enthralled, distracted eyes.

Rising panic struck her. Was she…was she too late?

No. Calm. She remembered her mother's calm. She could still sense that one's life through the remnants of their thel tether.

She moved forward to the shining man' turned back as he lifted up his mask to take in blood trickling from the heart down his hands.

Go, she told herself.

Go.

Forwards.

The warden squeezed the enormous heart beating in his hand, letting a small stream of deeply red blood hit his wide open and eager mouth. The blood hit his tongue, and the moment it did so, his triumphant smile faded as he dropped the heart and doubled over.

"Such…such foul taste," cursed the warden as he spat the blood out in a steaming, heated little puddle. "This is not the taste of a night child…what…what is this?"

Until finally, Krala was there, right behind the shining's man's back, but…but she had no more strength. Her single arm dangled to the floor as did her legs. She had no strength to drive them up, not physical strength nor magical power.

She knew…she knew deep down that using this power was dangerous, that it would hurt anywhere she channeled it. But for once in her life, she was free to make her own choice about her body, and she had decided to fight.

She closed her eyes and channeled mother's magic to her head. Black wreaths of magical energy arced and crackled at her forehead, growing her horns out, and then, she struck into the shining man's back, closing her eyes tight so she did not see his burning light but instead felt the comfort of the dark.

The Collector registered severe damage to its physical body. Damage significant enough to hinder its processing capabilities here in this foreign hyperspace nexus.

The already blurry images of iridescent rainbow circular planes grew even fuzzier, wrapped up in visual static, and the Collector knew that it had to leave.

To the Collector's own consciousness, time had passed for but a mere second, but the sheer breadth of information needed to process this enormous density of information across the alien hyperspace nexus must have caused even one second to feel as long as a minute, perhaps longer, to its physical body.

In that single second that the Collector spent in this hyperspace nexus, however, though it had not managed to locate the Collective, it had still sent out a powerful signal.

A signal that would continue to travel across space until it reached the Collective, though in what amount of time this would occur, the Collector could not begin to calculate with the lack of given information.

This was all the Collector could do for now. Already, it had spent too much time initiating the signal.

Now, it was time to escape.

The Collector's psionic profile deactivated the first part of the Dawning Protocol that propelled it into the hyperspace nexus. The many white psionic tethers anchored to the Collector's consciousness pulled back like a spooling thread, drawing it into the Simulacra again.

The hyperspace nexus and its countless converging patterns of circular plans disappeared in warped, light-speckled darkness first.

Then the Simulacra's environment of white, tendril-like psionic roots reaching out to and connecting a simpler series of rainbow roots emerged again.

Closer now in connection to its physical body, the Collector could lay out a visual of its physical body through an out-of-body point of view in front of its consciousness.

Thus, it witnessed that the opposing humanoid had torn out the Collector's heart. The female daemon specimen was behind the humanoid, but the Collector calculated that at the combat capacity it had witnessed her before possessing and her current injuries, she possessed a 0% chance of affecting the humanoid in any way.

The Collector understood that without having made immediate contact with the Collective, its directive to survive and consume was still in place. It yet possessed the opportunity to grow stronger and devour worthy foes.

Thus, it prioritized its survival once more, calculating a means of escape from this predicament.

It possessed two more hearts, but the loss of the main heart, the main core, involved such a massive immediate loss of magical and physical combat capability that it immediately began searching for an exit point.

Psionic tethers wrapped around the Collector's consciousness extended outwards, latching onto various roots, and analyzed. Here in the smaller scale Simulacra, the Collector could analyze and make decisions in the order of a tenth of a second.

Analysis of the possible warp points indicated areas that generally corresponded to points near goblin settlements across four realms.

The Collector fine-tuned the analysis to filter out warp points that were near too many life forms by assessing how many psionic profile signatures clustered around each point.

One of these points was near an enormous point of psionic energy.

Likely a 'Warp Temple' as the female daemon specimen had described prior. The Collector filed the location of this area into its memory banks for it was entirely possible that utilizing the far greater psionic energy of this area would allow for easier analysis of the hyperspace nexus.

But for now, the Collector could not afford to go anywhere near this point, for it was utterly packed with life forms.

The Collector would have to immediately enter into a metamorphosis state to heal its wounds, and it required the least amount of interference possible.

The area it therefore chose to warp to was still within this realm, but a vast distance away towards the northern hemisphere.

Here, the density of life forms was drastically lower than in any of the other warp points.

Taking this into account, the Collector locked in its warp. Glowing white tendrils on one of the rainbow roots rushed forwards and latched onto the Collector, initiating the warp sequence.

As the warp began, the Collector noted something immensely curious: the disappearance of the powerful humanoid's presence.

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Krala felt power rush into her horns and out, into the shining man.

This was not fully her own power, it came from somewhere else, somewhere very, very strong, but it was still her that channeled it, and she output as much as she could without holding back.

When she opened her eyes, she could see the shining man again, except…except he was dimmer.

His light was gone, and his golden wings were turning black.

The man stumbled backwards and fell to the ground as his left leg began to disintegrate into nothingness, a flickering edge of shadow traveling up from his leg and devouring his body as it moved, threatening to erase his body utterly out of existence.

"I…I am fading away? Disappearing?" The warden watched as his leg crumbled away, and then the darkness began to gnaw at this waist. "N-no! No, no, no, no, no! My jailers…my jailers…they will save me, they will heal me!

While the sun is still shining, yes, yes, they will yet save me!"

With that, the warden flapped his darkening wings of energy, sending his crumbling body away into the transit point leading out of the throne room.

This left Krala alone. She did not know what the warden said, but she knew he had felt fear, and that he had run. It made her smile.

For so very long, she had been so very afraid of him and all the hurt, thinking he was something so strong and shining and beyond her, but in the end, he was just as scared as she was of the dark place.

He was not special. He never had been. None of his words meant anything.

She collapsed onto the stone floor.

It was cold even though it should have been hot from the shining man's light.

Maybe…maybe because of the magic. She did not know exactly what it was. Just that it had made her strong for just a second, and that it had given her a choice to fight, and that she had taken it.

Oh…

Now the cold and numbness was coming back. She lay on her back and watched the ceiling of light crystals again. The ceiling was breaking apart, the sunny light of the crystals fading and flickering as darkness began to creep in.

Everything was breaking. Dust and debris and breaking shards of crystals began to fall everywhere as huge cracks started to web around the stone floor, shattering the throne at the center.

She turned her sight away from the decay. Things were getting dark and blurry again.

She felt cold.

Cold and...alone.

She did not want to go to the dark place. Because there, she would be so alone. Always alone.

She wanted warmth. She turned her face to the other side, towards that one, and here, she felt warmth.

That one's heart still beat in front of her on the ground where the shining man had dropped it.

With a last bit of energy, she crawled up to the heart and hugged it, slumping her tired, heavy head on its warm, gentle beating. The heart beat slower, and her breathing grew slow with it, and she smiled.

Mother…was this her? It felt like her warmth.

But now, she was the one holding mother. Because now, she had proven she was strong, strong enough to be the one holding and taking care of others.

"I forgive you," said Krala, her paling lips mouthing the words. Her tongue made no sound, but it would not have made a difference to her deaf ears.

She could feel light and warmth radiate around her, and maybe, she thought this was what happened before she went to the dark place. She did not want to be alone there, so she hugged mother tight.

Then, there was cold. She could feel mother disappearing from her grasp, and the cold filled in the void where warmth once was.

No. She did not want to be alone. Not here. Not in the dark place.

Then a voice that rang in her head, and even though it was murky, she still knew it came from that one.

Had he…had he joined her into the dark place?

Suddenly, she felt warmer again, and she opened her eyes.

The Collector stared down at the female daemon specimen. She lay atop a bed of thick snow. Howling winds packed with clusters of ice raged all around, compromising visuals and dropping the temperatures dangerously below the freezing point of water.

This was where the Collector had warped to.

A harsh environment unsuited for its current form that utilized various insect bases that simply could not survive here.

It had to metamorphose soon and choose a more appropriate form.

Still, this female daemon specimen-

The Collector knelt down by her.

'Return my heart to me,' said the Collector, but the daemon could only listlessly look up to it.

The severity of her injuries was too much.

A lost hand, arm, and foot. Several broken ribs. A lacerated lung. Severe blood loss.

Not to mention the harshness of this environment. The blood that pooled out from the female's wounds froze over in seconds.

She was soon to expire. Already, she had trouble even perceiving the Collector's thoughts.

The Collector knelt down to her side and took its heart from her hands.

This was its main heart.

Without it, the Collector lost access to any of its magic, rendering it drastically weaker than normal, not to mention the severity of the physical wound itself.

It had stemmed life-threatening blood loss by internal manipulation of its muscles and compensation with its two other hearts, but this was not enough.

The Collector calculated it possessed two minutes of activity before it rapidly expired.

Yet, the Collector attempted an operation. It placed the heart in the cavity it had been torn from, and in doing so, it could feel faint hints of magical energy still tethered from the organ to the rest of its body.

Using these small remnants, the Collector circulated using Sapia minor blood flow to the heart, eventually building that minute flow back up to something strong enough to gain minute access to its magical capabilities again.

It rooted the heart in the cavity with makeshift Sapia structures, though it determined that any usage of mana for other procedures was liable to sever this delicate operation.

Still, the Collector put a hand towards the female specimen and attempted a minor circulation of bodily processes through the female daemon's body using its Sapia. A faint aura of purple energy transferred between the Collector and the specimen, their link easing this process.

Blood flow resumed within the specimen.

This would not save her, but it might grant her some minute amount of time to potentially explain the usage of the magic she had utilized to defeat the humanoid.

The Collector had only observed remotely. It had not been consciously there to sense the nature of the power. It only understood that it operated similarly to the aged sorcerer from the tower's magic, his 'Chaos' as it were.

Though far more powerful. The two could not even begin to be compared in terms of the sheer density of magical energy that went into them.

Even now, the Collector could sense tiny remnants of that power from around the daemon specimen's head. Shadowy black circuits lined themselves across her face, running up her pale skin to fully grown, sharp horns.

An oppressively powerful presence emanated from these circuits in an even more overwhelming pressure than what the phosphorescent humanoid could muster. The power had been vastly too much for the daemon's body to handle.

Her head was beginning to disintegrate, the edges of her hair and horns flaking away into ash. Cracks began to line her cheeks, reaching into her eyes and making her blind.

Regardless, the Collector knew that by consuming the daemon specimen, it could gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. Taking in her core directly would allow for a greater analysis of what was within, far greater than what the Collector had been able to glean from by devouring a hand.

The Collector reached a clawed finger down to the female daemon's small heart. It had to tear the organ out soon before the disintegration reached it and potentially spread to the Collector.

The female specimen managed to reach out and hold her remaining hand around the Collector's finger in a spurt of energy that should not have been possible by any calculative standards.

The Collector heard her voice.

'There...there you are.'

The Collector stopped. The female daemon was too deteriorated to control the output of her emotions through their psionic link, and the Collector was too weakened to limit this either.

It felt relief from her.

Happiness.

Then, sadness.

'I'm going to the dark place, aren't I?'

The Collector understood what she meant through the simplified messaging of their psionic link. It did not tear her heart away immediately, even as the disintegration began to spread from her face to her neck. It gave her time.

'Yes,' said the Collector.

'I…I don't want to go there. I don't want to be alone.'

The Collector did not respond.

'I don't want to go to the dark place. I want to go there. The place you told me about.'

'You wish to enter the Collective.'

'Yes. Yes. That's it. You…you told me about it. There is no pain there, right?'

'No.'

'There…there's no hate…'

'No.'

'Lonely. Will…will I...be alone?'

'No. You will be enshrined within a greatness occupied by many that have been worthy.

You will not be alone.

In time, I myself will join the greatness of this unity.'

The specimen smiled, and then grew still. Her hand dropped from the Collector's finger. She had expired, her neural functioning nearly completely deteriorated by the disintegration of her brain. Soon enough, the rest of her body would follow.

The Collector reached into her chest and withdrew her heart. It stood up on its serpentine tail, looking at the tiny little thing slowly stopping its beating in the center of its palm.

Raging, ice-filled winds howled around a vast landscape of snowy, barren ice. In the midst of it, there stood alone the Collector, staring down at the tiny red dot in its hand as crystals of ice began to clump over it.

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Winter of 1561 Post-Convergence

In the Guild of Dwarka, one of the major cities of the Sundan Empire –

A Guild was the haven of any adventurer and a staple in any major city across every single realm.

Among the many often vastly different peoples and cultures of the Common Realms, if there had to be one thing that connected them all, it was the presence of guilds.

Large, domed buildings that functioned as training grounds, living quarters, hospices, and, most importantly, information hubs for picking up contracts and reporting them all at once. Ordained and guarded by Common Law set down by the gods themselves.

For the Adventurer's League and its sister organization the Sorcerer's Order were divinely founded and responsible for fending against the calamitous threats of monsters and undead respectively.

Constant defense against the World Dungeons and their unending spawning of monsters.

Constant surveillance against Null Zones and their tendency to spread the Undead Curse.

Without the League and the Order to face these threats, civilization would have ended long ago. The League and Order therefore transcended the differences between borders.

And in the highest point of a certain guild's dome, there stood a meeting room. Carved from stone of a grey and muted shade lined in a bare, austere circular construction. A round table of equally simple stone build circled this room with seven stone seats surrounding it.

This was the meeting room of the High Council comprised of the greatest authorities within the Adventurer's League.

Upon the head of each seat, there was carved a single large sigil, each different from the other.

On one seat, there was a sigil of a sword to represent the seat of the Leaguemaster of the Adventurer's League.

On the seat opposite to that one, a sigil marked by a staff denoted a spot reserved for a Zenith of the Sorcerer's Order.

The rest of the sigils on the seats followed similar dynamics, though they symbolized seats for the representatives of the Common Realms instead.

A sigil of a simple circle for Terra, realm of the humans and their many tribes.

A sigil of three straight lines for Mercia, realm of the Dwarves.

A sigil of a tree for Foraoise, realm of the Fae and Elves.

A sigil of three triangles connected together for Xin, realm of the feathered Karasi, scaled Yin, and furred Hwaran.

A sigil of a wave crest for Alo, realm of the mysterious Aumakan that are said to swim in a world filled only with water. Once, this sigil would have been marked with a crescent moon for Zerul, realm of the daemons and vampyrs.

And finally, separate from the table and carved into a throne of rock that towered over everything else, was a sigil of seven interlocked rings to represent Aetheria, realm of the gods.

The throne room was dark, illuminated only by the glowing visages of figures that sat around the round table, each filling their respective seat at the table though notably, there was no figure seated upon the throne meant for Aetheria.

At the entrance of this room kneeled a young man. He notably had only but one arm, and that was crossed over his heart in a traditional salute of honor.

"We have heard enough," said Ferdiad. He sat upon the Leaguemaster's seat.

His voice projected outwards in a powerful, stern tone that had the capacity to equally inspire or rouse fear. "Go to the hospice and take some rest. We will discuss this matter among ourselves."

"Understood, Leaguemaster," said the young man as he nodded, stood up, bowed, then left.

A sliding door of stone closed behind him, clicking in shut and sending a crackle of magical energy streaking out throughout the room, preventing any hostile, prying magic from entering.

Feriad put a carapaced hand to his sharp chin, the mandibles at the sides of his gaunt face clicking together. He did this from the comfort of his own underground burrow in Foraoise, but his magical projection in the meeting room mimicked his movements.

"You have all heard his testimony," said Ferdiad. "I apologize for calling for you at this odd hour, but my people are active at night, and thus it is in the dark that I favor my work."

"I do not mind," said Xie Bao, representative of Xin. He was from the kingdom of Yin, and it showed in his appearance.

Tall and lean. Dressed in blue, wave patterned robes that showed he had dressed up for this meeting, even though he was remotely projecting himself just like everyone else. A sheathed blade with a golden tassel lay wrapped to his hip.

His face had sharp, angular features. A few blue scales dotted the curve of his forehead. His long, pointed white ears twitched when he spoke, and as his thin lips parted to speak, his sharp, bestial teeth showed themselves.

"It is only proper that we conduct ourselves to the safety of the Common Body, and the good of the realms is a duty that we must be prepared for at all hours. Though I see that some of us are not of the same opinion, as always."

Xie Bao leered, and the slit pupils of his cyan eyes narrowed first at Leanan, representative of Foraoise, and then at Sieg, representative of Mercia.

He did not even bother to cast a look at the empty seat of Alo.

The Aumakan people throughout history had always lived in their own realm, and theirs alone had not converged with the others with the dawning of the gods.

They did possess their own way to traverse the realms, but none knew the mechanics of it, and they were inherently reclusive people.

Thus, the Aumakan had been thought mere myth until twenty years ago when the daemons and vampyrs invaded the Common Realms.

It was then that the Aumakan had shown themselves to lend their aid, but when the battles were fought and finished, they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

An honorary seat had been provided for a potential representative of theirs to replace the now disgraced realm of Zerul, but Alo had not offered a representative to take up the seat so far.

As for those present -

Leanan, in contrast to Xie Bao, was barely dressed at all with the barest of silken undergarments providing the most basic level of decency possible. She rubbed her twinkling golden eyes and yawned, messy curls of blonde hair framing her face and shoulders.

Sieg was, well, he was not really here at all. His projection crackled and fizzled in and out of existence.

Connection issues, probably.

Xie Bao pointed at Sieg. "The dwarves are masters of mana-tech, and yet, he is always the one with connection issues. I am beginning to think perhaps it is a convenient excuse to slip away from his duties."

Ferdiad raised his hand, beckoning for silence, and Xie Bao nodded. "It is fine.

Truthfully speaking, I do not believe this matter worthy of a High Council meeting, and normally, it would never have ended up at my notice, but with how unstable the world has been, I have told all the guildmasters to inform me of any potential abnormalities, no matter how small they might seem."

"You are way, way too cautious, Ferd," said Leanan. She leaned forwards, resting her chin on both hands.

Her faerie wings sprouted from behind her, fluttering lazily and showing off the floral patterns dotting their orange, butterfly-like lengths. "Sometimes, you should ease up – stress is bad for you. It's no wonder us fae live longer than you elves do."

Feriad ignored Leanan and continued. "Now, do all of you consider the young adventurer's testimony believable? Considering, of course, that you have read the Order's reports on the general situation."

Leanan crossed her arms and made a pouty face. "Ignoring me, huh? Well, I guess I'll contribute. Do I think his story's believable? No way!"

"Duly noted," said Ferdiad. "Now, on to more expert opinions-,"

Leanan raised her hand up and waved it vigorously. "You didn't let me finish! I did read the reports, you know."

Ferdiad nodded to her, and she continued. "I think his whole story is impossible. A random monster that just gets stronger and stronger by eating things?

No limits? Intelligent but no Primal Density? In a place like the Darkwoods where there's just dirty and creepy weak bugs – no offense to you, Ferd – but you see what I mean, right?

Come on, who ever has heard of anything like that? We should all know, right? Considering we're all seven stars at the very least. Right? Right?"

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"I did consider the vast number of inconsistences in the boy's testimony," said Ferdiad. "Yet, there is no disputing the fact that he is a four-star adventurer. Before he has even reached the age of twenty.

As a human, that is exceptional, and his record is clean and impressive.

Fifty-six successful hunts. A few of which were a letter grade above his own ranking. The boy may be young, but he knows what he is doing."

"Then why the holes in his testimony, I must wonder," said Xie Bao.

"Oh, the poor boy has just lost his mind, me thinks," said Leanan. "He lost his love and his sister passed from her injuries.

Who can blame him for breaking down? I know I could never bring myself to." Her words were warm and compassionate, and yet, the tone of voice had a faint hint of coldness to it that made it clear to everyone in that room that Leanan was still an eight-star adventurer who had killed and faced death countless times.

"What I think happened is that he picked up the contract for goblins and retrieval of the one star party's corpses," said Leanan as she put a finger to her full, deeply red lips. "He hit an Unbound dungeon, got cocky because he's young and strong, and maybe it warped in something way too much for him to handle.

That could happen, right?

And to push blame away from himself, he just made up this big and scary monster."

"If he has lied during his testimony to us, members of the High Council, then he must be executed," said Xie Bao flatly.

"Oh, no, not that!" said Leanan. "The poor boy must be dealing with so much already. So cruel, so harsh, no I would vote against that in a heartbeat!"

Xie Bao scoffed. "You let your emotions rule you to this extent? I wonder how you have made it so far in our line of work.

Rules are rules.

There can be no exceptions. If it is proven his testimony has been falsified, he must be executed for breaching trust, and trust is a precious resource among us Adventurers. I will sever his head from his neck myself if I have to."

"You know, I miss your brother when he used to sit there. Zhen always comforted me and laughed with me, oh, he was so charming," said Leanan with a sigh. "How did you turn out so different?"

"My brother is a fool, a drunk, a coward to his duties, and a disgrace to the Xie name," said Xie Bao. "I am far better suited to this seat than he ever was and will be."

Ferdiad raised his hand and beckoned for quiet again. "We still have not proven his testimony is false. And we must entertain the possibility it is yet true.

The boy is not insane. His head is still set square upon his shoulders. In fact, I have not sensed such sharp drive and focused will in a man's eyes in quite some time."

He nodded to the seat opposite to him where the Sorcerer's Order representative sat.

"Mithra," said Ferdiad. "Has the second round of investigations returned any more substantial information?"

Mithra drew in a long puff from an elegantly curved wooden pipe as she looked down to a stack of papers in her hand. She breathed out, forming a neat ring of smoke that faded away when it reached the end of the range for her projection.

She looked every bit the quintessential sorcerer. Traditional robes colored a sandy brown to indicate that she was from Utu and green eyes lined with deep, dark bags that too seemed to be a common accessory for sorcerers and their long hours of research.

"Hmmm...," Mithra trailed off for a second before speaking again after gathering her thoughts. "The second investigatory team of sorcerers has yielded little more," said Mithra with a soft, bored tone. "But that is to be expected.

Judica has blocked the area for their own investigations. With their interference, it is quite impossible to perform the necessary scans, sample analyses, and leyline readings."

Ferdiad clicked his mandibles in irritation.

Judica was likely the most powerful city state in the entirety of Terra, perhaps even the strongest force across all of the Common Realms.

They alone did not have Guilds within their city for each and every one of their citizens were powerful and capable of slaughtering most low-grade monsters with their bare hands. Not to mention the Nine Rays whose combined might could rival even the gods.

Because of this, the Adventurer's League did not hold much leverage over Judica. They would have to ask for permission to investigate the area, and there was no telling what the holy state would allow.

"Judica," said Xie Bao in audible disgust. "Sun-crazed fanatics, all of them, but I cannot deny their efficiency. Considering their presence, is it not prudent to believe that the cause of this incident of daemonic or vampyrean origin?"

"Oh, certainly, it is possible," said Mithra as she took in another draught from her pipe. "But quite unlikely.

There are no more rogue daemonic or vampyrean entities across the realms, or at the very least, none powerful enough to pose any real threat.

With the destruction of Zerul, I should say that those that have not been killed or enslaved hold not even the numbers nor order to form anything resembling an organized state."

Mithra cocked her head, thinking as she exhaled, covering her projection in a hazy sheen of smoke. "Though I suppose the refugees banding together in New Zerul comes close."

"Oh, Mithra, you must stop smoking," said Leanan. "It will wrinkle your pretty face and make your lungs all black and smelly."

Mithra smiled faintly. "I am a woman of habit. There is nothing to be done about that.

But on to New Zerul: though it is located in Terra, I find it improbable they would send any of their kind out.

Already, the existence of their state is in constant uncertainty predicated upon the contingency that they do not harm any Common Life.

They cannot risk the Common Body bearing down on them lest they lose the one final bastion they may call home."

"Better to have them wiped out. Are they not merely monsters now that they are removed from the Common Body?" said Xie Bao. "They killed millions in the Red Night. They have yet to pay for their sins. My brother might not have been able to raise his blade against them, but I will."

"Stay on the topic at hand," said Ferdiad, raising his voice slightly, and silence fell into the room again. He sighed. "We simply lack information, then.

All we have is the adventurer's testimony and reports that detail the traces of an Unbound dungeon, and its collapse has probably masked any potential magical traces we could have found to track any abnormal monsters. Not to mention Judica's interference."

"What are the chances, Ferd? A monster would have to be S-class at the minimum for us to have to step in, and a creature like that in the Darkwoods of all places?" said Leanan. "You must learn to relax.

You know, both of us are in Foraoise, and I know my kind only comes out at day and yours comes out at night, but maybe I can see you and help you relax?

Oh, the queen of the Summer Court and the Erlking spending time together, that would be quite the scandal between our peoples."

"Yes, and precisely why it shall not be done," said Ferdiad. "We will get nowhere like this. I will make a decision now unless the rest of you wishes to put this up to vote."

"I trust in your judgement," said Xie Bao.

"I must say I am of the same opinion," said Mithra.

"Whatever you want," said Leanan.

Ferdiad's inky black eyes blinked, slivers of thin white flesh covering sliding over them as his antennae twitched. Of course they would agree with him. Because he was strong. Because they were strong.

This was the problem with a council filled only by the strong.

The weakest adventurer here was Mithra at seven stars, and even then, that was because she did not prioritize work with the League and more her research.

Everybody else was eight stars and above, and all of them had been invited to join the gods in Aetheria as Ascended but for one reason or another, whether it be a need to manage a people or personal matters, they had refused.

A proper seven star adventurer was the perfect threshold where those born with incredible natural talent could reach with consistent hard work and wits.

Nobody here had truly worked for their power. Every single person here was born with power from the beginning that made them comparable to natural disasters. Because of this, they never learned to work with others. Other people would merely slow them down.

They faced death, but trusted only in their own strength to overcome it, and because they were strong, they always did.

Ferdiad might have been the only one here that was not born with monstrous power, the only one among them that had ever been in a proper party, and even then, he outgrew his party incredibly quickly once he gained the Blessing that made him as strong as he was today.

In any case, he still liked to hear other voices. And, perhaps he thought with some amusement, he too had started to value only the opinions of the strong.

"Then I will take some precautionary measures. An A-rank contract spread across all guilds to find any monster that fits the adventurer's descriptions. Triple coin reward and a potential star-rank promotion if the monster is killed should be alluring enough," said Ferdiad.

"No."

Ferdiad shivered as did the rest of the representatives' projections. They all turned simultaneously to the throne. The sigil of interlocked rings glowed a bright red, and from it, a voice projected.

"Lady Amanirenas," said Ferdiad with bowed head.

It was extremely rare for Amanirenas, goddess of war and the highest authority of the Adventurer's League, to ever make her presence known. Ferdiad in his twenty five years as Leaguemaster had only ever felt her voice once during the Red Night.

"It is…it is an honor to have you with us."

"There will be no contract," said Amanirenas.

Her figure did not project, only her voice did. It was calm while holding a rough edge to it that felt like a prelude to an infinitely more dangerous rage simmering just underneath the calm. "There will be no mention of this matter outside the boundaries of this space."

"What of the young adventurer?" said Ferdiad, his head still bowed.

"He has potential to be a fine warrior yet. I will not dispose of him. And none will believe his words."

"Understood," said Ferdiad.

"You work well, and you work often," said lady Amanirenas to Ferdiad. "Ease yourself of this matter.

It is mine and mine only now"

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Fjall, the land of eternal winter where snow that turned flesh to frost and winds that cut like knives reigned supreme regardless of the season. It is said that aside from the undead wastelands of Undir in the southern edges of Terra, Fjall was the most dangerous land of the entire realm.

Thus, it was no coincidence that the humans of this land grew strong.

Even before the Convergence, the humans of this land were a mighty people, their bodies clad in great cords of muscle and their skin grown pale and resistant to the bitter cold.

Before the gods, the Fjallan tribes were considered monsters themselves. Humans that never settled in one spot for long, always following the Great Storm to find fish and water and monsters to survive upon.

And in times the Great Storm grew too small, its vortex of waters and ice too drained, the Fjallans became raiders that brought untold misery when they sought land and food from the weak and sun-kissed peoples to the south of them.

Even Post-Convergence, the Fjallans stayed true to their nature, taking upon them worship of the war goddess and honing their strengths to even greater heights.

Even now, when the gods granted the Fjallans the city of Middir to settle upon so that they would no longer have to war and raid and follow always the untold dangers of the ever moving, ever cycling Great Storm, Fjall produced the highest number of strong warriors in proportion to their population.

It is said that among adventuring groups that to have a true Fjallan warrior in a party was akin to charging into battle with a ferocious beast, and what better way to best a monster than with an equally fierce and savage monster?

Atop a snowy peak of one of many mountains forming the Rift, where the air and clouds grew thin and few men ever dared to tread, there lay the dying body of one such fierce and mighty Fjallan warrior, fully marked in the ceremonial tattoos of his people to show that he was honored and worthy even among his own.

His muscle-clad barrel chest heaved with croaking breaths on snow-tipped rock as he looked first at the handle of his Everfrost battle axe sticking from his stomach, its spiked tip impaled through his stomach in a fatal wound.

Several of the mountain tops around him were shattered from the impacts of a great battle. A battle he had lost.

His fading eyes looked up at…at a dragon?

Impossible, he thought again. Dragons were extinct, Leif Gunnarson knew this. Everyone knew this.

He knew it just like anybody who knew anything of the old myths knew. He knew it like how even children knew the sky was blue.

It was a fact of life. A simple truth. One that the gods told over a thousand years ago and the elders continued to tell even now, generations upon generations later.

Once, monsters ruled this world, and dragons lorded above even the monsters. Then the gods had emerged, and with the Convergence, united the realms and brought an end to the reign of the dragons through the Draconomachy.

Every child across all Common Realms grew up hearing this tale. How the gods ended the dragons and thus started an age not of monsters, but of men to rule the world.

But here…beyond the mountains of the Rift that divided the territory of Vintr- the northern World Dungeon- from the lands of men, perhaps it was possible for a survivor, for some bit of the ancient dragons to have survived.

Leif had to report this back to the League. It seemed unlikely, but they would believe him. He had six stars to his name. All he had to do was get back and tell them of the danger.

This monster was strong. Strong beyond measure. It was no ordinary beast that fought with its jaws and claws.

It was almost unbelievable, but it knew how to fight. Martial arts. Axe wielding. All of it, it knew. It adapted to Leif's own fighting style mid-fight and grew stronger before his eyes with honed, almost beautiful movements.

It was as if the monster was trained by the mighty war goddess herself.

And it would keep growing and getting stronger if left unchecked. That much, Lief knew as a martial artist himself.

He tried moving, but only blood filled his mouth as his own axe pinned him down. The dragon grasped his axe and drove it further down, ensuring he did not move. He slumped back down to the icy ground and stared up at the dragon.

Though the draconic being did not…did not entirely look like the dragons of old.

Leif looked up at the monster's circular, ghostly white eyes, at the slit black pupils that narrowed at him.

Or at the least, he tried his hardest to stare back into those eyes, even as he died and felt his body grow weak, for a true Fjallan never looked away from the eyes of his enemy.

The monster's face was utterly inhuman with a sharp, elongated snout encased in white scales. It reminded Leif of the sharks he and his father fished up in the Great Storm, back when he was just a boy.

The beast knelt on two powerful, thickly muscled lizard like legs, the feet ending in three toes tipped with icy white claws.

Though, as Leif knew well, the beast could just as easily move around on all fours with a raw speed and agility that he had never encountered before.

Its face loomed over Leif's, and the creature…smiled. Its jaw was proportionally huge on its face and lined with three sets of sharp, hooked teeth protruding from thick, pale pink walls of visible gums.

And from that utterly monstrous mouth came sounds. And as Leif realized-

The monster spoke. It spoke the Common Tongue.

"Name…," said the beast, its voice a deep, raspy echo entirely unsuited to vocalizing the Common Tongue. "Your…name."

"Leif…son of Gunnar." Leif coughed, the effort of speaking driving his axe's handle deeper into him and sinking him further into death. But no Fjallan ever shied away from declaring their name when prompted, not by god nor monster.

"Leif…Leif," said the beast, its pronunciation awkward, as if it was still learning the language. "Good name. Good." The monster nodded at Leif before saying, "You die now."

Leif saw as the monster grasped his axe with a massive, scaled and clawed hand, and then twisted the handle and drove it up, smashing it through his ribcage and into his heart.

That was the end of Leif Gunnarson, six-star adventurer and next in line to be chieftain of the Boar clan.

Valtr gazed down at the human he had slain.

The human's eyes went wide as his life slipped from him.

Valtr took his fingers, retracted the icy claws from their tips, and drew down the human's eyelids to close them. He did not know why the humans did this, but it seemed they liked to do this to their dead.

And Valtr had enjoyed fighting this human. Leif…that was his name.

Valtr stood up, his slightly hunched, thickly muscled and white scale-plated back bearing all the sturdiness and mass of a fortress wall.

"You were strong, but you reached the limit of your potential. It is good that you die now," said Valtr in his own tongue to the corpse. He felt several cracks in his scales and a few shallow cuts into his flesh regenerate.

Two blue draconic wings made of pure energy started to flicker and form to his sides. "I thought maybe below the Rift, everything was strong.

The White Voice always told us never to go below the Rift. I thought it was because of you humans."

He looked at the human's dead face.

"You are fun. Fun, but not strong. Unworthy of my curse."

Valtr looked ahead, down the mountains of the Rift where below, the rest of the world sprawled.

And soon, this world would face the End. It was ordained by the White Voice.

And Valtr would be the End's herald.

But now was not the time to move.

Soon, though, soon.

Valtr smiled, all his fangs rattling in anticipation.

Oh, how wonderful the End would be. He would get to fight and fight and fight and prove his Blessing of Destiny wrong.

No, not a blessing.

Only now that he was strong did the others call it a blessing.

It was a curse. The very curse that had made him once an exile among his own. A curse that he would break soon.

Valtr turned around to go back to his domain, but then stopped.

"Oh, I almost forgot," said Valtr. He turned back to the human's corpse and picked the still body up by the axe handle embedded in it. "You humans like to bury your dead, too. Like the Jotun.

Unfortunately, I do not know your burial customs."

Valtr's eyes did not narrow – they physically could not, open in permanent battle-ready wideness as they were. Cold, almost dead eyes.

He scanned the endless white landscape beneath him, at the constantly raging, ice-veiled winds and clouds forming a thick layer of violently clashing elements under the mountains.

It was impossible to tell where this human came from through all that.

All Valtr knew was that he belonged below the Rift. Somewhere down there, wherever it was, he did not care too much.

Maybe someone of his kin would find him.

Maybe not. At the least, it was good to give the body a chance for the fun it had provided.

Valtr drew back the axe handle like a javelin, the human corpse pinned to it, and then threw it.

A shockwave of force gusted out from his throw, and he saw as the corpse parted a few clouds down below before being swallowed up by the endless winds and snow.

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The Collector trudged through the snow, struggling to keep its limbs from freezing over and seizing by continuously pumping as much blood as it could into them. Even then, blood from the massive wounds exposing its heart and back trickled patters of red with each of its heavy steps.

The drops of blood froze into red crystals even before they touched the snow.

The Collector did not waste energy clicking its mandibles, tough it would have if it could. It maximized its senses, attempting to find any reasonable form of shelter in this environment.

Winds howled in every direction, pattering snow onto the Collector, as if trying to shovel up ice to bury it. Visibility did not extend past five meters through the endless walls of whirling ice and snow. Auditory systems were compromised due to the constant background noise from the wind.

Tactile systems involving the sensitive hairs also did not work, the hairs freezing over in the temperatures while also trying to contend with intense interference from countless particulates of ice in the wind.

What the Collector could rely on was thermal imaging with heat sensors in its ocular system, but this yielded nothing of note worth. It had walked for five minutes now, but the landscape did not change from this endless wasteland of cold.

The Collector yet knew that there were life forms here. At the very least, there was a settlement of goblins opposite the direction it currently traveled.

This, it would tend to later.

Yet the presence of goblins indicated further the presence of wild flora and fauna that could be potentially harmful, though flora seemed far less likely due to the intensively cold temperatures.

Survival. This was all the Collector thought of now.

Whatever emotions it had felt before, with that daemon specimen, whatever foreign and unfathomable things those were, it suppressed because survival trumped all else.

Once its survival was assured, then it could begin to try and understand them, or if they proved troublesome enough, continue to suppress them.

Though, the Collector did note with a side thought, it was becoming more difficult to suppress these foreign emotions.

Disappointment, for example, had inadvertently leeched into the Collector's mind when it thought of calling the Collective.

And with the female specimen's death, it had granted her time to say what she desired. Answered her queries as she faced her mortality. It did not understand why it did so, but it had felt right.

But why had it felt right?

Something akin to a sign of respect for the service she had granted to it. An extension of the respect it felt when it granted worthy warriors apt deaths, perhaps.

Already, stray wasted mental processes on contemplation.

Calibrating back to prioritizing survival.

Five minutes until lack of magical energy would cause loss of control over the Sapia-supported heart, causing immediate death.

The Collector had no more time. It would have to metamorphose here, out in the open, though it seemed that the harshness of the current weather conditions caused a lack of lifeforms in the area.

Regardless, there was no choice, for finding any form of shelter in this homogenous landscape seemed improbable.

The Collector knelt down and dug into the deep snow, using its massive arms to shovel out great chunks.

As it did so, it assessed its current directives.

Contact the Collective.

Survive and adapt.

Those two in that order.

The Collector had failed that first directive.

Encountering an entirely different hyperspace nexus was an unfathomable phenomenon that it could never have predicted. That alone had stymied its calculations and processing enough to suffer grievous injuries as it did now.

The implications were also massive. A hyperspace nexus governed an entire universe's worth of space.

What did it mean to encounter a completely new nexus?

Did it mean that the Collector was in a new universe entirely? If so, then the implications were immense.

Not only was it entirely cut off from the Collective, it meant that it had obtained the Great Purpose the Collective desired to realize from its inception.

For in amassing the biomass of countless organisms, the Collective desired for either a miraculous reversal of entropy itself or a circumvention of inevitable heat death via access to different universes.

If this indeed was the case, then, now more than ever the Collector had to devise a means to return to the Collective for the Great Purpose had been fulfilled.

But the Collector knew also that it was equally likely that the Collective simply had not processed enough of the Tesseract to understand its true nature.

It was possible that the nexus the Collector encountered here was not foreign, but a sub-structure so distant that the Collective had not analyzed it.

Then it might even be possible that the signal the Collector had sent out would still reach the Collective.

There were an immense number of possibilities and explanations, but the Collector knew it could never settle upon any single one, for it simply lacked information.

Thus, the Collector decided to focus itself upon its simpler second directive.

To survive and adapt.

To grow strong.

Stronger than ever before. Stronger than anything upon this world. It felt desire prickling in its heart with warmth that stood against the cold.

Yes, this, the Collector would do.

There were still many more challenges to encounter in this world, this, the Collector knew well from its prior altercation.

Many more battles to face and overcome.

Many more prime specimen to devour.

The Collector by this time had dug up enough of a hole in the snow to somewhat conceal its form if it condensed into a ball. It curled up tight, serpentine tail wrapping around the lengths of its body, and allowed the raging winds above to bury it in layers of snow.

Then, it began its evolution.

There was an immense amount of biomass stored within the Collector, not to mention various new specimen and samples to consider utilizing. This evolution more so than any before would send the Collector to greater heights of power.

Yet, still insufficient to defeat that humanoid. The humanoid with the wings of projected energy.

But no matter.

While that humanoid, if it remained alive, stagnated, the Collector would grow and become ever stronger until this world was its own to consume.

The Collector began its metamorphosis, generating the cocoon's flesh from its carapace pores and encasing itself.

The cocoon would have to expand to a significant degree to provide enough of a buffer to ward against the cold, but the Collector attempted to minimize visibility by spreading the cocoon underneath the deep snow layer in a flatter, almost pool-like structure.

This made the cocoon itself less durable, but also less noticeable.

This way, the Collector could evolve underneath the snow, its form breaking down into primordial ooze spread thin on the frozen dirt. The snow even formed an insulating layer against the cold above.

It did not take long for the winds to fill up the hole the Collector had made, and soon, it was as if the Collector had never stood on the snow at all, completely hidden under a blanket of white.

Now was the time to evolve. To begin a new hunt in a new land with a new form.

It checked its status to assess its resources:

Metamorphosis Level 6

Biomass Level: 330/100

Stored Genetic Material:

-- (Author's Note: I am going to cut down this list now because it takes up too much space, but the full list will be available on the status update page)

-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall

-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]

-Flametongue Salamander

-Windcutter Wildcat

-Shockstripe Eel

-Shaker Fish

-Firefly Shinchu

-Lurker

-Goblin Lord [Core]

-Goblin Elite

Adaptations:

Internal Systems

-Ultrafiber Muscles Rank 6.4

--Coilboosters

-Autonomic Neuro-Bodily Matrix

--Metalloglottic Ossifier [5/5]

--Bone Binding Skull

--Volcanite

--Everfrost

--Abyssium

--Burial Tusks

External Systems

-Sensitive Hairs Rank 5.2

--Quill Spray

-Organic Hyperalloy Carapace Rank 5.4

--Longchain Chitinous Sublayer

Weapons Systems

-Monomolecular Claws Rank 4.4

-Pyrocatalytic Glands Rank 3

Current Form:

Assassin Bugbrute/Daemon/Dullscale Rohu/Jumping Arakka

Magic Status

Mana Level: 100%

Active Cores [3/3:

-Prime Core

--Trigger: Desire

-Daemon Core

--Trigger: Wonder

-Frostborn Thrall Core

--Trigger: Greed

Inhera:

-Sapia [Daemon Core]

Ethera:

-Devourer [Prime Core]

Primal Magic:

-Bone Binding [Frostborn Thrall Core]

Blessings:

-Blessing of Mount Oe

Primal Density: 5%

Root Consumption Limit: 100%

The Collector possessed an abundance of resources to weigh and utilize for its next evolution.

Already, in terms of sheer biomass it had accumulated already from consuming the four-star adventurer's weapons, the Collector would ascend not just one, but two metamorphosis levels.

Prime genetic samples to consider for a new form more suited to this weather. Useful Metalloglottic ossifier samples.

All of these would make the Collector leaps and bounds more powerful than its prior evolution.

Yet, there was another power the Collector was far more interested in.

Before the Collector even began to consider bases for its next evolution, it focused on what it had obtained from consuming the female daemon's core.

Within the matrix of the evolutionary cocoon, a system that had now melded with the properties of magic inherent in this world, the Collector could greater investigate what exactly it was that the female daemon specimen had utilized against the humanoid.

Previously, by devouring but a sample of the daemon, the Collector was able to obtain her genetic material and assume the physical form of her species while growing a corresponding core.

Indeed, this had been useful, for the female daemon specimen did possess prime genetic material, easily reaching the peak of her species to the point where she could have been considered an entirely different and superior subspecies, but that alone did not explain the power she had shown against the humanoid.

That power had no record within her genetic record itself.

No, that power must not have come from her physical properties, especially in considering that the female specimen did not have the magical energy necessary at the time to utilize that power were she fronting its cost entirely.

Likely, the Collector hypothesized, that power had been hidden directly in her core. Something deeply intertwined with her psionic profile, the 'soul' as she would have called it.

In essence, what the new evolutionary system classified as a 'Blessing'.

Like the Blessing of Mount Oe the Collector extracted from the red-skinned goblin champion, the Collector engaged the system's processing power to extract the blessing hidden within the daemon's core.

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The Collector's psionic profile floated within the depths of the greater system hosted within it. The system not only stored biomass without changing the Collector's physical dimensions or adding to its mass, but it also most importantly stored every single psionic profile of the creatures the Collector consumed.

The female daemon specimen had called psionic profiles 'souls', and indeed, the Collector understood from its stored memories of tinkering civilizations that most of them, when they were in more primitive stages of development, correlated psionic profiles with some part of their active will that stayed beyond the deterioration of their physical forms.

Yet, this was incorrect.

Psionic profiles that did not have a tether to a physical, living body were merely records.

Snapshots of the energies that comprised the mental processes that formulated living beings. No more alive than a tinkerer's image caught in a photograph.

No more alive than the genetic memories that they stored within organisms.

Complex, yes, but alive?

Not so.

There was no way to truly frame what the Collector was experiencing in interacting with its stored psionic profiles through the conventional senses, but if it were to be highly simplified down to purely visual representations, then it was as if the Collector was traversing through a great sea, a body of water, and here, there were flickers of light that indicated a unique psionic profile.

The Collector utilized the system's processing power to locate the psionic profile of the female daemon specimen.

The waters shifted, and the appropriate light came before it. Touching it would lead the Collector to an analysis of the specimen's profile.

This, the Collector did.

Yet, results unexpected.

Attempting to extract the 'Blessing' from the profile caused the Collector to abruptly find itself not surrounded by waters, but in the midst of what seemed to be a structure of tinkering architecture.

A circular room not unlike the throne room of the goblin lord in the dungeon.

The Collector remained at the very periphery of this area, blocked off by a wall of flickering darkness that obscured every conceivable sense, including psionic analysis, but even then, the Collector could perceive the vague shape of a sizable throne through the wall.

The Collector analyzed this area, for this phenomenon was a completely new one that had never been recorded when attempting to analyze psionic profiles.

The area was still analogous to a psionic profile, thus, the Collector existed in this space also as a profile, but it was not the profile of the female daemon specimen.

No, cross-referencing this profile with the many that the Collector had consumed determined no match.

A potential psionic infiltration?

No. There was no hostility from this profile, if there was, the system would have automatically registered it and destroyed it.

The profile was not foreign.

Its coordinates originated directly from the female daemon specimen, likely having inhabited her core, not her body, hence, the Collector had not encountered this before.

Initially, the Collector had thought this potentially similar to the gate system incorporated within the cores and roots of sorcerers it had consumed, for the female daemon specimen had showed circuitry that seemed to indicate gate connection.

But gate connections were almost purely a physical phenomenon.

A tinkerer would alter a portion of their spirit roots so that they were wired only to connect to a foreign energy source. In their case, a gate. The gate itself was not a living being, it was merely a well of energy, but the fact that it was regulated by a higher tinkerer known as a 'god' prevented the Collector from utilizing such a power.

Not only would the Collector never bow to a tinkerer, it was possible that said 'god' could damage the Collector from within if it wired any of its roots connected to the gate they managed.

Yet, this was different.

Assessing the potential threat of this new profile yielded a 0% chance of harm.

This psionic space and whatever profile it belonged to was not tethered to any living organism.

Thus, much like the countless other profiles the Collector stored within itself, this foreign psionic space and its corresponding profile did not possess any true will of its own.

It simply existed.

The Collector could sense that beyond this wall of darkness, the potential to retrieve the 'Blessing' lay.

But though this profile was untethered, that did not mean it would not respond to psionic stimuli.

The 0% threat rating attributed to this profile had the potential to shift if the Collector attempted to utilize more processing power to break this wall and interact with whatever was within.

Yet, the power the daemon specimen had shown was extremely tempting.

She wished for the dawning of the Collective and had laid down her life for it. If the Collector could access this power, then it could grant her wish all the quicker.

Some contemplation.

Analysis.

A decision.

The Collector withdrew. No more risks. Not now, when survival was so tenuous.

This psionic space would always exist within the Collector's storage to investigate later, potentially when the Collector possessed more information about it.

And that was one of the primary resources the Collector needed most now.

Information.

With the loss of the daemon female, obtaining a free flowing and easily maintained source of information would be difficult.

Keeping this in mind, the Collector tended now to its physical evolution.

Firstly, consuming the immense amounts of biomass it had stockpiled.

*Biomass Consumed*

Biomass Level: 3307

Metamorphosis Level: 68

With this amount of biomass, the Collector could ascend two metamorphosis levels. Thus, it could restore two of its prior adaptations.

*Neuro-Endocrinal Matrix Rank I Restored *

--Chronostasis: Utilizing psionic energy to boost neural processes, the perception of time may be slowed for short instants. After one second of usage, neural processes must undergo an adjustment period which may cause delayed reactions or warped spatial perception.

*Neuro-Circulatory Reserves Rank I Restored*

--Reserve Heart I: An additional heart. May be utilized to sustain bodily processes in the case that others are destroyed or compromised in function.

Like cornerstones building up a strong foundation, adaptations such as these that enhanced broad bodily and neural functions were prerequisites for developing stronger weapons systems and sub-adaptations.

The Neuro-Endocrinal Matrix granted the Collector greater control of its hormonal system and neural pathways, and with further evolutions, would also allow the Collector to unlock the psionic powers it once possessed.

Its psionics would never be at the level of a Dominator-strain Collector for all of its psionics were geared towards boosting control of its own body to maximize usage of its natural tools. But even so, this was a formidable adaptation.

One sub-adaptation, for example, allowed the Collector to spread its consciousness throughout its entire body, allowing it to maintain some level of mental processing unless its entire body was destroyed.

Coincidentally, this was the crucial ability it had utilized to survive as a grub against the so called 'high king of the gods'.

The Neuro-Circulatory Reserves adaptation would allow the Collector to manifest additional crucial organs such as hearts or brains.

Though, in the Collector's case, culturing additional hearts was far more useful in allowing it to store cores it consumed into the extra organs.

Now, to determine what forms it would take.

The Collector would have to discard every insect base it currently utilized. These specimens, though they could handle the lightless cold of the Darkwoods, could not even begin to survive in the Collector's current biome.

The Arakka genes, in particular, were highly inefficient here. The hydraulic systems the Arakka utilized to move its legs would freeze and compromise. None of the other insectoids from the Darkwoods would fare much better.

The rohu genes it utilized for aquatic mobility were also inefficient, even though the Collector assessed there was a high probability of water-based environments in this location.

The rohu swam in warmer waters. It would not contend with the chilling waters likely to flow here.

The daemon base the Collector currently utilized was quite exceptional, and unlike the other specimen, the genetic material from the daemon was exceptional enough that it would continue to get stronger and stronger as the Collector itself attained higher metamorphosis levels.

However, the daemon base also was not entirely efficient for the cold, and there was another specimen that was just as exceptional as it.

The Firefly Shinchu.

This creature's core alone had provided the Collector with the biomass to ascend an entire metamorphosis level. No doubt the true creature it sourced from would easily defeat the Collector even now.

There were two ways the Collector could survive this environment.

The first was in splicing forms that resisted the cold.

The other was to splice forms that could generate enough heat to beat the cold.

The Collector chose the latter option. Thus, it utilized the Firefly Shinchu as a base for though it was an insectoid, it could produce a heated bioluminescence that could quite comfortably negate the cold.

Not to mention its immense capacity to hunt monsters.

The Firefly Shinchu was an odd specimen. It seemed to not hunt tinkerers unless provoked. Instead, it devoured solely other monsters, specifically monsters with higher primal densities.

It seemed to operate as a specimen that regulated the magical biomes of this world, eliminating monsters that grew too old and powerful for their habitats.

Thus, the Firefly Shinchu had completely adapted itself to monster hunting.

Its bioluminescence could be tuned to attract monsters, and it could generate a form of magic that could wreathe its body parts in solid light that caused massive internal damage akin to spontaneous combustion when encountering the bare flesh of monsters.

The higher the primal density of the monster, the more severe the internal damage.

This ability, the four star adventurer had attempted to utilize on the Collector.

Yet, the Collector had not possessed much Primal Density for the ability to take strong effect.

In this environment devoid of humanoid population density, monster-hunting capabilities would be incredibly useful.

And this power in general would allow the Collector to "cheat" and face off against monsters stronger than itself.

Report chapter

Thus, the Collector sacrificed the daemon base, though in time, when it exceeded the tenth metamorphosis level, it could go back to genetic material it had sacrificed in creating forms.

However, the Collector desired to keep the daemon's magical capabilities.

It used its extraction point to take an adaptation from a native specimen to maintain the thel from the daemon genes, for Sapia was exceedingly useful and the thel was required to regulate it.

Now for three additional forms.

The Collector chose the goblin elite for its superb physical capabilities. The elite possessed a natural affinity with the ultrafiber musculature adaptation and would grant access to an additional pair of powerful arms.

Not only this, but the elite over time had the ability to adapt to environments. The Collector calculated that within the span of one week, the elite genes would develop cold-resistant properties.

At a higher metamorphosis level, perhaps the Collector would return to the daemon form and potentially utilize it to its maximum potential.

Then, it chose the Flametongue Salamander.

The salamander was itself not adapted to the cold, but it could maintain high internal temperatures and then expel them outwards on its skin via a series of external gills to generate a constant layer of flame around its body.

This, the salamander utilized to ward off predators on land where it was less mobile than in the water.

In the water, it would condense its heat generation on its jaws to superheat them for deadlier bites.

The Shinchu's light, if it was used offensively, cost an extraordinary amount of magical energy to maintain.

Thus, its reliability as a heat source was fickle after intensive combat.

In the case that the Collector's mana reserves grew low, it would require a backup source of heat to maintain itself.

This would be the Flametongue Salamander.

The salamander's aura of flame would only intensify with the Shinchu's light as well, effectively turning the Collector into a walking, endless bonfire in the snow whenever the temperatures grew too cold.

The Collector's Blessing of Mount Oe would also allow it to maintain this constant burning even on parts of its body that did not take have the salamander's flame-resistant lipid coating.

But perhaps the greatest value from the salamander was its regenerative properties.

The regeneration did cost mana, but it was still an invaluable resource. With it, so long as the Collector survived - something it excelled at doing – it could always maintain its bodily integrity for the next fight.

As for the last specimen, the Collector focused on obtaining genes that could traverse cold and aquatic biomes, even in the case that the Collector could not generate heat and light.

There were two powerful aquatic specimen the Collector could choose from: the Shockstripe Eel or the Shaker Fish.

Between these two, the Collector chose the Shaker Fish. It lived in the extreme, cold depths of deep waters, utilizing its vibration sensitive whiskers to sense prey in zero visibility environments and utilizing its earth-shaking powers to uncover subterranean prey on the seabed.

With its forms settled upon, the Collector decided upon how to regulate its magical cores.

It maintained the daemon female's core for access to Sapia. For the other two cores, the Collector maintained the thrall's bone binding mostly for its shockwave inducing powers that could amplify with the Shaker Fish's own abilities.

For its newly grown heart, the Collector slotted in the Goblin Lord's core, for there was a settlement of goblins nearby.

Utilizing the lord's Dominus-type primal magic to bend them all to the Collector's will would hopefully allow it to access more information about this environment and its threats.

Now for the mineral samples the Collector had procured through its conquest of the goblin lord's dungeon. Through the Metalloglottic ossifier, the Collector could as of now only generate small amounts of the mineral, encasing perhaps part of a single body with each sample at best.

The only exception was when the Collector swallowed small enough mineral structures whole.

These, it stored within itself intact and could retrieve.

The Collector surveyed its current lineup of samples.

Metalloglottic Ossifier Samples [5/5]

--Crystal Skull

--Volcanite

--Everfrost

--Abyssium

--Burial Tusks

The Collector utilized all five samples. It would manifest the crystal skull in a location upon its body that would make it visible as a potential target for tinkerers to strike, luring them into believing it was a vital area.

The burial tusks, it could cap onto the tusks it would naturally grow from assuming elite genes.

The Abyssium, it would encase upon its thel to significantly enhance its dominus-type capabilities.

Both the Volcanite and Everfrost, upon analysis, yielded themselves to be ores that could change their molecular structure depending on how mana was flowed into them.

Quite similar to the smart-steel utilized by tinkering battleships in the United Front, though significantly less flexible and durable.

But where these magical ores lacked in sheer tensile durability and shock absorbent proprties, they could made up for with the magical ability to change inherent physical properties about themselves such as their temperature, with the Volcanite emitting heat and the Everfrost emitting cold when mana flowed through them.

Thus, both ores were useful in that they scaled up to whatever entity was utilizing them.

An entity with powerful mana reserves would manifest far more impressive effects with the ores than an entity with less impressive ability. Though the Collector did calculate there was an upper limit to this.

If the Collector approximated roughly that star levels indicated mana levels and these increased in similar degrees per additional star among adventurers, then a six-star adventurer would find either Volcanite or Everfrost increasingly useless.

For now, both ores would serve the Collector well.

The Volcanite, the Collector lined across the biotrigger for its pyrocatalytic glands, allowing for any flames that emerged from it to react with the magical ore and enhance itself.

Like this, the Collector could now focus and extend the range of its flames or supercharge the biotrigger with mana, causing it to create an explosive, wider range burst of flames around it.

The Everfrost, the Collector would line across the knuckles of its four arms, allowing it to generate accelerated glaciation on whatever it struck with its blows.

Increasingly, there were entities that could deal with the Collector's monomolecular claws, for the weapons were still quite brittle.

It did not seem like magic utilizing tinkerers had figured it out against the Collector yet, but simply intensifying {Guard} so that the mana defensively covering a body part extended beyond the bare flesh would form an effective barrier against the claws.

The claws would tear through any flesh, no matter how strengthened it was, but it would not tear through even a thin layer of condensed mana above the flesh, for that functioned akin to a forcefield that required brute force, not exceeding sharpness to deal with.

In the case that the tinkerers did manage to catch on, having varied applications of brute force such as the bone binding shockwaves and now these glaciating punches would prove effective.

The Collector form, spread thin in a liquid state across its flat cocoon, pulsed once as it decided upon all the tools it would incorporate itself.

Now, it was time to splice its decided forms and truly evolve.

The evolutionary cocoon swelled and grew as it latched its roots of pulsating pink biomass into the frigid ground.

As the Collector's form within grew, the cocoon had no choice but to expand upwards, the heat emanating from it and the pressure of its expansion pushing against the many layers of snow above.

But under the snow, the Collector could at the very least hide its evolutionary cocoon until 85% completion.

And for good reason. The sheer breadth of genetic material it spliced together caused this evolution to take nearly two hours.

In large part, the delay was due to the fact that the Collector had to spend time processing the Firefly Shinchu genes, for the original specimen was incredibly powerful, far stronger than what the Collector's body could handle now, and thus it had to break it down to match the highest end of what its metamorphosis level could operate with.

At the end of its evolutionary metamorphosis, the Collector's cocoon formed a sizable, spherical ball of transparent flesh supported by a thick base of clumped tendrils.

The snow around it had melted away from the heat emanating from the cocoon's intensive, energy exhaustive biological processes.

But the Collector did not remain exposed for long.

Within minutes, the Collector burst out of the cocoon in its new form.

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Its status adjusted, marking the form the Collector would utilize to take on this new biome.

Metamorphosis Level 68

Biomass Level: 330/1007/100

Stored Genetic Material:

-Frostborn Hobgoblin Thrall [Core] [Equipped]

-Vineswinger Goblin Champion [Core]

-Windcutter Wildcat

-Shockstripe Eel

-Lurker

-Goblin Lord [Core] [Equipped]

Adaptations:

Internal Systems

Ultrafiber Muscles Rank 6.4 8.6 (0.2 from Goblin Elite genes)

--Coilboosters

Autonomic Neuro-Bodily Matrix Rank 13

--Metalloglottic Ossifier [0/5]

--Bone Binding Skull [REMOVED]

--Volcanite [REMOVED]

--Everfrost [REMOVED]

--Abyssium [REMOVED]

--Burial Tusks [REMOVED]

Neuro-Endocrinal Matrix Rank 1 *NEW*

--Chronostasis *NEW: By overloading neural networks with latent psionic energy, it is possible to enter into a state of heightened tachypyschia, temporarily slowing down the perception of time. Neural networks must require periods of rest in between usages.

Neuro-Circulatory Reserves Rank 1 *NEW*

--Reserve Heart 1 [Total 4]

External Systems

Sensitive Hairs Rank 5.27.6 (0.2 from Firefly Shinchu genes, 0.2 from Shaker Fish genes)

--Quill Spray

Organic Hyperalloy Carapace Rank 5.4 7.6 (0.2 from Firefly Shinchu genes)

--Longchain Chitinous Sublayer

Weapons Systems

Monomolecular Claws Rank 4.4 6.6 (0.2 from Firefly Shinchu genes)

--Extended Growth *NEW: Monomolecular claws may be shaped into extended, scythe or spike like structures for greater range.

Pyrocatalytic Glands Rank 3 5.4 (0.2 from Firefly Shinchu genes, 0.2 from Flametongue Salamander genes)

--Instant Trigger *NEW: Through the evolution of a chemically reactive tubular structure connecting both the pyrocatalytic glands and the biotrigger, there is no longer a delay between the activation of the glands and the emission of flames.

Yet, instant activations will compromise accuracy.

Native Adaptations

-Daemonic Thel *NEW*

Current Form:

Firefly Shinchu/Goblin Elite/Shaker Fish/Flametongue Salamander

Magic Status

Mana Level: 100%

Active Cores [4/4:

Prime Core

--Trigger: Desire

Daemon Core

--Trigger: Wonder

Frostborn Thrall Core

--Trigger: Greed

Goblin Lord Core *NEW*

--Trigger: Superiority

Inhera:

Sapia [Daemon Core]

Ethera:

Devourer [Prime Core]

Primal Magic:

-Bone Binding [Frostborn Thrall Core]

-Higher Calling [Goblin Lord Core] *NEW*

Blessings:

-Blessing of Mount Oe

Primal Density: 5%20%

Root Consumption Limit: 100%0%

The Collector's new form was one similar in basic shape to its prior one. It fused together the Flametongue Salamander and Shaker Fish tails to create a lower body.

It utilized the goblin elite's upper body and fused it with the Firefly Shinchu's own traits.

Yet, beyond that basic shape, there were few similarities.

The Collector stood at three meters tall again, condensing its power.

If it simply let its size run amok, then it would have easily surpassed ten meters, but taking such a massive form would only draw attention. And in principle, a smaller target with higher raw power was far more combat maneuverable than a bulkier, larger body.

The Collector's head and neck area fused into a wide, hood-like structure of carapace, forming a roof-like space sheltering five skulls packed together.

Three skulls at the base of the neck. Two above them. One above them all.

A pyramid of cranial structures.

This was the Firefly Shinchu's own head structure: an amalgamation of skulls fused together to form one massive network.

Though these were not truly skulls. They were carapace and flesh structures fashioned into the shape of them. Their inner structures were not hollow, containing neuro-muscular matter, though only one possessed a true brain.

Every single skull's eye sockets had glowing yellow compound eyes rolling around within them. However, only one of these skulls contained the Collector's brain.

One skull glowed with crystal light. This was the adventurer's skull, placed at the highest rung of the skull pyramid to seem like an important and easy target while minimizing potential damage to other skulls.

A distraction.

One of the skulls was that of the Goblin Elite's, noticeable by the large tusks jutting from its bare teeth. These teeth were capped with the Burial Tusk samples. The daemonic thel protruded from the back of this skull, the dreadlock of fibrous hair curling around to the front.

One of the skulls belonged to the broad, flat head of the Shaker Fish. Four sets of brown whiskers drooped from the sides of the skull's head, sensitive to all vibrations. Skeletal fin structures jutted out from the base of the skull.

One of the skulls belonged to the Flametongue Salamander. It was flat like that of the Shaker Fish, but its jaw was elongated. Hazy stripes of red lined its white carapace surface.

One of the skulls was that of the Firefly Shinchu, and it looked roughly humanoid, glowing with a faint golden light.

The Collector's own skull lay nestled at the far end of the skull pyramid's base layer, and it was a completely nondescript humanoid skull of white carapace with nothing special about it. Only a pair of mandibles lining its sides denoted it much.

Though, of course, this skull was the most important, for underneath its carapaced dome, the Collector's brain lay.

Beneath this monstrous series of stacked heads, the Collector's upper body took much inspiration from the Goblin Elite. It was a musclebound, thickly built humanoid shape armored in hyperalloy carapace.

Four arms jutted from the Collector's sides, two of them capable of unsheathing blades of monomolecular edges from their forearms. All four sets of knuckles were encased in crystals of Everfrost.

Around the Collector's neck, where its hood of carapace attached to its shoulders, the Flametongue Salamander's external gills flowed down.

These were fiery orange tendrils of flesh that draped down over the Collector's back. The tendrils were surrounded by branch-like, feathery red protrusions that flickered like tongues of fire.

The collection of gills flowed all the way down to the Collector's waist, forming into a structure a tinkerer might mistake for a red, royal cloak.

These gills, the Collector could utilize to channel the Flametongue Salamander's aura of flames.

At the Collector's chest, an orb of golden light lay embedded. This was the Firefly Shinchu's bioluminescent organ, and from here, the Collector could fire shards of solid light or channel the light to its fists, encasing them in the same light.

The carapace at the Collector's back was slightly domed, encasing the Firefly Shinchu's wings. Those wings could unfurl into four massive structures, the wingspan easily matching the Collector's three meter length.

Above that dome, where the Collector's shoulders were, two more arms sprouted.

These arms were long, spindly, and thin in contrast to the bulky arms of the Goblin Elite.

Unlike the rest of the Collector, these arms were comprised entirely of black carapace, and they seemed almost stick-like in their thinness.

They ended in three fingered hands, and these, the Collector valued.

These were the Firefly Schinchu's limbs. The Collector could only manifest two of the Shinchu's limbs, but the two it did manifest were significantly stronger than even the Goblin Elite's despite the contrast in muscle mass and bulk.

The arms could extend their lengths to a maximum of six meters but utilizing them costed magical energy that the Collector calculated was extensive.

Best to save them for surprise attacks or to capitalize on lethal mistakes.

The Collector's lower body mimicked that of its prior metamorphosis level without much variance. A thickly muscled, serpentine tail fashioned from the Shaker Fish and the Flametongue Salamander's genes.

The tail fins at the end were shaped in a flat, rounded, club-like structure capable of imparting immense seismic shock if magical energy was imparted into them.

With its form decided, the Collector shook its body, flinging off primordial genetic ooze from the evolutionary cocoon off its body. The flesh of the cocoon rapidly dissolved, steaming away into a gaseous state that ensured no trace of it remained.

The Collector felt powerful. Far more powerful than it ever had physically. However, mana wise, it had to consume creatures to build up its root count.

The Collector could skip metamorphosis levels, but its root count could not match the same growth. It could only increase in approximation to one metamorphosis level at a time.

Thus, the Collector had only 60% of the mana pool it should have had in this state. It would have to rectify this discrepancy by consuming mana-dense creatures.

The light from the Collector's chest orb glowed. This magical organ would make any monster hunt quite easy.

A squelching, cracking sound echoed in the howling winds as a thin line split down vertically from the center of the Collector's neck to its waist.

Then, in an instant, that line expanded, revealing the Collector's innards.

From that hole, a huge mass of sharp teeth and crushing muscle emerged, promising to ensnare, crush, and grind up any specimen caught in its bounds.

Almost as soon as the mass of teeth and flesh emerged, it sunk back into the Collector's stomach, the slit across its body closing in an instant.

This, too, was part of the Firefly Shinchu's biology. The Shinchu did not possess a mouth at its head. Instead, it possessed a detachable, extendable maw at its thorax, which to the Collector was its upper stomach and chest areas.

Another method of surprising and devouring prey.

The Collector possessed more tools than it ever had before, and it would use them to grow to higher heights. To become stronger and stronger as it desired until nothing in this world could ever stand to challenge it.

For now, the Collector headed its way to the goblin settlement, prioritizing information and eager to test its new Dominus-type magic.

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The Collector moved through the snow for about fifty meters before rapid buildup of ice crystals began to line every seam of its hyperalloy carapace.

The compromise to its movements was not marked, merely calculated at approximately a 5% loss of optimal mobility, but if the Collector ever stopped moving to break the formations of ice, then this percentage would continuously increase.

This was a test on the Collector's part to sense how long it could maintain itself in this environment without its new adaptations.

Several calculations assessed that with the Flametongue Salamander's naturally high internal temperatures complimented by efficient blood flow and some level of insulation from hyperalloy carapace indicated that the Collector would never fully expire to the cold, but it was entirely possible that if it was immobilized that it could find itself encased in ice in a hibernating state.

In other words, the Collector could not afford to hold back on utilizing its heat-based adaptations.

The Collector began to emanate a faint golden light from the orb on its chest. The orb emitted a shimmering aura as bands of golden light began to flicker all around it, expanding outwards and wrapping the Collector almost in a full halo of bioluminescence.

The Collector regulated this light so that it would not be strongly visible past five meters in the extreme weather conditions of raging, snow-packed winds around it.

Then, to compensate for lowered heat output from the light, it activated the external gills from the Flametongue Salamander.

The tendrils of red frilled flesh drooping down from the Collector's back lit up in a flash. All the feathery frills spontaneously ignited, and all their fires merged with each other, forming a swirling pillar of flame.

The Collector's hyperalloy carapace was coated in a magical lipid layer from the Flametongue Salamander that provided long-lasting fuel for the flames, and soon, the fires spread from the Collector's back to all around its entire body.

Thus, the Collector became a walking mass of fire, each tongue of flame further given support by the Firefly Shinchu's light.

Zero compromise now to its mobility. There was no real mana upkeep to this aura of flame. The salamander's pyrophilic lipid layer constantly regenerated.

There was only an initial 10% cost of activation.

Mana Level: 10090%

The Collector slithered forwards, and as it did so, it left a trail of steaming, melted water that quickly froze over again once it left. The snow all around the Collector melted into droplets of water before they even touched it, and when the miniature rain grew too close to the flames, it fizzled away into steam.

Surrounded and wreathed by a constant cloak of flames that danced and raged with the flow of wild winds, the Collector looked intensely unnatural.

Intensely threatening.

An anomaly of nature.

Fire where only ice was supposed to reign.

Heat where only cold had grasped dominion over.

And, strangely, perhaps in a sense of surreal comfort, a lone light where the veil of ever-present snow robbed all of their sight.

This would compromise its stealth to a degree, and yet, the Collector had understood this risk. This area had drastically lower population density of tinkering life forms, and the Collector could not afford to take a form that was less than combat optimized as it began to hunt for stronger and stronger lifeforms to amass its own might.

The Collector traveled for the better part of an hour. This land was vast and largely homogenous. A constant snowscape, though it seemed the harsh weather conditions did lessen as the Collector neared the coordinates of the goblin settlement.

Visibility thus grew to approximately fifty meters, though it seemed that though the intensity of the snowfall and the winds had dropped dramatically here, there was still enough to prevent completely unobscured ocular system functions.

Almost twenty-five minutes to the goblin settlement.

Though, as the Collector's main skull clicked its mandibles, an oddity had emerged.

As the Collector traversed through the night and the winds of winter, certain specimen began to float around it. These specimens were small and numerous and at first notice, could easily have been mistaken for snowflakes.

However, they were quite large, perhaps the size of an average human's hand, and they hovered in a distinct orbit around the Collector, circling around its aura of light and fire.

Approximately ten of them. An additional specimen circled the Collector every ten minutes.

The Collector had analyzed their physical dimensions and found that conventional senses yielded little information about them.

They possessed almost imperceptibly low mass. They glowed a faint shade of blue that differentiated them from snowfall, but otherwise, visually, they were highly similar. The light itself did not seem to emanate from any bioluminescent organ nor was it a byproduct of any heat producing reaction.

These creatures were entirely magical in nature.

Focusing magical energy on the ocular systems of one of the five skulls linked to the Collector's nervous system showed as much.

The Collector clicked the mandibles on its main skull. It would have asked the female daemon specimen what this was, and likely, she would have known.

But she had long since faded away, though still, some shard of her was immortalized in the Collective.

It was up to the Collector to investigate in this unknown environment all that which it did not know.

Swiping with physical attacks did nothing to the creatures.

The Collector did not like to utilize monomolecular claws in this environment for the risk of freezing rendered them even more brittle, but it tried so, swiping at one blue snowflake with its monomolecular arm blade.

The blade sliced through the snowflake, splitting it in half, but it simply reformed a moment later.

Quite similar in principle to the hobgoblin thrall's intangibility, but far more advanced.

They were impossible even to consume, for they seemed to hold no tangible form to devour and break down despite possessing a modicum of mass.

Quite interesting.

The Collector could sense that there was some minute form of life in these creatures, but they were likely nearly brainless, completely devoid of higher thinking and acting like automata to certain stimuli.

To what stimuli, however? This, the Collector hypothesized was the heat or light it generated.

Then what would the consequences be of these specimens orbiting the Collector? It did not take too long to find out.

Soon, when the Collector was ten minutes from the goblin settlement, one of the blue snowflakes surrounding the Collector detached from its orbit, floating away into the distance.

Minutes later, the snowflake came back, and following it was a frostborn hobgoblin.

A male specimen. Thoroughly deteriorated in condition. Even with his white, cold-resistant skin, he shivered, holding his arms together in an inefficient gesture to preserve warmth.

"Fire…fire," said the hobgoblin as he narrowed his blue eyes, reaching an eager hand out to the bonfire rising in the distance, rising through the snow. He did not want to let go of this warmth, not when he had been lost so long in the storm.

But he knew the elder's teachings. Follow the Snow Sprites, and they lead you to warmth. He smiled as he reached out to the fire in the distance.

A big fire, it looked like. Maybe it was a camp. There were no humans here. Maybe it was a camp meant to search for him.

But…but the fire moved towards him.

Fast.

His eyes widened and he trembled, frozen in fear as the fire grew great and large before his eyes, and through the curtain of fire, the glowing yellow eye sockets of six skulls stared down at him.

The Collector pointed at the frostborn hobgoblin. The hobgoblin was utterly frozen in fear, but even if it had run, it would have never been able to escape the Collector.

"Do not move," said the Collector, an echo underlining its voice as it channeled the Goblin Lord's Primal Magic.

Higher Calling, it was called.

The capacity to imbue the projected voice with magic that completely controlled the mental processes of goblins. All it took was for any goblin specimen to hear the Collector's command once, and they would be under the Collector's permanent bidding.

The hobgoblin stopped moving, even shivering, and just stared blankly ahead.

"What are these specimens?" said the Collector as it pointed with one of its four arms to the many blue snowflakes dancing around it.

"They are Snow Sprites," said the hobgoblin simply.

Too much like an automaton. For the specimen to operate more effectively, it had to possess more of its own will.

Perhaps this could be adjusted.

The Collector made the necessary fine tuning to the output of mana it utilized for Higher Calling and commanded the hobgoblin once more.

"Tell me what these specimens do," asked the Collector again.

The hobgoblin nodded and knelt in the snow; his white-skinned figure lit up by the aura of flames raging from the Collector standing in front of him.

"Lord," said the hobgoblin in acknowledgement. "Snow Sprites lead to warmth. Help us when we get lost. Elder always says to follow them when we get lost. I lost."

"Is there a way to destroy these specimens?" The Collector opened a fiery palm up, and a Snow Sprite landed upon it, seemingly enjoying the flaming heat while being unaffected by it.

"I-I not know," said the hobgoblin with a fearful quiver of his lip. "Only elder knows stuff like that."

"An elder, you say?" The Collector mused at the possibilities. 'Elder' denoted a title signifying age and, likely, knowledge. Yes, this 'elder' would prove useful under the Collector's command.

The entire goblin settlement would. But there was simply the matter of securing the settlement completely, to place them all under the Collector's dominion with no chance for fleeing stragglers.

"Do you hold any position of significance in your social group?" asked the Collector.

Higher Calling seemed to possess some similarities with psionic communication, simplifying the Collector's words into intent that the hobgoblin could understand.

"I am strong warrior. Went out to hunt frost bear. Got lost. Many looking for me, I think." The hobgoblin nodded to himself. "Yes, I important."

"Will they listen to your words? Your commands?" said the Collector.

"Most," said the hobgoblin. "Champion, no, he won't listen to me. Beat me instead if I tell him what to do."

The Collector's main skull clicked its mandibles. It formulated a plan. "That is sufficient information. You will inform me of the numbers in your social group, the dimensions of their settlement, and their orientation as we move."

"Go home now? To warmth?" said the hobgoblin with hope in his eyes as he stared at the Collector with nothing but admiration where once before there had been nothing but fear.

One pair of the Collector's eyes shone down on the goblin.

"Yes," said the Collector.