Chapter 27.East

Seeing the immediate use I put her animal experimentation to, Grace had found her calling. She didn't have much to do at first, but soon the brood constructs were producing their first batch of offspring. There were quite a few brood constructs made from the monsters encountered since the march began, and those were starting to bear fruit. Grace was sure to be there every time, though both she and I were surprised when the first one to be excreted from their construct was the bear offspring. The creatures that died to provide the construct were massive, capable of comparing if not matching ogres in mass if not height. Their offspring were so small they could easily fit in Grace's hand. Their proportions were also different. Opposite, in fact. Their adult forms had short legs and comparatively massive arms, allowing them to use them as weapons when they leaned back on their rear feet. In their small size, their legs were much larger than their arms, which were little more than hands that stuck out of their chests. They hopped on the back legs, using their tail for balance, without their front legs ever touching the ground. They could easily be called pudgy, but they weren't threatening at all. It would be hard to imagine a less similar creature to what they'd come from. Gone was the slavering mouth filled with vicious fangs, clawed arms capable of tearing through ogre hide, their tail even lacked the spines that made it so dangerous.

She lifted one to look at it closer, amazed at how quickly the little beast was growing as I had given it the ability to process nutrients from mana. It wasn't forming any other circuits as it did so, as if the creature wasn't advancing in class at all as it grew in Grace's palm until it couldn't fit and she had to hold it by the pits of its arms. It continued to grow larger, the arms remaining useless and short as the back legs grew longer and more powerful along with the tail.

Once it could reach the ground from Grace's grip, it finally started advancing to class one. The shoulders widened and the arms grew thicker, the face changed in a similar way to the intimidating horses turning wide angle eyes into acute angle eyes and changing from a small mouth with few teeth to a large one meant for biting living creatures. Its class one form hardly comparable to what it was born as, the change that class two brought was insignificant. It only got bigger, arms growing even stronger and larger as it assumed the form the creatures that I'd killed had had. Bears were strange creatures.

Even stranger were the banshees. They, like the bears, were popped out of the brood construct much faster than expected. The offspring was, again, a tiny creature that could fit in Grace's hand. Unlike the bears, though, it was obvious that this was merely a tiny banshee. Something interesting happened as I watched them, I realized they were squeaking not to communicate or attack but to sense. As they grew larger, their legs did most of the growing. The tips of their wings grew a bone claw, the finger sticking up out of the middle of their wing grew more pronounced and gained a talon from a tiny claw, but their legs went from tiny things that were little more than hands to much larger and more powerful implements looking similar to human ones that walked on fingers instead of heels. Their ears got even bigger, but their heads remained otherwise mostly the same. The wings that used to be the majority of their body became much more similar to limbs, taking up only as much space as they needed.

They were two pedes tall when they started building their circuits. They worked sensory confusion circuits into their sensory screeching but the circuits I found more interesting were the ones on their wings. Those allowed the banshees to change how the air targeted objects. It could make the air press harder on something, messing with its balance and causing it to exhaust itself faster. Their second class form gained talons at the end of all their fingers, but spent most of its resources on the screech, giving it a stronger confusing effect. Now it wouldn't just mess with depth perception and maybe cause something to lose its balance, but it was extremely vulnerable to hallucinatory effects, even something moving slightly fast could appear as multiple creatures as fake sounds turned one enemy into many. The only physical changes that happened were their hair going from coarse hair to wicked spines and their claws going from white bone with normal hardness to black bone with much more durability.

The banshees were barely magical at all, though the two circuits they could use were devastating against a single foe. Unfortunately, they hadn't faced a single foe and their confusion worked on brain-based senses, meaning it wasn't difficult for me to kill them.

The last group Grace wanted to be a part of breeding was the only non-monsters we'd come across so far, except for those lairs the monsters set up to rear their young until they were class one. They'd been useful to me in that they'd allowed me to create another nexus; an exoskeletal nexus. They weren't monsters, though. They rolled out of the brood constructs in the same form as the ones I'd harvested. No circuits apart from the mana generating ones I'd put in their guts and the nutrient conversion in front of them. No matter how much mana filled the creature, no circuitry was built. They were like humans, except as lacking in will as the monsters were prior to being class one.

I had four varieties spread through my armies; one was a thick and heavy one that rammed foes, another was a thin and long one that attacked using two of its long fingers to pull things into the jagged blades it had growing out of its palms, and the last the attacked with a long tail ending in a cruel spike. According to the human libraries, none had ever produced a monster though all were plagues the humans feared. One beetle was no issue, as the charge was easily dodged, but they always came in stampedes. Without walls, they were horrifying. The mantises were dangerous on their own, mainly because they were colored to blend in to whatever they lived in. The stone mantises that were in Grace's army were gray, as the ground was. It could be an easy mistake for a human, but I'd noticed that the ground wasn't perfectly flat in some places even if I couldn't tell the difference between the pseudo-will that filled the earth and sky and the true will that creatures possessed. Each aberration had been a mantis, though that didn't surprise me. The hornets combined the threat of both the others, being dangerous if not sneaky alone but also appearing in numbers. I only had hornets in my northern and western armies, but whatever plan I put in place would work when the southern and eastern armies came across a wooded area.

As the insects were already being left behind by the southern and western armies, I needed to work fast in developing physique templates for them. The result was many failures feeding my new exoskeletal constructs. The whole first brood of all insect creatures had been failures. Their bodies were so different internally that I had to change the way I built templates for them.

Grace wasn't affected much by the failure, instead she gushed out ideas of how to fix the problems once I explained exactly how each template had failed. It was helpful to have another person to bounce ideas off of, though it hadn't been helpful enough to utilize the first brood.

The experimentation was barely over when Glrt finally left Nagt at the brood construct. Those that continued to complain, now about Grace's abandonment of her duty in order to try and curry favor with me, cheered raucously as she approached Grace.

Grace didn't seem to care about the approach, her mind still occupied with the innumerable possibilities breeding had if she continued to serve me. She had an epiphany as Glrt approached, rocketing into the new tier. Glrt's approach slowed, but Grace didn't care. When Glrt stopped, now being suppressed by Grace's superior position, Grace approached instead. "Congratulations! You can now assume your status as the rightful commander of this army!" she chirped as she grabbed Glrt's leg in a hug. "Thank you! I was never suited to command anyway. Let the Sovereign's will be done and lead us to supremacy over the world, Commander Glrt!"

Glrt was very confused, seeing as she was feeling suppression from the very person calling her a superior. She wouldn't disobey me, though, and if Grace was abdicating with a superior position in my eyes it meant she was doing so with my approval. She'd barely accepted when a report came in about a murder of quail approaching fast. Glrt proved that she'd actually been paying attention to the complaining soldiers and started giving out orders to make sure her command wouldn't be questioned as she turned to take care of the quail herself.

Grace didn't even pretend to care about the order of the military as she rushed toward the battlefield seeking more experimental subjects.