Chapter 3

I spent awhile simply going over the blueprint for the hive mother. It has a large dome covered by a hard shell, and two dozen tubes coming out of the shell. These tubes would let out larvae, who it would then care for while producing more inside. It also has six long spider-like legs covered in a hard carapace, for defense it has four long limbs with scythe like claws connected to the dome. It is also able to spit acid from the tube, it crushes the growing larvae inside itself to use their blood as acid. It also has a large mouth with dozens of huge teeth on the bottom of the dome.

This is exactly what I want, but it does come with a couple major down sides. It moves very slowly since it's very top heavy with the dome where it has two dozen growing larvae. It's also extremely weak to any aerial attacks, eventually I can evolve it to make acid cannons though. It doesn't have any eyes either, instead it sees through the eyes of lesser members of the hive, so if it's the last member standing it is extremely vulnerable. The last major issue is how expensive it is, not only to make but also the fact that I'll have to constantly bring it dead things that it then eats and turns into bio-energy to make more hive.

Resources seem to be determined by a 1 foot cube, for example a cube of dirt is ten resources while a cube of diamond is 500. Luckily I don't have to manually count how many resources I have, as long as I have a set point for my hive to deposit resources, all of my hive members will automatically know how many available resources we have. It seems like they automatically add to the total whenever they deposit any resources, then they send the new total through our legion mind. The legion mind is exactly what it sounds like, it's like the hive connection but just for my legion of hive.

The hive is able to breakdown most natural resources into bio-energy, however actual biological resources give much more energy. We only call it bio-energy because we use the energy to create biological life, it doesn't mean we have to absorb biological material, though that is the best way. Which leads to my newest plan, summoning grunts to hunt the local life.

Focusing on the summon grunt spell, I felt my runic energy move through my body towards my hand. This time a bright red orb of energy shot out and hit the ground, and from it came my newest minion. The grunt looks like a giant praying mantis, it stood at around 12 feet from the bottoms of its feet to the top of its head. It has four long powerful legs and two arms with scythe like blades made from some kind of metal. When it open its mouth it would split into four section, allowing it to open wider then what seems natural. It doesn't have wings unfortunately, instead it's back is covered with a shell of the same metal as it's claws.

Ordering it to go hunt in the hill and setting the resource drop off to be the cave, I then opened my status screen.

{Rune Holder: Jerrick Mars

Rune Class: Hive King

Age: 16

Sex: Male

Compatiblity: *****

Rune Energy: Low

Health Status: hungry, dehydrated

Allegiances: Hive Legion}

{Current Hive Count:

1 hive harvester

1 hive grunt}

{Starter Spell:

Summon Harvester

Summon Grunt}

This was going to be a long process of summoning then eating and regaining my energy. The hive mother costs 1000 resources, so this would probably take a few days.

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2 Day Timeskip

I finally had enough to summon the hive mother, which is good since I would have a major issue soon. I stupidly forgot to order my 10 grunts to not attack any humans, of course I didn't realize this mistake until I noticed one with a young girl in its mouth. Luckily it seems humans give far more bio-energy then other creatures of similar size, so I now had enough to summon the mother. Yes summon not create, it turns out that all hive legions can simply trade bio-energy for already created hive that aren't in an active legion. Meaning if there's hive just sitting on an already conquered world, and there's no plans to use them in the near future, the leader of that legion can choose to exchange them for bio-energy. Allowing them to offload the hive and travel more quickly to their next target, where they use that bio-energy to setup and do it all over again.

Not every legion does this however, some prefer to travel with their entire legions, which is what I would be doing in the future. Most of my hive connection is blocked off since my feeble human mind can't handle it, something I will correct in the future, but Xyphos seemed to understand what I wanted and opened a connection to a hive queen of a dormant legion.

"Trade?" Before I could even think of a message, a simple one word message came through the connection.

"Hive Mother." I decided to send a simple message back. Hopefully Xyphos isn't the only being I could have intelligent conversation with in the entire hive. Right after I had that thought I felt amusement come through the connection, hopefully from Xyphos and not this random queen.

"Location?"

I sent images of the cave with the pile of bodies, then city, Mars and the solar system and then the nearby galaxies. Hopefully showing where I was accurately.

Sure enough a portion of the pile glowed dark purple before the rest simple disappered. The process sent a portion of the bio-energy to Xyphos who then used his power to transfer everything. Which made me wonder why the queen even needed my location, but I'd have to look into that another day since my Hive Mother finally popped into the cave. I was lucky this cave is a good 40 feet tall and 20 feet wide since the mother is big. She stands at about 30 feet to the top of her dome and a good 15 feet wide. It's a tight fit but while she's producing grunts I'd be making more harvesters to expand the cave. The single harvester had expanded it a good 20 feet deeper but it definitely wasn't enough.

Eventually I plan to make the spell to create the hive mothers but I don't have time to spend on that. Any day now a party could be coming to investigate the girl's disappearance, I needed to build up a decent force.

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3 Day Timeskip

I had a decent force of grunts now, the mother has been pushing them out as fast as I could make her. It takes her 1 day to make and push out 24 grunt larvae, and it costs 10 bio-energy per grunt, or 240 per unit. Then the larvae eat another 10 resources worth of bio-energy to grow into the grunts. 480 resources for 24 grunts, my 10 already existing were barely able to keep up with the first batch. However the mother had just been sitting there since she pushed out the first batch, we had used all our resources and apparently she wouldn't make more until she has enough for an entire unit.

The 24 grunts are finally cutting out of their cocoon. The first thing I noticed was their claw scythes and shell are made of bone and not metal like my summoned grunts. I decided I'd eventually have 1 summoned mixed in with every 24 natural grunts, making units of 25. The summoned would be the first I'd evolve and I'd use my runic energy to do it, since that seems to make them stronger then the natural ones right now. Of course once I get better resources the quality would rise as well. My 10 summoned harvesters had expanded the cave so there was enough room for all the new grunts, I also keep the mother back as far as possible without her being in the way of the harvesters work.

As I was examining the new grunts that were simply standing outside their cocoons waiting for orders, I felt one of my summoned grunts trying to get my attention through the link. I quickly pushed into its mind to see through its eyes, and found what I expected. There was 6 militia with laser rifles walking around inspecting the ground around the hills. I guess they finally decided to look for the missing girl after days of her being missing. I quickly ordered my hive to hide but to keep watch on them unnoticed if possible. Then I ordered the newly hatched hive out to reinforce them.

I wasn't going to leave such a juicy amount of bio-energy, no I planned to kill them and have the mother absorb them. Then with my new small army we would travel deep into the forest while the mother produced the next batch of grunts. I was already eating from the kills my grunts made, something I would have to get used to has a member of the hive. Eventually I plan to wipe this planet clean of the human stain on it.

I had a group of 15 grunts on once side of the militia and another of 20 on the other side. Once both were in position I ordered the group of 20 to attacked, drawing the attention of the men that were still calling out the girls name and looking for clues. They quickly noticed my hive as my grunts charged towards them chittering in excitement, shouting in surprise they began firing upon my grunts. Laser rifles fire decently fast but are lower powered lasers, and it seems the bone like shell of my new grunts could shrug off around 20 shots before the chest shell would crack and leave them exposed. Two of my grunts fell by the time they were half way to the militia, they were a hill away so they had a good distance to travel even with the ground being flat in the small valleys between the hills. Once they reached the half way mark I ordered the second and closer group to charge.

The milita didn't notice the second group until it was far to late. They dropped another grunt from the original group before all the militia turned around to start running, hoping to put some distance between themselves and my monsters. Only for that hope to be wiped away seeing another group of 15 monsters nearly upon them. The militia only had simple combat knives for close range, which did little damage to my grunts. I watched with excitement building as my grunts tore into the humans soft fleshy body, smiling as I saw blood pouring onto the ground. Now it was time to move deeper into the wilderness so we could build a true army. I pulled up my status sheet for a look before I started moving out of the cave.

{Rune Holder: Jerrick Mars

Rune Class: Hive King

Age: 16

Sex: Male

Compatiblity: *****

Rune Energy: Full

Health Status: Healthy

Allegiances: Hive Legion}

{Current Hive Count:

1 hive mother

10 summoned hive harvesters

10 summoned hive grunts

21 hive grunts}

{Starter Spell:

Summon Harvester

Summon Grunt}