《The Fourth Faction》Chapter 08 - Gipis and leviathans
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AN: I was supposed to finish this Saturday but I got sidetracked.
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The Overmind and his swarm had left their homeworld in search for the Protoss. On his way, he found several alien races he and his swarm attacked and eradicated. During his last assault against a slightly resistant race, he found something unexpected. An alien ship had just left the ravaged surface of the planet. The ship was too different from the other constructions of the race he was fighting. The Overmind though that the species to which this spacecraft belonged must have been spying on them, and they had recovered something from the planet. Unfortunately for them, they chose to move without being completely certain the fighting in the area was over.
They were caught between 2 mighty forces ready for a final, brutal battle. It was obvious that they wanted to flee from the area, and the Overmind though that they would try to go back toward their territory. That was why he got one of his behemoth to focus its senses on the unknown spacecrft. Behemoths were a space species that could navigate in the warp space, the space used for faster-than-light travel, and they could make precise calculations to get to their destinations.
When the ship tried to jump into the warp space, it got destroyed and the entrance of the warp space got disrupted, but the behemoth caugh on the general direction the ship originally wanted to go. The Overmind sent several scouting units toward that area to find the territory of this unknwon species, to find the terrans. However, unknown to the Overmind, the explorators traveled following a curved path supposed to bring them back into terran territory after some time, not a straight line. Finding the terrans would take longer than what the Overmind expected.
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Year 2452, 20 years have passed since the Grand lord's reincarnation. He kept on improving the quality of his equipment, especially the medical one. He used it to analyse the brain of his psionist humans. They numbered 6, with Alpha, the first 2 girls, the young guy, and 2 new additions, a boy and a girl. Afterward, Alpha had been assimilated, and the Grand lord has been very thorough when it came to her nervous system.
Though he was no longer human, he still felt very heavy. Though his body limited it, he still had feelings. He had gotten attached to this beautiful woman, the first person with whom he could talk, and also the person who brough within his reach the psionist potential. With the help of a Techys, after producing the necessary materials, he made a big painting of her, and a life sized sculpture. He put the painting in his resting area, and the sculpture would be put in the starport he planned to build in the near future.
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The 2 eldest psionist girls were renammed Beta, 19 years old, and Gamma, 18 years old. Though both of them had knowledge in fighting and engineering, Beta was the fighting specialist and Gamma the engineering specialist. Beta was helping develop weapons in the second workshop, which had turned into an small industrial complex, while Gamma helped make better tools in the third workshop, which had turned into a small research laboratory. Both buildings had been continuously upgraded during the years and had reached the standards of the terran confederacy.
The third psionist, the boy, was named Delta, 12 years old. He was currently in artificial coma. The last psionist children to appear were 10 years old, a girl named Epsilon and a boy named Zeta. The Grand lord decided that from this point he would only use the psionists to try to breed more psionist. As for the non-psionist children, they would still be used for cerebral experiments. To g further, he decided to do something he was reluctant to do at the beginning: infesting them.
By infesting them, he would bring them closer to the zerg, and the results of the experiments would probably be more significant. He would also have infested mate with each other and see what kind of offsprings would come out of it. He did so with some of the gipis above 15 years old. The infestation process turned out to be very difficult for them. Some died just from the pain, while for other, the body couldn't bear the burden and broke down. Only 8 subjects survived the change.
Unlike in the game, the process was very risky for the subject. And the infested humans would degrade over time. They didn't even last a month, not long enough to carry an offspring either so the idea was swiftly buried. He had a limited amount of time to work with them, and he was worried the continuous degradation of the bodies would have a significant impact on the result of his experiments and observations. He couldn't allow himself to fully rely on them.
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Thanks to the explorations he ordered, he found several sources of vespene gas and deposit of crystals. He made small bases near them, with creep roads and micons colonies at regular intervalles between them and the main settlement. With the increase in ressources, he started to work on the type of zerg that would allow him to leave the planet and travel in space. He already had a base for that as the overlords were originally a space-faring species.
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Their sharp senses, and their large, complex brain could allow them to travel with uncanny precision within the warp space. But their low speed was still an issue. That was why the Grand lord wanted to developp technology, so he could merge the zerg with fast flying machines. The end result would be something similar to what he had seen in a sci-fi serie back in his previous life. In this serie, the hero was a human who traveled with other aliens in a living spaceship called Moya.
In that serie, that race of living ship was called leviathan. It sounded just fine for him. So he started working on this race of space cruisers. The remain of the spacecraft that brough him here would be used, and he would get inspiration from the creep as well. A basic structure would be built, then the leviathan would grow on top of it starting from a special egg that would become its core, and finally fuse with the basic structure.
But before using the only piece of spacecraft he had, the Grand lord choose to work on something smaller. There was an old vulture in the cargo bay, and it could be easily reproduced in the industrial complex. It was nothing like what was available in the game, it was more of a prototype, and didn't go over 70km/h. But it was enough. It was used as a base to make a hovering car, hovercar for short. Only the frame and critical systems such as the hovering system were left.
On the other hand, using the overlord and the creep as base, the Grand lord started to design the organism that would grow over the frames of the machines. His creep could already change color depending on the composition of th ground and spam zerg plants. This feature would be pushed further, to grow special muscles, organs or cover depending on the material it was growing on and using other stimulis.
20 years had gone by, and less than 50 years remained before the war. He still didn't know how was the rest of the planet he was in, and even more important, he didn't know where the planet was. However there was one thing certain for him, he was very far from the terran territory. He only spent 2 or 3 days in warp space after being recovered by the human crew on the alien planet, he couldn't have gone far from there. Reaching the place where the action would take place was bound to take years. The Grand lord needed a solid idea of how long it would take.
That was why he reported most of his efforts on creating the leviathans. Besides, he would be able to use the result to make fast flying units equivalent to the terran wraith, or bomber. It could even be used to make a ground unit akin to the terran siege tank or the protoss dragoon. He would first make small scouting leviathans to find the terran confederacy, then he would make fighters and bombers.
Still, to stay on the safe side he would have to pursue his research on the cloaing system he had though of. He didn't want his scouting vessels to be noticed by anybody. That complicated the design of the hull of the leviathans, but the end result would be worth the effort.
Afterward he would make the big ones: the cruisers-type, carriers-type, and his flag ship, one of the 3 battlecruiser-type leviathans he intend to make. The cruisers would be made specifically for air and space battle, only carrying weapons, fighters and bombers. The carriers would be specialised in all units transport aside from the fighters and bombers.
As for the battlecruisers, they would hold within them a downsized version of the fort and the genesis core. They would also be equiped with the strongest long range weapon he will be able to develop.
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AN: ... *scratch his ass while reading a xianxia novel*
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