With my Tunnellers making my dungeon far more robust it was time for my last creatures, the Reavers. Unfortunately, due to having to forcefully incite the fungi’s spores, I was too short in essence for making all 5 of them but if I wait about an hour I’ll recoup those costs. I’ll have to wait until the budget is refilled before creating any of the Reavers since even one of them is as expensive as all of my Swarmlings and will cut my hourly income harshly, once all of them are placed I’ll only make 8/hr (17 from FIN, -5 from Reavers, -2 from Tyx, -2 from wolves/vipers). The Reavers are going to be my elite force, I honestly don’t believe that one Reaver is 100x more valuable than a Swarmling but I need some fighters who can go one to one with more powerful enemies, my Swarmlings are extremely weak health wise.

A single serious blow can wipe out any of my Swarmlings immediately and my basic spells alone show that the idea of a single powerful individual overturning an army might actually be possible here. I need individuals who can challenge some of the more powerful threats, I might be a ‘hive’ and ‘swarm’ but if I let myself get chained down by that then all it will take is a single mage that has some wide range extermination spells and a shielder or two who can hold of the small fraction of the horde that is able to maintain contact while the mage recharges. I mean, think about it. If there are a million Swarmlings and only 2 invaders, then it’s only the perimeter of their forces I can field troops around, I can use at most 10 swarmlings and the rest would have no room to fight. They’d be blocked by their allies.

I need elites to face elites, in fantasy stories quite often a single person can turn the tide of wars. If I want to grow this dynamic will only expand, there is no way to just ‘add more troops’ and solve the problem. Sure it could exhaust them but how much would I have to lose for that? And how can I be sure, how can I know that they actually will be exhausted? If they’re able to pace themselves properly and keep themselves in a relatively risk free situation (hence the shielders) then they would be absolutely fine no matter how long I kept bombarding them with more and more Swarmlings. Powerful units that can challenge stronger invaders are necessary.

The battle plan is to exhaust invaders with the tunnels, make my very environment hostile. The plants, the geography, the positioning. Everything. I need my pop lichen to keep them paranoid, I need the labyrinthine architecture of my tunnels to keep them feeling lost and frustrated, I need to rob them of opportunities to rest, I need them to feel agitated, I don’t want them to feel enthusiastic about their descent, I need them to hate every minute they spend here, I need them to feel enraged. If they are enjoying their time in any capacity they will have a more harmonious sense of cooperation, I need to break that down. If they feel safe they can take time to rest and plan, I need to break that down. If they can focus then they can make better decisions that are well thought out, I need to break that down. I need them to hate each other; to be impulsive and aggressive; to act irrationally; to be jumping at shadows; to be completely drained of all will to go on. I need my very environment, even before I attack them once, to slowly erode them. To wear them down.

Next, I need my wolves to harass them, this will force them to use up any of their resources like potions or magic crystals or scrolls. I don’t know if any of those exist, but if they do I want them gone. The wolves will also test the invaders: I’ll better understand their party composition; their roles in battle; if there’s any non-combatants; their skills and any spells they have; how strong they are relative to my monsters; how they fight together; how much damage they can take and how much damage they can deal. Hopefully my wolves can force them to split up or expose any vulnerabilities the party has and exploit them, if not then they can simply continue to grind away at the invaders. Then, once in the nest they’ll be faced with the Tyx. They’ll need to act slowly and cautiously. Surrounded. It will capitalise on their pre-existing stresses that the tunnels created and force them to keep everything under control. They’ll be extremely distract and slowly but surely start to lose hope and give in to desperation as they get constantly ambushed and the groups of tyx just get larger and larger. Then finally, once I force them to confront one of the larger patrols and I deem them to be thoroughly weakened. The Reavers sneak attack their back line and the swarm descends upon their vulnerability.

That’s the plan.

That’s how we win.

This way, even if invaders are strong enough to be completely unthreatened by everything I can throw at them. If their strength is so overwhelming I cannot even scratch them, we still win. So for that I’m going to need a lot from my Reavers. My goal is to separate them into 2 groups, a caste of straight up brawlers and one of high damage ambushers. If I make the separation gender based I don’t need them to be two distinct species and can expect the distribution to self regulate in a sense. Since by default female Reavers are bigger and bulkier sort of like with normal Praying Mantis’ I’ll make the women the head-on attackers and I’ll make the men the hidden stealth option. I’m gonna need to do something about the long body as well. It’s extremely useful stability wise but I feel like there’s a lot of wasted potential there.

Reavers have a thin, wing like membrane with a chitin blade between the front two segments of their upper limbs that allows them to cut instead of tear their prey. This completely changes how they go about using their upper limbs as they can no long effectively snap their tibia closed forcing them to use horizontal slashes instead as they can’t grasp prey as effectively anymore. They have a sharp spine on the tip of their tibia which can be used to pierce and is curved to facilitate effective use in the curved sweeping motions necessitated by the Reavers limb structure. Their abdomen is both wingless and far more diminished than that of a standard Praying mantis, only about half the length of the thorax in order to only require one set of limbs that are far bulkier. The removed set of limbs are raised up into the thorax where they can be used as extra legs for stability or wound back with a muscle group that can be pulled taught and then released with immense force, snapping with the force a coconut crabs claws instantaneously and with enough sharpness to puncture steel.

My plans are as follows, first I want to lengthen the abdomen to be twice as long as the thorax. Then I want to add a second set of legs to it. Thirdly, I want to have angle that the claws thrust from to be more forward-facing in order to increase the range of positions it can attack from rather than being limited to a single point half a meter ahead. Finally I want to make the females stronger and more durable while making the males harder to detect and able to deal more immediate damage.

The first point is easily addressed, its relatively simple to just make something longer all things considered however it does mean for the next while the sense of balance will feel seriously off until I do something to mitigate that. The second was easy enough as well, I just took the back set of limbs and inverted them so the joints are forward facing instead and placed them near where the abdomen and thorax connected. For the third change what I decided to do was use the idea I’d implemented in the Tunnellers, I brought the claws down to the joint between the thorax and abdomen while straightening them out and removing their central joint that they affixed the ‘spring muscles’ to.

After bringing them to the joint I created two ‘chambers’ which I rested the claws 0.1m deep inside of their 1m total length and filled the rest with spring muscles that connected to the base of both the chamber and claw. This would allow the spring muscles to slowly wind back, pulling the claws deeper into the chamber till only the tip was exposed and when the tension was released they would rush out along a mostly straight path. Burrowing deep inside whatever they impact. In order to balance the creature I first weakened the hind limbs significantly as they no longer needed to bear half of the weight each, instead more effectively distributing weight amongst the four corners. Next, removing the joint in the claws also contributed positively to the balance. Finally, I weakened their field of vision significantly by reducing the size of their eyes and setting them lower in the skull of the Reaver. I don’t need them to spot ambushes, I have near enough omniscient perception after all. At this the balance finally returned and I could move onto the differentiation of the two sexes.

First, the females. Their changes would be simplest and I wanted to start easy. I begun by diminishing the spring muscles and bulking up the forelimbs, then I diverted some of the mana circuits dedicated to allowing silent movement towards their blades. Not all, mind you, I still want them capable of stealth. I’m just shifting their focus. The next change was to make their legs slower and less precise in exchange for returning them to their original bulk and thickening their shells overall. I changed the shape of their shell so it was a little easier to spot while also being a bit bulkier and better at blocking hits then after deciding on their colouration as a dusty grey base with white markings I called it quits.

Then, it was time for the males. I had a lot of changes I wanted to put in place since this caste was going to be extremely overspecialised and it would take a little bit of time. The first major change was to completely remove the bladed membrane meaning the forelimbs would rely solely on their tibia spike, this is because I want to make their entire purpose centred around a single attack from the claws so the only use of the spike is to hold the target in place. In addition, by removing the membrane the Reavers can hold their limbs in a vertical position rather than their horizontal sweeps which means the spike can be driven into the skull of unarmored targets like archers for a quick kill that doesn’t have a long recharge associated with it or buried deep in the gaps between shoulder armour for a solid grip on the enemy to ensure an effective puncturing of the victim. This also gave me a rather generous amount of ‘modification energy’ before I had to worry about the creature experiencing any disparity that would lead to everything starting to malfunction, I used a large portion of this not direct a host of mana circuits towards the claws and legs of the Reaver in order to better facilitate the stealth and damage capabilities of the male reavers.

In theory, this would allow for the female Reavers to hold back their front line with Tyx assistance and the males to land a single strike that would disrupt the enemy formation while disappearing in the chaos to later repeat the process. I decided to give the male reavers the same colouration and patterning as their female counterparts, substituting the white markings with a similar metallic purple as is found on the walls. It took the best part of an hour to create these creature plans so I’ll be able to summon 5 immediately. I’m just not fully sold on how to distribute them and which one to make their named representative, as grow further the development of these ‘representatives’ is basically going to dictate the future of their entire species.

Even Spencer, a mostly mindless member of the hive is seemingly developing a leadership role amongst the Swarmlings assigned to guarding me. Let alone Null and Samantha who are by design commanders of their kin. No matter who I make my named they will become the face of the modified Reavers and if I pick two named it’ll likely lead to internal conflict between the Reavers as well… wait… is that really such a bad thing? I mean as far as I can tell they’re unable to oppose my orders and if they all get linked into the hive they’ll place it above all else so at worst they’ll inconvenience each other, I shouldn’t need to worry about the infighting leading to sabotage or anything but the conflict could lead to innovation… and since they’re sex based castes it’s not as if either can cut the other off. They’ll both need to constantly interbreed which should keep them close and since every paring will produce members of each caste there’ll be a vested interest in amiable relations.

Yeah. I think I’m actually starting to like this whole ‘opposing factions’ idea, I think since the males will be getting more kills as a whole due to their role and the females are more at risk I’ll give them the extra member and I’ll place the males first to try and minimise that advantage. I’ll make sure that the chance of a newborn being a member of one gender is inversely proportional to that genders abundance so the system is even better at self balancing. As for their names I think I’ll take them from mandarin since the Chinese Praying Mantis is a pretty big deal, I don’t remember much mandarin but I know the word for claw was romanised as something like ‘Zhao’ and that the word for sword was romanised as ‘Jian’ so I think I’ll name their representatives that way respectively.

Once I was decided I immediately began the creation process and after all 5 had been summoned and the representatives named they all seemed to poke curiously at each other with their forelimbs before the two representatives slowly started taking light slashes and stabs at each other, the spar ramping up in intensity as the two got more familiar with each other and their own capabilities. Building in speed and skill. And as they changed, so did the hive. All of my Tyx seemed to stop dead for a moment as the Reavers took glancing blows and got more creative in their attacks. The observing reavers slowly started doing practice attacks that resembled their representatives, the tyx changed their footwork so they disturbed the grass around them less. The Tunnellers began make use of their appendages to more effectively glide through stone and some of the ambushed Tyx started dangling by a single limb and swinging across the ceiling soundlessly. As the spar slowly came to its climax and both of the Mantis’ finally fired their claws while making use of air slash everything fell silent and both representatives stepped back seemingly satisfied while the hive felt a rush of information and each members battle sense surged to new heights immediately as I was bombarded with notifications.

Hive update:

The hives understanding of mana grows .

Hive update:

The hives understanding of combat grows.

Hive update:

The hives understanding of stealth tactics grows.

Achievement: Council

Have a total of five different leaders of Kin that are all allied with each other in your dungeon. +10EXP

Achievement: Civilised

Have 3 previously ‘bestial’ races become ‘tribal’ +10EXP

EXP Gained:

30/20; Level Up! Level 2 achieved!