Swarming Sovereignty

Lia had her first surprise when she reached the doors to the room she was in. The doors all contained a smaller door within them, and a smaller door within that. Up on the wall next to the door, there was a little note that read “I thought you might have a hard time opening the bigger doors when you’re so small, so I’ve made the doors to this building have several sizes so you can get through easier. You’ll need to figure out your own way into other buildings, though. Good luck!”

That was probably good. The main doors here were several times her size, and this specific building was built to be a fortified shelter in case of monster attacks on the campus, so she doubted she would be able to break out.

She pushed the smallest door open and went through, keeping a wary eye out for monsters as she did. Campus was just as she remembered it, a group of buildings designed around the mountainous terrain they were located such that at times it was hard to tell the buildings hadn’t always been there.

The bazaar should be to her right, and that was her first priority. It was a large area with lots of places she could hide in, and hopefully she’d be able to find some sort of potion or equipment or something that she could use in case of emergency. Obviously, equipment for humanoids was out of the question, but if she was lucky there would be some gear for tamed monsters that she could use.

…Now that she was a monster, could she theoretically be tamed? The thought made her uncomfortable; it was her job to force people into servitude, not the other way around. Well, no matter, she’d just have to get strong enough that no one would be able to tame her.

A few minutes of walking later, she was able to make out the first stalls of the bazaar. The bazaar as a whole was under a large overhang, putting it in almost perpetual darkness, pierced only by the lights of the stalls. The result was a sort of permanent twilight, giving the bazaar an atmosphere quite unlike anything else Lia had ever seen.

However, hidden among the entrancing sight were flashes of motion, telltale signs that there were living things in that bazaar, and Lia doubted they were shoppers. So, it was with caution that she approached the outside of the bazaar, taking her time to make sure there were no monsters about before she dashed into a stall.

Unfortunately for her, there were no goodies to be found in the stall. Still, that didn’t mean she had been wasting time in coming here. She was in cover now, and getting to other stalls would be easier.

She skittered around to the edge of the stall and peered into the darkness, straining her eyes to try and see if there were any monsters about before she went to the next. When she was satisfied there weren’t, she went to the next stall, which also contained nothing.

She repeated the process a few more times, until she was interrupted by a couple of windows.

You have gained the Skill Night Vision!
You have gained 2 Skills this evolution! Further Skills will require more practice to obtain!

 

Night Vision

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Allows the user to see better in the dark.
Level 1: Provides black-and-white vision 10 meters out from where colored vision ends in the dark.
No batteries included, but they’re not required anyway so you lucked out.

Well, that was…probably going to be more useful than Spiderclimb, at least. It didn’t require any Stamina usage and was always on, and presumably would, once it reached a higher level, give colored vision much further out.

Though, now that she was thinking about it, perhaps she was underselling Spiderclimb? Depending on her Stamina regeneration and how much the Stamina cost reduced as the Skill leveled up, she might get to a point where she could walk on walls and ceilings for free, and that would probably be less tiring than flying.

She tentatively walked onto the wall for a few seconds before coming back down and examining her status.  Her Stamina was at twelve out of fifteen, and seemed to be coming back at the rate of…about a tenth of a Stamina per second. Given her rather pitiful pool, that could only mean that the regeneration would end up being…pretty decent once she had an actually good amount of Stamina.

And Spiderclimb had gained three experience, so it appeared that there was a rough ratio of one Stamina to one experience in the Skill. That was pretty good, all things considered.

Right, she’d stick to walls whenever possible in hopes of leveling Spiderclimb. Just…not high up, in case she wasn’t paying attention, ran out of Stamina, and fell off of the wall. And at some point, she’d have to practice flying in hopes of getting a Skill, but she didn’t want to do that outside of a safe place, where the buzzing of her wings wouldn’t attract attention.

But now was not that time. She stuck herself to a wall and peered into the darkness, keeping a watchful eye out for any motion. Unfortunately, not every stall was lit, and even with Night Vision she could only see so far, so she was stuck with imperfect knowledge of the area.

She unstuck herself from the wall and skittered over to the next stall. The cycle repeated itself for about ten more minutes; she would get to a stall, put herself on the wall until her Stamina was nearly exhausted while she searched the area, and then moved on to the next. Night Vision leveled up once in that time, expanding her effective range of sight by 10 meters, but Spiderclimb still had about 30 experience before it would level up again.

Her reverie was interrupted by a flash of movement at the edge of her vision. She immediately hopped down from the wall and moved a little closer. There, walking around like a guard patrolling the market was a goblin, fully equipped with what looked like new leather armor and a nasty wooden club with metallic spikes embedded in it.

You have gained the Skill Presence Detection!
You have gained 3 Skills this evolution! Further Skills will require more practice to obtain!

 

Presence Detection

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Allows the user to sense the presence of beings within a range.
Level 1: For 1 Stamina per second, points the user to the strongest being within 10 meters.
Never get surprised again! Unless you do.

A goblin. Amelia put a goblin as the type of monster patrolling this area, and went to the trouble of making sure they were fully equipped.

That was bad. That was very bad. Goblins were weak on their own, that was true, but that assumed two things – first, that the goblin was alone, and second, that the goblin didn’t have tools or armor. Unfortunately, goblins were never alone, and this one had good looking equipment for goblin standards. If goblins were able to equip gear, that meant they were at least level five, and maybe were even evolved.

Or, in short, she didn’t stand a ghost of a chance. It appeared that Amelia wasn’t going easy on her if this was the standard monster that patrolled the first area of the dungeon.

Uh, if it was that, anyway. She didn’t feel like this was one of those special monsters guarding food and water dispensers, especially since she was still skirting the outskirts of the market in case she needed to run. That and this dungeon wasn’t…linear like many, so it might not be where she was intended to go at first.

But, knowing Amelia, it was likely that all the other areas were just as bad or worse. She wasn’t one to go easy on people, especially not when it was an important matter like this. However, she also wasn’t one to make things impossible; there had to be other prey around here that she could take, she just wasn’t seeing it because it was hiding.

She scurried out of sight, hiding behind one of the stall’s boards. Right, new plan, she was going to –

You have gained the Skill Analysis!
You have gained 4 Skills this evolution! Further Skills will require more practice to obtain!

 

Analysis

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Helps the user draw conclusions on a situation.
Level 1: For 10 Mana, helps the user by supplying relevant information they once knew that may have been forgotten.
Kowalski?

That was the fourth Skill! How much more practice did she need?! It really didn’t seem like a notable amount, unless…well, she had been looking for monsters for a long time, and she had been evaluating her situation for about as long, so perhaps it just needed a push that the new information gave her?

She activated Analysis, trying to see if it had anything that might be of use.

Like many things to do with monsters, how monsters obtain Skills is currently unknown to science.

Yeah, she could have figured that out herself. Hopefully Analysis wouldn’t be that bad all the time, but she had asked it about something she had no way of really knowing the answer to, so she couldn’t blame it that much.

As she had been thinking before she was so rudely interrupted, once the goblin was gone, she was going to climb out of the stall and head back out of the market, and go look for things to kill using Presence Detection.

She flashed Presence Detection on for a moment, got a bead on the goblin’s position, and turned it back off. She didn’t need to have constant knowledge of where the goblin was, and she couldn’t afford it either. So, she kept to pulsing the Skill on and off until she was satisfied that the goblin was gone.

Unfortunately, it only extended ten meters right now, so after a few flashes the goblin was gone, and she had to trust that it had kept going in the direction it had been moving. Even so, she waited for a few minutes longer and kept up searching with Presence Detection, just in case.

Satisfied that she was alone, she crept out of her hiding spot and began climbing up the wall, ready to –

You have gained the Skill Active Camouflage!
You have gained 5 Skills this evolution! Further Skills will require much more practice to obtain!

 

Active Camouflage

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Helps the user stay hidden.
Level 1: For 1 Stamina per second, the user appears somewhat similarly colored to objects near them. This effect is visual only and only affects the vision of creatures other than the user.
Not the greatest when moving, though

Joy. Now Skills would take ‘much’ more practice to get, and she didn’t have anything that was directly useful in combat at the moment. Spiderclimb was really only good for running or reaching high targets, Power Attack cost too much and did almost no damage, Analysis made her stop and read a window, and Active Camouflage was apparently not great when moving.

Actually, now that she was thinking about it, where was that flavor text coming from? She never had flavor text on her Skills before, and hadn’t heard of anyone who did either, so…why did she have it now?

It was probably pointless, but she didn’t have anything else to spend the Mana on and she wanted to level up Analysis, so she activated Analysis to see if it had anything to say about the situation.

Amelia appears to have access to the inner workings of Skills, to the extent where she can create new ones, at least for monsters.

That was…actually helpful. So, there was a high probability that Amelia was the one that wrote those flavor texts. Was she doing it in real time whenever Lia got a new Skill? Did she go through every known Skill and apply flavor text for her? Was it something else entirely? She’d have to ask when she was actually capable of speech.

Analysis has leveled up!

 

Analysis

Level 2: 0/200 EXP

Helps the user draw conclusions on a situation.
Level 1: For 10 Mana, helps the user by supplying relevant information the user knows or once knew and may have been forgotten.
Level 2: For 20 Mana, provides the user information that could reasonably be obtained by deduction using information the user knows or once knew.
Kowalski?

Great. She didn’t have enough Mana to even use that new effect. Whatever, she’d just have to level up until she did. She approached the back wall of the stall, climbed over it, and began dashing for the light of day.

Soon she was outside of the market and back in the area between the market and the main office, and she took a moment to bask in the warmth of the sun before she began flicking Presence Detection on and off to look for smaller prey.

It took her a few minutes for Presence Detection to pick up something strong enough to register on the radar. She didn’t know what it was yet, but the fact that it seemed to be moving away from her was a good sign.

She kept Presence Detection on as she ran towards whatever it was, and after a moment she was able to catch a glimpse of the creature. It was…a rat, much like the ones Amelia had tied up and presented to her for eating.

Another moment later and she was upon it, sinking her mandibles into the fleeing creature. She wasn’t confident in her aim with her stinger, not on a moving target, and right now she was more worried about getting EXP than she was about biting into something disgusting.

You have dealt 7 damage to Fearful Rat!
You have killed Fearful Rat! You gain 3 EXP!

Now that she wasn’t focused on catching the thing, she was suddenly very aware of the taste of the rat in her mouth. It…actually tasted pretty good. It was nothing to write home about, but it was something that she could see herself choosing to eat. She tore off the bit that she had latched onto, and chewed it up further before swallowing.

This…would be a good thing to take back to the main building. She would love to have a little food stocked up, even if she didn’t know how long it’d stay good for. If the goblins were really just the standard enemies for the area, then she wasn’t confident she could beat whatever was guarding the food and water dispensers, even after an evolution.

That just left the problem of how to get it back. She could probably drag it with her mandibles, but that seemed…difficult. She’d also be blocking her vision with the corpse, which really wasn’t ideal.

Wait, she had that Dimensional Storage Skill. She had entirely forgotten it, since she had never had anything close to what it could do, but that should totally be able to fit the rat, right?

She pulled up its description, and then pulled up Venomous Sting as well, just so she knew exactly what everything she had did.

Dimensional Storage

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Gives an extradimensional space to store items.
Level 1: Spend 10 Mana to store an object you’re touching. You have a maximum storage capacity of 1m3, and objects within experience the flow of time normally. Retrieving an object costs 10 Mana and you may choose to place it in your grasp or on the ground in front of you.
It’s like a backpack or pockets but way, way better

 

Venomous Sting

Level 1: 31/100 EXP

Applies venom to your sting attacks.
Level 1: Venom deals 25% of the hit’s original damage 5 seconds after any successful sting.
It gets better, I promise

Yeah, Dimension Storage was the way to go. She placed one of her legs on the rat and willed the Skill to activate. The rat sort of…folded in on itself before vanishing altogether. And that was that, her first hunt completed, and her prey stashed away. At some time in the future she’d need to figure out how to add things to her swarm, but she wanted to wait until she had some alone time to do that, and for now she preferred going solo anyway.

Though, even with her level up she was still nowhere near capable enough to take on those goblins. So, it was time to go looking for more relatively defenseless creatures and level up everything just a bit more before she tried to brave the market again.

Fighterman481 So...all I really want to say is that, Amelia may be madly in love, but she's not about to make Lia's training easy. She's planning to pit Lia against the entire world someday, so babying her now would just stir up trouble later when she's not in such a..."controlled" circumstance.

But that's it for me, so, as always, thanks for reading!