Chapter 304: 7
I shook off that line of thought, and refocused on the conversation I was ignoring. Calen's honest plea for help was refreshing. I was getting tired of being avoided all the time. My muscles coiled slowly as I stood to stretch slowly. I didn't know what was going on with him, but his lack of suspicion toward Vernon was more than a little irritating.
I stood up casually. Walking around on Ethan's side of the group. Stopping directly behind him as if I were waiting for him to give the order.
{Vernon won't like this plan of bringing me along,} I stared at no one in particular.
My eyes scanning each of the men in the group one by one. My dislike for Vernon was set in stone. He had four guys that made up his group. Besides him. The mage, and three mostly unknown ability users.
The mage was the only one in the group that wasn't wearing top notch gear, and didn't seem to like the rest of the group. I didn't think he was a willing member of Vernon's little group. He wasn't one of the people that would be coming with us. Calen on the other hand seemed to have a tighter relationship with the two people he'd brought with him. I liked one of them.
The other one seemed neutral. I didn't like him, but at the same time I didn't not like him.
{Vernon will do whatever he can to keep you out of it,} Ethan glanced at me over his shoulder.
{The real question is what will he do to keep me here,} I snorted when my eyes fell on Vernon {I've been working hard at cultivating a good reputation here.}
"What do you think Ethan?" Savannah interrupted us.
I'd been completely ignoring the conversation so I didn't know what she was asking about. Ethan on the other hand had been doing a better job of keeping track of what was being said, and filled me in on the details of the beasts that they referred to as spiders. The nickname fit since the beast looked just like spiders, but acted like a combination of ants, and wolves. A single queen at the center of the massive hive would take meals from the millions of male offspring she produced in exchange for the opportunity to reproduce. They weren't exactly a species restricted to one planet.
The other rare females that the Queen produced were hunted by the queen herself. Those princesses mimicked the appearance, and scent of the many males within the colony to escape, and create a hive of their own. Often choosing to escape through portals where the mature Queen couldn't go. Now normally mana toxicity would kill anything that jumped from the planet they were born on, but these spiders didn't have a normal mana core. Their mana core didn't actually require a specific planets mana until they matured.
This mutation allowed the species to spread whenever, and wherever they wanted. It wouldn't be a big problem if the nests stayed a manageable size. They created a nest on a planet, and grew. Sometimes more than one nest would form on a single planet if it was big enough. The males had a short lifespan of a year or two.
The females on the other hand lived for decades, and they could preserve a batch of eggs through conditions that would kill any other living thing in a heart beat. Sometimes when a replacement Queen wasn't nearby the Queen would opt to throw her eggs into space. They could float around in space indefinitely theoretically. When they got close enough to a planet they'd get pulled down. If the planet had life on it the eggs would hatch, and start the cycle again.
If there wasn't then the eggs would just wait there dormant. Most of the variants of the spiders had a single large Queen. Smaller Queens would be the size of a Humvee if you didn't include their legs. Larger ones could walk the oceans if they wanted to without getting their back wet. Males never had a body larger then a Humvee.
Most would be chest height at maturity, and grow from there. They were largely a carnivorous species that attacked anything that moved, but some variants were omnivores, and there were even a rare few that fed on plants or other non living things. My wings twitched as I absorbed the information. Hard to kill planet jumping creatures was something new to me. I found them a little exciting.
I was practically salivating at the thought of what they're cores might taste like. I'd never tasted cores from a creature that could jump planets. I wanted to know more about them, but there was a disturbing lack of information on how the creatures worked. There were two things humans knew besides the fact that they could jump planets easily, and some about their biology. One was that the spiders were a highly aggressive toward humans.
The second was that the nests always grew out of control. It didn't matter where they created a nest. It just grew out of control. The less carnivorous version of these spiders could be contained to a certain degree since they were smaller then their carnivorous cousins. Their cores went for double what other cores went for.
I didn't know if it was because people didn't know much about them, and were still sending them to scientists to research their unique properties, or if it was because the quality of their cores was higher then normal cores. If it was the quality of the core that pushed it's price up then I was even more interested in getting a taste. Beasts flesh wasn't always the most appetizing thing I could put in my mouth, but their cores were a completely different story. To me the cores were sweet candies wrapped in layers of flesh. Some weren't as tasty as others, but that didn't stop me from being interested in the taste.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone