บท 39: Flight and Hunting

The purple skinned variant stirred from the Collector's back.

'You…can fly?' she said.

The Collector brought the arakka leg she was tethered to in front of its face.

"With the correct adaptations, airborne maneuverability is but a basic form of locomotion for me," said the Collector. It clicked its mandibles.

"Now that I have ascertained the enriching nature of this planet's atmosphere, it would be prudent to assimilate a species with appropriate flight structures better equipped for aerial movement than this beetle.

Yet, a distinct lack of airborne species apparent in this area."

'Ah, I remember,' said the specimen, her eyes alight with recognition. 'It is early summer, I think, and during this time, I have heard that in Sunda, large swarms of locusts will cloud the sky.

Big, big swarms of big locusts that can even eat people whole.

Usually, the birds leave this place then.'

"I see." The Collector clicked its mandibles. "Yet, I have not ascertained the existence of such creatures so far."

'When there is a monsoon rain, they will fly is what I have heard. Though I have never seen it myself. I would like to see that, too. I read much about many things, but I never saw much of it.'

The Collector could sense the humidity of the surrounding atmosphere through its sensitive hairs adaptation and the moisture absorbent spiracles dotting its carapace.

With these, it could approximate the onset of rainfall, yet, the reliability of the predictions were unstable.

Still, it would be prudent to consume one of these airborne creatures, these 'locusts', when they appeared.

For now, the Collector did not place flight on a high priority. It knew that this world might not have possessed significantly advanced technology, but in its place, magical constructs existed, and these could be even more dangerous, even more unpredictable.

Becoming airborne was an exceptionally easy way to become an easy and visible target prone to discovery by even the most basic of sensory systems.

'I always, always wanted to fly,' said the specimen. She stared down at the ground as she dangled from her silken bonds. Then, she looked up, to the sunlit sky before it would cease to be visible in the choking darkness of the Darkwoods. 'Everything seems so simple up there. So free. With wings like the birds, you can just go up and run away and never look back down.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles and began to move into the Darkwoods. "Ridiculous.

You would desire an adaptation beyond your means simply as a means of escape? That is fundamentally a mindset of prey species that exist under the constant fright of death by superior jaws or superior muscles.

They do not choose to fight. They choose to flee.

Thus, they grovel at the lower rungs of the food chain. That you would be content to waste an adaptation simply on such means proves to me only further that you tinkerers are merely compensating for inherent weakness with your trinkets and technology and now this 'magic'.

Stripped from the crutches that support your debilitating weaknesses, all of you are merely but prey."

The specimen grew quiet, fearful of the Collector.

'I'm sorry-,' she began.

The Collector glided under the endless shadow of the Darkwoods, hearing the distant chitter and chatter of insects on the forest floor. "An expression of apology?

Unneeded.

This is simply the nature of tinkerers such as yourselves. It cannot be changed. Remorse for the unchangeable is impractical. A waste of mental resources.

Instead, divert those resources better towards providing me with information."

===

The Collector knew it would take time for this purple skinned variant to grant it all the information it wished to know, and so instead of wasting time, it hunted while she spoke to it. The insects of the Darkwoods were largely tactile creatures that sensed movement through vibrations channeled through the air.

However, the purple skinned specimen communicated through psionic channels, leaving her undetected to the writhing masses below.

The Collector's arakka arms stabbed down in precise and mechanical motions, skewering two beetles and one centipede. It consumed as it moved, its arakka arms raining down like homing missiles to cull some of the endlessly writhing mass of bugs at its feet.

>>>

*Biomass gained (+1)*

Biomass Level: 53/100

*Genetic material gained*

Stored Genetic Material:

-Black Ant

-Black Hobgoblin

-Human

-Lesser Oni

-Frostborn Hobgoblin

-Horse

-Daemon

-Dullscale Rohu

-Lesser Greatcentipede

-Lesser Greatbeetle

>>>

Gaining biomass was slow as the creatures of the Darkwoods no longer provided much nourishing mass, but it was better than doing nothing while the specimen spoke.

'Excerpt from the Compiled Scrolls of the First Circle, published 500 PC…,' began the specimen.

The Collector listened as she regurgitated information, this time about the types of magic.

As she did so, it continued to hunt. Only once it had a full grasp of magic would it decide to incorporate it within its combat systems, for though it was inclined to utilize magic, it wished to know as much about it as possible beforehand.

By the time the specimen had sated the Collector's curiosity, it would hopefully have hunted enough to reach the next metamorphosis level to heal all of its wounds.

With both a fully restored, level 6 metamorphosis form and magic, the Collector would finish what it had started.

It would annihilate the goblin 'thrall' and their self-styled 'lord' as well as any survivors that did not possess notable information.

The Collector hunted for two hours.

Hunting became more difficult past an hour, for after eliminating twenty four lesser insectoid specimen, the majority of the rest, even through their simple minds, came to sense the Collector as an apex predator among bottom feeders, and they fanned out, ceasing to busy themselves with devouring each other to save themselves.

This meant the Collector had to wade in further and further into the Darkwoods for prey, and too far in would lead back to the expansive nest of jumping arakka.

That area, the Collector wished to avoid. It was difficult to hunt there, and hunting the arakka themselves was risky, for one misstep could trigger a chain reaction of arakka leaping down and swarming the Collector.

The Collector instead did not move straight into the Darkwoods but traveled in a circular path around its edge.

Throughout the time it took to hunt, the Collector had bid the purple skinned specimen to continue talking.

In this way, she enlightened the Collector much on the nature of magic.

There were two types of magic, it seemed.

The first was the kind that came from the gods, and though it was vexing, it seemed that it was not technology that granted these gods dominion over natural phenomena, but this substance known as mana emitted naturally from this world.

Magic granted by the gods and their gates was known more specifically as sorcery. It involved portioning a percentage of an individual's spirit roots to a deity and its gate, hence the appearance of luminescent circuitry.

The greater the spread of this circuitry throughout the body, the more of this sorcery an individual could utilize. This, however, came at the cost of being unable to utilize the connected spirit roots for body strengthening purposes.

In this way, there were tradeoffs. Sorcerers often held a vast breadth of spells that could manifest a great many external effects, but at the same time, this left their physical bodies frail and unenhanced.

Then there was magic of the body. Where mana that naturally flowed through the physical form could be channeled and shaped according to the user's will.

This was called body strengthening or martial arts, and in the case of certain beasts that could utilize magic without bowing to any god, primal magic.

Thus, in broad terms, magic that manifested externally was in the realm of the gods while magic manifested internally was inherent in all living beings sensitive to mana.

There were exceptions, however.

Some humanoids by virtue of imbibing mana in different environments could develop abilities inherent to their bodies. The humans of the northern lands apparently possessed extraordinarily durable skin that made them resistant to both shock and cold.

Some of the humans of this land known as Sunda possessed eyes sensitive to the flow of mana, allowing them to easily create and operate magical constructs or identify the nature of magical threats.

These were termed Inhera – abilities inherent to the biological composition of individuals created from growth in specific mana rich environments. The psionic-esque ability of the daemons known as Sapia fell into this category as well.

A form of evolution enhanced by magic.

Beyond Inhera, there were certain abilities developed by a small portion of the humanoid populace known as Ethera.

These were called manifestations of the 'soul', and they were powers that seemingly had no rules to adhere to, all of them being expressly unique to the individual that harbored them.

Those with ethera were generally military units of the highest caliber, often 'adventurers' of high merit.

The Collector knew now that the adventurers it had slaughtered before were nothing. These adventurers, humanoids specialized to defeat creatures, 'monster' as they called them, had their strength ranked on a scale that ranged from one to ten stars.

The adventures the Collector devoured were all merely one star.

A stroke of sheer luck that the Collector had crash-landed upon this part of the world, this remote, largely uninhabited land where apparently only the weakest of the humanoids dwelled.

And the nature of this power, this ethera, was troublesome. On account of expressing the uniqueness of the individual, the manifestation of the power was highly variable.

From the specimen's recitation of certain records and tales, the Collector came to know the nature of a few documented ethera.

There was one that could change a man into a beast.

One that could negate any kinds of harm.

One that could cease the heart with but mere eye contact.

And potentially countless more-

Yet, the Collector came to realize a common pattern among all magical phenomena: rules.

Though magic and mana itself might have seemed limitless in a broad scope, they in practicality manifested with hard coded rules that restricted their usage.

The ethera, for example.

The man who could shift his frail form into that of a monstrous beast would lose the fine tuning of his sanity as time went on.

The one that could negate any kinds of harm could only do so while his feet were planted upon the ground.

The one whose gaze could halt cardiovascular functions had hers eliminated when her stare was shown back to her through a reflective surface.

These limits became less defined with sorcerers that had an array of spells to choose from. The Collector remembered the female sorcerer it had devoured that had chanted the word [Fireball] in Unitan to manifest a gout of flame.

Already, the Collector could make various new conclusions as to the link between Unitan, gods, and sorcerers, but for now, it assessed the combat threat of magic.

Sorcerers were limited to the spells belonging to the gate they connected to, and there was a limit to the number of spells they knew based upon their natural talent and the degree of their connection.

Thus, the Collector analyzed, in battle with magically sensitive individuals, it was imperative to scope out these limitations and exploit them.

More difficult in practice. If these individuals had unique abilities, then they would have unique limits.

Every altercation among them would be a wholly new challenge of analytics.