When Joe selected the insect faction his crystal grew smaller and turned light green. It was no longer see through. Unlike before, life ebbed and flowed within the crystal, giving Joe a strange feeling.
His focus returned to the window which had once again changed. Ego was beside him absorbing the information just as quickly.
“Ego what do you say?” Joe asked. The system had stated earlier that he’d be able to enter a unit, and Joe figured that would be the elite. Whatever option he picked would be the one he’d be staying in for quite some time, so he should be getting the choice.
“Great lord! Thank you for giving me the option to give you my opinion. In my humble opinion snails are too slow for aggressive combat.” Joe agreed with that, basically anything could flee the snail, making it good for only defensive combat. Also, it surprised him,
“The tiger beetle is good, but it does not mesh well with the legendary perk,” Ego said. “We want to incapacitate our enemies, not kill them. Such powerful mandibles will at best cripple or foes.”
Once again Joe agreed, although he didn’t quite know how Ego knew so much about these insects.
“Ego how do you know about insects?”
“When the great lord chose the insect faction I gained some information about them.”
“I see, so anyway, do you think the caterpillar will be the best choice?” Joe said.
Ego eagerly flew around in circles, probably from happiness that the lord was listening to him. Joe was happy that his companion liked him, but it wasn’t the best to be admired. He could feel that Ego was new-born almost.
Stolen story; please report.
“Yes, great old one, it will be the best choice,” Ego said.
As Joe selected the caterpillar option, blue light shone from the window down to the stone floor, which slowly molded like clay into a large caterpillar almost as big as a dog. Just as the process was about to be finished, a light sprung out from his core connecting them.
With how big this caterpillar is, I hope it doesn’t need to eat.
When the caterpillar stopped forming, it looked up at him with its large black eyes, stretching its neck backwards. It seemed to be waiting for orders, but Joe had none to give, so it turned around and dragged its face across the room, moving in circles.
Boy that seems popular here.
“Ego could you try taking over that caterpillar’s body?” Joe asked.
“Of course!” Ego said and rushed towards the caterpillar. His ball of light sunk into the caterpillar’s head, and after a second it protruded from the caterpillar’s eyes.
All of a sudden, Joe had access to a set of new sensory stimuli. He could see the room from the caterpillar’s perspective. It was a lot more blurry than what he could see, and he realized that it was rather cold in here. It handn’t impacted him or Ego, but he’d have to think more about details like that as his army grew.
This access would also prove useful for when Ego left the confines of his core. He’d be able to see how the caves looked, and give Ego direct instructions, although as he saw Ego drag the caterpillars head through the floor, he doubted he wanted to leave his army in his charge.
Joe looked back at the window which had changed again.
The system didn’t ask him if he’d understood what it had tried to tell him, it just sent him on his way. What if he hadn’t understood a single thing? Then he was just on his own, left to get killed by another core. Brutal.
Joe claimed the truemass feeling energy swirling into him and checked up on Ego. He played around with the caterpillars body. A small sensation of pain came from the body as it was pulled across the floor in an unnatural fashion, but it didn’t hurt. Joe didn’t feel like screaming or making it stop. It was just like another number for him to contend with.
Joe opened all the tabs he had access to. Creating a simple iron pickaxe would cost one truemass. That was simple enough. Creating more advanced pickaxes would cost more than that though. He could only see that value keep increasing until it reached ridiculous sums.
100 000 truemass for a refined diamond pickaxe, Christ.
The tab containing all of the species he could unlock and upgrade went stretched across his entire sight. There was at least a couple of thousand upgrades he could get, most almost all of them were grayed out. Currently, only three were unlocked, shining a green light.
As he checked the units he could create he saw what that meant. He could create stone ants, cheap, they were only three truemass each and they came with their own pickaxe, namely mandibles. He considered the possibility of creating an army of ants. They were ferocious back on Earth, thriving wherever they went. That was for later though. He pushed the thought back into his mind.
The second option was called spit bugs. They cost five truemass each and they would shoot an acid out of their rear. So archers essentially. They would be a great addition later on, but for the moment he needed to focus on the acquisition of truemass.
The third option seemed to be geared towards exactly that. Tiny, weak, and really only good at eating up resources were ladybugs. These ferocious things were capable of destroying whole ecosystems. Don’t let their innocent and cute appearance fool you.
The ones available for him were called cave ladybug, and they would eat through the rock all around him rather quickly. They only cost one truemass to produce, so, Joe produced ten of them.
They spawned and Ego shuffled over to watch them. Each one was about the size of a thumb, with a gray sheet and white colors. Joe ordered them to go and mine, and they quickly scuttled off.
Joe watched them in anticipation to see how quickly they’d shred through the wall, but they went about it in a different manner than he’d expected. They secreted some sort of liquid on top of the walls, which seemed to weaken it, turning it into clay, before devouring it. They took small sheets of with each iteration.
This is going to take some time.
