Swarming Sovereignty

Amelia woke up, feeling for all the world like she had fallen asleep only moments ago.

“Ah, good, you’re up.” Jerry said. “How are you feeling?”

Amelia paused, taking a moment to confirm she was still in that same room, then looked inwards. While her regular magic reserves were more or less unchanged, her Hero power had been…locked down. It was still there, but she instinctively knew she couldn’t use it as freely as she used to.

“That’s not power from being a Hero.” Jerry said. “That is raw bits of the system that were thrust into you when it broke.”

Amelia frowned. She hadn’t even felt his presence in her mind, something that disquieted her to no end, just another reminder that he was significantly stronger than she was. “What’d you do to it?” She asked warily. “I thought you were getting rid of it?”

“You’ll need it in the future as my assistant.” Jerry said calmly. “But the way you’ve been using it is dangerous to both yourself and the world at large. As such, I have restricted it to only interacting with the parts of the system dedicated to the swarm. And, even then, any changes you attempt will be sent to me for manual review, so don’t think you can get all change-happy just because you still have the ability.

“I have also taken the opportunity to clean up your existing changes to the system, integrating them in a way that isn’t going to cause more errors with the system and polishing up some of the more…frustrating artifacts you couldn’t quite get rid of. I’ll be pushing that update to the world the moment I send you back, but, before then, do you have any questions for me?”

“How long was I out? How will this affect Lia?” Amelia asked. “And what did you change?”

“You were out for roughly two weeks, and Lia will be perfectly fine. More than fine, since in this patch I took the opportunity to apply a fix for her as well. Nothing nearly as drastic as what I did to you, I just needed to make her body a little better suited for using the system’s power.

“As for the changes, it’s mostly minor optimizations and fixes that make the systems you’ve put in place work with the existing ones. I’ve made a record of those, and I’ll expect you to read through and understand them once you start work as my assistant. Aside from that, the user-facing changes are as follows:

“First, I’ve removed the “Swarm” prefix from species names. It’s going to become redundant when every sapient being is part of the swarm, so there was no point in keeping it around. Second –”

“You said when, not if.” Amelia pointed out, a glint in her eyes. “May I take that to mean we have your backing and our goal is all but guaranteed?”

“No.” Jerry said quickly. “But, at the rate things are progressing, I think it is more likely to occur than not. You should not get complacent, however; your victory is certainly up in the air, and dropping your guards will lead to your demise.”

“But if I die –”

“If you die, then I will keep your soul up here, to serve as my assistant full-time for however long it takes to untangle your mess. I am fully capable of giving you the necessary abilities to make that work, so you will have no special protections of any sort. Now, as I was saying, the second thing I did is refactor the evolution system entirely, for both regular monsters and the swarm. Evolutions will no longer see any sort of limitation or penalty based on how strong the monster was originally, and I have standardized all evolution and conversion times to be a flat one hour.

“The biggest change is to the frequency and nature of evolutions; evolutions will come much slower, but each individual evolution will be more impactful, and will no longer reset your stats. The Skill acquisition system has likewise been updated, giving a flat limit to skills per evolution which will roll over, much like the change Lia made for herself. To compensate for limiting Skills in this way, I have given the ability to delay Skill acquisition once the requirements have been met, allowing you to ignore Skills you do not wish for. And that is the end of the notable changes, do you have any other questions for me?”

Amelia thought for a moment. “My only other question is what happened to the modeling wax of my cocoon and the items that were within.”

“They have been placed in your dimensional storage, with the rat pre-cocooned for your convenience. I’ll be placing you next to Lia now, try not to die out there.” He waved a hand, and then Amelia was whisked away, back to the dungeon.

There was a sudden, brief moment of pain in Lia’s head, and then suddenly Amelia was in front of her, smiling widely. “Your friendly neighborhood Hero is back to save the day!” She said exuberantly. “I assume you got all the details about the system change?”

Lia blinked in surprise. “System change? Is that why my head hurt for a second there?”

“Probably.” Amelia confirmed. “Jerry did a bunch of changes while he was fixing me. I’ll give you the details later, but we should get me converting now. One of those changes is that converting and evolving will always take one hour, so by the time I’m done everyone should be gathered and I can brief everyone on what’s going on.

“Now, I’ve got that rat cocoon with me still, and I’ve got the modeling wax for mine, so I’m going to dump it and the rat on myself, and I fully expect you to convert me into some rat-based race, okay? I’m not that attached to being a vampire, and getting you access to every single type of magic is far more important than my race. Worst case scenario, I just transform away all the rat bits, so seriously don’t worry about it.”

Without leaving Lia a chance to respond, a torrent of modeling wax appeared over Amelia’s head, swiftly covering her. A moment later, a smaller cocoon appeared in that same spot, falling onto her and absorbing into the cocoon.

Lia sighed, glancing around herself warily. She had cleared all the enemies in this area, but there was no telling when more would be coming. So, she had her guards set up a small perimeter around her, where they would alert her at the first sign of trouble. She hadn’t wanted to bring the guards along, but everyone else had insisted, and they were coming in handy now, so she supposed everyone was right this time. That out of the way, she began to skim through Amelia’s myriad options for conversion.

And, like she had suspected, there were a lot. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to filter out those that weren’t rat-based or magic-focused, so she was able to narrow it down to a few options after only a few minutes.

According to Analysis, Vampire Ratkin maintained most of the properties of vampires, except instead of being based off of bats, it was based off of rats. This mostly manifested in their feral form being more ratlike, as well as communication with regular rats instead of communication with regular bats.

It was a tough choice. Each of the options had its pros and cons, so she had to weigh them carefully. The Millennium Sage was likely the most immediately powerful of the lot, assuming their relative strengths would be preserved by the binding, Fallen Hero was almost certainly best long-term, and Swarm Architect seemed to be fantastic for supporting the swarm.

Unfortunately, mass support was not attractive compared to the other options; Amelia had always displayed overwhelming power, and that was something that they desperately needed. Even after the whole Ira situation, Amelia’s power would likely be necessary in their continued expansion into the Spine, and their conquests in the civilized world.

So, it came to a payout in this current situation versus a payout later on down the line. And, when she phrased it like that, the choice was obvious; she’d have to take the long-term option. Yes, the Ira situation was less than ideal, but Lia didn’t think the addition of one more powerful person would change their plans. Even if it would change their plans, the Fallen Hero, whether or not it was the strongest of the options, would likely still end up being stronger than anyone else in the swarm, so it wasn’t like it was going to be weak, either.

With that settled, Lia got Amelia converting, and ordered some of her guards to grab the cocoon and carry it back to base as they returned. While they walked, she also began sending out messages to the rest of the sapient members of the swarm, instructing them to meet back at headquarters for an emergency meeting.

So it was that, one hour later, everyone was gathered in one of the offices they had been using for “official” meetings, waiting anxiously for Amelia to finish converting. And, as the cocoon in the corner melted away, Lia was struck with a sudden wave of extreme dizziness, much to the alarm of those around her.

Fortunately, much like when she had been when she was nearly unconscious when Ira attacked her, she still maintained a semblance of awareness of her surroundings courtesy of her swarm senses.

“She’s fine.” Amelia said, standing up. “She’s likely just overwhelmed by gaining access to literally every type of magic at once.” It was hard to tell, as Lia was looking from her own unfocused eyes supplemented by snippets from the perspective of the others, but Amelia seemed to look exactly as she had before.

“You, go grab her a cup of water.” Amelia said, pointing at…Dahlia, Lia thought.

“Amelia, that’s not how we do things here.” Rose said carefully. “If it is something trivial like this, we ask, do not order.”

“You may do things like that, but not me. I know the hierarchy here, I’m well within my rights.”

“Oh?” Rose said. “Lia doesn’t give orders, she asks nicely. Are you implying that, even though Lia feels like it is important to ask politely, that you are above her and do not need to?”

Amelia grit her teeth. “She has no need to do so. She is the supreme commander here; no one should be willing or able to disregard her orders.”

“And yet, she asks anyway.” Rose said calmly. “It was a shock for me too, at first, as it was for most of us who were enlightened, but it is the way she has chosen to operate, and as such we have followed suit.”

“Rose is right.” Lia croaked, dizziness beginning to fade. “You need to be polite to other people. It is fine to order around unenlightened members of the swarm, as they are not capable of feeling much of anything, but we try to keep relationships between us enlightened people as friendly as possible. That will change in the future, when we grow larger, but for those of us here now, I would prefer we treat each other as friends instead of underlings or coworkers.”

“Very well.” Amelia said, turning back to Dahlia. “What was your name again?”

“Dahlia.” Dahlia said slowly.

“Then, Dahlia, would you please get Lia a glass of water?”

Dahlia nodded cautiously, standing up and grabbing one of the glasses on the table before leaving the room. She returned moments later, having filled it from the drinking fountain nearby, and set it down next to Lia.

“Thank you.” Lia said. “Please, take a seat, we have much to discuss.”

As Dahlia sat, Lia sipped at her water, and, once she had finished the glass, began to speak. She filled the group in quickly, introducing Amelia before turning the floor over to her to explain the system changes. Amelia quickly and succinctly summed up what she had been told of the changes, then turned the floor back over to Lia.

Lia gave everyone a few minutes to think on that, then began to speak slowly. “I…don’t think this changes our plans, right?” She said. “While our lives have gotten more convenient, none of those changes were enough to give us an edge.”

“Agreed.” Rose said. “Though it will likely decrease the number of losses we take.”

“Oh, yeah, speaking of, there’s one big problem with your plan.” Amelia said.

“What’s that?” Rose asked curiously. “I’m open to better ideas.”

“It’s about what you do with Ira. Why kill him if we can use him? Yes, using him as-is would be highly dangerous, but we don’t need to. If we just convert him with, say, a couple other people and a few strong monsters, we can entirely erode his sense of self. Then we just build our new recruit back up with some extra conditioning from yours truly, and she’ll be perfectly safe to use.”

“Would it be doable if we don’t use other people?” Lia asked. “I don’t want to do that to people who have done nothing wrong.”

“I feel like that’s an overreaction, but if you don’t want to, we won’t.” Amelia said indifferently. “Yeah, it should be doable, but we’ll need a lot of monsters to pull that off. We can just chuck him in my dimensional storage until we’re ready for that, then. That aside, I’m assuming you want me out fighting those monsters and protecting everyone here?”

“Yes.” Lia said. “And…I think that’s meeting dismissed. Everyone get back to training, we don’t have a second to spare.”

Fighterman481

I took this opportunity to tidy up some annoyances about the system that I had while writing. It was a convenient opportunity, so I did it.

Anyway, this is a sort of transitional chapter, because writing about a bunch of grinding is boring, next chapter we're probably timeskipping to just before the fight, so look forward to it!

And, as always, thanks for reading!