READ NOVEL ONLINE B2 – Lesson 44: “The Punch You Don’t See Coming…”
<< Alpha Log -
6952 SFY-Third Era, 6 standard months since Planetfall.
2 days since the beginning of Operation: Safari Hunt >>
Before anyone says anything else, I would like to state for the record that technically, the Dragon’s Garden counts as a training simulation, as defined by the native understandings of the term’ dungeon.’ As such, it in no way violates the terms of any previous contracts I may or may not have signed (under duress!) with Naughty Ducks Interstellar Games Inc.
All content found there-in is solely the work of ALPHA-555-12-4412 and the residents of Federation Expeditionary Outpost A-00-01-87643.
Any and all sibilance to previous works are purely coincidental.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s get this show on the road!
Your first question is likely, ‘But Alpha! Why bother?’
After all, isn’t the goal of the Dragon’s Garden a distraction?
Yes! Yes, it is!
But does that have to be all it is? Is not one of the key principles of planetary conquest the three Rs? Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle!
Reduce your dependency on extraplanetary resources by sourcing native equivalents.
Reuse your equipment to save time and resources! That Class-X Laser Bore works just as well boring through your enemy’s armor as through the ground.
Recycle what you can, whether it’s enemy supplies, equipment, or ideas. Why go through all the trouble of doing it yourself?
While the primary function of the Dragon’s Garden is bait, both for the Adventurers and the approaching bandits, we have to think long-term here.
If my goal is to turn the cavern into a successful outpost of the Federation, then it needs a connection to the wider world. There’s no telling how long I’ll be here. The Federation might jump in tomorrow, or I might be stuck on this rock for the next century, building the infrastructure I need to crack the ice layer surrounding the planet.
Toward that end, a so-called ‘dungeon’ offers several benefits.
First, it’s an active draw for natives, both Adventurers and those looking to possibly settle in the area. While I’ve found a few gems in the rough among the goblins, the quantity and quality of talent I’ll need in the future will only grow from here.
This also gives me the opportunity to study these ‘Cultivators’ and ‘Mages’ in a controlled, more natural environment. My experiments with the bandits have been fruitful, but by their nature, they’re not the most cooperative bunch.
A dungeon also offers the opportunity to discreetly spread Federation technology and ideas among the native population.
Why bother, you ask? Good question. My current identity won’t last forever. The more I learn about the natives, study what little history I’ve been able to collect and connect the dots, the more I’m certain that this isn’t first contact.
Too many things don’t quite add for this world to not have had some interaction with the Federation.
Even if not the Third iteration.
My interactions with Jīshí, in particular, strike me as… odd. It hadn’t wholly occurred to me at the time, but Jīshí’s reaction to supposedly reading the memories of my ‘soul’ wasn’t what one would expect from a native of a world with no apparent spacefaring capability. Even from possibly thousands of years old rock ladies.
She had shown a rather worried concern about my exploits (rude!), yet never once had she actually questioned concepts such as traveling between stars and planets or even life beyond the local star system.
Compared to her complaints about me personally (again, rude!), her reaction to that knowledge was muted. More of a… silent contemplation rather than world-view shattering revelations it tended to be for those in her situation.
As if she was already aware of such things.
The events with the Deadwood Tree only further strengthened my belief in this matter. After all, she had said the organism was responsible for destroying several planets prior. If that’s true, it may even be the cause of the debris rings orbiting the rocky supergiant in the sky.
I can only attribute the delay in making these connections to the damage to my personality and processing cores. It makes me wonder what else I missed while recovering.
Not that she’s getting away with STEALING MY TAWP!
Ahem, As I was saying… my identity as a ‘dungeon core’ will eventually come under scrutiny. More so, as more numerous and experienced Adventurers visited the cavern to explore the Dragon’s Garden. I simply don’t have the full scope of cultural understanding to play the role well enough.
Even the Adventurers here already seem to believe I’m some sort of aberrant… or am half-insane (RUDE! ALL OF YOU!). So, before the truth comes out, I must lie down a firm Federation presence in their hearts and minds. The goblins are already loyal, mostly — even if they don’t yet understand to what or who — while Dr. Maria is a prime example of how loyalty can be bought with knowledge and technology.
I need to make the cavern, and thus the outpost, indispensable to the Adventurers. To where not only will the truth not phase them, but they will come to our defense if the need arises.
And so we come full circle.
Why am I putting so much time and effort into what should have been a simple redirect? Because If I can pull this off, it won’t be just that. The Dragon’s Garden stands to be the beating heart of the outpost from which the Federation’s influence over this world will spread.
There was just one small problem I hadn’t accounted for…
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“More of them are coming from the north!” Big Bert yelled, his billowing voice easily carried over the chaotic battlefield. At his words, a small group of goblin hunters and Adventurers broke off from the frontline. They rushed toward the northern wall just in time to see a horde of skittering creatures burst from the treeline.
A hundred carapaced creatures charged the walls, massive mandibles attached to even larger, bulbous heads clicking in chaotic disharmony. The sound was so loud that it nearly drowned out the defenders’ cries and the clash of steel on insectoid armor.
Several larger creatures stayed near the back. Even compared to those charging forward, their heads were massive, dwarfing their body. On top of their heads sat a long, hollow horn. A deep blue light emanated from within, and one of the goblin hunters called out, “SHIELDS!”
Goblins pulled long poles from their backs and rushed forward along the northern line. They plunged the poles into the ground in front of the gathered defenders. The ball-like tops of the poles whirled before shooting into the air. At the top of their arcs, they unfurled into plates held aloft by spinning rotor blades.
The edges of rods and hovering plates sparked as a glowing white energy field swept outward to fill the gaps in between. At the same moment, each of the creatures at the back of the horde released a barrage of glowing blue slimeballs from their horns. The glowing balls of goop soared through the air in high arcs before slamming into the energy barriers and splattering across the solid light surface.
The burning substance caused the barriers to flicker and spark as it rained down on the charging horde. However, the creatures in question seemed barely affected by — or didn’t care about — the burning blue substance as they, too, slammed into the barrier.
At a signal from Boarslayer, small holes opened in the deployed barriers, large enough for only one or two of the creatures to pass through at a time. The creatures took the bait, and the waiting Adventurers cut them down as they pushed through.
Alpha watched the entire process through several [Wasps] scattered around the battlefield before turning his attention to another one.
Deeper in the forest, an army of ants clashed with a horde of massive… termites?
At least, that’s what Alpha thought they were. These creature’s morphology seemed far more varied compared to the ants. Huge soldiers with snapping jaws were accompanied by smaller, agile ones whose only job seemed to hold down the larger ants. Intermixed were slower-moving termites who could shoot mortar-like globs of slime from long horns. Then there were the skittering balls of glowing blue the size of watermelons — like ticks gorged on blood — who would charge into the ant army. Only to explode and cover the surroundings in burning slime.
Alpha had almost missed that last type, as they were fast, and their heads and legs were tiny compared to their explosive abdomens.
Thankfully, the enemy’s numbers were much smaller than his own army of ants. The termites seemed to favor these specialized units over the sheer number of the ants. The result was it took several natural ant soldiers to take down a single termite soldier, even if Alpha’s intermingled Antonio-model antborgs helped even the odds.
The result was a rather unsettling stalemate of sorts, with each army pushing and losing ground in an unpredictable ebb and flow.
Occasionally — mostly those lines left to the natural ants — a few of the termites would slip through the defenders and swarm into the surrounding forward, attacking anything they came across.
With Alpha’s warning, the goblin village and gathered Adventurers had reacted in time, but the termites were relentless, and Alpha had quickly allowed the use of a few tricks the goblins had ‘won’ from the dungeon.
It was more than he’d wanted to show so early in the game, but…
“This is kinda my fault…” Alpha said to the bobbing form of the incubating Antoinette. Despite the antborg still being a growing embryo, Alpha could almost feel her judging him.
She wouldn’t have made such a silly mistake, after all.
“Don’t give me that look, young lady!” Alpha said. “Anyone could have made this mistake!”
Antoinette bobbed doubtfully at him.
“Okay, OKAY! So maybe I got a little too excited at finding the source of the ant’s ‘nitro.’ But can you blame me?! They never bring it back into the colony, and they only ever seem to produce it when under major threat!”
It had taken forever to figure out exactly how the nitro was produced, but once he had, Alpha had nearly kicked his own circuits for not seeing the obvious.
Chemical analysis of what little of the nitro-like substance he had collected showed it shared a similar composition to the golden ‘honeydew’ substance the ants harvested from the aphids in the root room.
At that point, he still hadn’t figured out what exactly caused the change, but he still started stockpiling the resources. Alpha had even expanded the root room, digging out his own chambers so that he could tap the roots without disturbing the colony’s natural farm.
That’s when he had made his first mistake.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that other organisms would take advantage of such a massive root system in some way. The woody roots spread out for hundreds of kilometers in all directions, and the ant’s farm was only a small part of that.
What Alpha hadn’t expected was to break into an entirely different colony, only a few kilometers away from the ant tunnels.
At first, Alpha had been excited at the prospect of absorbing another colony. However, That excitement quickly died as it became apparent that the termites weren’t just farming the root system like ants, but devouring it. Surveys showed parts of the root system were infested with the creatures, and the damage was enough that entire sections had died.
The blue slime the termites secreted was highly acidic and particularly effective against the woody roots. Right now, they too only occupied a tiny section of the whole, but that wouldn’t always be the case. If these creatures were like their smaller cousins, they would continue spreading so long as food was available. Left unchecked, there was a strong possibility that they could irreparably damage the root system.
If Alpha’s theory that the ant napalm was somehow synthesized from the root sap, then that would ruin a lot of his plans. More so with this other colony being so close to his own.
So, Alpha had done something about it.
It had started with small raids on the termites. Alpha would send in antborgs to dig tunnels under the termites’ own, then collapse them. His plan had been to cut the termite’s access to the root system off little by little, hopefully starving them or forcing them away from away. At first, it had worked. Alpha would collapse a tunnel, and the termites would rush to try and clear it, only for Alpha to collapse another. Those termites trapped on the other side would be slaughtered by antborgs and collected for study.
Everything seemed to go well for a time.
Then Alpha had made his second mistake.
Or rather, it had been what he hadn’t done.
Alpha didn’t have the time or resources to exploit the termites as he had the ants, so he hadn’t bothered to fully scout out the termites’ colony. After all, if it was anywhere close to the size of the ant’s, it could stretch for hundreds of miles and comprise tens of thousands of tunnels. With everything he had to deal with at the moment, Alpha hadn’t bothered beyond sending a few MUD slimes and other scouts to look for something interesting.
So it had come as a surprise when termites broke into the goblin’s cavern early that day. The insects poured into the forest, devouring the new source of fresh wood at astounding speeds. By the time Alpha could establish a response, the termites had invaded the ant territory, instantly triggering a war between the two colonies.
Part of Alpha knew that with the two colonies being close, such a thing was inevitable. But he also knew that his intervention and cutting off the termites from the root system had forced the termites to push out, accelerating the confrontation.
It didn’t help that it came at the worst possible time.
Or maybe the best? It wasn’t any stretch to say the Adventurers had been a boon to the defense of the village. To their credit, they had rushed to defend the village as soon as the first termite was spotted.
Bert, in particular, was defending the western wall practically by himself.
Something had to change, however, or they would be caught with their pants down when Icefinger’s men arrived.
Thankfully, there was one blessing in this mess.
The ants had started producing napalm once more in response to the termites.
And Alpha had seen how…