The Anti-Intellectualism Demon King’s World Invasion

Chapter 16. The Most Vicious and Ruthless Predator 3

Pudding. It refers to the predators in my ecosystem.

A giant pudding that eats slow and large jellies, and a strong pudding with a tough jaw that eats small and hard-shelled jellies.

These are the main types, but I intentionally raised a third type of pudding that is not particularly advantageous for survival.

The mobile pudding. It rolls up its body and bounces or rolls, or runs quickly with elastic legs to capture and eat fast jellies or other puddings. It’s a type of carnivorous pudding.

These guys make up a significant portion of the meat-eating puddings.

They are generally over 60 cm in diameter and weigh 15 kg. There are two types: one specialized for running quickly (12 km/h) without scales, and one with scales that rolls a bit slower.

Objectively speaking, they are not very strong creatures. An average adult male on Earth could kill them with a kick, let alone a club.

The ones with thorns can be beaten with a club. They don’t have regenerative abilities like fantasy slimes that regenerate even when crushed.

However, these guys are the fastest predators in my ecosystem. They are agile enough to catch external reptiles or birds that have been turned into dessert troops, and strong enough to tear apart large herbivorous mammals or livestock.

They don’t understand the concept of sociality yet, but they have evolved to move in groups and swarm to devour meat.

I use these guys.

In the cactus forest, there are large camels that eat cacti and fast-growing grass, and smaller camels that are still larger than Homo sapiens.

“Why do you have to make it so complicated? Just say there are camels.”

“Clearly, they are two different species!”

“Ah, yes… But still, just call them camels since they are camelids.”

Originally, there seemed to be hamsters and ants, but now that those two civilized species have disappeared, it’s a free-for-all. Thanks to the magic of Yogo-Tosos, nectar rain pours endlessly.

And they are thriving immensely by devouring the plants near the Taymong River and the wetlands close to the cactus forest.

The problem is, those creatures are quite large and agile, so the existing carnivorous puddings can’t catch them.

The jelly-eating crocodiles, which were turned into a dessert army, are specialized in catching fish, so they can’t catch those gigantic herbivores.

So, let’s deploy the carnivorous puddings and see what happens.

“Alright. What will happen?”

Observation result 1: The camels leisurely walked away from the fierce charge (12 km/h) of the carnivorous puddings. Currently, the carnivorous puddings are not predators of the camels.

We gave the carnivorous puddings stronger muscles and reduced their mineral content to increase their speed.

Observation result 2: The camels simply crushed the carnivorous puddings with a kick during their fierce charge (45 km/h). The carnivorous puddings couldn’t hunt the camels.

We restored the mineral carapace to the carnivorous puddings and reduced their size.

Observation result 3: The carnivorous puddings moved quickly, but the energy consumption was too high, and they collapsed from energy depletion while chasing the camels.

It seems the carnivorous puddings need a different kind of improvement…

“What should we do?”

Leave them alone.

“What?”

The carnivorous puddings, which have been improved to this extent, have already become predators that bounce around and attack every living creature they see, tearing them apart for meat.

To survive, the prey will also evolve. We will accelerate time with divine power and observe how the survival competition among these creatures unfolds.

So, we brought some quick-footed creatures from the community. Rodents that can live in wetlands… In other words, creatures similar to capybaras or beavers, large, fast, and capable of swimming.

When left alone, the carnivorous puddings couldn’t respond at all to the abnormally fast capybaras. Those rodents were surprisingly well-caught by the dessert army crocodiles and even the giant frogs.

At this point, the puddings can’t deal with fast creatures like capybaras or large creatures like camels.

Eventually, they increased their size and entered the water, becoming aquatic predators by eating jellies, fish, or crocodiles and frogs. It seems that the puddings can easily evolve by increasing or decreasing their size.

Perhaps it’s because their body structure is simple, or maybe it’s because the expansion and contraction of their internal organs according to body size are relatively free.

I kept observing. The carnivorous puddings left on land gradually fell behind in the competition, but occasionally succeeded in hunting and reproducing.

Those that survived spread their genes. Then, the evolutionary tendency of the puddings became quite clear.

I thought they needed to be at least 60 cm in diameter to hunt camels, but they started to get smaller instead. 50 cm. 45 cm. 40 cm. Then 35 cm. They went down to 20 cm and finally settled at 30 cm. The optimal body size that balances weight and speed.

And their carapace became harder, and their bodies became more elastic. The magic consumption decreased, and they started consuming herbivorous or omnivorous jellies instead of minerals.

The original carapace evolved into spikes. I thought it was unnecessary, but some of them developed strong muscles and showed that they could kill a crocodile with a single body slam, impaling it on their spikes.

I was encouraged by this result. I made their spikes even more vicious, but that made molting difficult, so I intervened directly to change them into a more efficient form.

Evolution continues.

“The world’s ‘military’ score has surpassed 1,945 points, and the level has risen to 5. You can now choose a new trait.”

I chose the new trait ‘Cooperative Battle’. It’s a trait that gives bonuses when fighting in groups.

I smiled with joy.

“Got it.”

“Oh. Did something happen with this trait card?”

After testing the enhanced pudding with the new trait a bit more, I came to a conclusion.

No, it’s not right to call these creatures pudding anymore, as they no longer retain the shape of pudding.

They are [Candy]. Hard, charging once, bursting, and melting, these carnivorous desserts in the dessert army focus on agility and strength.

“Finally, the [Camel-Eating Candy] is complete. It has a hunting success rate of 5% against camels.”

“······Isn’t that low?”

“The hunting success rate of carnivores is generally pathetically low. As long as they succeed enough to reproduce, it’s fine.”

Look at this. This carnivorous predator, about 30 centimeters in diameter, has now shed its previous sluggish snail or bouncy ball-like movements. With dozens of tentacles, a flexible body, and strong muscles, it can leap over 1 meter in any direction.

The running speed using the tentacles is an average of 30 km/h, which means a human running at full speed might barely escape, while camels can be easily outpaced. When it accelerates by bouncing its body, it can charge about 30 meters at over 70 km/h once.

A hard mass weighing about 4 kg, covered in glassy, mineralized armor, charges and strikes with its horn-evolved spikes, instantly breaking bones or piercing internal organs of Homo sapiens, causing immediate death. Camels, too, would be injured if struck in the legs or knocked over.

These creatures have no social intelligence, but they can secrete pheromones, form groups, and swarm to tear apart the enemy’s body.

It takes only 3 days for these creatures to grow into adults. Their lifespan as adults is just 3 hours.

Due to budding reproduction, if they have eaten enough, they give birth to nearly 100 offspring upon death.

The 100 offspring have the disadvantage of dying if they starve for just 10 minutes, but they devour any visible organic matter and rocks, growing from 15 mm in diameter to 30 cm while eating and excreting.

“Wow······. You’ve truly created a monster.”

I used an enormous amount of divine power to enhance the species’ specs to coexist in the current ecosystem. If the life level rises a bit more, more aggressive tuning will be possible.

“So?”

Camels have already overbred in the desert. Using these camel-eating candies, I will mercilessly hunt them and raise about ten thousand of them.

“And then?”

As soon as the next world opens, I will open a dimensional gate and inject these camel-eating candies to the limit.

The next dimensional gate, and the one after that, will keep pouring in candies. When the dimensional passage opens, these creatures will naturally jump in, attracted by the smell of their kin’s corpses.

If the next species is made of meat or plants, they will be ground down. These creatures eat camels well, but they eat softer and smaller prey like Homo sapiens even better, and they can also eat plants and minerals.

“What if the species is made of mystical beings? Oh, does that not matter? Since we will choose another world through the auction anyway······.”

“No. We won’t do that. We will naturally collide with another world.”

“What? But then it would be meaningless against species that rely on mysticism.”

“So, for a long time now, I’ve been scouring the community to find a way to grant magical abilities to non-intelligent beings. Maybe I can fuse them with toppings? Since I lack knowledge about magic, I can create ‘Yogurts,’ magical creatures that will form the legion of Yog-Tosauce, and deploy them en masse.”

Combining these two creatures will probably crush any mediocre force.

This is the most vicious and ruthless predator.

There’s no need to attempt slow strategies like ecosystem destruction.

In fact, I originally intended to go for a more ecosystem-destruction-focused strategy, but if the opponent is likely a ‘good defeat’ oriented player who cooperates and manages internal affairs rather than military power, there’s absolutely no reason to do so.

First, reduce the enemy population quickly and create a dessert apocalypse to win.

If the initial shock through candy doesn’t work, deploy Yog-Tosauce right after the rift opens to ravage them.

The opponent, exhausted from trying to block the candy and yogurt legions, will find it nearly impossible to defeat Yog-Tosauce.

“Wait. Hold on. That… that strategy seems a bit nonsensical. Why are you so sure the opponent will fall for a quick-strike strategy? They could handle the candy and yogurt without much trouble and even manage to take down Yog-Tosauce… well, it’s extremely difficult, but still possible, right?”

I’m not sure.

“What???”

The angel questioned, but I wanted to question back.

Is there a ‘sure strategy’ in the ecosystem? Did dinosaurs go extinct because they had a bad strategy? Their strategy was excellent, but a meteor suddenly appeared and devastated the ecosystem, leading to their extinction.

You just choose the strategy with the highest probability.

“How do you know the probability is high?”

It’s a process of elimination.

Let’s say the player is mid-tier or higher. They won’t quit. It’s only the third round.

And if they’re mid-tier or higher at this stage, they probably climbed up with a cooperation-focused build. Because that’s the ‘best strategy.’

Now, let’s say the player is lower-tier. Lower-tier players have a sure way to avoid top-tier forces. They can buy the worlds of quitters. Then they can survive. They might even have time to rebuild their civilization during the collision phase, or even leap to mid-tier or higher.

And if a player quits at this stage, they’re probably in a state of near mutual destruction or annihilation with the opposing civilization, so they have no choice but to quit.

In other words, all the worlds that quit at this stage will have terribly low scores. In other words, there will only be unattractive worlds for mid-tier or higher players.

And the fact that civilizations are in a state of mutual destruction or annihilation means that ‘predators’ fought each other and exhausted their power.

So, what would be the most numerous players in the game if we didn’t auction worlds right now? Think logically.

“Cooperative players who didn’t invest much in military power?”

Correct.

I will refine the dessert legion and target those ambiguous mid-tier to high-tier forces.

“What if we encounter a top-tier force strong enough to defeat Yog-Tosauce?”

In other words, what if we encounter a meteor?

In that case, we threaten them.

There may be forces I can’t defeat, but there are no forces I can’t ruin.

No civilization can refuse to negotiate with a dessert legion that has a Yogurtosaurus capable of single-handedly wiping out half of their civilization score.

“Let me just say, you are in the position of the meteor that fell on the dinosaurs who were living their lives diligently with well-established strategies.”

Then from now on, call me the master of mass extinction.

“……”