A benefit of working with veterain Samurai? That depends. If it's someone like Heracles, then it's a lot of clean up, but otherwise an incredibly safe, fun, and lucrative job. With Blizzard? It's safe, sure. And we still get combat pay, but even with the heavy winter gear we specifically ordered to work with her, shits still too cold to work comfortably near her.

  -Interview with Matte Cat PMC, 2055

  The fight for our lives that I was expecting didn't really happen. Laser and Heracles decimated the swarm at the front, Shrew was able to penetrate the Fourteen's goopy coating and actually map the tunnels and direct ambushes, and I had Rogal manage the swarm bubble, shredding the Fourteen goop cause it apparently also contained ModelSeven eggs. I was sitting on a platform following Shrew, working on the production queue.

  I set up the extra four pairs of Fabricators and then seven Builders that Rogal recommended, but had them on standby. I then continued to set the queue to work on combat swarms, and turned my thoughts inwards. I didn't accelerate my thoughts, as that would make this excursion take longer.

  

  That would require Class I Hover Vehicles Catalog. I would also recommend getting the Class I Material Science Catalog and the Class I Chemical Science Catalog, as these would allow your Swarms greater access to different materials, as well as better defences for whatever vehicle you end up getting.

  

  Very well.

  Unlocked Class I Hover Vehicles

  Unlocked Class I Material Science

  Unlocked Class I Chemical Science

  Unlocked Class I Physics

  Unlocked Class I Advanced Spatial Manipulation

  Unlocked Class I Plasma weapons

  Unlocked Class I Advanced AI Programing

  Unlocked Class I Power Generation

  Points reduced to 26720

  Tokens 2

  

  Indeed. Shall we go over vehicle options now?

  

  There are two routes we can go in terms of the vehicle itself, and two options for obtaining it. For the vehicle, we can go with a simple truck hauler.

  A diagram appeared on my augs.

  Extended cabin with a decent living area, enough room to house five people comfortably, but not spaciously. The trailer has enough room for two hundred Swarm Dice and a small space for Fabrication.

  It looked like a thicker version of a truck and trailer. Nothing special.

  Of course, once you unlock Class II Advanced Spatial Manipulation, you can easily expand the trailer to contain thousands of swarm dice and plenty of room for Fabrication and storage.

  

  While I agree, this is the cheapest option that can be used semi-normally in a city.

  

  The wire frame truck leaves my augs and what replaces it causes me to sit up straighter.

  

  Correct! I figured that while a full kilometer long ship would be impractical, a tenth that size would be manageable. Fully armed with two 135mm cannons on both port and starboard, one double barreled 135mm cannon turret on its bow, and twenty hard points for point Defenses. With the Class II Spatial Manipulation, it would have more space inside than the truck trailer, but it also has multiple floors and bays. Storage for tens of thousands of dice, an entire Fabrication deck, and Modular designs to allow for sensor, engine, and armor upgrades.

  My eyes were bulging. I wanted it. This thing could be my actual main base instead of a floor of a damn megabuilding that tried to kill me.

   I say with heavy disappointment in my voice.

  Correct again. With the bare minimum required to make this behemoth float and have only its hard point mounts, with room to add the main cannons, it would still be one hundred and sixty thousand points.

  I glance at my total, then back at the model.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  

  She chuckles, tingling my brain in a pleasant way Correct for the third time. The other option would be to build it yourself.

  The model exploded into multiple, manageable chunks. Then, a list formed.

  Bridge

  Armor

  Engines

  Power supply

  Crew deck

  Fabrication deck

  Officers deck

  Storage

  Observation deck

  Main cannon

  Port

  Starboard

  Bow

  Hardpoints

  Hydroponics

  Vehicle bay

  

  That is one method. The other is even more hands-on. Using a different AI seed in a Fabricator, you could have your own AI figure out the specifications, design, and cost in order to make your own blueprint. And thus, instead of buying two hundred thousand points worth of blueprints over the course of however many days, you could work with your own network and spend five thousand points on a knowledge download for them.

  That was a far better deal. The file Synaptic sent me was just this, a rough model exploded into chunks. If I could build it myself, I would.

  Unlocked Class II Spatial Manipulation

  Purchased Class II AI personality Seed

  Purchased Dream Learning nanite Augment

  Purchased Multi-research and design information

  Points reduced to 27630

  Tokens reduced to 1

  One of the silver swarms in the back paused for a brief moment, then I felt the budding AI enter the hive network. Before I could reach out to then, Rogal reached out to me

  “General, please allow this one to develop a bit first. I have seen what Visser Synaptic has shown you, and that would be beyond an AI seed that had just developed. Please give it some other tasks, simpler tasks, and allow it to develop a personality core.”

  That made sense. It took six hours for Rogal to develop, I could wait that long to start designing my new ship.

  There was still a problem. I needed a vehicle to transport the now one hundred Swarm Dice that would only grow in the time it took us to kill this hive.

  So, I sent a few simple requests. Make some blueprints for a transport vehicle able to contain three hundred awake dice, a personal vehicle able to hold six people and a couple Swarm cubes, a few weapon designs for point defence, a better optimization of swarm creation, and a small fortification that my Builder swarms could make in ten minutes.

  I felt an acknowledgement from the new AI seed, and a simple approval from Rogal, then I focused my attention on the map Shrew was generating.

  It was a massive, twisting series of looping tunnels that descended hundreds of feet below the surface and spread out for miles.

  “Excuse me, Shrew, do you have an idea as to where the hive core should be?”

  She doesn't glance up at me as she begins to speak.

  “There are a number of locations where a hive could be down here, and after checking the surface hive distribution and comparing it to the tunnels I have mapped, there are three locations that have the highest likelihood of containing hive structures.”

  On the map, three points glowed blue. Each of them was within four hundred feet of each other, and about a mile below the surface. They were also six miles of tunnel worth of walking away. I also noticed some walls behind us shifting on the map.

  “Why are the tunnels moving in this map?”

  “Fourteens and Twenty Eights, most likely. A command type is probably in control of this hive, probably a high numbered one. Best case scenario, if we can get Gunny appropriate coordinates, he will atomize the hives for us, bypassing the plans of the hive. Worse case, we will run into a Thirty something spawner and you will lose a decent chunk of your swarms.”

  “Wait, why would I lose swarms?”

  Before she could answer that, the Mole behind us shifted and drilled into the wall to our right, speeding off. The map then revealed a branch of tunnel that was on an intercept course with us, and the Mole drilled to it. I sent a Scout swarm to observe the situation and was shocked to see the violence the pod unleashed. The single massive drill split into eight drills attached to tentacles, and they were ravaging a column of two Forteens being followed by four Twenty Threes, eight Twenty Ones, and ten Fifteens, along with hundreds of Threes.

  Shrew doesn't react. I just realize how absurdly over powered the Samurai in New Phoenix are.

  I check the map and saw the other group was progressing slightly slower than us, so I sent a call request to Senestera.

  “What's up, kid? Bored already?”

  “A bit. I saw you guys were moving slower and got curious.”

  “That's Fleming's fault. He keeps testing new chemicals and requests Blizzard to freeze the ‘interesting’ ones, then he ships them off to his lab. And before you ask how, portals.”

  “But otherwise fine, right?”

  “Yeah, nothing too crazy yet. The first main chamber is coming up, so we're expecting a bit of a snag, but otherwise we're fine. You've got six vets, with Heracles at Class IV, with Gunny on standby, so it's more of a point farm for you and Chocolate. The main chamber should be interesting, maybe we'll see a Forty something. Last time we saw one that high was something coming down from Nevada a few years back.”

  We chatted for a bit longer, then she had to go cause they were about to enter a chamber.

  I focused on the map again, seeing that the path Shrew plotted for us bypassed any chambers entirely.

  I laid back on the hardlight structure, thinking about the stories I read on various forums posts, official interviews, and hacked corpo files Cody and I read over depicting Samurai hive dives. The desperate struggle for survival, surrounded on all sides, trying desperately to avoid being ripped to pieces in the dark and unaware of where you were going and wandering for hours.

  Then I realized that I counted that pretty hard, not to mention my team members. So long as I didn't allow them close, the antithesis could never surround me. I could do some limited mapping, but Shrew blew me out of the water, bypassing the antithesis attempt to obfuscate our path. And then Heracles and Laser Lasso simply stomped any Model Twenties into the dirt. I couldn't even call my family since they still had a day before they woke up.

  It made me question my path. It was a good thing that I was in no danger, that I could easily counter any antithesis under Twenty. But there was no excitement, nothing that I could do to speed up the process, no rival to challenge me, push me to greater heights. So, I turned to Synaptic.

  

  In the grand scheme of the Protectors. Yes. Safe, steady elimination of the threat would be preferable. You did grab the technology Catalog that would ensure that. However, even the War Swarm has stumbled, been pushed back, and have had to redesign entire planets to adapt to a new threat the antithesis throws at them. As one of the frontline civilizations that fight the antithesis, there are a number of counters that have been developed specifically to target the Swarm, and a decent majority of those upgrades became standard abilities for higher numbered antithesis. EMC, communications hijacking, even some rare forms switching from eating biomass to metal. Area of attack abilities using sound, water, fire, sand, plasma, Gravity, and many others.

  You are not invincible, Victor. And since you have the points, you should shore up some of those weaknesses before its too late.