The Royal Worm Ascends

The Hatchery's efficiency had indeed lived up to the Overmind's expectations.

Workers—powerful units nearly the size of three-wheeled motor tricycles, with work efficiency comparable to tunnel-boring machines—required only seventeen hours to produce.

And that was without factoring in the boost to biological reactions provided by the strange trees' green energy. With that included, Worker production time dropped to under ten hours, nearly halved.

Unfortunately, the more powerful a strange tree was, the larger the area it seemed to claim exclusively. Whether in the Rockhide Monster Forest or the Goblin Forest, no new strange trees appeared after the tide of root-vine monsters caused by the rapid spread of creep had been dealt with.

Compared to its production time, though, its simultaneous production capacity was far less impressive. Perhaps because the Hatchery had only just been born, it could hatch only a little over eight hundred Workers at once.

That meant that even in a month, the Hatchery could breed only... a little over fifty thousand Workers.

Naturally, that number did not satisfy the Overmind. However, as the Workers continued excavating the space beneath the Hatchery, its various glands and organs would proliferate and expand as well. According to the information the Overmind had obtained from the Swarm Mind, an unmodified Hatchery without the support of any Evolution Chamber technology could hatch more than thirty thousand Workers at once simply by extending its organs to their limit.

Of course, the Overmind had not devoted all of the Hatchery's production capacity to producing Workers.

The Overmind had also hatched two Overlords, freeing himself and Agatha from overly simple command tasks such as keeping watch and patrolling.

Finally, I won't have to deal with those idiots anymore...

Because most animals suffered damage to their central nervous systems when infected by the Zerg virus, most infected were simple-minded fools. Getting them to attack and bite on instinct was no problem, but other tasks—such as digging tunnels, transporting objects, or patrolling designated locations—

required the Overmind and Agatha to direct them bit by bit, until those mechanical, repetitive movements were etched into instinct through the Zerg's rapid evolution mechanism. If the Hatchery had not been on the verge of completion, the Overmind had even considered establishing a Goblin nest and mass-producing infected Goblins as laborers. After all, they had larger brain capacities and could understand more complex orders.

Overlords differed from Workers. Due to their enormous size, hatching a single Overlord took a full two days and consumed enough resources to produce more than five hundred Workers. Fortunately, the Hatchery's internal hatching chambers already had a certain amount of spare space, so Overlords did not require quite as much room as expected. Two Overlords occupied only the equivalent capacity of three hundred Workers.

Aside from that, the Overmind assigned some of the Hatchery's remaining production capacity to the Bait Birds and Arrow Gulls in the bird nest.

It would take some more work to transform the bird nest into a standard Zerg structure, one responsible solely for producing messenger proteins and corresponding hormones to induce larval gene expression.

For now, the bird nest merely produced fertilized eggs, after which the rodent infected that had previously dug the tunnels carried the bird eggs to the Hatchery. They were not even sent into the Hatchery's internal hatching chambers, merely tossed onto the creep outside, where tissue extending from the Hatchery wrapped around them, supplied nutrients, and regulated their hormones, increasing their hatching speed nearly tenfold.

The Overmind was already considering phasing out the Bait Birds.

After all, Arrow Gulls could do almost everything Bait Birds could do. Even when small birds were occasionally needed, it was simply a matter of producing a batch of juvenile Arrow Gulls. Making organisms smaller was far easier than making them larger.

On the evening of the third day after the Hatchery's completion, the Overmind, seated upon his throne and holding a larva with three long legs and five short ones, abruptly opened his eyes. Within the hatching chambers, the two cocoons belonging to the Overlords split open.

The Overmind turned toward the Hatchery.

At that moment, the Hatchery was slowly "blooming" under the movement of the immense muscles all across its body.

The central passage opened. The sharp teeth around its upper opening retracted outward, and the ring-shaped muscles relaxed... Visible to the naked eye, a round, bloated object pushed open the narrowest section at the Hatchery's top as it was expelled from the internal passage.

With a soft pop~, a gigantic creature nearly twenty meters in diameter, its body covered in air sacs like a hot-air balloon, slowly rose into the sky.

The Overmind tilted his head back to look at the terrifying armored beast. He had known Overlords were enormous, but he had never imagined they could be this large—he himself was not even as big as the small feelers beside an Overlord's mouthparts.

No wonder the Swarm used Overlords as transports.

With a body that large, even without evolving specialized abdominal sacs for carrying Swarm units, it could simply grasp a larger piece of carapace with its huge limbs and carry hundreds of Zerg units into the air.

The Overmind lifted the larva with psionic energy and set it aside, a red gleam flashing through his eyes.

When he came back to himself, his perspective had already shifted to high altitude. His consciousness had entered the Overlord's body.

An Overlord's eyes could perceive a far broader spectrum of light than human eyes, making everything around it look strange and distorted. The eight eyes also covered a wider angle than human vision. However, because an Overlord's head was positioned on the lower slant of its body, it resembled an elongated, widened Q without its appendages. Combined with its nearly nonexistent neck and the heavy carapace surrounding its head, its vision to either side was blocked by its own "shoulders," and it could not look up at the sky.

Fortunately, eyes were not an Overlord's only sensory organs. The appendages hanging beneath its abdomen could intermittently release pulses to sense spatial information in the surrounding area. Overlords usually also bore the important responsibility of navigating the Swarm.

At that moment, through this sense, the Overmind could directly detect the other Overlord still being born, all the way down from the exit of the passage at the Hatchery's peak.

While the Overmind curiously experienced the world through the Overlord's senses, the Overlord's body was changing as well.

It rapidly recovered from its newborn state. Large sections of carapace gradually hardened, bony spikes originally buried beneath its tough hide began protruding from its surface, and, most importantly, powerful psionic energy began reverberating through its brain and the neural nodes spread throughout its body.

Because of its massive size, even without the support of any Evolution Chamber technology, the Overlord's psionic level reached Level Seven.

It simply had no offensive capability...

Of course, that was a trait of Zerg psionic energy. Even if Agatha's neural cords had not been damaged, her psionic energy would not have had much offensive power either.

After all, the essence of psionic energy was Void energy drawn into reality through a living being's will. Void energy itself carried annihilating properties; the closer psionic energy came to the essence of the Void, the more violent and difficult to control it became.

But Zerg psionic energy was refined, filtered, and distributed to each psionic unit through the Swarm Mind. The violent portions were all blocked by the Swarm Mind, so Zerg psionic energy was naturally gentler.

Conversely, as the incarnation of the Swarm Mind, the Zerg psionic energy in the Overmind's hands was especially powerful and violent...