Minas Tirith Port, offshore observation platform.
The sea wind whipped around Veylin as he stood with his hands behind his back. Sarah stood quietly beside him. Black chitinous armor covered her porcelain-pale skin, making her look like an exquisite Gothic sculpture.
Tristan, Kale, and Ola watched the distant sea nervously.
The surface looked calm, but beneath it, a Biological Submarine shaped like an enormous squid was cruising through the depths. It was Leviathan One.
Beneath that placid blue expanse, the Biological Submarine codenamed "Leviathan One" cruised through the deep sea. High above, hidden within the clouds ten thousand meters overhead, Sarah's latest evolutionary creation-the Queen Insect "Kirov" Type Two-hovered silently like an enormous floating jellyfish, looking down on everything below.
"Begin," Veylin ordered calmly.
"Yes, Father."
A glimmer flashed through Sarah's purple-black compound eyes, and an immense psychic wave instantly swept across the entire sea.
[Kirov Type Two airborne.] [Altitude: ten thousand meters. Hive Matrix... deploying. Connecting aerial nodes... stable.]
As she explained, the images in everyone's minds abruptly changed.
Their view opened up. Mountains, rivers, forests-every detail was projected directly into their consciousness in three dimensions. This was the Hive Matrix they knew, but its precision now was astonishing.
"Damn, that's clear..." Ola instinctively reached for the image suspended before him. His rough fingers passed through a miniature mountain. His eyes widened in disbelief. "Before, we could only sense a few kilometers around us. Now it feels like someone's stuffed the whole sea into my head."
Veylin did not answer. He merely stirred his consciousness, and countless tiny moving points of light instantly appeared across the vast map.
"Watch these nodes."
Guided by Veylin's thoughts, their vision zoomed in rapidly, as though an invisible hand were pulling it forward. Those insignificant, dustlike points expanded at tremendous speed,