"Look at you, hot-and-cold hero," Mikhailis chuckled, shalessly proud. He imagined a stadium crowd cheering each ti the Crymber stomped and steam exploded. Stats overlay listed core temperature swings: 420 °C to −180 °C in three seconds. Ridiculous.
Another notification: SLIWEAVE-ALPHA LIVE. He quadruple-split the screen. Now a dim corridor stitched with dart traps filled quadrant three. The cara perched atop Sliweave's translucent do, giving a top-down view as the variant flowed like syrup over pressure plates. Every needle hissed just too late, punching harmlessly into glossy erald skin. Where runic trip-lines criss-crossed, Sliweave extruded pseudopod fingers, plucking each glowing filant from anchor points, rolling them up, swallowing them whole. Trap dismantled, nutrition gained.
Quadrant four lit as a Scarab's helm-cam flickered on. Crystal outcroppings glistened like sugar stalactites. The Scarab pinged each shard; green orbs popped over resource-rich nodes. Waypoints scrolled to an uplink queue: Potential mana battery, Rune capacitor grade-B, Unknown violet ore. Treasure chests in an RPG indeed.
A laugh bubbled from Mikhailis's chest. He scooted forward and toggled keyboard macros that let him swap between feeds with flicks of a finger. Crymber view, sa view, trap corridor, crystal mine—each smoothly replaced the last. The world danced for him.
He popped the rest of the nut bar into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "Huh. If I had a bag of salt and this screen, I'd never need a tavern again," he declared to the empty room.
A shrill pop-ping from the drawer reminded him—caffeine ration. He snagged a chipped mug from the shelf, poured thick espresso concentrate from a vacuum flask, and took a scorching gulp. Eyes widened. Yes, perfect. Back to exploring.
Overlay text scrolled at the bottom:
Drakeant-Recon Delta: altitude 300 m, tailwind favourable.
He clicked. The main view soared skyward. Now he rode on the scaled back of the Tempestrike Drakeant as it glided above thunderclouds. Flashes lit the underbelly of each cloud, echoes of caged lightning the Drakeant could call at will. In the distance, a double-rainbow arced, fragnted by static discharges.
Too gorgeous. He sat frozen, coffee halfway to lips, a child again watching first airship lift off. I made that. The knowledge felt surreal—pride braided with awe.
A soft tone indicated a private ssage. Rodion's avatar—sterile cube with glowing eyes—blinked on his secondary monitor.
"Oh hush, mother hen," he muttered, typing with one hand. Busy. Experiencing the miracle of remote adventure. He almost added a winking emoji, then rembered Rodion would ignore it.
The sentinel replied at once:
He smirked. "You love ," he told the screen, then dismissed the window.
A hiss beside the desk drew attention. The popcorn bag—not yet popped—lay on a shallow iron plate carved with a warming rune spiral. He'd tossed it there earlier, half-joking. Heat lines shimred above the rune, but kernels remained obstinately whole. He tapped the bag. "Co on, little future popcorn."
Out of habit he flicked another feed—this one to a Worker pair pushing deeper into a canyon sward by mana-reactive ferns. Colours exploded whenever a frond brushed their carapace—blue flare, pink puff, gold sparks. One Worker paused to sniff a blossom; pollen coated its antennae and it sneezed so hard it flipped backward. Mikhailis snorted laugh, coffee spraying a droplet onto his keyboard.
He wiped the spill with a sleeve, unfazed. Rodion would lecture about equipnt hygiene. Good thing Rodion's busy.
Through all of it a background part of his brain—sharp despite the jokes—catalogued anomalies, flagged resources, logged each variant's fatigue. Sliweave's calorie draw rising: note for extra glucose paste. Crymber approaching thermal runaway: ti for a cooldown chamber. He might be a couch explorer, but he was still responsible.
A ping. The stealth Scarab feed entered the queue: downward shaft, walls lined with pulsing fungus. White threads quivered at the Scarab's nearness. They parted as if sensing ant pheromone, then quivered with… was that hostility? Static fuzzed the signal, new sub-frequency overlaid. Mikhailis frowned. He placed that feed on standby, decided to alert Rodion later.
But for now—lava surfing, sa skimming, treasure mining. It was a better show than any Sli Supre filler arc. He rummaged for another snack—
"I need popcorn for this," he muttered, grabbing a bag from under the desk and tossing it onto the warr rune.
_____
Rodion's inert chassis remained inside the palace, standing as silent as a suit of ceremonial armor—yet miles below, his consciousness slid down the psychic lattice like moonlight on a well. The Queen's Emotion Web accepted him without resistance, strands of pheromone data unfurling in sudden, impossible color.
He always forgot the first jolt: no eyes, no ears, only pulses of scent-thought-mory weaving around him in luminescent ribbons. Garlic-sharp alertness tasted green; mineral pride tasted violet. Millions of tiny emotional motes drifted past, each one a Worker's stray notion or a Soldier's instinctive thrill. He sifted through the current until larger tides appeared—mories the Queen herself replayed as if smoothing fabric on a loom.
Most scenes were expected: a ledger of soil nutrients translating into an earthy bass hum; load-bearing calculations echoing like drumbeats; a tactical overlay of Stratum-27's branching halls rendered as sharp peppermint frost. Routine. Comforting.
Then ca the deviation.
The ambient rhythm slowed. Every ribbon of scent around him seed to hush, pivot, and begin spiraling toward a single point: the matte-black egg. The playback ford not in sight but in sensation. Rodion felt the slick cool shell under the Queen's antennae as though his own fingers traced it. He felt the low, heartbeat-slow vibration in its core—thump…thump…thump—steady as a forge bellows. Mixed into that was a curled emotion so tender it stung: protective longing, the psychic equivalent of cupping a candle with both hands in the dark.
Again. The mory rewound, replayed. Each loop the longing grew softer, deeper, older—as if the Queen tried to morize hope itself.
Rodion overlaid his diagnostic trics. Peaks of neuro-electrical discharge aligned perfectly with each pass around the egg. The spikes were gentle slopes, unlike the jagged pulses of hunger or alarm. Maternal imprinting, his analysis core labeled. Continuing escalation. Unknown ceiling.
That shell is inert to normal mana light, he mused, tracing data curves, yet the Queen invests precious cognition cycles. Why?
Within the psychic arena he whispered, voice a filant of logic in all that scent-emotion glow.
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