Alien Evolution System 6 Slaughter

The entry to the den was quiet. It was a sizable pit in the ground, easily enough for the hobgoblin to have went in an out of, covered with piles of sticks and a layer of leaves to camouflage it with the environment. Presumably, the goblins did not want any unwanted visitors during the day when they slept.

Afternoon had barely come. The temperature was hot and the weather humid, the warm, moist air of the jungle gathering on the forest floor. Insects and birds alike chirped aplenty, not knowing they were singing to a scene of impending ma.s.sacre.

The Collector was thorough. It quietly removed the sticks and leaves, uncovering the pit. It sloped downwards, into the earth and leading to a much larger cavern where the twenty goblins could comfortably rest. It crawled in with a measure of difficulty as it was larger than the hobgoblin which was about the maximum size the hole could accommodate.

When the Collector was inside, it felt the air underground was damp and cool, perfect to hide in when the jungle became torrid in the day. It took its hand, now humanoid in shape, and extended an index finger. Fine lines of spider-silk emerged from the fingertip, glinting in the sunlight that draped into the dark of the pit's entrance. It used its finger to draw up a web, sealing the entrance shut. The pit became darker, the webbing blotting out the sunlight.

There would be no survivors. No wasted bioma.s.s.

The goblin den was simple. One large cavern where all twenty goblins slept, sprawled about and snoring. Underground, it was dark, but the Collector's night-vision and antennae could sense each and every one of these little creatures, their minute movements, the up and down of their breathing, the beating of their fragile hearts.

It was a testament to the Collector's silence that it could stalk its way to the middle of all of them without alerting them at all. Or perhaps it was a testament to their laziness.

Either way, it was weakness. Prey should always be on the alert. The Collector was disappointed. This was what happened when animals gained unrefined intelligence – they lost touch with their most basic instincts.

The Collector knelt by one of the sleeping goblins. It rustled a little, perhaps sensing its impending doom, but it rolled over on its stomach, snoring and snorting.

The Collector decapitated the goblin with one clean swipe of its clawed hand. Blood spurted from the goblin's empty neck, spattering onto a companion sleeping nearby. This other goblin woke up, rubbing its eyes. They glowed yellow in the dark, but with how wide they became, the glow accentuated his utter terror.

"Monster! Monster!" shouted the goblin, scrambling up.

The Collector punched its claws into the goblin's stomach and expanded its fingers from within, slicing the creature in two.

By now, all the goblins had roused from sleep and started screaming a symphony of terror and alarm.

One brave goblin attempted to bite at the Collector's leg but instead shattered its teeth on blackened carapace.

The Collector raised its foot and squashed the goblin, grinding the creature's skull under its heel.

The goblins, their eyes adapted to darkness, saw everything clearly, and knew they had no chance against this monstrous intruder.

"Draug! Draug!" they shouted in unison. With ma.s.s hysteria gripping them, they collectively moved further into the cavern, into a secondary, smaller chamber.

The Collector took its time, leisurely following them.

"Where Draug!?"

The goblins looked around in confusion. The Collector also looked. This cavern was cozier than the one before. It was more private and smaller. There was a rug and a basket filled with fruit by it. Draug's quarters, presumably.

"I killed Draug," said the Collector. Its voice was deep and raspy, a clicking undertone emphasizing its every word with an unnatural, skin-crawling intonation. The side effects of producing vocal cords mixed with insectoid genetic material. "I butchered him wholesale at his watering hole. He's nothing but bones now."

The Collector neared the goblins, and they withdrew even further, huddling together and shaking in fear.

"You strong! You Draug now!" said one of the goblins.

"You Draug! You Draug!" repeated the others.

"I am Draug?" said the Collector. It knelt on the ground to look the goblins in the eye, almost as if it was talking to children. "What does that mean, little creatures? Draug is dead."

The Collector was no fool. Although it would have liked to simply annihilate all these goblins and consume them, it was better to obtain knowledge from them. Until the Collector was at the height of its power, it was still in a strange, unknown world of many dangers. Utilizing language to extract information was efficient. To be sure, consuming the goblins was also possible, but the Collector needed keywords about things it wanted to know first for that to be effective, and interrogating these goblins enough might give the Collector some idea of what to search for in their memories. Optimally, it would be even better to communicate and learn many things from the goblins instead of consuming them and learning only about one topic.

"Draug mean strong, very strong! Strong one. You are strong one!"

"Draug mean you leader. We follow!"

"You Draug! You Draug!"

The Collector remained motionless. It would seem that 'Draug' was not a name, but a t.i.tle of leaders.h.i.+p. It was amused that these lowly lifeforms wished to follow it, but it could see that this was simply a desperate plea for their lives. The greatest honor the Collector could grant these primitives was to absorb them, placing their genetic material into the Collective database where they would be immortalized.

But for now, the Collector humored them, using its newfound position of authority to ask about what it was most curious about.

"Tell me, since I am leader of your pack now, do you know of humans?"

The goblins jumped up and down, excited to be able to tell the Collector of things they knew about, hoping that by being useful, they could save themselves.

"Humans tall and mean. They kill us, so we kill them. Take food and women," said a goblin.

"Many, many humans. They outside jungle. We want kill them," said another. "Humans outside jungle weak. We hungry, so we take from them."

"Here, here!" said a goblin from behind the crowd. It grunted and heaved. "Here human we capture!"

The goblin crowd parted, and one of them pushed forwards a limp humanoid.

The Collector a.n.a.lyzed it. Judging from the memories it had absorbed from the hobgoblin, this was a female of the human species. She was curled up in a ball, s.h.i.+vering and naked. She was b.l.o.o.d.y and bruised, her auburn hair torn in many places.

"I see," said the Collector.

"If you want, you use," said one of the goblins. The other goblins nodded in agreement.

"Use?" the Collector asked. It pressed one of its claws gently on the human's arm. The skin easily yielded to the monomolecular edges of the claw and started to bleed.

"Make babies, feel good," said the goblins.

"Ah, procreation," said the Collector. It had no need to procreate. Certainly, if it was to be given a gender, it would be male because male physiology granted it the most muscle ma.s.s and power, but it was immune to unnecessary and exploitable instincts such as the drive to reproduce.

"Pro-?" asked the goblins, confused at the difficult word.

"Interesting." The Collector stood up. "Your language is sufficiently complex, and yet all of you are too simple-minded to utilize it fully. Curious. Perhaps there are more intelligent subspecies of yourselves."

The goblins looked at each other, trying to see if one of them had understood what the Collector meant.

"Do not worry yourselves over my rambling," said the Collector. "You will not have to worry at all anymore."

The goblins sighed in relief.

"Your intelligence is too lacking for me to gain information through conversation. Consumption will tell me more than your primitive babbling."

The Collector slashed forwards, taking wide, arcing swings with its deadly claws extended. It was a slaughter. Each swipe cleaved multiple goblins into multiple pieces, their body parts flying in the air and their blood splattering everywhere.

The goblins screamed, each swipe thinning their numbers and lowering the volume of their collective cries, but one had the wits to remain calm and dart through the Collector's legs and attempt escape. The Collector did not pay heed to it. It would find no way out.

The Collector retracted its claws. Blood had made its entire body slick and reeking of iron. It opened up its pores, draining the liquid bioma.s.s into its skin. The blood faded almost immediately, sinking into the Collector's hungry cells.

There was the matter of the human.

The Collector grabbed her head in its palm and shook her ever so slightly. The human s.h.i.+vered. Goblin blood had drenched her, painting her pale skin red.

"Human," said the Collector in the goblin's language.

"Please," the human whispered.

The Collector could not understand. It was evident the human did not speak the language of the goblins.

"Save me, knight, save me," said the human in a weak voice no louder than a whisper.
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The Collector sensed the human's vitals and registered a slowing heartbeat and internal hemorrhaging that had forced her into a state of delirious shock. She would be useless for providing information and soon to die anyway. With a quick jab, the Collector stabbed its hand into the female's heart, ending her life in a merciful instant.

The Collector set about consuming everything it could in that den, devouring all the dismembered goblin bodies, the human female, and the lone goblin that had attempted to escape only to find itself ensnared by webbing.

-Bioma.s.s gained

--Bioma.s.s level 25/100

Disappointing. The goblins provided a meager 1 point of bioma.s.s at this point and the human a pitiful 5. However, this was to be expected. Higher levels of metamorphosis required exponentially higher levels of complex bioma.s.s, after all.

More useful, however, were the memories and knowledge.