Chapter 70 Squirrel Queen

            It took the dungeon nearly a century to figure out how to make an essence creature with a hivemind, and the dungeon was rather upset with the process. A hive mind creature had to develop the hivemind while its various bodies were embryos. The only reason why the dungeon learned this was because he was so frustrated with all his failures, he decided to see if he could produce a “naturally” occurring hivemind by making his many failures give birth to litters of essence creatures. Nearly a third of those litters were hiveminds.

            The way it worked was that the sage squirrels used radio to instantly share one mind over many bodies. To create this, the embryos of the sage squirrel had to develop their radio in utero before they had their first thought, and a batch of embryos had to have their first thought within just a few hours of each other to create the hivemind. Once their thoughts were sufficiently complex, they could not add bodies to the hivemind, which was a rather annoying complication for the dungeon as this meant that the dungeon couldn’t just create a thousand sage squirrel bodies and have an incredibly powerful spell caster. The sage squirrel had to be born not made.

It wasn’t all bad news though. Squirrels with different mothers could share a hive mind if they developed their first thoughts within the right time frame. This meant that the squirrels did not have to be in the womb together to create a hive mind, they just needed to develop their first thought at nearly the same time.

While the dungeon was working on the sage squirrel project the radio humans were playing around with drawing essense, and computer algorithms. Magic and science may seem contradictory but they are far from it, its just that if you have the ability to cast spells there is often no reason to study science. In this case they fed each other. The humans were able to make digitial cameras and use them to exactrly map the best ways to draw the essense channels they stumbled upon, and then use computer algorithms to map and optimize the spells.

The purpose of the radio humans doing this wasn’t so that they would be combatants as they had zero chance of beating the mage humans who used haste magic to move at unreal speeds. The purpose of this research was to give the dungeon optimized spells to give the sage squirrels.

With that in mind the humans began experimenting with connecting mana cores, and using multiple people to cast one much larger spell. In a combat situation this would be useless to humans, even radio humans, but this would be the bread and butter of the sage squirrels. The dungeon was very sure it was possible to have multiple spell casters link up their mana to cast larger spells because when his soul was pulled from his homeworld to this one he saw mutlple mages.

A few years in, the dungeon's assumption was proven to be correct. It turned out that if you wanted to use essence drawing to make a magnetic bottle, you needed one caster to create the magnetic field and ten more to shape it. If you wanted to create a magnetic shield to envelop the castors, you needed four casters to create a strong enough magnetic field and another thirty-two to shape it into a bubble protecting them.

Once they were able to consistently make magical electromagnetic shields, they began experimenting with weaponizing them. For instance, using the shields to squash essence creatures like the test bed bear. That didn’t work as well as the dungeon hoped, as it could be used to squash the test bed bear unless the test bed bear had lightning immunity on. That said, the electrical force spell affected anything, including antimatter, that it touched, otherwise, and the more mages feeding it the stronger it became. That said, with radio humans they had serious issues with synchronizing multi-caster spells that had more than sixty-three people, and to be honest, they were only able to get so many casters because they could talk mind to mind with their internal radios. That said, a hivemind would have perfect synchronization.

With that in mind, the dungeon wanted a sage squirrel with at least five hundred bodies. But there was a huge problem with making such a large litter. The squirrel that gave birth to such a large litter would be significantly different from the squirrels they gave birth to. This meant the dungeon needed to create a queen squirrel to give birth to the hivemind sage squirrel, which would be tremendously different biologically.

With all that said, it wasn’t uncommon for insect queens to be significantly different than the brood they gave birth to, but insects were not warm-blooded creatures, so the dungeon had to figure out how to make warm-blooded squirrels have the reproduction characteristics of insects. With that in mind the dungeon began working hard on giving squirrels the reproductive capabilities of insects, both for the queen and her brood.

It would be far simpler for the dungeon to make a large group of bodies for the hivemind if all those embryos started developing at the exact same time. Fortunately, some insects did not start developing until certain triggers happened, so the dungeon’s first and second priority was making a squirrel able to lay eggs, which did not hatch until a certain trigger was released. In this case, temperature. The queen squirrel would lay its eggs in a temperature-controlled room, and once enough eggs were laid, the dungeon would trigger their development by cranking the heat up.

More than a century passed as the dungeon dramatically modified the squirrels' reproductive ability. During this time, the dungeon’s area of influence continued to grow, the radio humans continued to grow in population, knowledge, wisdom, and power. As the dungeon’s area of influence grew the labyrinth grew, and it was now hundreds of miles tall, albeit still not the tallest dungeon on the moon. As the labyrinth grew, the dungeon added more and more fusion power plants, which helped the dungeon grow faster and faster, and the dungeon was producing so much essence that he was starting to compete with the tier three dungeons for essence production. He was producing so much essense that the forest that was around the dungoen was starting to naturally produce mana creatures. In fact there was serious thought about making a mage school near the dungeon, but at this point, more and more mages were radio humans, and the immortals did not want the young radio mages influenced by the dungeon's radio mages until they were old enough to understand the truth. That said that did not stop the mages from continuing to take one of the dungeon’s radio humans ever decade or so, although as the labyrinth grew, that job grew harder and harder as the tier two mages had to climb to ridiculous heights to get there, in fact it often took mages a week to find the humans hidden in the branches of the Great Black Tree Labyrinth.

Although the moon was much different when the dungeon finally completed the queen squirrels reproduction system, the sage squirrels were far from complete. The first batch of hivemind squirrels were born without any mana cores. Furthermore, the senses of the squirrels was too much for the hivemind so the dungeon was going to have to give them alternative senses, and the nature of the sage squirrels meant that they should have a much better sensory organ than the void dolphins had. The sage squirrels would have so much power flowing through them they would naturally discharge the electricity, so the dungoen decided to give them the ability to see with electricity, and take away their eyes and ears which confussed the sage squirrel when its bodies exceeded forty.

The centuries passed as the dungeon modified squirrel after squirrel. This was a far longer process than other projects because the dungeon had to make changes in the queen squirrel before it laid eggs, and then wait for the gestation period before seeing if its handiwork came to pass.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as the dungeon’s radio humans were able to create a lot of new electric, wind, and earth spells, including spells that allowed the caster to become one with their element, albeit with the one flaw that it took multiple casters to draw the overly large essence channels to make that effect. The mages had no idea what they were going to face when the dungeon was finished with his sage squirrels.

Nearly five hundred years passed before the dungeon had completed version one of his project. It took nearly ten thousand generations to bring about the first useful generation of sage squirrels. These squirrels had seven spells etched into their bodies: draw earth channels, draw wind channels, draw electric channels, durability, oxygen, lightning immunity, and discharge.

The sage squirrels looked like mid sized terrors. Each was nearly the size of a ferrot and weighted an average of twenty pounds. They had two heads, six legs, and fourteen tails. They had two tails on each of their heads, a single tail on each of their knees, and four more tails on their back. The reason for the excessive body parts was so that the dungeon could etch the needed spells into their bodies.

Their bones were all made with metallic hydrogen, and with clever uses of discharge they could move through the air however they liked, and since they needed to use discharge to stay floating, they always had to have discharge on at all times, whether they were moving or not. With that in mind, the dungeon gave them sensory organs to use the electricity from discharge to see. It could even work in vacuum. In fact the sage squirrels were hardened against vacuum, albeit not to the level of the void dolphins.

This particular brood of sage squirrels had exactly one thousand squirrels, and when tested the sage squirrels were able to cast spells to connect their essence channels, flawlessly cast electromagnetic shield, and even cast spells to make themselves merge with their element for a short time.

The dungeon was looking forward to the battle between his sage and the immortals’ mages.