My eyes opened slowly and I sat up I looked at the blinking notification in my vision.

  I somewhat regretted continuing to fight the ants, if I’d upgraded at level fifteen I could have gotten an extra eight stat points for leveling to level seventeen. I pushed the regret aside I would have gotten much less XP from most of the ants due to their lower stages as I finally reached adulthood for my species. I wondered what was past adult, extra adult? The old sense of loneliness filled me as I looked at my mark of progress reached, I should have a hive around me to celebrate my achievement but I was on my own.

  Pushing the feelings I aside I forced myself to move on but resolved to work on trying to make progress on my quest and find a mate somewhere. There was a massive pile of biomass next to me to consume I looked at the centipede, it was time to decide to absorb or eat it. I picked absorb the XP cost right now as low and I had a huge number of ants to eat.

  “Yes,” I said and the corpse turned to a dry husk before crumbling to dust.

  I thought about it then selected yes, I’d yet to have a bad experience merging paths and a heavier carapace while possibly negative did have some significant positives that came with it.

  The armor had advanced from common to uncommon, my defensive skill now let it block a large amount of damage, creatures like the aphids wouldn’t be able to do a single point of damage against me now. I looked over the changes seeing how much damage my carapace could potentially negate, I didn’t feel any loss of speed or flexibility and I suddenly considered how much more I could improve this. Imagine if I could merge the Heavy Carapace path, something I doubted wasps even had access to into my own path. How far could I potentially increase my DR even further?

  That was something I had to think of, for now I needed to eat and upgrade my different paths. I began to chow down on the ants and other stockpiled insects letting my biomass tick up as I looked over my skill ups for Stealth, Dagger Fighter and Parry.

  My previous skill ups for Stealth had resolved around pulling in the shadows and doing more sneak attack damage. My new options were tailored along those lines, there were skills for dealing more damage on my first attack out of stealth further increasing that bonus, ones to help me move more silently, one to help block my scent and so on. I chose one that incorporated the previous concept of darkening the area and would pair well with my chameleon mutation.

  My hope was that this combined with my camouflage would make me a ghost even while moving the heat in my chest, perhaps my soul if I had such a thing settled and I moved onto the parry skill. There were lots of potential skill trees to pick from but I had no idea where any of them would lead. There were ones that increased my parry strength based on the weight of my weapon, others that let me use my parry skill with my shield skill (which I didn’t have) and ones that let me parry with carapace on my forearms. I selected one that would increase my parrying skill and make it more reliant on my Dexterity instead of Brawn.

  Lowering my chance to not fully parry my attack wasn’t great but parrying the attack so it hit my leg instead of vital organ in reducing its damage was still better. There was also the matter of my improved carapace and my plans to further improve it. I didn’t know if I would ever be a tank but I did plan to make it so I could survive on the front line of battle. I had chosen the ability to spray venom to avoid having to do that but it had been a choice made for survival and it wasn’t something I was opposed to.

  I brought up my options for Dagger-Fighter I had leveled up the skill to rank five mostly just to see if it would be worthwhile as a skill so far the daggers hadn’t done much to contribute to my damage not able to compete with my significantly upgraded stinger. I was disappointed with what I saw, they weren’t bad options but I wasn’t actually planning on relying on daggers that much and using them instead of my stinger was interfering with leveling up Stinger-Knight. I spotted one skill that gave me a flash of insight, it would pair perfectly with my Parry skill and let me continue to use daggers without sacrificing XP for my other combat skills.

  Now I could use my secondary limbs for parrying, they weren’t as strong as my main arms but that didn’t matter with the skill tree I had chosen for Parry, I could constantly parry attacks reducing the damage and letting me continue to attack with my stinger.

  With my skill points spent I focused entirely on eating until my stomach was bulging as I’d consumed three-hundred biomass already. I sat back letting my body digest the biomass and put it to wherever it stored it and brought up my options for my mutation paths. I had lots of things to work on for all the major groups, head, body, arms, wings, legs and genitalia. That last option was still untouched, and I’d never unlocked any mutation that was related to it. Looking over the options for it that I had ignored last time I decided to upgrade it.

  Quests didn’t seem to be a common thing, or at least I didn’t know how to get more of them. The only quest I had was to repopulate my species, but I had yet to see any wasp humanoids or even wasps. The closest I’d gotten was a murder bee that tried to impale me for breakfast. I chose the option I’d known I would always pick Ancestral Power.

  That might not have been the best choice for others but with my Analyze trait it was a no brainer, I had access to mutation paths no other wasp would ever obtain and passing them on would help to assure my descendants survival. The upgrade cost one-hundred biomass and I felt the greatest pain of my life as my genitals were physically altered. After getting up I checked that they were still intact, they didn’t look different but I hadn’t really expected (or wanted) them too.

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  “I never want to do that again,” I said to myself closing my crotch plate with a mental though sealing my manhood behind a carapace shell again.

  I was going to wait until I upgraded that path again.

  Of all my biomorphs my most important ones were my venom sack, stinger and carapace. I brought up my stinger first, I wasn’t greeted by just three options. There were three options related to the mutation path I had chosen for my stinger initially related to bypassing armor from the puncturing path I had chosen and gone down with the next upgrade, Diamond-tipped. However, I wasn’t just limited to those three options, I had three options related to extending the reach of my stinger further, three for effecting the blade of my stinger, and three related to its vampiric ability. I was excited to go down all those branches until I read a notice.

  That made me pause, apparently while my analyze let me upgrade a biomorph and unlock new paths that didn’t grant permanent access to those paths. I was now left with a choice as I looked at the glowing nodes in the tree of the biomorph. Based on what I knew every other insect and person’s biomorph tree would be a straight line unless there was some other way to gain new mutation paths I wasn’t aware of.

  The options I had now weren’t my only consideration but also whatever future options lay behind that tree. I dismissed the bladed options, my stinger had a blade now and that was enough I didn’t need to keep refining that. The same went for the extended tree I already had a descent reach granted by that mutation it wasn’t a necessity to keep extending it, bigger wasn’t always better. That left the puncturing tree and the vampiric tree. This was a difficult choice piercing heavy carapace was always going to be a necessity but I doubted I’d ever gain access to something like the vampiric mutation again. In the end I went with the vampiric mutation based on this, the puncturing ability of my stinger wasn’t going away and already increased with my Brawn and Dexterity. The vampire mutation healed me and it was so exotic that it set me aside from almost every other insect. The biomass cost for the upgrade was massive and I looked at the price my heart dropping. Two-hundred-and-fifty biomass! The jump in cost was enormous, the first upgrade to this had been just five! I wondered if the cost varied based on what it was but I was committed now and I could always collect more biomass. Selecting the biomorph I felt my stinger burn the red glow around the stinger intensified and the hardened carapace it was made of turned from a dark black to blood red.

  The life steal from my stinger jumped up nearly by half after the upgrade restoring almost a full third of the damage I dealt directly with my stinger back as health. I thought about upgrading my carapace but paused, based on what I knew now about the biomorph paths for my mutations and my plans for trying to merge my carapace with heavy carapace I wanted to wait to upgrade it until I had all three types, light, medium and heavy carapace all merged into one path and select from my options at that point.

  With my stinger upgraded it was time for my second most important upgrade my Venom-sprayer, while contained withing my stinger it was counted as a separate mutation path. There hadn’t been many ranged bugs that I had encountered, the fire-ant arbalists had been the only ones and they had offered no improvements to this biomorph, so I only had three options to pick through. I’d chosen rifling before increasing my accuracy and the next three branches were all related to that.

  The options all continued the theme of accuracy but each in their own way. I hadn’t had a problem with my stinger being damaged and I suspected its strength was somehow related to the strength of my carapace so that would hopefully be solved by analyzing heavy carapace. That scratched off the first option from my selection the second option was a lot better, it didn’t actually effect my stinger in any way only in how I used it having a lot more in common with my skills than a typical biomorph. The third option was good but clashed with my fighting style and the build I was being moulded into. The second option was the way to go and it cost two-hundred biomass, fifty less than the mutation for my stinger but still large chunk. I had three-hundred-and-ninety-two biomass in storage so this would probably leave me short for my next upgrades.

  The searing pain in my head as I selected the mutation left me rolling around on the ground but I sat up, there were no outward changes that I could see and I suspected I wouldn’t notice the difference until I fought next time.

  The upgrade hadn’t so much as increased some base percentage of my accuracy or reducing an opponents chance to dodge but by adding the new neural branch in my brain for just this biomorph it had linked this skill from only benefitting from Dexterity to now also improving based on my Perception and Intelligence stat.

  I needed more biomass now before I could continue upgrading, I started to eat again as I began to look over my options for my venom gland. Unlike my Venom-Slinger I had unlocked improvements to this just one but it opened more options but as I looked them over I realized I would be deciding between fire and the charges I had to use for damage. A bit of additional fire damage was interesting, but I needed more shots to make that effective.

  The options for my venom gland didn’t relate to its damage but its charges. There was one that just straight up increased the number of charges by enlarging the gland, the second distilled the venom into more of a sludge so less of it was needed per shot and the third didn’t immediately upgrade the number of charges I had but split the venom gland in half creating two smaller versions of the gland.

  The first two options had immediate application to combat but I wanted to go with the third. My gut told me that having two versions of the gland would benefit more from possible future biomorphs I unlocked with Analyze. I selected the upgrade and felt the burning in my forearm as the mutation took place. It wasn’t as bad as mutating my genitals or brain but still burned like hell. It had cost another two hundred biomass leaving me with forty-five at the moment.

  The damage, time and charges had all increased since I’d put so many points into Toughness. It looked like I got about two more charges for every five points in Toughness above ten and the same seemed to apply to my regen rate. The damage seemed in increase at a ratio of one damage per two points of Toughness in addition to the damage increase from my Poisoner skill. The time for the poison had gone up but I wasn’t sure what the math was for it yet.

  I only had forty-five biomass left and I would run out of ants soon so I probably could only get one more bio-morph upgraded before I had to go out hunting again. Crunching through carapace with the pincers on the side of my cheeks I slurped up the hemolymph and scraped the inside of their shells clean. It took about half an hour but I finished off my kill’s I’d stored gaining three-hundred-and-ten biomass.

  I’d upgraded all my bio-morphs that could be put in the weapons category apart from my pincer which I had no intention of wasting bio-mass on to upgrade. Looking over my mutation paths I selected one for arms that I had only upgraded once. Striker Muscle let me deal more damage based on my Brawn attribute, I’d neglected this bio-morph so the next upgrade was only fifty bio-mass and hopefully I could afford another for it. Looking over the list there were various options all related to increasing damage but I chose one that I best thought would fit my build as it looked like it would take advantage of a focus on dexterity.

  With my current stats of twenty Brawn and thirty Dexterity I dealt an extra fifty total physical damage with just this bio-morph. Looking through the next available mutations for this biomorph I selected another also relying on my dexterity but this time to increase attack speed. This cost me a further two-hundred-and-fifty biomass.

  With all my prey eaten and down to just fifty-five biomass it was time to go out on the hunt again.