After all the things Kai had just thought about, like her only training for the future, starting things off with training might sound a tad bit counter intuitive. There wasn’t a lot she could do instead though, they didn’t have access to the time sink that was the internet and, just because she had realized that she was worrying all the time, Kai couldn’t just stop preparing. It was just important that while she did that, she also enjoyed herself and the time spent with her daughters.

After they arrived at their ‘training court’ Kai handed two relatively short sticks to her daughter, earning herself a confused look. “What are these for?”

Kai raised her lower left arm somewhat shakily in response. “I want to do something a bit different today, namely training these two beauties.”

She hadn’t really used her new arms yet and mostly let them rest to her side. Sure, Kai had experimented with them and tried to get a feeling for them, but out of fear of them not yet having fully grown and something going wrong she had never put any strain on them. 

These few exercises had been enough to tell her that getting a hang of her new limbs was going to take a bit longer. Considering that humans grew up with their two arms and basically trained their coordination while they were still infants, she hadn’t really expected anything else for herself now.

It did make her wonder though, since her arms were still not quite fully grown yet did that mean she was still considered an infant queen?

Huh, that was a weird thought to have, even if it was probably right. Kai had just never thought about her body that way since she had crawled out of that egg six months ago. Humm, there is probably not much use worrying about it anyways.

Not wanting to waste anymore time, she instructed her daughter to basically wave the two sticks in front of her, as if she was playing with a dog, which would be Kai in this instance. Kai’s own mission would be to ‘catch’ the sticks and whenever she managed to grab hold of one she wanted Anna to put a bit of pressure on the arm.

The whole thing sounded silly, and it honestly was. Scrap that, the pair of them had to look hilarious, even more so because Kai wasn’t able to reliably catch the damn sticks, which was embarrassing as hell!

It couldn’t be helped though. This exercise was meant to train her coordination and to ingrain certain movements into her muscle memory in the hopes that she wouldn’t have to consciously think about every single move her arms had to make. From now on she would have to use them basically every single waking moment if she wanted to be able to use them without a second thought like her first pair of arms anytime soon.

Despite the embarrassment and the shame however, the laughs and smiles she elicited from Anna and those that came past and watched for a few minutes were absolutely worth it. It always made her heart flutter with warmth when she saw and heard one of them laugh, a feeling that she had never experienced as a human. If that was how human mothers felt when their kids were happy, then Kai could absolutely understand why people decided to have those little menaces. It was a nice feeling to have, different from the bliss she felt when she laid eggs.

After a few hours of training they washed themselves in the river and Kai tried to become better at manipulating mana a bit. She was still a bit reluctant to do so as she technically had Brian to do the casting for her, but she couldn’t deny the possibility of there being some method to disrupt the hive connection. It was also a little bit childish to not train her mana proficiency in an act of rebellion because she thought it was unfair that she wasn’t really talented and didn’t get the systems help, she had to be better than that as the family paragon.

Still, Kai couldn’t help but be secretly disgruntled at the gap that was already forming between her and her daughters, not only Anna and Artemis but all of them. The help the system was providing was insane and reduced any amount of training and learning to what felt like was zero, not that that was entirely true. 

The point was, as long as someone knew something they should be able to be proficient in the area in less than 10 percent of the time it normally takes, even less if someone guides them. This kind of advantage should make the progress of a species laughably easy, yet what Rash had told them and how he presented himself all pointed towards the nearby kingdom being somewhat medieval and Kai suspected there to be something more at play here, mana being the most obvious.

When she was done training, she made it a point to spend some quality time with her daughters before she went to bed.

Much to her surprise, Brian finished a new blueprint during this time. She hadn’t really expected the hive brain to finish anything new anytime soon, for one because it was busily doing small improvements to blueprints they already had or stuff they already knew about and second, because it was busy with the drone management, or at least she had thought so.

After a quick check it turned out that it was still doing what it was meant to do and just had more processing power than Kai had thought. She had kind of forgotten that her stat growth would strengthen Brian too and hadn’t taken that into account.

Since everything was alright and the hive mind had just exceeded her expectations she let it know that she was proud of it. If she was going to give more love to the drones she might as well do the same to Brian after all.

Speaking of drones, the new blueprint was a drone blueprint for a tier 1 drone and whoever assigned the names, be it the system or the hive mind, had named the new addition [soldier drone (chitin)]. They were or would be a little bit larger than the original swarm drones and had some chitin armor shielding their head, the legs and their backs, but their bellies were still unguarded. In addition to that their mandibles seemed to be a little more powerful and vicious, but it looked like they lost their ability to carry more delicate things instead.

[Soldier swarm drone]

Soldier swarm drones are one of the possible evolutions of a swarm drone and are part of the Antanoid society. They get around as large as a german shepherd, slightly larger than the regular drone, and have a variety of chitin armor that covers their upper body. Due to their more complex and more combat geared minds they take up a capacity of 2.

To summarize the rest of the information Kai had available, Brian had taken the swarm drone as base model and then added, changed and taken away things to gear it more towards general combat. 

All in all she was quite happy with this drone type and couldn’t wait to see one for real, since they took two drone capacity points most of her daughters wouldn’t be able to get one any time soon sadly. Kai could just give birth to a new hunter or traveler of course, but they weren’t as needed as the workers at the moment and it wasn’t like she couldn’t just wait until then.

With that done, Kai retired to her room together with Anna and the two of them settled down for some rest.

The next two days went over much in the same way and it took until noon of the third day before her daughters finally reached the dungeon.