The blue Mantis Leader grabs a Witch, and the large grasshopper makes a series of screeches, then the Leader starts running towards an empty tunnel, and the squad of bugs follow it.

Though we're all surprised at this sight, Yunia is completely speechless.

"You don't understand," she begins and backs off from the front line, then she takes off her helmet, and massages her elastic ears as she continues, "What I believe happened may not be what truly happened, but if it is, then it's completely unprecedented. If that lizard man altered the leader-type to make it gain a water affinity, then it means that the monsters are deliberately adapting to the situation, something truly unheard of!"

I scratch my horn in confusion and question, "I don't understand how monsters 'don't deliberately adapt to the situation.' What about the breeder-types? Don't they create settlements that mimic humanoids and then lay siege to our towns?"

She shakes her head gently. "They mimic, but they don't adapt… unless that leader-type was born with water affinity by chance… or if the color of its chitin doesn't have anything to do with water. It happens."

I hum in thought as I realize something, "Hm… so monsters only change due to chance? Like, natural selection?"

The girls aren't very clear on what I mean by "natural selection," so I give them a crash course in evolution as it happens on Earth.

Yunia hums and fondly recollects one of her lessons with Almaria, "Yes, that's… pretty much what happens. A new, random variant spawns once in a while, and the longer it lives, the higher the chance that more of its kind will spawn, either through normal reproduction or through the curse of the God of Destruction, which uses our collective consciousness to choose which monster should spawn where."

I narrow my eyes in thought as I don't fully get it yet, so Ciel kindly expands on it, "The knowledge of a new, dangerous variant quickly spreads among the hunters, and so, its presence increases in the local collective consciousness, making it more likely that it'll spawn nearby. And the more that monsters of a specific kind spawn, the further the knowledge of their existence spreads, creating a vicious cycle."

So, for monsters, it's not survival of the fittest, but the deadliest or most fearsome… No, it's survival of the most popular.

Yunia agrees with my assessment and calmly requests, "I want to find out more about that lizard man. The magic he used is completely unknown to me, and the fact that we have bugs and lizards interacting in their reproductive methods is also unprecedented. Leader and breeder-types can get different types of monsters to work together to attack humanoids, but they hardly ever interact as meaningfully as we've just seen."

I hum in thought. Her assumption neatly explains everything that's going on out of the norm, but we still lack an explanation for how the lizard man mage came to be.

Well, there's one pressing matter that we need to solve first. "If we want an explanation, we need to get past that Hydra first," I remind them.

"Kill it!" Aoi shouts in my soul space excitedly. She wants to know what Hydra tastes like.

I smile a bit guiltily as I dash her expectations, "That'll alert the bugs and the lizards, making it much harder for us to observe anything useful."

"A distraction, then," Alissa whispers thoughtfully as she stares intensely at the Hydra.

"Careful. I honestly think you could kill it by yourself," Ciel wryly warns her.

And Alissa is caught off-guard. "Oh… well, thanks," she mumbles

I keep it simple, "I'll leave a [Gate] coordinate at the tunnel behind us for you to retreat to, so just fire a few shots, and then rejoin me."

She nods diligently, and we separate. After I leave a coordinate deep in the tunnel we came from, I [Fly] up and hug the wall as I fly towards an unused tunnel on the opposite side from Alissa's position.

Once we're both ready, she dispels [Invisibility] and unleashes an [Arrow of Annihilation].

"GRUUUUU!" The three heads howl in rage as the fourth goes limp, now with a long hole that goes in through one of its eyes and deep into its brain, then the dead head falls on top of a few bugs, crushing them and making bug guts spill everywhere.

The fire imps screech like monkeys, then the Witches screech too a moment later, immediately raising a cacophony that gives us both headaches. A normal arrow follows as the Hydra moans in pain, but it only hits the cheek of one of the heads and reveals Alissa's position.

The three ferocious heads turn their fiery gaze towards her, then their mouths glow, and three large fireballs shoot out. Though one of the heads receives an arrow down its throat, it doesn't seem to care.

Alissa activates the [Rush] on her armor and dives behind a large mushroom tree, then the fireballs explode at the spot where she was standing just a second ago, leaving three pear-sized holes in the stone. Rather weak, but it would still have hurt a lot and damaged the armor if she had taken it on her chest.

Aoi snorts, unimpressed by the Hydra's power.

"I could take it with only my [Draconic Body]!" Hana brags and pokes my soul space because she actually wants to try it.

I wave Hana away and focus back on Alissa.

While the Hydra lacks in power, it makes up for it by blanketing the area with fireballs, quickly razing down the mushroom tree into nothing.

But Alissa has long left that cover.

"GRUUAAAH!" The Hydra roars again as another head falls to an [Arrow of Annihilation], but the first head has already disintegrated into sand, and two new necks are now growing at an impressive pace.

The Hydra suddenly gets distracted, and the two remaining heads look in different directions as they continue to shoot their fireballs, blanketing the bugs with their barrage.

More bug guts are thrown about into the air as they explode with disgusting sounds, and fire imps scamper about in fear, not of the fireballs, but of the wet flesh that could easily snuff out their short lives.

The Hydra suddenly freezes and stops its onslaught, then it stares at the damage it has caused with what seems to be fear and confusion. Alissa's combo of [Mesmerizing Butterflies] and [Daydreaming] was apparently super effective.

Then she whistles, and the Hydra turns its heads towards her.

"RAAAH!" The two heads roar in pain as a normal arrow takes out one of its eyes, but the unharmed head immediately lunges towards her as the monster's large body charges forward, trampling even more bugs.

Alissa retreats into the tunnel, and she's pursued by a few imps and bugs that spotted her, but then the Hydra growls and stops. It trains one pair of eyes on the tunnel she fled through while the last eye looks down at its feet, its lips raised in what seems to be a snarl of disgust.

The Ice Wraith attacks the bugs coming into the tunnel, giving Alissa more than enough time to cross through the [Gate] and rejoin me.

"Good work," I gently praise her and give her pats through [Bind].

"It was kind of fun," she whispers shyly as I recast [Invisibility] on her.

The bugs mostly ignore the commotion, so while the Hydra and the imps are still distracted, we have a clear path to fly further into the cave. I put the Holly on my shoulder and grab Alissa's hand, then we fly onwards.

The Wraith is technically impervious to the bugs' attacks, but the summon's ice sword is broken repeatedly as the monsters turn on it the moment it begins to reform, so I just unsummon the Wraith since it's not useful to us anymore.

We fly past the (what we assume to be) previous iguana man as he goes back to the Hydra. This time, he's without a cocoon, so perhaps he's going to check on what the commotion was all about.

"How do we know it's a 'he'? Female lizards don't have breasts and males keep their dicks sheathed," Roxanne asks the question that Lina was thinking but didn't have the courage to ask.

Alright… it goes back to check on the Hydra.

Roxanne smiles, pleased with herself.

Anyway, the "farm" continues on for a while as the cave gradually widens, but we don't see any more tunnels ahead of us, so perhaps the choke point that the Hydra guards is a deliberate design choice.

Then Yunia warns Sandoro that there's a leader-type likely hunting down the Thalantro.

 

We notice a group of imps having a fistfight for some reason while a number of them keep their tails near a deep puddle of boiling water. I think they're trying to dry out the cave by making the water evaporate, so they must be the reason why everything is so misty.

We also see a few imps widening a hole that provides access to lava and taking a "mud" bath in it.

The mist slowly starts to clear as we fly forward, then we notice that the cavern splits into two as a chasm intersects the "farmland."

Steps carved into the stone lead to a darker section where an uncountable number of cocoons are strung up to the ceiling, held above wide rivers of glowing-hot lava.

Human-sized daddy-long-legs tend to these cocoons, stringing them up and taking them down, then laying them in front of assorted bipedal lizards, who use a quicker version of the string magic we saw before to force them to hatch, and the newborn bug immediately rushes out towards the "farms."

What's the difference between lava and magma…?

My mind wanders towards a happier place, tired of all the creepy crawlies everywhere.

"At least this confirms that they're working together more closely than was ever imagined," Yunia tries to comfort me.

I sigh tiredly, and Alissa squeezes my claws reassuringly, then we move on and fly in between the eggs, avoiding the large daddies as best we can.

Some of the lizards look up, their attention drawn to either the mana of our [Fly] enchantments or the slight disturbance our passage leaves on the cocoons, but none of them seem to have detected us.

I'm reminded of a production line from the methodical and repetitive way that both the daddies and the lizards move about. It's almost hypnotizing, though I definitely don't want to stare at the daddies while they work.

As we carefully fly further in, we notice an opening near the wall with a simple metal bridge leading to it. There's a bipedal lizard coming out through it, carrying a cocoon.

The opening is too small for us to continue to use [Fly], so we land, and I put a few points in [Quiet Steps] so that we won't make any noise as we walk. Using the skill consumes mental stamina, making me wish that Yunia was here to use [Silence] instead.

"I'll pass…" She immediately, and unashamedly, declines.

The bridge is inconceivably hot, and even with the [Breeze] enchantment of our armor, we begin to cook as we pass over the lava river running under it, but once we've finished crossing, the heat becomes bearable again, though what we see still makes us uncomfortable.

It's both a hospital and a lab.

A few dozen, seemingly pregnant, human-like lizards are laying down on beds of rock while other lizards use their string magic on them; and a few of the pregnant lizards are squatting on top of some nests, one of them actually giving birth to an egg.

Nearly a hundred eggs of varying sizes are lined up near the wall, exposed to the heat of a lava channel that passes beside them, and an even larger number of lizards are using their magic on them as they speak to each other in an unknown, gruff tongue. Some of the observers are holding crude metal clipboards that they use to occasionally write scribbles on rough pieces of paper with thick charcoal pens.

An egg suddenly hatches, and a deformed lizard emerges. Its limbs are undersized and awkwardly angled, and its skin is rather smooth and thin-looking.

A lizard-scientist growls as it casts its string magic on the newborn's head, who immediately falls limp on top of the remains of its egg, then a daddy on standby grabs the corpse with its jaws and takes it away.

Then we see a group of scientists in a corner dissecting a deformed corpse as they discuss and write on their clipboards.

"That isn't that different from how we study anatomy," Ciel softly remarks, feeling rather creeped out by everything we're seeing.

"Do you also engage in genetic engineering experiments?" I dryly ask, but she remains quiet.

The priests don't, but someone does. Breeder-types like these mimic humanoid civilization, so someone, somewhere, is doing this.

My mind immediately goes to the heretics that created those Clone Soldiers. I have a pretty strong belief that they were genetically engineered.

"What is 'genetic engineering'?" Ciel soberly asks. I give her a simple explanation as we slowly walk across the hospital floor, and she quickly becomes revulsed by what I tell her. "Wicked 'science.' That's what this is!"

And I cringe as I do my best to salvage her opinion, "Well, what they're doing here would be unethical on Earth. Not only is experimenting on humans not allowed, but you also can't just kill the 'defective' people. And unless you can guarantee that the newborn is going to be born healthy, nobody sane would ever perform such genetic changes on them."

"Hm…" She hums in thought and remains silent for a long moment as she considers things before she continues, "perhaps I was too hasty to judge, but it's still something that shouldn't be practiced in this realm, for that's the domain of the Goddess of Fertility." If it wasn't me explaining it, I don't think she would be so understanding.

I nod in agreement and add, "What they're doing here is a desecration of scientific ethics, and also, genetic engineering on Earth is almost exclusively practiced in plants and other lower life forms, not humans."

Then we notice a crude pair of metal doors leading to another room. If the hospital with the pregnant lizards is here, then what's beyond there can only be…

We walk up to them and cross through without hesitation, then we freeze at the chilling sight.

Hundreds of armless, legless humanoids are neatly arranged in a grid. They're either hanging from hooks that hold up the harnesses that are secured around their bodies or laying down motionlessly on rock beds. Their eyes have been gouged out, and their lids burned shut; their ears are covered by thick lumps of cloth tied tightly to their heads; and their mouths are kept permanently open by tubes glued to their lips so that they can be force-fed.

A channel on the rock bed or on the floor underneath the hanging ones takes care of their bodily waste, though the smell of sewage is actually pretty faint. Even monsters are clean when necessary because these humanoids are breeding livestock, valuable resources that allow the monsters to birth stronger versions of themselves.

Two human men and one dragonkin woman are being raped by lizards. They're fed an aphrodisiac and energizing drink before it starts, but none of the survivors ever remember this part because mixed into their rations is a calming drug so strong that it puts them into a sort of dream-like state, where one feels nothing but the cold touch of the void.

Living as a monster's breeding livestock isn't actually that horrible of an experience itself, what breaks people is coming back from it. The body remembers the trauma, and the mind craves for the void again, to be free of the troubles of reality.

This is what I was spared from seeing when we wiped out the goblin village. At the time, I didn't have the mental stability to deal with this knowledge, and now that I do, I feel nothing but cold determination.

If I ever fail in defending our territory, this will happen to everyone.

Aoi observes our reactions with wonder. She's a breeder-type too, and she feels nothing from the sight of the "livestock."

"Do you not feel any empathy for them?" I coldly question her through [Bind].

"Hmm…" She hums as she taps her claw against her chin. She's very confused about her own emotions as this is the first time she has had to think deeply about the nature of breeder-types. "I think I feel sad that humanoids have to suffer, but I don't know any of them, so I don't want to feel anything."

Ciel walks up to her and gently touches her snout as she advises, "Feeling something is good, even if it's a negative feeling."

Aoi is feeling something negative, so she brings it out to the surface, and her expression changes into a fearsome scowl. "Monsters are slaves of the God of Destruction, but the God never gives us any guidance or leadership…" She grumbles angrily, then she raises her eyes to Ciel and declares, "They abandoned us, so I want the other monsters to become like me, free and able to choose their own masters."

"Why a 'master'?" Lina flatly asks her through [Bind], not very pleased with Aoi's choice of words.

Aoi turns to my little dwarf and bluntly answers, "Without Wolfy, I'm nothing, so the godless monsters need a master to guide them." But my heart is simply too cold right now to feel proud of her words.

"A parent, not a master," Ciel whispers a correction.

Aoi's wings slowly flap as she thinks, then she raises her forepaws, trying to shrug. "A 'parent,' then, someone to guide them."

Then we go silent as we try to process our own feelings on the matter.

"I pity them, the monsters…" Roxanne's voice suddenly echoes in my soul space after a short moment, her tone wavering as she's unsure if she should even be speaking.

"Aoi's presence gives us a new perspective," Yunia melancholically states.

"They're all victims too," Ciel stoically adds.

"Wretched existences, cursed to do evil," Lina whispers gloomily.

"Death is a mercy," Hana soberly asserts.

"The only solution," Ted surprisingly chimes in.

And I feel a weak smile trying to sneak onto my lips. "What if we kill a God?" I wryly ask.

"Even that might not undo the curse," Ciel immediately rejects.

I snort softly and shake my head, then we go silent again for a long moment.

The gnomes are taking too long to attack the nest.

There's nothing left for us to do but to wait, so I observe the rape with cold determination. I burn every detail of this horrific sight into my mind, then I pray.

I pray that I am never weak of mind again, that I never let my resolve falter, that my hand never hesitates.

I pray that I never forget this day, for I've learned the true price of failure.

I pray that my draconic fire never ceases to burn, for I need it to be able to face this world.

I pray that the Gods will always guide me when I need it, for I can't ever afford to become lost when so many are following me.

And the Gods answer by filling us with righteous fury.

We grunt and growl as we adjust to the sudden influx of energy that gushes into us.

"L-Lord Aoi?" Almaria stutters fearfully as she backs off from the angry dragon.

"We're called upon once more," Yunia sternly announces, then I summon everyone.

Our bodies may be tired, and our minds may be hazy, but, in an instant, we're all ready for one more battle, so we promptly begin the slaughter.