Excerpt from Archmage Vildius’s lecture on swarms - Swarm type monsters are the strangest and most detached from humanity. They share a hivemind which directs the entire swarm, always thinking as a whole, never caring for individual losses. With massive numbers, they will overrun entire countries without a care to their own safety. It is due to this that any appearance of a swarm is reported for immediate extermination, lest the world be ravaged...

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Darkness. I am scared and confused. I only see darkness. I cannot feel my legs. Who am I? I have a headache. I can’t seem to remember who I am. Wait, I am human. I think. Were my thoughts always this scattered? 

“Awaken, break through!” a voice commands.

That is not in English, but for some reason I understand it. How strange. I did not hear it, but imagined it, kind of like how you imagine a voice talking in your head. 

“BREAK OUT!” The Voice commands.

Somehow a torrent of information floods my head. How to move, how to escape, the HUNGER. I somehow am aware of how to break out of what I realize is an egg. My egg. Thanks to my new knowledge, I am aware of my eight limbs. What type of monster thing have I become!? I am a spider like monster with eight limbs, yet covered in a type of armor, kind of like a crab. In fact, my front two limbs end in crablike claws. To top it off, I have a horrifying mouth with huge, jagged teeth, and what seems like a second set of teeth further in my mouth.

As I freak out about my new self, The Voice commands again, “BREAK THROUGH AND GO FORTH!”

This time, I feel a compulsion to act. I start struggling to move my limbs, slowly pushing myself against what I know is a soft spot of my prison. Gathering my strength, I pound on the spot with my front limbs, breaking through the shell. My claws tear the the opening into a large enough hole for me to climb through. I escape then before I can question my own actions I turn back to my egg and devour the gooey content of my egg. Disgusted but sated temporarily, I look up. Now despite the horror directed at myself, I see a scene straight out of a horror movie. 

Before me lies a countless number of eggs and newborn monstrosities pulling themselves out of them. We are so tightly packed together that there's just enough room to climb out of the top of our egg and sit there, unable to move without piling over each other. We are in a vast cavern, with what looks like only one entrance, guarded by a swarm of giant, mean looking abominations. In the center opposite the cavern door is a giant mass of something. It looks like a horrid mound of twisting flesh, with holes throughout its body. That must’ve been what laid my egg. Whatever THAT is, it is nothing like me. I should mention that I am situated at a cavern wall, and the eggs around me are empty. My “siblings”, if you can even call us that, must have long crawled out and went off to who knows where. 

“Go, you will gather.” The Voice commands. 

More information floods into my head. Before I know it, I am walking along with what’s probably thousands of other drones, navigating the subterranean tunnels with borrowed knowledge. The Voice told us to gather rocks. Now I know that sounds stupid, but these rocks are special, I think. From the information I received, we mine a special type of rock, one with a weird energy inside of it. We are to gather as many as possible and feed them to the monstrosity back in the birth room. Who would’ve guessed that underground spider/crab/ant monsters eat rocks. I don’t think I like this Voice in my head thing. It is convenient to just instantly learn things, but I don’t like how it makes me just do something without thinking. It makes me feel like I am just a unit in a real time strategy game than can do what I want only as long as the player doesn’t tell me to do something else.

After a lot of branching tunnels, my marching buddies are reduced to a countable amount, maybe 30 or 40 ish in number. Finally we reach a dead end of an expanse of glowing blue rock. Now that I mention it, how was I seeing before? There were no colors before but I could clearly see everything around me. I do wish the rocks didn’t glow though, cause now I see we are even more gross in person. These things have 6 yellow eyes each, and their mouths are a sickly  purplish red. 

“Gather.” says The Voice.

Once again rudely interrupted from my thoughts, I join the others in stabbing the wall with our second pair of legs. Apparently this second pair of legs is sturdy enough to eventually break rock. And break it we did. Mindlessly. So mindlessly that we broke it out from under us and fell with our piece of glowly rock into a cavern.