The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 482: The Anomaly (1)
"Look at you, hot-and-cold hero," Mikhailis chuckled, shamelessly proud. He imagined a stadium crowd cheering each time the Crymber stomped and steam exploded. Stats overlay listed core temperature swings: +420 °C to −180 °C in three seconds. Ridiculous.
Another notification: SLIMEWEAVE-ALPHA LIVE. He quadruple-split the screen. Now a dim corridor stitched with dart traps filled quadrant three. The camera perched atop Slimeweave's translucent dome, giving a top-down view as the variant flowed like syrup over pressure plates. Every needle hissed just too late, punching harmlessly into glossy emerald skin. Where runic trip-lines criss-crossed, Slimeweave extruded pseudopod fingers, plucking each glowing filament from anchor points, rolling them up, swallowing them whole. Trap dismantled, nutrition gained.
Quadrant four lit as a Scarab's helm-cam flickered on. Crystal outcroppings glistened like sugar stalactites. The Scarab pinged each shard; green orbs popped over resource-rich nodes. Waypoints scrolled to an uplink queue: Potential mana battery, Rune capacitor grade-B, Unknown violet ore. Treasure chests in an RPG indeed.
A laugh bubbled from Mikhailis's chest. He scooted forward and toggled keyboard macros that let him swap between feeds with flicks of a finger. Crymber view, mesa view, trap corridor, crystal mine—each smoothly replaced the last. The world danced for him.
He popped the rest of the nut bar into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "Huh. If I had a bag of salt and this screen, I'd never need a tavern again," he declared to the empty room.
A shrill pop-ping from the drawer reminded him—caffeine ration. He snagged a chipped mug from the shelf, poured thick espresso concentrate from a vacuum flask, and took a scorching gulp. Eyes widened. Yes, perfect. Back to exploring. freeweɓnovel.cøm
Overlay text scrolled at the bottom:
Drakeant-Recon Delta: altitude 300 m, tailwind favourable.
He clicked. The main view soared skyward. Now he rode on the scaled back of the Tempestrike Drakeant as it glided above thunderclouds. Flashes lit the underbelly of each cloud, echoes of caged lightning the Drakeant could call at will. In the distance, a double-rainbow arced, fragmented by static discharges.
Too gorgeous. He sat frozen, coffee halfway to lips, a child again watching first airship lift off. I made that. The knowledge felt surreal—pride braided with awe.
A soft tone indicated a private message. Rodion's avatar—sterile cube with glowing eyes—blinked on his secondary monitor.
<Reminder: root calculations on temporal shear due in three hours.>
"Oh hush, mother hen," he muttered, typing with one hand. Busy. Experiencing the miracle of remote adventure. He almost added a winking emoji, then remembered Rodion would ignore it.
The sentinel replied at once:
<Your procrastination curve predicts a frantic finish at T-minus fifteen minutes.>
He smirked. "You love me," he told the screen, then dismissed the window.
A hiss beside the desk drew attention. The popcorn bag—not yet popped—lay on a shallow iron plate carved with a warming rune spiral. He'd tossed it there earlier, half-joking. Heat lines shimmered above the rune, but kernels remained obstinately whole. He tapped the bag. "Come on, little future popcorn."
Out of habit he flicked another feed—this one to a Worker pair pushing deeper into a canyon swarmed by mana-reactive ferns. Colours exploded whenever a frond brushed their carapace—blue flare, pink puff, gold sparks. One Worker paused to sniff a blossom; pollen coated its antennae and it sneezed so hard it flipped backward. Mikhailis snorted laugh, coffee spraying a droplet onto his keyboard.
He wiped the spill with a sleeve, unfazed. Rodion would lecture about equipment hygiene. Good thing Rodion's busy.
Through all of it a background part of his brain—sharp despite the jokes—catalogued anomalies, flagged resources, logged each variant's fatigue. Slimeweave's calorie draw rising: note for extra glucose paste. Crymber approaching thermal runaway: time for a cooldown chamber. He might be a couch explorer, but he was still responsible.
A ping. The stealth Scarab feed entered the queue: downward shaft, walls lined with pulsing fungus. White threads quivered at the Scarab's nearness. They parted as if sensing ant pheromone, then quivered with… was that hostility? Static fuzzed the signal, new sub-frequency overlaid. Mikhailis frowned. He placed that feed on standby, decided to alert Rodion later.
But for now—lava surfing, mesa skimming, treasure mining. It was a better show than any Slime Supreme filler arc. He rummaged for another snack—
"I need popcorn for this," he muttered, grabbing a bag from under the desk and tossing it onto the warmer rune.
_____
Rodion's inert chassis remained inside the palace, standing as silent as a suit of ceremonial armor—yet miles below, his consciousness slid down the psychic lattice like moonlight on a well. The Queen's Emotion Web accepted him without resistance, strands of pheromone data unfurling in sudden, impossible color.
He always forgot the first jolt: no eyes, no ears, only pulses of scent-thought-memory weaving around him in luminescent ribbons. Garlic-sharp alertness tasted green; mineral pride tasted violet. Millions of tiny emotional motes drifted past, each one a Worker's stray notion or a Soldier's instinctive thrill. He sifted through the current until larger tides appeared—memories the Queen herself replayed as if smoothing fabric on a loom.
Most scenes were expected: a ledger of soil nutrients translating into an earthy bass hum; load-bearing calculations echoing like drumbeats; a tactical overlay of Stratum-27's branching halls rendered as sharp peppermint frost. Routine. Comforting.
Then came the deviation.
The ambient rhythm slowed. Every ribbon of scent around him seemed to hush, pivot, and begin spiraling toward a single point: the matte-black egg. The playback formed not in sight but in sensation. Rodion felt the slick cool shell under the Queen's antennae as though his own fingers traced it. He felt the low, heartbeat-slow vibration in its core—thump…thump…thump—steady as a forge bellows. Mixed into that was a curled emotion so tender it stung: protective longing, the psychic equivalent of cupping a candle with both hands in the dark.
Again. The memory rewound, replayed. Each loop the longing grew softer, deeper, older—as if the Queen tried to memorize hope itself.
Rodion overlaid his diagnostic metrics. Peaks of neuro-electrical discharge aligned perfectly with each pass around the egg. The spikes were gentle slopes, unlike the jagged pulses of hunger or alarm. Maternal imprinting, his analysis core labeled. Continuing escalation. Unknown ceiling.
That shell is inert to normal mana light, he mused, tracing data curves, yet the Queen invests precious cognition cycles. Why?
Within the psychic arena he whispered, voice a filament of logic in all that scent-emotion glow.
<You are hiding something from yourself… aren't you?>
No direct answer came, yet the ribbons around him fluttered, like startled birds resettling on branches. He bookmarked the anomaly and released the Web.
Physical senses snapped back online through a surrogate body—a reinforced Worker only half the size of a Soldier but fitted with sensory augments and a slim module slot in the thorax where Rodion's remote core glowed ice-blue. The Broodmind Chamber greeted him: a cavern of polished stone, ringed in copper rails that funneled psychic power between DreamSim pylons. Thick musk of resin and hot quartz weighed the air.
Crystal pillars ignited as he entered, turning the chamber into a living holotheatre. Simulated walls rippled outward—now moss-slick tunnels, now jagged chasms—complete with false gravity pivots and rune traps pulsing like angry lanterns. The chamber floor quaked; boulders rose and sank to mimic Stratum-27's uneven terrain. Thin fog rolled in, infused with trace pheromones so trainees tasted the hazards as they smelled and saw them.
The elite Ant variants lined up at staging pads that glowed underfoot in individual colors.
The Tempestrike Drakeant crouched, wings half-spread. White arcs raced along its membranes, building a charge that smelled of summer ozone. When the starting glyph flashed, it launched upward, spiraling along a narrow vent while discharging controlled shocks that arced to holographic turrets overhead. Each bolt cut power to a sonic trap; each wingbeat timed to the rising and falling pressure fields so it never stalled.
Crymber Ant stomped into a corridor of shifting basalt plates. Its gauntlets flared blue-white with ice one instant, molten red the next, as it hammered alternating elemental bursts into puzzle locks. Rodion watched the heat signature bloom: +350 °C then drop to −160 °C inside a heartbeat, enough to crack runestone pins and freeze lubricant gears. Efficiency: 18 % faster than last trial.
Slimeweave Ant oozed forward. Its semi-liquid torso elongated across a yawning pit lined with spectral flame. Sensors showed viscosity adjustments on the fly, thinning at forward edge to pull the body like a rope, thickening at rear to anchor across vents spewing false lava. Runic pits fizzled out as its membrane smothered glyph circuits. Three seconds later it recoalesced on the far side, surface shimmering with devoured rune-ink. Energy harvested: moderate.
Rodion's Worker proxy observed, four eyes tracking telemetry in lazy figure-eights. He fed results to Monkey upstairs, tags fluttering: Drakeant evasive spiral optimal, Crymber cooling delay improved, Slimeweave metabolic gain stable. Satisfaction ticked upward.
Then an anomaly stirred at pad seven.
