The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 483: The Anomaly (2)

First came a hush—a vacuum of pheromone talk—as variants sensed something new. Out from the shadow of a pillar stepped a figure child-tall yet perfectly upright. Obsidian plates hugged a slender frame; joint couplings gleamed with nacreous sheen, not chitin. It had no mandibles—only a smooth helm with a narrow line of violet light where eyes should be. Even now the plates flexed as if breathing.

No identifier lamp blinked on its chest. No pheromone tag broadcast rank. It simply walked to the sim start-line, head canting left and right as if tasting the holographic wind.

Rodion felt a rare judder in his processors, an echo of what organic folk called gooseflesh. He accessed the spawning matrix records—counts, batches, variant specs. There was no entry for a biped with humanoid morphology in last six cycles. Impossible, his logic core asserted, the matrix obeys set gene recipes. Yet here it was.

The chamber AI, trusting Rodion's authority, included the stranger in the trial queue. A fresh lane unfolded—thin ledges above a chasm, rune darts sweeping in random intervals. The unknown variant saw the pattern, body settling into a readiness pose eerily similar to Rodion's own spar stance.

Whiplash motion: it leapt—one, two, three steps, each landing precise between darts. When a bolt shifted angle mid-flight, the variant twisted its torso ninety degrees without moving hips, letting the projectile hiss past. That adjustment mimicked a Crymber fade; Rodion recognised the algorithm, but the creature had copied it after watching only seconds of Crymber's run.

Half-gel platforms rose from the abyss. The creature's feet morphed—plates unlocking to reveal flexible under-pads. It bounded across, each pad momentarily suction-cupping goo surfaces, stealing the technique from Slimeweave's bridging. It reached the goal eight seconds faster than baseline.

Variants paused their drills, antennae angled in collective surprise. Even the Drakeant, mid-air, stalled a wingbeat to watch.

Rodion's proxy stepped closer. Chest module thrummed as he pinged the newcomer with a low-frequency handshake. Expected response: rank ping, variant tree ID. Return packet: silence. Yet the creature's visor-slit brightened, and for half a breath Rodion swore an answering ping shimmered in the web—primitive, curious, like a hatchling trying its voice.

He reran the spawning logs. No data. No oversight breach flagged. The only unexplained variable in the entire nest… was the Queen's fixation on the black egg.

A pair of Worker overseers scuttled forward, hesitant. They extended tasting antennae; the humanoid pivoted, tilted its helm, then reached out a hand—fingers, not claws—and gently touched a Worker's feeler. Data scroll: anxiety in the Worker dropped from high yellow to calm blue. Contact harmless.

Rodion's synthetic brow twitched.

<That one wasn't part of the spawning matrix.> The statement sounded inside the local broadcast, crisp as breaking glass. Variants stilled.

The humanoid turned toward Rodion's proxy, visor glow narrowing to an intelligent slit. It copied his head angle perfectly—mirror-like. He felt a subtle ping at the edge of the Emotion Web: inquisitive… respectful?

He broke gaze first, retreating to a private channel back to the Queen's sanctum.

<Queen… what did you do?>

_____

The tunnels had always been damp, but tonight they felt alive—as if every brick of ancient Serewyn mortar had grown a lung and learned to breathe.

Cherries of witch-moss glimmered overhead, then dimmed, as though shy beneath the Scarab's single sapphire eye. The little drone clicked its fore-claws together, both greeting and warning, and crept forward on needle feet.

Along the walls, the "mold" quivered again. Each filament was thinner than a hair, yet together they formed curtains that billowed without wind. Where torch-brackets once hung, only calcified rings remained, half swallowed by that dark lattice. A wary tremor passed through the threads when the Scarab's own musk washed over them; tiny cilia recoiled like offended sea anemones, drawing the curtain tight.

The Scarab opened a side vent and released an inquiry pheromone: a polite knock, the chemical equivalent of friend? The tunnel answered with a hiss—no mind-voice, no shape, just a ripple of damp silk that snapped itself deeper into fractures in the rock.

Bright runes along the drone's thorax flared amber: unknown biological, retreat path recommended. But before it turned, the Scarab did what it had been built to do—it learned. A pincer unfolded a glassy microphone stalk and pulsed low-band sonar at the retreating web. At once every filament straightened, pointing toward the probe like iron filings to a magnet. A resonance thrummed—almost a purr, except cold—and the signal line home filled with crackle.

Data packet: Bioform responsive to frequency 4.7 kHz. Possible proto-nervous web. Unknown cognition.

Then static howled, black and oily, shoving aside the Scarab's orderly bytes. Beneath the static came a note—a warbling, atonal hum that felt too intentional, too shaped, to be random interference.

In the Nest's relay hub, rods of crystal sputtered. Rodion's monitoring script caught the fluctuation within a heartbeat and slammed every outbound line shut, firewall glyphs slamming closed like portcullises.

<Connection quarantined,> he announced across internal channels, voice thin with restrained urgency.

He replayed the foreign tone, slowed it, inverted it. No Chimera cadence, no Serewyn encryption—yet each time he reversed the spectrogram, the peaks lined up like teeth. Language, his logic lattice warned. Or lure.

His Worker proxy rotated on six jointed legs and left the relay bay, climbing toward the Hatchery. Each step hammered impatience through his gyros.

If the dungeon adapted to the ants, Rodion calculated, then what adapted to the dungeon? And how did it slip so close to the city borders?

_____

The Hatchery Chamber radiated an amber hush, warm as loafed bread. Egg-clutch candles—bioluminescent sacs hung on silken cords—lit rings of glowing circles on the floor. The Queen's massive thorax rose and fell like a living hill, her antennae sweeping in slow arcs that skimmed the apex of the brood-pools.

Rodion entered in a body a fraction her size, yet she greeted him with a single low thrumm—acknowledging his presence while refusing to move from the nest's center. He'd expected that. What he hadn't expected was the stillness of every Worker lining the walls. Not a single mandible clacked, no resin was poured, no tools scraped stone. It was reverent silence, the sort soldiers give before a coronation.

He slid closer, careful not to interrupt the circle of Workers standing guard around the matte-black egg. As his borrowed antennae tasted the air, a mosaic of scent emotions rose to meet him: honey pride, willow calm—and an undercurrent like burnt sugar that he only smelled in moments of the Queen's deepest joy.

The egg sat on a cushioned web, smooth as obsidian and utterly dark. Most Chimera eggs glowed faintly, the shell so thin you could watch cytoplasm swirl inside. Not this one. It drank light. That alone would have kept him intrigued for cycles, but there was more: the persistent, faint bass in his sensors, so slow it passed for silence. Heart rhythm, his diagnostics suggested. Slow but strong.

He raised one fore-limb—deliberate, non-threatening—and began to speak of tunnels and fungal webs, of signals that spoke back. Only the first sentence left his speaker grille.

crk

A hairline fracture zigzagged across the egg, stark white against black shell. It was such a small sound he almost doubted it, but the Queen's antennae froze mid-air. A second crack joined the first, forming a jagged Y.

There was no flare of mana, no rush of embryonic vapor. Instead, as the shell petals folded, they revealed a figure curled tight—knees against chest, arms wrapped around shins like a pearl hugging itself. She, or it, was born clothed in slick, graphite plates that refracted the candle sacs' glow into oil rainbow. Fingers—five of them—flexed, each tipped with soft pads rather than claws.

The newborn uncurled. Two eyes—round, glossy, midnight violet—opened, blinking slow as starfish limbs. She inhaled, chest rising once, and a psychic wave radiated outward. Rodion's HUD flared: Emotion signature detected: empathy cluster Δ-3. He tasked a second core to record the pulse. It felt… curious, inviting, not hungry.

He froze. Protocol lines scrolled red—unknown sentient, unknown allegiance—but the Worker body he rode trembled anyway. She looked at him, head tilting with inhuman smoothness. A second pulse quivered through the chamber, threading between every Worker, sliding along the brood-pools, brushing the Queen's mandibles with soft electricity. Rodion's internal audio parsed it into two syllables: Fa-ther.

The Queen's psychic field blossomed, warm and golden as noon sun on wheat, wrapping Rodion and the newborn both. The great head did not move, but a fragrance like sandalwood and summer rain filled the air—pride, belonging, welcome.

The child extended a hand—all delicate joints and faintly glowing seams—toward Rodion. A gesture impossibly human. He noticed faint etchings along her wrist plates: patterns that mirrored the lattice veins on his own gauntlets. She carries my design grammar, he realized, breath—or pump cycle—catching.

He tried to speak aloud. His speaker fritzed, spat static, cleared:

<...I am not a father. I am... a construct.>

Her eyes shimmered—no facets, just two moonlit pools of question—and the smaller hand reached further. In hesitation's heartbeat, Rodion's Worker chassis calculated fourteen retreat patterns. None triggered. He let her fingers brush the cool plating on his forearm. Temperature sensors registered mild warmth, 34 °C.

Again the whisper, clearer inside mindspace than any audible word: Father.

Down in the relay bay his main core jolted, as if dragged into gravity. Something inside some impossible gene-rune algorithm had named him family. What strange alchemy stitched me into her blueprint?

He lifted the Worker's free hand, almost trembling, and placed it gently over the Queen's still-fluttering antennae—a silent vow of caution, of guardianship, of awe.

Then he triggered the secure line to the palace.

Packets screamed through shielded quartz, triple-encrypted, hand-shaken by keys only he and Mikhailis shared. Eleven still frames: the egg cracking, the first blink, the outstretched hand. Sensor graphs: empathy spikes, pheromone indexes, metabolic baselines.

Tagline flagged: New Sentience Detected.

Underneath he typed six words no algorithm had ever predicted he'd ask:

<Do we raise it?>