A Robotic Overmind for a Dungeon

It took a little while to count up all the corpses and differentiate between the hounds that were mine but eventually the death count came up with four fifths of my fifteen hounds, the complete destruction of my hornet wing, two thirds of the repair spiders, a swarm of fifteen woodpeckers, two of the five original moles, and lastly two of my crabs. In comparison, MAI lost seven hounds, ten of the new termites, and eight hornets.

It seems that my drones had managed to make an even-ish kill to death ratio but it does not matter now as they had managed to plunder more than enough resources to replace their losses. My remaining spiders had managed to repair the most critical of injuries within my drones and had already begun patching up the small drone works to facilitate construction of more spiders with the remaining stockpile to help with the rest of the wounded.

Shifting my conscience back over to my main factory base, I quickly checked on the alloys kept in the storage room to find a decent stockpile that unfortunately was around two fifth the size of the mining outposts. Floating back over to the drone works, I begin ordering up a dozen hornets, one third being EMP with the remaining two thirds as standards.

Along with them, I order a squad of rat scouts to patrol the outpost more thoroughly in order to alert the garrison if an ambush like this happens again. This drains up the majority of the stockpile which is less than ideal but if I want to get the mines back and running, it is a sacrifice I must make.

With the drone works beginning to churn out reinforcements for the all but crippled outpost, I slipped back over to the water treatment outpost and my vessel. Shifting my conscience into my vessel drone, my senses begin to reinstall themselves into my surroundings as opposed to the blank emptiness that is moving around without a physical manifestation.

Looking around the outpost, I take solace in the fact that nothing too bad has happened while I was gone. In fact, due to the abnormal amount of feral drones in the area, who seemed to have not dismissed but seemed to somehow maintain the density, have been constantly throwing themselves against my defenses. Now that I think about it, the feral drones do not seem to contain any level of self preservation compared to my own and even MAI's drones. I wonder why.

Nevertheless, the constant influx of corpses has certainly helped keep the stockpile here from diminishing too much from the constant need for repairs strived to match the number of attacking drones. Thankfully the majority of the feral attacks had led to only minor injuries due to my earlier decision to have the hounds take more of a supportive role rather than front line combatants which was now being handled by the ants.

I suppose the ants should have always been my main melee drones rather than the hounds and now that I had the subway trains the main downside to fielding ants, their lack of speed, was subdued somewhat. Speaking of which, I have not looked into the newest of drones MAI has decided to throw at me.

Shifting back over to the mining outpost, I begin to inspect the most intact of the termite corpses, many of which were too burnt to allow me to examine them completely. Eventually, I settled on one of the corpses which had been taken down by a hound and so I began to focus on the corpse before a description appeared in front of me.

According to said description, the Electro-magnetic Disruptor or the EMD are a specialized drone who originated from a design meant to manually shut down sections of hardware, or in some cases entire power grids depending, to cut off malicious malware before it could wreak havoc. The military quickly took the design and weaponized it to quickly rush into enemy lines and destroy electrical based infrastructure and, if needed, other drones.

It also states that the termites are very vulnerable to attacks directed at their abdomens due to the fact that the majority of it is their exposed coils which, if disabled, effectively cripples the drone in question. Additionally, covering the coils in armor plating to protect them in fact greatly hinders them as it makes it extremely difficult to dissipate any excess heat and thus cause the drones internal systems to fry themselves.

I suppose these new drones could act as a decent offensive drone. I definitely could use something to help take down crabs if scorpion or hornet fire support is not available. Closing the description and looking around, my eyes eventually settle on the remaining spiders still alive at the outpost.

They look to have finished with the repairs on the small drone works and have already begun fixing up the remaining wounded. Floating over to be drone works, I order a dozen spiders to help their understaffed seniors who paused for a second to give me a thankful nod before returning to their work.

On top of the spiders, I ordered up a team of five beetles since they performed quite well for their small stature compared to the hounds and termites they were facing. Although compared to other small drones, they cost considerably more than, say, a woodpecker. Still, with them managing to take down medium sized drones, they are more than worth the investment.

Unfortunately, the five beetles have all but bankrupted the remains of the once overflowing stockpile, save the resources saved for repairs to my drones and the refinery which still had multiple spikes sticking out of it. But with all the spiders focusing on repairing my drones at the moment, it would take a little while before they could shift their focus onto the refinery.

I began making my way over to the factory before I got a new message from the lead scout rat who contacted me earlier. Upon arriving at the factory, I could see that the scout rat was waiting patiently and began scurrying towards my disembodied form with the guard ant from before in tow who was also carrying the tablet.

As they approach me, the scout quickly connects themselves to the tablet with its tail and so a long string of words begins to spread across the screen. Looking down at the tablet, I begin reading through the lines of text which states that they, the rat scout team, have found the source of the noise down in the tunnels. It also states that the mole they had brought with them began drilling around, only to stumble upon more tunnels that we had not made.

My rat scout had decided to take the initiative and had his scouts begin mapping out the tunnels with one of the moles just in case something nasty pops up. With them all wandering around the leas scout decided to run up and over to the factory to inform me of the situation. With their message delivered the scout scuttles off toward the direction of the subway tunnels and his squad.

Looking back to the ant guard, I see that they had walked back to their station as well. Shrugging to myself, I float over to the drone production area to find that a few of the new drones have already finished fabricating. I decide against sending them immediately seeing that the enemy raiding party might have not left quite yet and are just waiting to ambush my drones.

With that taken care of, I begin floating around aimlessly as I watch all of my drones wander around.