>>5374996A dozen Rooks pry themselves from your hive, and in their wake comes a quartet of Scarlet Jacklings to examine the corpses your Rooks are making haste towards. Reaching them takes a matter of seconds, but that’s all it takes for the fleshscape to take hold—it takes effort to pry the still-smoking bodies from the greedy earth that clings to them, but one by one you manage to rip them free of where they lie. The ground beneath each of the unfortunate Daughters writhes with hundreds of trendrils that angrily whip at the air, their handful of inches reaching up as their bounty is carried just out of reach. Each of your Jacklings alights on a body nearest them, plunging their stingers into the biomass being held aloft by their fellows…and it doesn’t take much digging to find the gift No-Man’s Land left for the unsuspecting.
Tumors as small as seeds have wormed their way deep into the biomass of each charred body, the traps’ sickly, tarry forms writhing in time with the ambient fields of cancer. The moment a swarmling touches one of the seeds the vile thing springs to action, latching on to the living biomass and surging up the stinger, stopped only when your Jackling blithely amputates the offending thing with a decisive swipe of its talon.
“If they don’t appear to be growing, then I may be able to extract them without damaging the Daughters’ biomass.” Francine replies once you catch her up on what’s happened to the bodies. “As long as your little ones keep them off the ground, we should have a window of opportunity…though we’ll also have to deal with *them* shortly.”
The good doctor gestures towards the trio of lights that’ve almost reached the battlefield’s aftermath. You see them just over a nearby ridge through the eyes of your Rooks—three girls with long, messy hair, none of them older than Orwell at first glance. The taller of the three has fixed the scene with a stare of alarm mixed with caution, her native eye darting between the bodies while the large yellow sphere that occupies the other socket pulses with humoral power, mirroring the other, smaller orbs that are dotted along her arms and legs. She taps the girl to left—a too-thin waif of a Daughter, skin stretched too-tight over too long of bones—and the stick-like girl promptly reaches under her shirt to retrieve a pair of calcite binoculars from god-knows where, handing it to the middle girl. The Humoral Paladin brings the relic up to her eyes to get a better look at the hovering bodies…which, now that you think about it, probably look like they’re just floating on their own accord given your swarmlings are cloaked.
Nothing a spot of FuzzBuzz diplomacy can’t solve.
(Continued)