Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 73 - Last of Her Kind

Xavier flew through the different underground tunnels of the Arakashinai home world, moving across hundreds of miles, flying over one vast stone city after the next with skyscrapers taller than any back on Earth. Cities filled with nothing but mindless drones—or, at least, fragile minded drones without their own will or personality.

He was headed toward the Arakashinai queen’s chamber.

His time dilation field was wrapped tightly around him. Time outside of the field was slowed as much as he could manage. Even to him it looked as though it was completely frozen. Xavier, however, knew that was more fiction than fact. He’d become incredibly adept at using this spell, and his Speed attribute was stronger than ever before, making it a more powerful spell than anything at Rank 150 had a right to be—like all of his spells, if he were honest.

But even so, time still trickled forward outside that field. Even if it did move slower than a dead snail, it still moved. He didn’t have the ability to freeze it completely.

Once he’d finally found a memory from one of the Arak drones of the queen and experienced a mere echo of the power of the queen’s mind, a niggling worry had come to him. He’d encountered more than one enemy who seemed to be able to perceive that he was in a time dilation field even while they were “frozen” outside of it.

The speed of their thoughts exceeded the speed of their bodies—that was much the same for Xavier, too.

Feeling the power of the Arakashinai queen’s mind had made Xavier wonder if she would be able to do the same thing. All the time he’d spent within the time dilation field working on the Willpower Infusion pattern of runes and invading the minds of the Arak drones, followed by the time it took him to travel to the queen’s chamber…

If her mind worked swiftly enough—and there was every chance it did, considering how many drones she was able to control—she would already be aware of his presence. Even though he hadn’t cancelled the time dilation field once since coming to this world.

The niggling worry threatened to lodge itself firmly into the forefront of his mind. But Xavier knew that in the grand scheme it didn’t matter whether she knew or not. If she knew, she knew. He couldn’t take that knowledge away from her. And he couldn’t let himself worry about the things he couldn’t change. All he could do was focus on what was in his control.

That was why he was moving through the tunnels and Arak cities as swiftly as his wings would take him even inside the time dilation field.

Even if the queen knew the drones’ minds had crumbled, she wouldn’t have figured out why. The sooner he reached her chamber, the more likely it was his attack would still come as a surprise.

When Xavier came close to the queen’s chamber, flying down the tunnel toward it, a sense of apprehension settled in his stomach.

The power of the mind he’d felt… It had not been the mind of a C Grade. A fact he was sure he would imminently confirm once he scanned the creature.

Xavier alighted on the ground just before the tunnel opened up into the massive chamber that held the huge Arakashinai queen. Hundreds of drones crawled along the ground or flew through the air along the tunnel. He took a step forward, the chamber coming into focus, expanding around him. Though he’d already been able to see the queen’s chamber for some time with his Farscope ability, he’d been waiting until he set foot within it to truly take stock of things. It wasn’t a logical instinct, but for whatever reason in that moment—safe inside his time dilation field—it felt right.

The chamber contained hundreds more Arak drones. It looked a little different to what he’d seen in the memory he’d experienced, though it took a moment for Xavier to realise why.

The chamber. It’s… larger.

The chamber wasn’t the only thing that was larger. The queen herself had grown larger, too, which made Xavier wonder just how old the memory he’d experienced had been.

Unlike in the Arak drone’s memory, there were Arak drones inside this chamber standing either side of the queen, with some flying above those on the ground. Each of those drones was a soldier drone, not a builder drone like he’d encountered back in the city, and there were two hundred of them.

The queen has an honour guard… Why would she even need an honour guard?

To him, it seemed like a strange precaution. It would take an enemy a long time to make their way to this chamber. The queen would have ample time to prepare.

Unless, of course, the enemy had the ability to freeze time—as Xavier did.

He scanned several of the drones in the honour guard first. Even as he did, he realised what he was doing was an act of procrastination rather than of due diligence.

Xavier frowned. While what he found was to be expected given his knowledge of the queen, it didn’t make any sense to him. The Arak drones here were all D Grade. They were identical to the ones populating the army attacking the Kingdom of Eldaarn’s castle.

In other words, they were incredibly weak.

How, exactly, could this honour guard protect the queen better than she could protect herself?

Perhaps they’re just cannon fodder. There to be nothing more than a momentary distraction so the queen could do whatever she needed to do against an enemy invading her chamber.

Even that felt like a weak reason for having them there.

His act of procrastination concluded, Xavier turned his attention toward the Arakashinai queen, using his Identify skill on the insectoid Denizen.

He blinked as the longest wall of text of a description he’d ever seen when using Identify on a Denizen appeared in his vision.

{Arakashinai Queen – Level 401}

The Arakashinai were once a great and varied race, containing thousands of different queens dotted not only around their home world, but upon the moons, asteroids, and neighbouring planets of their solar system.

Before the System integrated their planet, they were considered a great spacefaring race.

The Arakashinai Queens birthed several types of Arakashinai. Once, they had a court surrounding them that consisted of individual Arakashinai with their own personalities—an honour guard of soldiers, a harem of consorts, and many Queens in Waiting they would send to new hives once they were fully matured.

The rest of their domain was populated by drones that had to return to the queen to receive new instructions each day. This restricted each queen from being able to expand their domain, even though their technology ultimately took them to space, as instructions had to be given via pheromones.

Thus, the Arakashinai Queens had a tentative peace. It was this peace that allowed them to expand into the spacefaring race they had become. But even with that peace, the Arakashinai Queens were each too territorial to live in perfect harmony.

Everything changed when the System integrated their home world.

The Arakashinai Queens began to develop the ability to command their drones from a distance. Spells replaced their natural processes of birthing drones, allowing the process to happen far more swiftly than ever before. The need for consorts disappeared. The honour guards queens once had were replaced by unthinking drones. And, with the ability to give commands to their drones over a large distance, the need to birth new queens became unnecessary.

The tentative peace between what had become hundreds of thousands of individual Arakashinai Queens was shattered.

The Arakashinai’s territorial nature had made them wipe out all other life on their planet except for the plant life needed to sustain them and their people long before the System had arrived, meaning the only way for them to gain Mastery Points was to fight one another. Their world held no beasts, and as one of the first planets in their sector to become integrated, it was never invaded.

One Arakashinai Queen came above the rest as her focus became purely on two things—the expansion of the number of drones she possessed, and her ability to communicate with them.

This allowed the Arakashinai Queen’s mind to develop immense powers. Ultimately, she became the only remaining queen.

This Arakashinai Queen has resided within her chamber for over two hundred thousand years, the vast majority of those years experienced before the System integrated her planet. She is the last of her kind, with only the will to expand remaining in her mind, and she has only one goal—expand into the entire universe, until she is the only one to dominate it all.

Note: Your Identify skill is not high enough to receive any detailed tactical information about this Denizen.

Xavier looked up at the ceiling and raised his eyebrow, as though directing his expression to the System itself. “All that information, and none of it about what she can actually do in a fight? Thanks, System,” he muttered with a sigh.

Level 401.

That seemed like the most pertinent information of the entire description, other than the queen’s mind being powerful. Though, that was something he’d figured out himself.

The queen is B Grade—just as I suspected.

Xavier was yet to face a B Grade enemy. He’d stopped short of doing that back on the Hell Moon Thazamar. The mimic he decided not to fight had been B Grade. There was another B Grade he wished to fight, one in a sector near Silver River. The Collector.

He’d thought that man would be the first B Grade he would kill.

Xavier looked at the massive Arakashinai Queen. Her back was arched, her head brushing the ceiling. He couldn’t help but shake his head. This Denizen had been inside this chamber for two hundred thousand years? That was a time frame he still couldn’t fathom, even though he knew it was rather small in the grand scheme of lifespans when one took into account how long others in the Greater Universe had lived.

But it made him realise something. Something that had occurred to him before but he hadn’t really explored in depth.

The queen is B Grade… but her soldiers are weak. Very weak. Their only strength in their numbers.

That wasn’t the thing he’d realised. But that, along with other information he’d gained here…

He looked at the description again. It was the longest description he’d ever gotten, and it appeared all of it was just info-dumping on this creature’s history—but Xavier noticed there were other things he could glean from it.

The queen had never left this chamber. At least, not since it had first arrived here, two hundred thousand years ago. The tunnels weren’t even large enough to accommodate it.

She must have been significantly smaller when she arrived.

The queen focused on creating drones and communicating with them. When the System had come to this world, and the only threats on it were her fellow queens, that strategy made a lot of sense. And, clearly, it didn’t only work here, otherwise the Kingdom of Eldaarn wouldn’t have been reduced to a single caste.

She overwhelmed every one of her fellow queens, killing them, expanding her territory with her drones…

Xavier’s forehead became deeply furrowed, thinking about what had occurred to him—it seemed more and more likely to be true.

Does that mean the queen herself has never actually fought anything without her drones? That she’s never been in an encounter with an enemy in front of her?

King Elric had led people to this planet, but he or any of his people had never encountered the queen. The queen had overwhelmed its fellow queens, meaning they never would have gotten a chance to make it here, to her chamber, a place she hadn’t left in a long, long time…

Her only power is in her drones… And her mind.

The drones’ weakness still bothered him, but it could be explained by the Denizen’s initial specialisation—she’d pushed so hard on expansion that the strength of her drones must have taken a massive hit.

Xavier stood a little taller. The tension in his stomach that he’d felt as he’d approached this place disappeared. A smile slipped onto his face.

All the queen’s strength was in her drones, and he’d simply walked straight into her chamber, avoiding millions upon millions of them, with only the honour guard at her side to deal with.

He released a chuckle, shook his head. Yes, the queen was B Grade, but without ever having to fight herself, it must mean she was incredibly weak compared to just about any other B Grade he was likely to ever encounter.

Xavier took a moment to think about how powerful the queen could have been. If her drones had ventured to other planets, not just to King Elric’s, she would have been able to gather a tremendous amount of Mastery Points, constantly. She could have sent her drones to dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of different worlds. On each of those worlds the drones could have been gaining Mastery Points in a constant stream, while ever expanding her domain.

She would have been a scrouge not just on this sector, but on the entire universe—if she ever had gotten a chance to truly get going.

But her individualistic nature had seemingly restricted her from ever even knowing that was an option. She struck back at the Kingdom of Eldaarn, but it must have been the System that had shown her, in a quest, how to get back to that world.

In everything that Xavier had seen, all over the different Arakashinai cities he’d encountered, there had been something missing.

A pedestal for a System Shop.

The Arakashinai Queen had done all of this without access to one. Without access to any information but that which the System gave her. She probably never even gained the Identify skill, either. And she clearly hadn’t gone through the Tower of Champions, as she’d never left this chamber. All she cared about was expanding her domain and destroying everything that stood in her way.

That lack of curiosity had crippled her.

Xavier released a long breath as he stared up at the hideous looking creature. Any worries he’d had about his ability to defeat the queen had faded away the longer he’d stood within that chamber. Killing the queen was now nothing more than a foregone conclusion.

Knowing that this queen was the last of her kind, despite the millions upon millions of drones she possessed, made him realise that killing her would technically be an act of genocide. While humans, elves, dwarves, and all manner of different races seemed to be spread around the entire universe, if the information from the System was correct, it implied the Arakashinai hadn’t evolved on other worlds.

She’ll exist in other universes. Maybe even in my own.

Still, even if killing her meant her species died out in the entire multiverse, Xavier couldn’t muster up an ounce of guilt about it. Just because she was the last of her kind didn’t mean she had a right to go on existing. Besides, she was the one who’d killed the rest of her own.

She did this to herself.

And so, Xavier was ready to kill the Arakashinai Queen. He knew exactly how he would do it, too.

The idea had formed as he’d made his way here. It was a little crazy, perhaps, and he hadn’t yet tested it, but he would have ample time for that.

There was something very interesting about the drones that he’d discovered. Something that if he really thought about it, seemed as though it shouldn’t be possible—but it clearly was. It must have been because of how these drones had originated. Something told him the spell the queen used to create drones was incredibly unique, one given to her kind because of their abilities before the System.

The Arak drones… Their minds were weak. Fragile. Easily dominated. Even so, they were living, breathing creatures. They weren’t constructs, like the Divine Guardian golem Siobhan was able to summon, or the golems that could be created and made into items—like Guardian back in Collinsville, or the Spirit Golem that could be inhabited by Rhaalir and other spirits.

And because they weren’t constructs, or other types of summoned creatures, that meant that each and every one of the drones possessed a soul.

Xavier’s smile grew.

If his plan worked, it would allow him to inflict more damage than he ever had before.

He got to work.