Chapter 3455: A Trail of Chaos II
Most species of the phylum that flies belonged to only had thousands of visual units comprising their eyes. It gave them a compounded kinetic vision that created an almost precognitive effect where they could see the future and evade any threats before the threats could even reach them.
This species of flies, however, was specially engineered and had naturally evolved to have more than a million visual units comprising their eyes, allowing them to see things that no other species could possibly sense.
They could see entropy itself.
They could not only see entropy itself, but they also had the ability to recognize entropy from particular species, which helped it track down prey and avoid predators.
The little fly sat on the bark of a tree, doing things that flies normally did, rubbing its appendages on its head and eyes, before spotting a trail of entropy that seemed to come out of nowhere. Its other senses tried detecting an existence that could explain where all the entropy was coming from, only to find absolutely nothing.
The entropy, unlike the entropy of other creatures that it sensed, was muddled, telling it nothing about the source of the entropy that was releasing all that energy. It just seemed to come out of nowhere. Then, in a biological mechanism engineered into it, it released a radio signal.
A report.
To the Dthrivoraustrat Clan within Kiriket, a clan that was centered around the flies in their Beast Path. A report that detailed an anomaly on the continent regarding an unknown source of entropy within the continent.
This was a top-secret surveillance measure that the clan had kept to themselves, telling absolutely nobody in Kiriket about it, not even the Dragon Emperor.
The initial report itself did not mean much. An anomaly was merely an anomaly. Sometimes it was a new species, or a new mutation, or some obscure ecological phenomenon that deviated from the norm, registering as an anomaly.
They got multiple anomalies each passing day, making a single anomaly report about strange entropic patterns not the greatest of priorities on the continent. Especially when many of these anomalies were in fact just glitches in the fly’s biological systems.
Inorganic technology was most certainly capable of its many bugs, failures, shortcomings, and defects. The same was true for actual bugs; a real biological surveillance system integrated into its DNA by the Dthrivoraustrat Clan.
However, what was different about this anomaly was the sheer number of flies reporting it. One fly could be faulty, certainly, but a large number of flies, ranging in the hundreds, to later even thousands, couldn’t feasibly all be malfunctioning.
Thus, the Dthrivoraustrat Clan sent a team of therianthropes from its hive, situated in the South-East part of the nation, that sought to explore the anomaly up close. The team comprised not just researchers but also warrior therianthropes in case the anomaly was dangerous. Given the amount of area it covered as judged by the timeframe difference between reports from flies in entirely different areas, it would be fair to assume that it was a rather powerful anomaly.
BZZZT...
In the middle of the night in the Dthrivoraustrat Clan, a large number of giant insects gathered in a large opening in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges.
Mountain ranges made from special hives.
The Dthrivoraustrat Clan was a clan that adopted the homemaking traits of another species of insect that made hives, integrating it into the DNA of a specialized fly that they cultivated the Beast Path with.
The mountains were not made up of wax, unlike with bees, but they were nonetheless artificially engineered, born from tectonic manipulation on the part of the Dthrivoraustrat Clan to cause a series of mountains to erupt from within the ground that they then drilled into and gained complete control over, creating a giant hive within the mountains they occupied.
Most therianthropes in the clan have tamed a giant fly, a species of massive insect that they created using genetic engineering. While there used to exist insects in the past that were absolutely enormous due to the environmental conditions supporting such lifeforms, they had all but died out until the therianthropes had achieved a breakthrough that allowed them to create a stable and active species with just those very traits that allowed them to bond with insects that retained their tremendous abilities scaled to massive sizes.
BZZZZ!
The environment in and around the Dthrivoraustrat Mountains was completely flooded with the buzzing sound of winds for dozens of kilometers, if not hundreds. The sound of giant chitin wings flapping at extremely high speeds was loud, especially when there were hundreds of millions, if not billions, of such giant flying piloted by therianthropes.
The therianthropes were different from many others, containing wings of their own, as well as eyes that took after the insects that they had bonded with.
BZZZZT!
A large group of therianthropic fly-men buzzed together in formation in an open clearing within the mountains that they occupied.
They donned attire patched together from the chitin wings of their little prey, shunning normal clothes woven from threads taken from some kind of fiber from plants. The therianthropes fashioned their clothes from the deceased of those that they ate, which made for gruesome images that distanced the therianthropic world from the other five, now six, homo species of the true world.
BZZZT
An even larger therianthrope with even greater parts of his body beastified stepped forth, directing a sweeping gaze at the squadron of fly-men with his insectile eyes. His head contained antennas, something that none of the lesser fly-men of his squadron had.
"The anomaly we are going to be looking into is one that has been reported by nearly ten thousand flies in the past one hour. This means that it is undoubtedly a real and significant report that we have decided to prioritize immediately."
He grabbed a scaled ball from the chitin belt wrapping around his body, pressing bone buttons.
BZZZT
A three-dimensional hologram created from bioluminescent projection holographic technology from the biological product emerged midair in front of him, reflecting a red trail in the Southeast of the continent, rapidly moving inwards.