"Reincarnated" As An Overmind

CH:11//Actual scale and Invasions are boring.

 The King was pleased with my progress. The next target is a week away-- a mildly fortified village, next to no guards. I'll need to use most of my Biomass to encircle it in creep, for little material gain, but that's okay, it'll get me some genuine credibility, and likely a lot of info as to how the lower class of the Empire are treated, just in case I can't breach a city for whatever reason and need to take it. 

Of course, the sheer amount of biomass needed to cover the distance between the border and the first settlement is... insane. I need to get farms set up after every step, and a stockpile so my troops don't starve immediately. I spend 20000 Biomass on fruit trees at the wall, as well as 5000 on a cold room and 20 shogs. I also need intel. I divert the passive income at home towards Spy Roach production. I made 200 Biomass/hour with them... wait... That can't be right. OH, right, reduce by 20% to account for food production support, that's still 160 Biomass/hour. 

That's 2.6 Biomass per minute, enough for 1 Spy roach, plus an extra one every 4 minutes, then another extra every 20 minutes. In a day I'll have made... 1992 Spy roaches. but in a week I'll have made 13944. Surprisingly it might not be enough if they figure out these bugs are spying on them. I can always sacrifice the quality of the senses to halve the cost, despite how much I despise that idea.

Then again, I can't exactly choose what the enemy does, so I need to make sure that what I do can't be countered. 

Within that week, I've managed to use metal successfully in my drones, significantly reinforcing their carapace and weapons. I'll implement it in the Swarmers first, they're the least protected of my units, Spy Roaches and Shogs barred. 

The princess wants to observe my tactics, in preparation for her future role as Queen. I accept, as long as she doesn't join into combat directly, dealing with another unpredictable element that isn't hostile would significantly complicate my advance, hence why I want to surround the village and get them to surrender. The hardest part is feeding them on the way to the MPK, an airborne transport unit would be the best option, but also very much hard to put into place-- who'd want to step into a giant flesh box that came from the sky?

unfortunately, I can't spend that much Biomass on transport, so I'll just clear a path through the forest towards my Nest, then I'll lead them to Miryan, where the King'll take care of things.

I also already started growing the creep towards the village, it's already surrounded, I just need my troops to get there. Which should happen within the hour. I've also overestimated the Biomass consumption of creep. It makes enough biomass on its own to be self-sufficient and grow, regardless of how slow. It only needs water, which is taken care of thanks to the Heart, which I'll need to make another of, the flow is starting to get a little weak even just at the wall.

I still haven't been ratted out through my Spy Roaches, funnily enough. Maybe it's because my Magic stat is just so ridiculously high that I can even see the link between me and my drones. That also means that any strong enough mage can just follow that link back to me, not a real problem, not when you have the buggiest growth type in this world. 

All things considered, it should be pretty easy to get a single village to surrender, especially when faced with something like me. 

I've kept the village surrounded for over two weeks, they just refuse to surrender. I'm starting to realize how hard it'll be to get rid of the Empire. I know they plan to try and break the siege because I heard them strategize the attack. Even if I wasn't aware of it, it wouldn't work. 

I mean really, oil? It doesn't matter how many of you kill yourselves to me, I can still gain from that, charred bodies only lose roughly 15% of their biomass. Additionally, my drones aren't weak to fire.