Chapter 24: Chapter 23: Killing Time

After a while, Lia found overseeing the looting…boring. She was basically just sitting in one place and waiting for things to be brought to her, so…why was she bothering being in the goblin camp? The burrowers had just about finished digging up the feeding station, so she figured she might as well go back with them.

She felt a little bad about leaving Lily alone there, but she tried not to let it show. There was just something…different about Lily when compared to Rose. Rose had the aura of…well, a big sister, someone who Lia could talk to and rely on. She just…made Lia want to let her guard down.

Lily, on the other hand, felt like a subordinate. She was someone who Lia felt confident in commanding, but not someone Lia really felt compelled to confide in. Lia was a boss giving orders, Lily didn’t need to know about Lia’s personal doubts. Besides…it wasn’t like she would be in any significant danger; Lia had made it clear that, since Lily had no combat prowess, she was to stay with one of the groups of soldiers at all times. And if one of those couldn’t protect her, then she was probably just as much in danger back at the base.

So, Lia left as soon as the burrowers had finished, joining their escort in taking them back to the home base. Once she arrived, she oversaw the placement of the food dispenser, then set off to find Rose. It had been almost an hour since she had last seen the girl, and she was more than a little curious as to how close her evolution was to being finished.

It wasn’t even that Lia was worried, she knew that this would take a while, she was just…lonely. Rose was the only person Lia could really talk to, since communicating with Amelia was hard and Lily was…well, more akin to an acquaintance.

She located Rose after only a moment, and turned away just a breath after that, giving her just enough time to confirm Rose’s general size and shape. She wanted to let as much of it as possible be a surprise, but from what she saw, she was guessing Rose was getting close to being done. Rose was clearly humanoid now, and by the looks of it was…roughly the size of a young teenager.

Lia was guessing it would take another hour at the most to finish, so, until then, she had to figure out something to do. Well…the tunnel to the burrow had been completed and she hadn’t yet checked it out, so that was something that would probably eat up a bit of time.

She made her way to the tunnel and through to the old burrow. It was…almost exactly the same as she had left it, save for there being no exit to the outside. It was a bit darker than before, though that didn’t really mean anything to her with Night Vision.

…She wasn’t really sure what she had expected. It wasn’t like she had ordered any remodeling aside from the entrance, so of course it was going to be the same as it had been before. Still, between walking down the tunnel, taking some time to poke around the burrow just in case, and walking back, she wasted a solid thirty minutes, so she was that much closer to Rose’s evolution being completed.

But she could feel that it hadn’t yet fully completed. Rose’s presence in the back of her mind was…thin, and, if she pressed that presence and looked for more details like she would with a non-enlightened member of the swarm, she just got an “evolving” in return.

Well…she had received a lot of Blood Money from that siege, enough to get her that Dimensional Search Engine Skill, and she was in a safe place, so she might as well get that taken care of while she had the time. She activated the Skill, and began to read the window it made.

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