I looked at the problems floating in front of me, the corpses of my new pod of aquatic minions bobbing at the surface of the lake. When I checked my minion counter, I saw a good quarter of them had up and died.

  At first, I thought some creature had gotten into the lake and killed all of them, but I couldn’t find any. My second thought was that something had poisoned the lake, so to check, I used my domain sense with Bug Jacobs permission, following the faint lines of power to check on their condition. And I was correct, but not in the way I thought I'd be.

  The lake water itself was poisonous from all the things that were shoved into it, the excrement from the living things crammed together, having created a toxic soup. And there were no plants or filter feeders to keep things livable, I had just plopped them into a random pool of water.

  I groomed my Antenna.

  Then I spoke to Bug Jacob, “Maybe I should just give up on the whole aquatic minion thing? Hell, maybe we should give up on this specific battlefield altogether and go create another one.”

  “No,” Bug Jacob countered, “It’s too late for that, you’ve invested so much into this battlefield that going to create a new one, even if we started now, would make us worse off in the end. Might as well go all in on this.”

  “That sounds like a sunk cost fallacy.”

  “Maybe, but am I wrong?”

  “I don’t think so… but we’re the same mind and stuff, so could it be that I’m only saying that because it’s what I want to believe?”

  “No,” Bug Jacob snapped, before wrangling themself in and said more calmly, but still with an underlying vitriol, “We’re different people in the same body, we have completely independent thoughts and minds. Though I do admit we’re similar because I was based on you.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude to you,” I didn’t know exactly what I was apologizing for, but I knew I had somehow hurt him, so I said it anyway.

  They sighed, “Thanks… and I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  “No worries,” I replied, “Anyway, let's get to saving this lake.”

  And I got to work, the first thing I did was try to figure out what the problem was exactly. I knew that the water was a pool of sludge, but I didn’t know exactly what I would need to fix. So I went through my aquatic minions, sharing their senses to let their natural instincts to tell me what was wrong. But as you can imagine, sharing the senses of a completely different creature that was swimming in sludge wasn’t exactly pleasant.

  And it wasn’t yielding the best results since I didn’t know how to interpret their instincts, so I took time to get used to them. But even then, their insects weren’t the most helpful, since most of the time it was just telling them ‘bad water, bad water, bad water!’ without saying what was bad.

  Then I had a breakthrough when I shared my Senses with Guppy the Mud Dragon, my old faithful minion, once again coming in handy. When I looked through their eyes, I was bombarded with thoughts on how horrible the water quality was again, but it was giving specifics. It was telling me how things should be, and how to fix it so I could make my nest and attract mates- No, not doing this again!

  I focused on my own body again, the foreign bodies' sensations fading away. After I took a moment to collect myself, I dived back into Guppy's head, parsing out the useful information. And pushing aside the information about how to make a nest as attractive as possible, and to cultivate the best fish for a proposal.

  It took a few hours, and I was now dealing with a killer headache, but I now actually had a plan. The first thing I did was get rid of the dead bodies and kill most of the remaining fish, only leaving the hearty ones that would actually survive past the next few hours. The ants happily disposing of the corpses, I was worried that they would get food poisoning. But I think they knew what they could and couldn’t eat better than me, so I let them.

  The next thing I did was go on a little trip with Guppy, allowing their instincts to take over and gather the plants and fish needed to cultivate a proper mating nest- lake, I mean lake! And when they took interest in something and brought it back home, I had my other minions do the same. But I ran into a problem, most of the aquatic plants and animals sorta died when they were out of the water for too long.

  Guppy could do it by putting it into their mouth along with some water and fly back with them, then spat it into the lake. And only some of the other minions go do something similar, primarily Huginn, Muninn, and some crimson colored hippo like things I had gotten at some point. But none of them could seal their lips well enough to keep the water from leaking out, so they could only get things from a short distance away.

  And we quickly scavenged all those that we could find from the nearby rivers, permanently devastating multiple ecosystems in the process (but that wasn’t my concern). And so I was left with a single Dragon bringing in the needed supplies, one at a time. When I had let go of my control over the minions, it was morning, and I got a surprising notification from the system.

  “Level up, +1 LV to Lunar Scale Dust. 9/10”

  “Level up, +1 LV to Moon Silk. 9/10”

  Yes, that took way too long!

  I had finally broken through the bottleneck in Lunar Scale Dust, but was a bit confused as to why Moon Silk had leveled up. So I investigated the only thing that it could be, I extended my domain and looked at the strands of power connecting me and my minions. I felt the energy, ‘tasting’ it, and found two flavors. The first one was the Domain that had been connected to Lunar Scale dust, and the other was Moon Silk. I suspected it was the reason why I could see through my minion's eyes; maybe I could move MP and Ep through it as well.

  I quickly tested it and found I was right, it was much weaker than the actual thing, but damn, it was still going to be useful. I was startled out of my thoughts by a tap on my wing. I whirled around to find it was only Urg, then they made the gesture for Moon Silk.

  When I gave it to them, they said, “Didn’t mean to startle you; Apology.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Don’t worry, just don’t do it again. By the way, what did you want to talk about?”

  They pointed towards the lake, “I noticed you had made major changes, and I was wondering why, and if I can help; Question?”

  “Oh, I’m just making the thing actually hospitable to life, apparently just plopping things into a lake and hoping they’ll live does work. And you don’t have to worry about helping me, I got… wait, no, you would be perfect!”

  “What would I be perfect at; Question?”

  I didn’t even explain it to them before I put them to work creating a water bubble to carry plants and animals back to the lake. Speeding up the process exponentially, and by noon, I noticed Guppy was starting to throw out plants and animals. So I stopped bringing them over, and now Guppy was cultivating the lake, herding the fish, and tending to the plants.

  After letting Guppy do that for around an hour, they stopped and deemed that it was ready to put in my desired minions. But when I put one in, Guppy had a visceral reaction and tried to throw them out of the pond until I stopped them. But I didn’t ignore it, I looked through Guppy’s senses to tell what was wrong, but all it told me was that the fish wasn’t supposed to be there. So instead, I watched the blue fish with rock like scales I had put in the pond. And within ten minutes, most had gone belly up. Confused, I connected to the senses of the remaining ones.

  And felt cold chilling my very bones, I immediately disconnected, still shivering despite only being connected for a moment. After I collected myself, I fed the soon to be dead fishs to my minions, then went out to collect a variety of different aquatic life. Putting them into the pond a few at a time and monitoring them to see if they could survive the climate, then when that batch was done, I did another until I had a sizable list to pick from. Then, after that, I inspected their abilities and narrowed it down even further, in the end winding up with a list of three creatures I wanted.

  The first was a large type of sturgeon I had found in a nearby lake with poison covering the sharp edges of the scales covering its body. And they could flare out their scale almost like a pufferfish.

  The second was the most annoying to get on the list, a mud fish that had grown wings and could bend the fabric of space to create little pockets to hide in, or to teleport, or to carry their young in. I had only been able to catch them because they couldn’t hide their magical signature from my Domain, and if I could sense them, I could subjugate them.

  The third wasn’t a fish but rather an exploding poisonous dart frog; they weren’t the most deadly, but they could spread the poison far with the aforementioned explosion. But the main reason I chose them was a bit different, it was currently the middle of breeding season for them. And they had an absurdly quick growth rate. I saw one go from an egg to a tadpole, to an adult in a quarter of a day. I thought I had a different frog until I checked my connection with it. And with my (admittedly bad) calculations, I judged that I would have around six hundred of the buggers by the time of the fight. Probably more, since I would be protecting and preventing them from cannibalizing each other.

  And when I was done hauling them over into the lake, I got a notification from the system, telling me I had gotten Slip Away to level nine. Just barely passing the three levels a day needed for the best outcome as the sun began to set. Then I checked my status to see how much I’d improved.

  Species: Elder Queen Lunar Scale Moth

  Level 70/70 till Evolution

  Antenna: Imperial, Crown of Lunaris

  Wings: Imperial, Cloak of Lunaris

  Tarsus: Imperial, Sceptre Of lunaris

  Abdomen: Imperial, Heart of Lunaris

  HP: Green

  Lv: 10

  MP: Green

  Lv: 27

  EP: Green

  Lv: 15

  Core Skills: 4/5

  Lunar Scale Dust

  LV 9/10

  1873/4800

  Moon Silk

  LV 9/10

  Royal Will

  LV 10/10

  Slip Away

  LV 9/10

  36/390

  Locked

  Gained Skills: 3/5

  Stealth

  LV 10/10

  Appraisal

  LV 10/10

  Split Focus

  3/3

  I could see my Minion counter had doubled, and Slip Away's capacity had increased massively again. But the bigger the number got, the less fulfilling they felt, weirdly enough. It wasn’t like I could get that many minions in the time before the Boss Rush, so I just skimmed over it.

  Then my mind went towards something that could actually be helpful, the minions I did have. There were my elites, the Storm and Nimbus Ravens, the Colossal Tempest Anteaters, the Giant Cutter Ant Queen, and of course, my big beautiful boy Guppy.

  But there were also the non elite minions, a few of them were more useful than the fodder. And I took my time to pick them out of the medley. There were the Solar Scale Butterflies, the Sun Rhinos (the ones that shot flame), and sadly the only new addition, the Blood Hippos.

  They were the ones that I used to transfer flora and fauna to the lake, and they had caught my eye. So I looked into them, and they were built like tanks, even more so than the Anteaters, but not as much as Guppy. But they had two other edges. They could heal rapidly when they drank blood, and they grew considerably stronger, too. But it came with the downside of them going berserk. Even my control of them barely worked, I could only give them a general direction to kill everything in.

  The first time it happened was not pretty to say the least, you would not believe the amount of destruction forty walking tanks of spite and hatred could cause. I tried to find other, more reliable minions among my group. I discovered a few promising candidates, but they number so few that they just fell back into being fodder again.

  When that ended up being fruitless, I spent the rest of the third to last day just cultivating what I already had. Growing my population and grinding to get my levels up, but by the end of the day, I had only gotten Slip Away to max level.

  So the next day, I absolutely put my nose to the grindstone, talking even less to everybody than I already did. Barely keeping up the facade of actually having a plan to help them. It was so bad that they probably had figured it out by now… probably, who am I kidding, they already have.

  Then, at the very beginning of the last day before the Boss Rush, after hours of hard work, I had finally hit max level in all the skills. A new system window popping up.

  “Evolution available, take it? Yes or no?”

  Moon Sigil Moth: The right hand of the god Lunaris, one of the few demigods in existence. There is only ever one at a time.

  Requirements: All mutations taken, four max core skills, no other Moon Sigil Moth, Favoured by Lunaris Terra

  “So…” I said to Bug Jacob, “Ready?”

  “Stop hesitating, there’s nothing else we can do.”

  Taking his words to heart I proceeded down the tunnels, going into a shallow one since the deeper ones were still flooded. And then I hit accept, my vision going black, knowing the next time I awoke there would be war.