The Collector spent a good hour sprinting through the woods, its sensitive hair adaptation picking up any changes in temperature and wind current around it to ensure that nothing escaped its spatial awareness.
Small animals, mostly mammalians of little worth such as the rabbit it had consumed before, made way for the Collector's charging yet deathly silent figure, scampering into burrows or deep undergrowth like retainers parting in fear fueled hurry before the descent of an almighty tyrant.
Good.
That meant that the Collector was not wasting its time. It would seem that the best sources of biomass in this forest biosphere would be the goblins, more specifically the larger hobgoblin variants.
The Collector knew that in terms of spatial orientation, the goblin den it had consumed was the one furthest positioned south, closest in proximity to the human settlement.
The other four were more remote, with two of them located in what seemed to be a darker, harsher part of the forest biome located far north.
The memories the Collector extracted were hazy, sufficient enough to map out where it needed to go but not clear enough for it to be completely confident of what it would face.
It could recall distinct emotions of fear and wariness from both the hobgoblin and the goblins it had consumed when they roamed the darker zone of the forest, but nothing in detail as to what exactly they faced.
The northern part of this forest biome might house hobgoblin variants that were even stronger than the 'Draug' the Collector faced. It seemed likely, in fact, if these northern hobgoblins were adapted to a suitably harsher environment.
The Collector clicked its mandibles as it slowed down, sensing that it neared the approximate location of the second den it would consume.
This den, however, still sat within the warmer zone of the forest, just a small distance north of where the Collector had initially crash landed.
It stood to reason then that the hobgoblin here would be of the same variant as the 'Draug' the Collector had already consumed.
Indicating that there would be no threat.
Yet the Collector still moved with caution. By now, its once breakneck sprint had eased down into a sauntering walk focused on complete obscuration of presence.
Each of its steps were soft, evading any breakable debris that could cause sound, and it utilized the thicket of trunks around it to its advantage, hiding its figure behind them as it advanced.
The Collector's olfactory system alerted its brain. The scent of the goblins was faint here, but sufficiently strong enough to follow. It paid attention to the forest floor, keeping its many bulbous eyes alert for tracks, but did not find any.
A minute passed as the Collector stalked its way forward.
Then it tensed up. The scent of the goblins continued to intensify, but it quickly realized from a minor calculation that the scent was increasing at a rate near double to what it expected.
Which meant that the goblins were on the move and headed directly towards the Collector. It hid behind a tree trunk thick enough to cover its whole frame and waited, keeping all of its vast sensory array alert.
All of its internal functions slowed down to a near halt, its heartbeat nearly deadening and its muscles freezing to an absolute stillness, preventing any sound from escaping it.
It could not hide in treetops anymore as it did in its previous metamorphosis level due to its now significantly increased bulk, but it still had more than enough programmed skill in stalking and hunting to minimize its presence to a level far, far beyond what any evolutionarily backwards hunter was capable of in this world.
It did not take long for the goblins to near.
The Collector sensed that up ahead, twenty meters ahead, an entourage of goblins moved through the forest. They did not care much at all to obscure their presences, obviously believing themselves apex predators in this specific zone of the forest biome.
Their footsteps were heavy, crushing apart dead and brittle foliage, and their voices filled the air in conversation.
The Collector's vibration sensitive airs were not effective at this range, but its hearing was developed enough for it to calculate that there was one heavier pair of footsteps accompanied by the faster, lighter scampers of six other bipeds.
An entourage consisting of one hobgoblin and six goblins.
Encounter approximately due in ten seconds.
The Collector began to restart its heart, pumping blood back into its body to ready for battle. Its monomolecular blades slowly unsheathed from its fingertips and elbows.
"Draug, draug, we take village now, right!?" said a goblin.
"Yes. If my brother ready," replied a gruff, deeper voice. The hobgoblin. "But be careful. We no move yet. Have to wait for shaman. Then the lord."
Five seconds.
"How long we wait?" said another goblin. "Want to eat. Hungry for days now."
"I know, Kiri. Two nights. Just two nights," said the hobgoblin, its voice very near now. "Then we eat. We take back our land. Make humans pay for stealing. Make goblin kingdom again like lord says."
At precisely the mark of one second remaining before the hobgoblin would pass the tree trunk the Collector hid behind, the Collector moved first. It swerved around the trunk in a single sweeping motion, calculating based on motions its sensitive hairs detected where the hobgoblin would be behind the trunk and slashing at the throat.
The hobgoblin flashed into the Collector's sight, and surprisingly, it managed to move backwards just in the nick of time, evading the claws aiming to shred its jugular by just a hair's breadth.
Yet the Collector was not so unsophisticated that it would botch a planned attack with any sizable margin of error. Its claws might not have slit the hobgoblin's vital parts into pieces, but it did inflict a deep wound.
The hobgoblin stumbled backwards, putting a tawny black hand to its throat where five deep lacerations exposed pumping, soft and vulnerable major arteries to the air.
Still, the Collector did not like that it had managed to err in its calculations. It had done so before with the humans, too, misjudging their speed, strength, and the properties of their weapons.
Though in the end its miscalculations were so minor that they did not affect the outcomes of its battles, such sloppiness was unbecoming of the Collector. Of the Collective and the evolutionary progress it exemplified.
As a representative of the Collective, the Collector had to do better. It would prove itself now.
"Wh-what?" said the hobgoblin as it glanced down at its hand. Blood red smeared its black flesh in contrasting hues. It looked up to the Collector, a snarl half forming at its mouth, but then its yellowed eyes widened.
"Brother?" wondered the hobgoblin aloud, and in that moment of hesitation or recognition or whatever it was that made the creature inefficient, the Collector acted.
The Collector thrust its hand out, pointing its spider silk spinneret topped index finger at the hobgoblin. It contracted its ultrafiber muscles around its finger, and like a spring loaded coil, a thread of spider silk shot forwards, latching onto the hobgoblin's forehead.
The Collector grunted as it grabbed the silk thread with its other hand and pushed down violently at just the precise angle to make the hobgoblin face plant with a heavy crash into the forest floor.
There was an audible thump of impact as a cloud of decayed sticks and leaves fluttered up around the hobgoblin's head. The forest floor was too soft of a surface to cause lethal injuries, but the sudden blow would daze the hobgoblin for a moment, and a moment was all the Collector needed.
It leaped forwards and landed by slamming its carapace encased foot into the hobgoblin's head like a falling sledgehammer, crushing the feeble biped's skull with a sickening, thoroughly audible crunch before the Collector twisted its foot, grinding everything soft and vital under its heel.
It was then, when their leader, the precious 'Draug' was reduced to nothing but a pulped soup of brain matter mixed with cranial shards that the goblins reacted with shrieks.
The entire altercation must have lasted three seconds, if that, and shock had prevented the simple-minded goblins from doing anything in that short timeframe.
The goblins took a single look at their dead 'Draug', then at the Collector's hideous, towering form of musculature and carapace, and turned their backs.
No survivors. The Collector gleaned from the short conversation between the goblins and the hobgoblin that their forces were mobilizing. Any goblins that escaped would alert the other dens.
The Collector shot forward another thread of silk, and it latched onto the nearest fleeing goblin's back, and it fell backwards as the string grew taut from its attempted escape. Like reeling an unruly dog in by leash, the Collector tugged at the string, sailing the goblin back.
The Collector grabbed the silk string like a lasso and started to swing it around above its head with the goblin still attached. The velocity of the revolutions was such that the tethered goblin could not even scream, the air sucked out its lungs.
The other goblins were running now, and all in different directions. The Collector had anticipated this, and there was no better way of dealing with scattering prey than ranged weaponry.
Of course, the Collector did not possess its acid spitters or spine shooters yet, so it made do with this…improvisation. It did not like doing anything that remotely resembled tool usage, scornful of the tinkerers and their reliance on tools as they were, but this barely passed its standards.
The Collector swung down the thread, using the goblin at its end to slam down into another goblin, crushing both into broken and lifeless bodies. It made sure that the impact was not strong enough to completely explode the goblin's body for it had to be used four more times.
And four more times, the Collector used the spider silk tethered goblin corpse as a wrecking ball to bludgeon the rest of its brethren to a broken boned demise before the little things could even dive into cover.
The Collector cut the spider silk from its finger and breathed in the iron scented smell of its victory. It felt less rewarding than before, when it was at its previous metamorphosis stage and it had actually felt injury against the other hobgoblin.
This was far too easy now.
Perhaps the other hobgoblins in the harsher environ of the forest would provide a better challenge for consumption.
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