The evolution process that took lords years of domain management, gene point collection, and resource expenditure had been compressed into hours of simple self-predation.
He asked Freya about it while still moving.
'Can they keep going?' he said internally. 'Past the 5th Origin? Diamond class, even Mythic?'
'I genuinely don't know,' she said. 'I've never seen them push this far before. Diamond class seems possible based on what I'm watching. Whether they can stabilize at Mythic is a different question. The doubling mechanism puts enormous stress on whatever structure holds these things together. At some point that structure might not hold.'
'Might not,' Neil said.
'That's the honest answer,' she said.
He kept moving toward the center.
The queen was not difficult to identify once he was close enough.
She was larger than everything around her, substantially larger, and her appearance deviated from the standard creature template in ways that were immediately visible.
