The Collector slithered its way through the Darkwoods.

Wide tree trunks came into its vision, then blurred behind it as it rushed through the forest.

At first, the female daemon specimen tethered behind it had exhibited an elevated heart rate and tensed muscles indicative of fear, likely at the speed with which the Collector moved, but soon, she had adjusted herself.

With some skill, the Collector noted.

The daemon had oriented herself using minor applications of Sapian force to keep herself more stably tethered to the Collector, and this required not only a good approximation of the Collector's speed, but also when it would make twists and turns.

With the Collector's calculations, it would take forty minutes to reach the main goblin encampment if the memories of its approximate coordinates were correct.

Margin of error within eight minutes.

Its approximate speed: four hundred kilometers per hour.

And with every passing day, its speed and strength would increase to no end, unbound as it was now by mana enriching its physical properties.

Yet, the Collector would not reach those heights of power, that zenith of strength that lay beyond its limitations, even perhaps by the metamorphosis level limits set upon it by the Collective, once it signaled to the Collective.

No. Such thinking was flawed. The Collective was strength incarnate already.

Assimilating within it once more was the zenith of purpose and power the Collector strived for, respected and desired.

For in the end, that was the Collector's designated life cycle.

To be born with strength, to fight enemies, to gain their biomass and samples, and then in turn, when it became defective or outdated, to become consumed by the Collective itself, enriching the greater whole with new samples for the great purpose.

And the Collector knew that its life cycle would draw to an end once the Collective dawned.

The Collector was defective, and the Collective would either consume it for its unique new samples or restart the shard within it.

Either way, the Collector as it was now would no longer come to be in time.

And all for the better. The Collector would serve its glorious purpose. Become whole once more.

___

After some time traveling unimpeded, the Collector sensed the daemon speaking to it.

'I…I never asked. Where…where are you from?' asked the daemon.

'I do not herald from any one place. No fixed geographical point bound by the arbitrary limitations of borders and other such divisions. I am born of the Collective,' said the Collector.

'You…you've mentioned it, the Collective. And, forgive me for asking, but I-I'm curious: what…what is it?'

'You turn your curiosity, this 'wonder', to the Collective. Agreeable,' said the Collector, projecting its thoughts for ease of communication at its current speed of travel. 'The Collective is no mere thing. It is being itself.

Evolution progressed and honed into a singularity that will never falter.

It is the absorbed will of countless species that have all lost the discord and differences that once demarcated them as 'individuals'.

Inducted into the Collective, they become one, and as one, they attain a utopic perfection that no tinkering civilization can ever hope to match or even conceptualize.'

'I…I can feel what you are saying a little bit, even if your words are hard for me, and…and I can sense that this…this Collective is something big,' said the daemon. 'Something you really, really believe in.

The Collective…you said there are so many people in there, but…but none of them hate each other?'

'Emotions such as hate are outdated and vestigial remnants of tinkering imperfection,' said the Collector. 'Even within myself that is afforded limited emotion, I may hold measured judgements against you tinkerers, but hate?

I do not 'hate' your kind.

I simply see all of you as life that has strayed afar from the path of evolution, marking yourselves with discord even among your own kind.

In need of absolution from yourselves.

For it is known that you tinkerers are inherently self-destructive. Even without an external threat, you tend towards warring amongst yourselves regardless of the form you take and the biomes you originally adapted to.

Without the advent of warp-based technology, there is no doubt that you tinkerers would have hit a wall in development and expansion caused by conflict among yourselves and other self-destructive tendencies.

Thus, tinkering is a disease. A plague that feasts upon itself and others while leaving nothing of value to the universe.

It is inherently self-destructive.

A heresy against the fundamental principle of evolution: the propagation of one's own.

Within the short timeframes of your tinkering lives, you may believe your methods best to propagate, but in greater scales of time, it is faulty to the highest degree.'

'Hm,' said the daemon with wonder. She gazed at the Collector's slithering form, at the back of its horned head. 'That was…was one thing I noticed from you.

No hate. Just…just calm. And you say that the Collective, everyone in it, feels this calm.'

'That is precisely so,' said the Collector.

The daemon hung her head down. 'I…I never wanted to hate. It was hard for me to. Even when I hurt so much, it was hard. Thorian never told me to hate. Mother never told me to hate.

But…but I don't know. When the hurt kept going on and on and it felt like it would never end, I…I just had nothing left.

Nothing left but hate.

It makes me feel bad inside, a little, I know it's wrong, imperfect, like you say, but…but I still want to see this world break down just as much as I did.

That's why…that's why I trusted you so much from the start, because you were going to hurt people,' She paused, taking a long look at the Collector. 'But…but if you are going to change everything, bring calm to everyone, make everyone one, stop the hate completely, then…then I don't feel bad about trusting you.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles. 'When my mission is complete and this world has entered the greater ranks of the Collective, it will become whole. There will be no aberrant defections that lead to unnecessary divisions among your kind.

And in the end, the unique, anomalous strength and lives of this world will fuel the great purpose to ensure that life remains infinite,' said the Collector. It continued:

'Tinkering species build monuments to themselves, spread themselves across planets and star systems to replicate themselves, but in the end, they will never be infinite.

They will exhaust their resources and the energy. The cold of entropy will take them, and in all their warring and discord among each other, they will never manage to stand against the inevitable darkness.

But the Collective will be beyond this.

The fundamental principle beyond all evolution is the propagation of one's species. In the scale of the Collective, this is the continuation of life, and for this purpose, it will evolve, absorb, and grow to no end.

Once the Collective has inducted enough life across the stars within its being at a sufficiently grand scale, it will fulfill the Great Purpose.

The processing power of life united as one will surely stand against the darkness. Break the inevitable approach of heat death that otherwise comes for us all, tinkerer or hive-unit alike.'

'Wow,' said the daemon. 'I…I don't understand all of what you're saying, but the feeling I get…I get the feeling of being a part of something big and important. Being special.

Will I…will I be a part of this too? Even if I'm broken like I am now?'

'There is no doubt,' declared the Collector. 'The information you have provided me so far has been of great worth, contributing significantly to my survival and further planning.

For this, you shall be immortalized within the ranks of the Collective with as much honor as the true warriors I have devoured.'

'I'm…I'm worth something…and I won't be broken anymore…,' The female specimen nodded to herself, the tiniest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, though in an awkward, stilted fashion, the muscles for smiling having never been used in years.

She blinked as she tensed up, and the Collector stopped its movement in an efficient instant, a rush of wind blowing past it as it halted from high speeds.

'I…I can sense something off. The leylines,' said the daemon as she hovered in front of the Collector. 'They are warped. The mana swirling through them, through the land, is circling, spiraling int one point.'

"The dungeon," said the Collector as it clicked its mandibles and unsheathed its monomolecular edge claws. They clinked out from its fingertips, growing now to twenty-centimeter lengths.

It sensed there were insects around it, and, as the daemon noted as it focused mana into its eyes to make them more sensitive to the flow of magic, it could see what she was talking about.

Its vision became tinted in light blue as it inspected the area around it.

Lines of mana circulated throughout the land, 'leylines' as they were called, and these bright blue streaks poured out from the earth and danced over the grass and twirled around the trees.

Yet, the Collector had not been able to discern any significance from these flows, merely that they supported life in some way.

However, when prompted by the daemon, it now knew what to look for. It could see that in the seemingly random mass of flowing lines, there was now a pattern.

A slight swirl, more a tendency of the lines to break and move away and into a central point a sizable distance away from them.

And as its eyes sensed magic, its auditory systems sensed physical sounds. The clashing of hardened alloys breaking upon each other. Flesh rending. Bones breaking.

The sounds of battle.