Molly was baffled by the sheer beauty of this forest. She had been in an elvan’s holy Grove only once and that was for the marriage of her sister and the only reason she had been allowed in was for the ceremony. The elves all but worshipped nature and the nature goddess. This place was like an entire forest spanning holy Grove. No, it was even more than that, as unlike those carefully critiqued bastions of magic and mana. This place had magical beasts huge guardians of the forest lumbering around just casually.

  Though she could see several bared scars from the recent undead invasions. Though considering how she could feel the very potent life energy in the air mending her own wounds she wondered just how recent those wounds had to be. As one massive emerald stag covered in scratch marks laid down near a group. No an actual heard of emerald stags. The second largest got up and wandered back the way the first had just come.

  As Molly traveled deeper into the forest, she witnessed this seen repeated several times over with several different species. They were clearly defending the place but not desperately so from what she could tell.

  What shocked her was when a Terra Ursus or an earth bear, one of the mightiest of the common classification of forest guardians stopped letting a pack of the silverish blue slimes pass in front of it. Magical creatures tended to show difference to the master of their territory. So why the heck was the most powerful common class magical creature here showing any form of subservience to slimes and it didn't even bat an eye at her flying guide. So maybe the two were connected? Maybe the slimes could be an earlier stage of this flying creature.

  She'd never heard of anything like that, but monsters were weird, and she was proven just how weird when she entered a Grove of massive old trees. The trees were covered in silver markings with crystal leaves and more of the flying creatures made their nests in its branches. As the slimes came in and out of their roots. This was the heart of the forest, not its literal heart as she doubted it was old enough for such a magical artifact to have formed but this, this was what was protecting it. This was what was making it so strong. She had seen the silver slimes attacking the undead, but she had thought them just regular beasts. Yeah, the slimes were weird, but this was just beyond anything she could have imagined.

  The air in the grove was charged with a faint presence like standing too close to a Thunder spell. But instead of it being wild and violent like she was used to it was a faint hum in the background. She’d guess this was why all the animals and magical beasts avoided the unique trees.

  In the center of the small Grove of unique trees was a pit of bluish silver material that made-up the slimes.

  Sam wasn't quite sure what to think of their guest, but they couldn't let the chance to be a little dramatic pass them by. So as their guest passed the pit they had been using to fabricate larger units in they activated their newest prototype. This prototype was the test bed for new larger robotic units. Well larger being a bit of a big word considering they were used to working on a much smaller scale. After all their slimes weren't much bigger than a basketball and his drones weren't that large to begin with. They could easily scale them up for heavier loads or for specialty projects but never really had a need to.

  As for the newer unit well, a bipedal design was still a bit too far for them. But robots had been a bit of their interest back home. When they had been a kid their parents had got them a spot unit as both a house tender and the family pet spot units were basically just improved versions of Boston Dynamics old spot program. Robots had never really gotten to the point where they could fully replace people. However, when improved versions of stuff like the spots, store guides or Atlas bots found their way into the open market after a huge rise in automation had nearly caused a financial collapse.

  Eventually, the government had to bite the bullet and give tax breaks for using human employees but by the time they had. Almost all factory or industrial work was nearly done completely by robotics supervised by humans except on a few very special cases. So, they had plenty of ideas and basic information to pull from to design actual robotic units. Nothing to advance or even anything equivalent to military grade just yet though.

  The cat girl startled back as the dog like robot Sam had been working on rose out of the pool approaching her only for her to trip over a root. Sam chuckled at the scene before having the bot extend its gripper to offer to help her up.

  The catgirl just stared at it for a few seconds before grabbing the thing's arm instead of its gripper. Ohh well, it did sort of look like a mouth. Once she was back upright the blue pool behind Sam's bot began to rise to form a platform on which it printed a small speaker in a little wooden box.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Sam couldn't help but find the poor girls baffled confusion amusing but they didn't do this just to show off they had a task to do.

  Sam had honestly wished they had managed to get more audio recordings from the camp. Research was an amazing skill but it could only do so much with what it had on hand.

  The spot bot gently picked up the small speaker and once it was firmly latched into its small gripping appendage the platform of nanobots collapsed back into the pool. The bot then walked over to Sam's original tree and pressed the small speaker against it . Small silver like appendages reached out from the bark fusing to the box and connected it to the circuitry network that spanned across the ancient tree that Sam now called home. The speaker popped and crackled as they took a second to adjust it just right before.

  “Hello? Speak learn speak?”

  It wasn't their most elegant of sentences, but they hoped they got the right phrasing across.

  “Hello? Communicate study talk?”

  At least that's what Molly thought the thing said. In all honesty, it was really rough. The strange voice was stunted and it did not know how to accent the words correctly and what little it did seemed to be a blend of multiple different accents. But it was trying to talk so she’d try too. After all, that's kind of what she was supposed to be here for anyways. Not that this wasn't the most insane and downright almost creepy thing she'd ever done. But she was in the middle of the most vibrant forest she had ever seen during an undead crisis while most other lands were trying to stave off being blighted talking to a magic tree. At least she really hoped it was a magic tree maybe the druids or elves could handle this a bit better but at least they'd know what they would be dealing with. Its magic was so weird though it had created a creature right before her eyes and then made another weird tool that let it speak. So yeah, she had to at least try. Especially since who knew when they'd ever manage to get back into this forest again.

  A week later Molly was regretting so many of her decisions, one of which was not taking longer to train the blasted thing on how to speak their language at least somewhat decently. Because she was desperately wishing her comrades had found a way into the forest by now. Molly grit her teeth and grabbed onto the strange metal rope attached to the harness around her hips and back that was further attached to eight of the flying little drones? She believed that was the word the tree well the core or Sam it had been using the two interchangeably had referred to the little flying things as.

  She watched in blatant fear as their little spinney wings spun up into an absolute roar seconds before she felt her feet leave the ground. She gulped and looked down not liking this not liking this at all she watched the forest pass underneath her followed by swarms of undead. Witch was terrifying but thankfully it wasn't a long flight before she spotted the small cave in the cliffside they had been using as their base.

  She watched as her comrades filed out to look up at her as she was set down in the middle of their camp.

  Her legs were shaky from the short flight and she was so thankful to be back on solid ground that she nearly fell over but she righted herself quickly enough and before the flying things had a chance to land she yanked the stupid harness off. Before stumbling to the nearest seat and plopping down on it. Much to the absolute bafflement of everyone there who was pretty sure they were going to find her body shambling around the valley somewhere.

  “Someone anyone get me a drink or something I don't care at this point.”

  She grunted when she found a flask of dwarven whiskey shoved into her hand. She poured a cap full and swallowed it down before another. The stuff nearly killed her going down, but she didn't want to be shit faced for her report to the commander so she put the cap back on after the second shot.

  “Gods damn it that stuff is rough. I needed something to settle my nerves not.” Cough. “Not knock me out.” Cough. “I got in. Mmmh. I got into that insane forest. Met the guy. Um, girl. Um, thing. I don't know, in charge. Ohh fuck whatever you guys do the silver slimes the flying whirly thingies the metal dogs don't attack them. They belong to whatever is in charge around here and we need to give back whatever we took from those. Cause yeah it's not happy about that. It doesn't like thieves it sort of understands we weren't trying to steal from it but it does want its stuff back. Apparently, those little disc thingies aren't easy to make I think. It doesn't really fully understand our language just yet. It I did the best I could in the time I had but it can talk at least ohh ship I need to do this all to the. Ohh there you are commander uh we got a week to fortify this place it's digging a tunnel or well a pipe. It thinks a week might be longer, but it thinks a week and till it reaches us. It just told me to make this place as safe as possible. Again, it's not got a big vocabulary it's still learning but it learns fast. sooo yeah uh I ohggah damn that's drink was strong I'm not I'm not going back. It's gonna try and make me fly and I'm not going back.” She grunts before slumping over onto the table.

  It took three days to punch a hole into the back lines of the goblin camp. Sam was beginning to think their estimate of a week to reach the nearby camp of the expedition was a bit overly enthusiastic. They just side and continued digging while the first slime poured out into the goblin nest. What followed was a really short fight if you could even call it that. They weren’t sure what they were expecting really but they weren't expecting a bloodbath. They were expecting a panic, they were not expecting to eat most of the goblin's forces before they even realized what was going on. Followed by the survivors freaking out and fleeing out of their defended nests and into the waiting jaws of the undead. But well, regardless they now had a small cave system under their control.

  They would definitely need to fortify the small cave system before starting work on improvements but that was for later. Right now they had to get busy clearing out the goblin settlement along with one of the greatest and most disgusting caches of resources they had ever found. At the back of The Cave system was a deep deep pit deep enough that even just looking down Sam could see veins of iron and other materials along with a small. Ok, it was actually, quite big but in comparison to the cavern, it was small mound of goblin waste. Goblins could eat just about anything though that did not mean they could necessarily digest it. So obviously they would have to relieve themselves of anything they couldn’t, including a lot of iron and other metals.

  While it wasn't as useful for larger scale construction as the lake would likely be once they could gain access to it. This place would be ideal for setting up a small subterranean factory complex to produce more of the more complex units. Not to mention the mineral rich rock and the abundance of forgotten materials by the goblins. But for the time being, they began cleaning and working their way towards the meeting point which was Sam's top priority. However, once they had a bit of room to work with they'd start setting up the first sections of their new assembly lines.