“Gather within this hallway. Do not step beyond its boundaries,” said the Collector. It started to surge its magical energy, and brilliant, massive arcs of blue crackled out of it in thick bolts that slammed into its surroundings.

Its carapace cracked and its flesh sizzled as it poured out immense amounts of stored magical energy. The magical energy came not only from the Collector’s current 200% reserves but also by the immense amount of overcharged energy that was gathered inside of the Origin Rune. The amount of energy it channeled, when counting the Origin Rune, was at a sufficient enough quantity that even the Collector could not accurately harness it without harming its body over time.

Initially, the Collector had desired to utilize the magical energy to force a further evolution for all of the goblin swarm, but now, it could utilized it for a different purpose that was likely to be far more useful.

The Collector channeled the overwhelming magical energy within itself and ran it through its Jotnar core, coloring it blue in the form of the Unity affinity. The Unity affinity was the most suited for creation, and creation was what the Collector needed to do now at the largest scale it had ever done so in this world.

The bolts of blue energy arcing from the Collector did not just crash against the walls of the hallway, but instead funneled into them, permeating throughout the structure of the mountain and latching onto the flow of magical energy imbued inside of it.

Essentially, the Collector was hijacking the magical energy of the mountain by attaching its personal threads of magical energy into it. The hallway started to shake and rumble, rubble falling from the ceiling as the white ice crystals that provided light flickered.

The Collector then began to utilize its Origin Rune. Its four red gleaming red eyes flickered, their normally pupil-less ocular systems filling in with spiral shaped dark blue pupils. The spiral patterns threading outwards from the Collector’s golden light core.

Within the Collector’s mental processing, interfacing with the Origin Rune was in many ways quite similar to interacting with the Collective’s Evolutionary matrix. If there was a means to create a visual approximation for the process, then it would have been like sifting through a collection of flickering blue lights that floated in the darkness, with each of these lights representing the individual core of a Jotnar.

It would have taken an ordinary tinkerer hours or, at the very least, an inordinate amount of time to sift through the number of cores to access what they desired, but the Collector had memorized every single core’s capabilities and knew easily which one to select.

The Collector selected the Jotnar core that possessed the Fortress ability. It belonged to a Jotnar that had been named Dor Run Thoom. The core itself possessed a trigger of ‘Hope’, and this emotion, the Collector was only vaguely familiar with.

The Collector would have to artificially open the core and allow the trigger of ‘Hope’ to flow into itself for now, and then later, perhaps it would attempt to try and rationalize the emotion and develop it in its own terms.

By now, the Collector was far less averse to allowing emotions it did not understand into itself for it was confident that it could rationalize them and understand them, or even if it could not, it had come to know that emotions, even those that it could not fully grasp even now such as the trigger of ‘Wonder’, did not infallibly corrupt it or make it defective.

Certainly, emotions at first value were irrational and antithetical to pure efficiency, but the Collector was beginning to realize that though some of them did not follow rational boundaries, that they like any body part could be understood, harnessed, and mediated.

Thus, the Collector channeled Hope, and it felt the emotion forcibly entering its processing system. The hope that the specimen that this ‘Dor Run Thoom’ had felt was one that looked forward. Where there was darkness and death all around him, he could use this ‘hope’ to see ahead, to conjure up an image of a brighter future in spite of the countless variables around him that made such a future a nigh impossibility of probability.

It was hope in spite of his weakness. Hope in spite of his environment.

As the Collector channeled the emotional trigger and opened up its newly slotted Jotnar core, the spiral patterns extending out from its shinchu light orb shifted. The spiraling pattern of dark blue shifted instead into a series of rectangular patches of blue, as if six dotted lines had been drawn across the Collector’s chest.

The core was now fully stabilized and active, and the Collector could feel the heat of a newly opened core flowing through its body. It closed its four fists and focused its magical energy. The tethers of unity mana it had created to latch onto the cavern walls grew in size, and the Collector could feel that it had wrapped around most of the magical energy remaining in the mountain.

Now, it was a matter of using Fortress.

The Collector breathed out through its skin pores, and chilling, thick air akin to fog vented out of its body.

“Impressive,” said Kui as he watched with crossed arms, his robes billowing from the wind pressure of the Collector’s outwardly projected energy. “To amass this amount of magical energy remotely is a feat that I have never seen before.”

“As expected of the Sovnar,” said Goromir with a nod.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. It also was not powerful enough to manipulate magical energy at a large scale like this completely remotely. But its control was greatly aided by the fact that it possessed the Origin Rune.

The rune acted as a storage of Jotnar genetic memories and core data, functioned as an identification marker for Jotnar magic and technology, and also was a magnet for Jotnar based magical energies, and in this case, the entirety of the magical energy remaining in the mountain was the remnant of a now broken large scale spell meant to create its own pocket dimension.

This energy, the Collector now repurposed. It gathered the immense amounts of magical energy into itself drawing it in directly to its Jotnar core. The cavern stopped shaking and the light crystals above dimmed down completely, drained of magical energy.

All of the magical energy was now condensed inside the Collector’s Jotnar core, and the heart located in its stomach area glowed a bright blue that was seen through hits carapace and flesh.

Now, it was a matter of shaping it using the Jotnar core.

At a fundamental level, Fortress took magical energy, shaped it into a functioning core, and then using that core as a stable foundation, built a fortification around it. Thus, the quality of the initial core was the absolute most important factor in determining the strength of the fortress. Not only the durability of the fortress, but potential to customize its capabilities.

The original Jotnar could only create an icy shell of defense approximately fifty meters in radius around himself, but the Collector’s vastly superior processing ability and infinitely better genetic and magical potential meant it could add in offensive capabilities, mobility, and even localized warp capabilities provided it could access a sufficiently developed energy source for the formation of a high quality core.

The magical energy in the mountain, however, was easily enough for the Collector’s purposes. The Fortress it could create would be on a scale easily rivaling a Dreadnought class starship. But the Collector would never shape a vessel that carried it into anything resembling that the tinkerers utilized.

Instead, the Collector knew perfectly the biological blueprints of what it desired to construct.

The Collector hunched over for a moment, stabilizing the vast amounts of magical energy circulating in its Jotnar core, and programmed exactly what it would build before standing up straight, releasing the stored energy in a blinding burst of light.

The light made all the goblins close their eyes and shield them with their hands, but Kui continued to watch with no issue. The cavern started to break apart as the magical energy gathered into thick blue aura that attached to the cavern, the stone and ice breaking off and funneling into raw material for the creation of the Fortress.

Within ten seconds, it was as if the entire mountain was being transmuted, its thousands of tons of rock and ice flowing like water as it swirled around the Collector, taking up a new form as the Collector’s personal mobile fortress.

Or, more specifically, the Collector shaped its Fortress into that of the Vanguard Unit of the Collective. This was the primary unit the Collective used to transport its troops across the vast expanse of space.. It was an enormous sphere-shaped mass of smooth, armored flesh lined at the bottom with enormous tentacles lined with bioplasma thrusters that granted it mobility.