Within the Collective, only two units were superior to the Collectors. The first were the Queens that acted as secondary Hiveminds or essentially as Carrier units to the Hivemind itself, directing combat operations far from the Collective homeworld.

Queens were granted a level of individuality that was nearly on par with the ordinary tinkerer, though they still possessed an ingrained absolute loyalty to the Collective.

The other were the Vanguards. They were, as their name suggested, the frontal Vanguard of any Collective force. They were responsible for housing troops across deep space and opening warp gates, making them the primary utility unit of the Collective whereas the Collectors were the primary offensive units.

The Collector circulated the streams of raw stone, ice, and magical energy floating around it in a whirling sphere around itself. The sphere encompassed the hallway-shaped cavern, but outside of it, the rest of the upper half of the mountain had been completely broken down, its raw materials now floating around in broken down form ready for recreation.

The Collector replicated the form and functions of a Vanguard unit.

First were the internals.

Like the grooves of a brain, the insides of the sphere of flesh were densely packed together in folds, and each fold could house Collective units within it, often in stasis cocoons that preserved them until the Vanguard unit landed upon a target location for battle. These groove pathways, however, the Collector would alter such that they were more spacious, sacrificing efficiency to grant the goblin swarm more space to move with, for from its initial observations, the Collector understood that the goblin kind as a species functioned well with free space to roam with and to interact with each other.

There were also evolutionary chambers and spawning pools where units could enter to regenerate their wounds or be directly adapted into higher forms. The Collector could not replicate these directly, but it could somewhat approximate them by using the mountain’s own magical resources.

It created ‘spawning pools’ using the glowing healing waters laden throughout the mountain. Within these pools, units could enter to fully restore their wounds. In addition, the Collector used the warp capable nature of the water and spread it in specific areas around the Vanguard, creating ‘doorways’ of this warp sensitive water solidified into a fleshier, gel-like membrane that units could phase through to reach different areas of the Vanguard.

‘Evolutionary chambers’ could be fashioned through the Collector’s ability to interface Higher Calling with heavily condensed pockets of primal energy such as dungeon cores to create cocoons out of them. With these, the Collector could significantly increase its drone production, though the quality of the drones would be far worse than the carrier units it had already created, capable of splicing either with genes from weaker and more bodily compatible creatures or only mixing small aspects of variant genes together.

The largest Vanguard units could easily reach beyond ten thousand kilometers in total length, being comparable to moons, and house enough units to easily swarm and overtake entire planets. They were autonomous units capable of thinking on their own to a simple degree, following coordinates and warp trails, but they usually required the presence of a Dominator class Collector which would mesh with the Vanguard in a symbiotic relationship, acting as the enormous creature’s ‘brain’.

The Vanguard the Collector created now was far smaller, being only two kilometers in length with the spherical holding compartment, or the head of the fortress, being just shy of one kilometer in diameter. Regardless, this was still enough to house thousands upon thousands of units.

Vastly larger then any army the Collector fielded for now.

And though the Fortress was smaller, its structure and functioning would be relatively similar.

In typical Vanguards, the Dominator would fuse with the Vanguard deep in its defensively fortified center, a center known as the ‘Command Chamber’, and from there, psionic and flesh pathways would link to the Dominator and allow it to manage very aspect of the Vanguard, deploying units, generating warp gates, and the like.

The Collector could not create a warp capable Vanguard at nearly the same scale, but it could repurpose the dimensional magic that the mountain’s mana was previously being used for to allow the Genesis Chamber and the Fortress Core to be in its own isolated space, thus requiring hostile forces to possess some way of breaching dimensional barriers to fell the Fortress.

For without the core’s destruction, the Fortress could constantly restore itself by absorbing environmental mana, though outside of primal energy rich areas, this regeneration would dramatically slow.

In addition, the Collector could have the Fortress channel small scale gates akin to that generated by the Fang specimen, having a maximal range of thirty kilometers, though there was only a set amount of warp based energy the Fortress could use before it had to be recharged.

Regardless, when all was said and done, the Collector had created an enormous flying fortress, repurposing the material of the entire twin mountain ranges, condensing the countless tons of rock and primally charged mass into immensely sturdy carapace, flesh, and offensive armaments in the form of enormous tendrils that could fire blasts of concentrated freezing force or raw concussive bursts of pure mana.

The process of creation took no more than ten minutes, and to the outside beholder, it truly must have seemed like nature itself was bending and moving to the Collector’s will. The enormous twin mountains that cracked apart like the shells of fragile seeds, spilling out all the mass within: unfathomable measures of rock, ice, snow, and a flood of stored water within that all swirled around the Collector in a rotating mass that likely was easily visible from space had not the area been properly obscured by fog.

All the golems that were hidden in the mountain, too, were taken up, and aside from those already in the cavern hallway, the remaining force numbered up to two hundred golems. The Collector quickly began to realize that the majority of its fighting force was going to comprise of automated golems, and to that end, it would have to use the Legion Jotnar core to enhance them, modifying them to grant them both superior strength and flight capabilities so that they could properly maneuver around the Vanguard Fortress.

Because the Collector had essentially just transmuted two mountains into its new Fortress, the Collector now also had access to a reliable and infinitely replenishing force. There were certain creatures that were manifestations of the environment such as the golems of snow that naturally formed on the primally charged mountains.

These creatures, the Collector could not simply will to spawn provided it was in the Command Chamber. The Fortress possessed a finite amount of magical energy, however, so continuously spawning golems would eventually drain the Fortress’s magical energy reserves. In addition to the golems, the Collector also had access to other types of creatures the environment could naturally crate such as Wraiths and particularly mighty specimen known as Elementals that were living manifestations of elemental energy.

The Collector calculated that the Fortress could only generate three Elementals at a time, but in terms of sheer combative power, they were almost on par with the Collector, though because they were unstably created masses of pure energy, they burned out over a short period of time.

The Collector finalized the creation of the Vanguard, finally programming behavioral patterns inside of it, though nothing as complicated as a fully functioning processing unit for the Collector could only make the Fortress as autonomous as a golem.

That is to say, the Collector could leave the Command Chamber and have the Fortress follow it or float towards a specific direction, but for any true large scale or complicated commands and controls, the Collector would have to manually direct.

The presence of an additional Carrier unit to control the Fortress when the Collector was away was one that the Collector realized would be greatly helpful, and to that end, utilizing the Jotnar core of Self Breath to generate a clone of itself would be useful.

At the same time, the Collector realized that utilizing the Jotnar cores to this degree burned them out severely. The magical threads of energy spooling out from its body broke apart, fading away as the creation of the Fortress entered its final phase, the mass creating the sphere around the Collector shaping into the specifications the Collector had programmed.

The heart in its lower stomach, that of the Jotnar core, sizzled with smoke, and the Collector could feel that the core was completely dysfunctional. No regular regeneration would restore it.

“You have Overloaded your core,” said Kui.. “Though you have multiple Cores, so your life should not be in danger.”