Lord: Starting with Biological Modification

Inside Leviathan One’s biological chamber, faint blue energy conduits pulsed like blood vessels on the walls, illuminating the two hundred crew members.

Fully staffed and equipped, their morale was sky-high.

But the atmosphere was hardly harmonious.

On the left, Ola’s fifty Knights sat in full armor. Even in their fixed seats, their backs were as straight as spears.

On the right, Sea Wolf’s fifty sailors were a completely different sight.

They lounged in various poses; some had their legs crossed, while others huddled together, silently mouthing crude jokes.

One went even further, yanking down a hive terminal to toy with in his hands, trying to feed it a potato.

The two groups were clearly divided, as if an invisible wall separated them.

Sea Wolf’s gaze swept back and forth between his own slovenly crew and the "tin cans" opposite them, and a nameless fury surged through him.

He strode to the base of the command platform and fired a verbal broadside at Ola, who was also standing there.

"Hey, shorty! Did you bring a bunch of tin statues? Anyone who didn’t know better would think the lord opened an armor exhibition in his belly! We’re going to war, not having a contest to see whose shell is shinier!"

Ola’s face turned beet-red, his meticulously braided beard trembling with rage.

"Sea Wolf! I’m warning you, call me shorty one more time, and I’ll shove you out this monster’s asshole!"

He roared, his voice echoing in the chamber, "My Knights are Warriors! Not like your pack of salty, lazy dogs who can’t even hold a formation!"

"Ha! Warriors?" Sea Wolf laughed theatrically, pointing at the Knights.

"A bunch of land-lubbing turtles in iron shells! They can’t even stand steady on a ship, and you call them Warriors? I bet if this big fellow so much as sways a little, they’ll all go CLANGING and rolling into a pile of scrap metal!"

"What can your pack of thieving sea dogs do besides scramble up a mast!"

Their argument grew louder. The Knights glared furiously, while the sailors started whistling and stamping their feet, egging them on.

Velin came down from the command platform and, without a word, stood between the two men.

The uproar automatically subsided under his gaze, eventually fading into silence.

"Sea Wolf is in charge of tactical command. Ola is in charge of combat discipline."

He frowned slightly, and the sight sent a chill down both their spines.

"Your mission is to forge these two groups into a single fist, not lead them into conflict! Now, begin basic maneuver training."

Sea Wolf and Ola shot each other a vicious glare before sullenly returning to their respective groups.

Velin returned to the platform and issued the first command.

"Hard to port. Dive thirty meters. Maintain stealth posture."

"Understood! Hard to port, dive thirty meters, maintain stealth posture!" The voice of a communications officer echoed in everyone’s mind via the hive terminals.

Leviathan One’s massive body lurched downward, then began a sharp, banking turn.

"Whoa—!"

The Knights’ side immediately descended into chaos.

Accustomed to solid ground, their bodies instinctively fought the tilt, which only made them lose their balance.

CLANK! With a sharp noise, a Knight’s helmet flew off and rolled clattering across the metal floor toward the sailors’ side.

Immediately after, another unlucky soul slipped from his seat, knocking over two of his companions.

In an instant, the air filled with the clang of metal, shouts of surprise, and curses.

Meanwhile, the sailors’ side erupted in unabashed laughter.

They were long accustomed to the lurching of ships. A negligible sway like this from the Leviathan was nothing to them. Steady as rocks, they were now pointing at the other side, doubled over with laughter.

Ola’s face was as black as the bottom of a pot.

Just then, a voice cut through the noise on the public channel.

"Command platform, five high-speed targets detected, five thousand meters ahead!"

"Based on energy signatures, they’re a Multi-Armed Race Scout squad, closing on our position."

The atmosphere in the chamber turned cold.

"Kill them!" Ola’s eyes gleamed, his earlier humiliation instantly transmuting into battle lust. "My axe is thirsty!"

"Vetoed." Velin’s voice was flat. "Our mission is reconnaissance, not to alert the enemy."

He turned to the operator in front of him.

"Communications officer, execute deception protocol ’Clumsy Giant’."

"Order confirmed."

"Sir, this protocol... you want *these guys* to do it?" Sea Wolf was taken aback.

"Let them," Velin’s voice came through a private channel.

"I need them to learn that the things they’re each so proud of are worthless here."

The next moment, Velin’s command went out to everyone on the public channel.

"All hands, listen up. Each of you will now be given micro-control authority over a part of the Leviathan’s body."

"Your mission is to coordinate your actions to make it look like a startled and stupid, ordinary deep-sea Magical Beast."

"We’re going to put on a show and fool them."

The Knights exchanged glances. Coordinated maneuvers? That was their specialty!

The sailors, on the other hand, broke into knowing smiles. Playing dumb? That was *their* specialty!

"Begin!"

The disaster began.

In the crew’s shared "vision," the five spindle-shaped shadows were rapidly approaching.

They were Multi-Armed Race Scouts.

And the Leviathan they were piloting began a performance that could only be described as farcical.

The Knights tried to control the great beast with the mindset of a land-based army formation.

"Second left appendage, forward stroke! Maintain a thirty-degree angle with the third appendage for stable propulsion!"

The sailors, however, operated on a completely different logic.

"Hey, mates, feel that current! Sway with it! The tentacle on the right, give it a flick, like you’re dodging a rogue wave!"

Their control was spontaneous, chaotic, and completely empirical.

A hundred brains, a hundred different ideas, flooded the Leviathan’s central nervous system all at once.

And so, what the Multi-Armed Race Scouts saw was a great beast that had begun to move erratically.

Its colossal body first shifted forward ten meters with rigid stiffness, then suddenly tipped sharply to the left as if it were drunk.

Its eight appendages flailed about like headless flies, and one of them even managed to slap itself in the face.

RUMBLE—

Caught between a Knight-led "emergency course correction" and a sailor-led "roll with the current," Leviathan One’s tail lost control and squarely sideswiped a nearby undersea mountain.

A massive tremor shot through the entire chamber.

"What’s happening?!" Ola roared, feeling the floor beneath his feet jump violently.

This time, it wasn’t just the Knights; even the sailors, who had been as steady as rocks moments before, were sent sprawling.

The chamber was in chaos. The fixed seats groaned, supply crates toppled over, and tools rolled everywhere.

Outside, the undersea mountain had been half-demolished by the impact. A huge amount of sand and rubble was stirred up, forming a murky cloud that completely obscured the Leviathan’s form.

The Multi-Armed Race Scout squad, startled by the sudden commotion, halted in the distance.

They circled outside the turbid water for a while, seemingly assessing the situation.

A moment later, the Scout squad emitted a few sharp sonar pings, then changed course and swam upward, quickly disappearing into the darkness.

"Restoring normal control mode."

The shared "vision" cleared up again.

The first thing everyone saw was the slowly dispersing cloud of sand and the half-collapsed undersea mountain not far away.

You could have heard a pin drop in the chamber.

The violent tremor they had mistaken for an enemy attack had, in fact, been... self-inflicted.

And they, like a bunch of blindfolded fools, had been scrambling around trying to "play" the part of an idiot, only to become real idiots in the process.

Ola stood there in silence. He looked down at his brightly polished combat boots, which hadn’t even been able to keep him steady during the earlier tilt.

He walked to the wall and, without a word, slammed his fist into the metal interior, letting out a dull THUD.

"The Knights’ problem is rigidity. You brought your land-based formation tactics into the sea."

Velin’s voice rang out on the public channel.

"The sailors’ problem is indiscipline. You’re used to fighting alone and can’t work as a cohesive force."

He looked at the silent Ola and the conflicted-looking Sea Wolf.

"Now, do you understand why I put you all together?"

"Continue forward."

Velin ignored their embarrassment and turned back to the command platform.

"Communications officer, tag the Scout squad’s signal. Enter silent running mode, maintain a distance of two thousand meters, and tail them."

"Yes, sir."

Leviathan One slipped silently into the darkness, like a true deep-sea Ghost, tailing the unsuspecting Scout squad from a distance.

After the initial embarrassment wore off, Sea Wolf’s attention was drawn to the 3D nautical chart being generated in the lower right corner of his "vision."

As the Leviathan moved, the seabed topography, current directions, and even the locations of special resources were scanned and marked one by one.

The five red dots representing the enemy were moving across the chart, leaving a patrol route in their wake.

The accuracy of this chart far surpassed any he had ever seen.

’My God... The Maritime Duchy spent a hundred years and lost thousands of cartographers to draw a chart that’s not even as good as what this monster makes on a single stroll through the seabed.’

’Sir... this thing is worth more than a mountain of gold! From now on, wherever there’s treasure, that’s where we’ll go!’

Meanwhile, the Multi-Armed Race Scout squad had completed its routine patrol.

The squad leader sent a report back to camp, documenting a "mindless brute."

That report soon found its way to the desk of a famously cautious mid-level commander—Korsh.