Puddings. The name I use for the predators in my ecosystem.
There were the giant puddings that preyed on slow, large jellies, and the powerful, strong-jawed puddings that preyed on small jellies with hard shells.
Those two made up the mainstream, but I had deliberately cultivated a third kind of pudding that was not especially advantageous for survival.
The mobile pudding. A carnivorous pudding type that curls its body into a ball and bounces or rolls around, or else runs quickly on elastic legs to capture and eat fast jellies or other puddings.
These things make up a considerable portion of the carnivorous puddings, including the [Meat-Eating Pudding].
They are generally over 60 centimeters in diameter and weigh around 15 kilograms. There are two kinds: one specialized for speed, with no scales, and capable of running quickly at 12 kilometers per hour; and another that has scales and is a bit slower, but rolls instead.
Objectively speaking, they are not that powerful a life-form. An average adult human on Earth could kill one with a kick, never mind a club.
If it has spikes, you can just beat it to death with a stick. They do not have some fantasy-slime regeneration where they reform after being crushed.
Even so, they are still the fastest predators that exist in my ecosystem. They are agile enough to catch and devour outside reptiles or birds that have been turned into members of the Dessert Legion, and tough enough to tear apart large herbivorous mammals or livestock.
They still have no concept of sociality, but they have at least evolved far enough to move in groups and rush in together to strip massive amounts of flesh.
I will use them.
In the cactus forest, there are giant camelids that graze on cacti and the fast-growing grasses, and there are smaller camels that are still, nevertheless, larger than Homo sapiens.
“Why are you making it sound so complicated? Just say there are camels.”
“They are obviously different species!”
“Right... Even so, they are both camelids, so just call them camels.”
Originally there also seem to have been hamsters and ants there, but now that both civilized species are gone, it is a paradise. Nectar rain pours down without end through Yogur-tosoth’s magic.
And while feeding on the plants in Teimong River and the wetlands close to the cactus forest, they are flourishing at a ridiculous rate.
The problem is that those things are fairly large and fast, so the existing carnivorous puddings cannot catch them.
The Jelly-Eating Crocodiles I turned into members of the Dessert Legion are specialized for catching fish, so they cannot prey on those giant herbivores.
So let us release the carnivorous puddings here and see what happens.
“Sounds good. What do you think will happen?”
Observation result one. The camels calmly walked away from the carnivorous puddings’ ferocious charge at 12 kilometers per hour. As things stand, the carnivorous puddings cannot possibly become predators of camels.
I gave the carnivorous puddings much stronger muscles and reduced their mineral content to make them faster.
Observation result two. The camels simply crushed the carnivorous puddings’ ferocious 45-kilometer-per-hour charge with a kick. The carnivorous puddings failed to hunt the camels.
I restored the carnivorous puddings’ mineral carapace and tried reducing their size further.
Observation result three. The carnivorous puddings moved quickly, but their energy consumption was so severe that they chased the camels until they collapsed from exhaustion.
It looks like the carnivorous puddings need improvement in a slightly different direction...
“How?”
I leave them alone.
“Huh?”
Carnivorous puddings improved to this degree had already become predators that bounced around and slammed into any living thing they saw, ripping off flesh and eating it.
To survive them, the prey should evolve as well. I accelerate time with divine power and watch how the survival competition between these life-forms unfolds.
I also bought a few quick species from the Community. Rodents suited to wetland life... In other words, large fast creatures like capybaras or beavers that could also swim.
Once I left things alone, the carnivorous puddings proved completely unable to respond to the unnaturally fast capybaras. Those rodents were hunted surprisingly well by the Dessert Legion crocodiles and even the giant frogs.
At the current stage, the puddings cannot deal at all with fast life-forms like capybaras or enormous life-forms like camels.
In the end, they increased their body size and moved into the water, reinventing themselves as aquatic predators that hunted jellies, fish, crocodiles, or frogs instead. The puddings seem to be able to evolve body size up or down with remarkable ease.
Perhaps that is because their bodily structure is simple. Or perhaps it is because the expansion and contraction of internal organs according to body size happens comparatively freely for them.
I kept watching. The Meat-Eating Puddings that remained on land were gradually pushed out in competition, but from time to time some succeeded in hunting and therefore in reproducing.
Those individuals survived and spread their genes. Once that happened, the evolutionary tendency of the puddings became quite clear.
I had assumed that to hunt a camel, they would need to be at least 60 centimeters in diameter. Instead, they began getting smaller. Fifty centimeters. Forty-five. Forty. Then thirty-five. They went as low as twenty before ultimately settling at thirty centimeters. The best body that could reconcile weight and speed.
And their carapaces grew harder, their bodies more elastic. Their mana consumption decreased, and instead of favoring minerals, they began consuming herbivorous jellies and rockivorous jellies.
The carapace they originally possessed evolved into spikes. I had thought those would be unnecessary, but some of them developed powerful musculature and began killing crocodiles in a single body-slam by impaling them on those spikes.
That result encouraged me.
I made their spikes even more vicious, but that made molting difficult, so I intervened directly and reshaped them into a more efficient form.
Evolution continues.
「The world’s <Military> Score has exceeded 1,945, raising its level to 5. You may now select a new Trait.」
I chose 『Coordinated Combat』 as the new Trait. A Trait that grants bonuses when fighting in a group.
I smiled in delight.
“It’s done.”
“Ah. Did that Trait card make something happen?”
After testing the puddings strengthened by the new Trait a little further, I reached my conclusion.
No. At this point, calling these life-forms puddings feels wrong. They no longer even retain the shape of puddings.
They are [Candy]. Hard, charging, bursting, melting away—carnivorous dessert-life that makes agility and toughness its defining traits within the Dessert Legion.
“The [Camel-Eating Candy] is finally complete. Its hunting success rate against camels is a whopping five percent.”
“...Isn’t that low?”
“Predators all have shitty hunting success rates. They only need to succeed often enough to reproduce.”
Now look. This carnivorous predator, roughly 30 centimeters in diameter, has escaped its former clumsy snail-like or rubber-ball-like movement. Using dozens of tube feet, an elastic body, and powerful muscles, it can now leap more than a meter in any direction.
Its running speed using those tube feet averages 30 kilometers per hour, which is just barely fast enough that a human running at full speed might or might not get away. A camel can still casually outrun it, but when it snaps its body and accelerates in an instant, it can make a single charge of about 30 meters at over 70 kilometers per hour.
If a hard lump weighing around 4 kilograms and covered in a glassy mineral carapace slams into a body with the spikes it evolved as horns, Homo sapiens dies on the spot from shattered bones or pierced organs. Even a camel will be wounded if it falls or takes the hit in the leg.
And though these things have no social intelligence whatsoever, they do know how to release pheromones, rush in as a pack, and tear an enemy’s body to shreds.
And it takes only three days for one of them to grow into an adult. Its lifespan after reaching adulthood is a mere three hours.
Because it reproduces by budding, if it has eaten enough food, it instantly gives birth to nearly a hundred young when it dies.
Those hundred young have the weakness that they die if they go hungry for just ten minutes, but in exchange they do nothing except eat and shit nonstop, digesting any organic matter or rock they encounter until they grow from a diameter of 15 millimeters to a full 30 centimeters.
“Uh... You really did make a monster.”
I spent an enormous amount of divine power dragging the species’ specs upward to the furthest point they could coexist with the current ecosystem. If my <Life> level rises further, I will probably be able to tune them even more aggressively.
“So?”
The camels in the desert have already over-proliferated. I will use these [Camel-Eating Candies] to hunt them without mercy and raise them by the tens of thousands.
“And then?”
The moment the next world opens, I open the dimensional gate and pour in [Camel-Eating Candy] up to the limit.
Then the next dimensional gate, and the one after that, and every one after that, I keep stuffing in nothing but candy. Once the dimensional passage opens, they will smell the corpses of their own kind and naturally rush in.
If the next species is an organism made of flesh or grass, it will simply be ground to pieces. These things are good at eating camels, but they are even better at eating softer, smaller prey like Homo sapiens, and they can also graze and eat rock.
“What if they are a spirit-type species made of mysticism? Ah. Then I guess it does not matter? If you are going to pick another world through the auction and enter it anyway...”
“No. I am not going to do that. I will just collide naturally with another world.”
“What? But then against species that depend on mysticism, this becomes meaningless.”
“That is why I have been digging through the Community this whole time, looking for a way to grant magical ability to non-sapient life. Maybe fusion with [Topping] would work. Since my knowledge of magic is lacking, I can just create magical creatures—[Yogurts]—to form Yogur-tosoth’s legion and drop them in by the masses.”
Combining those two life-forms should probably shatter any half-baked power.
This is the vilest and most persistent predator.
There is no need to bother with slow strategies like “ecosystem destruction” anymore.
Actually, I had originally been planning to lean harder into an ecosystem-collapse strategy, but if the opponent is likely to be a “good defeat” player focused on cooperation and internal development rather than military force, then there is absolutely no reason to do that.
All I have to do is reduce the enemy population in a lightning strike and turn their world into a dessert apocalypse.
If the opening blow with candy does not work, then the moment the rift opens, I deploy Yogur-tosoth and let it ravage everything.
An opponent that exhausts all its resources trying to block the candy and the yogurt legion will have almost no chance of defeating Yogur-tosoth.
“Wait. Hold on. Um... Your strategy sounds completely ridiculous. Why are you so sure the opponent will just sit there and lose to a blitzkrieg strategy? They could deal with the candy and the yogurts without too much trouble and maybe even kill Yogur-tosoth too... Well. It would be very hard, but maybe they still could.”
I am not sure at all.
“Huh???”
The Angel shot back in disbelief, but if anything, I was the one who wanted to ask that question.
Where in an ecosystem is there such a thing as a “certain strategy”? Did the dinosaurs go extinct because they chose the wrong strategy? No. Their strategy was excellent. Then an asteroid appeared out of nowhere, sterilized the ecosystem, and that was that.
All one can do is choose the strategy with the highest probability.
“How do you know the probability is high?”
By elimination.
Suppose the opponent is a player in the upper middle ranks or higher. Then they probably will not exit. It is only the third round.
And if they are upper middle rank or higher at this stage, the odds are extremely high that they climbed there through a cooperation-centered build.
Because that is the best strategy.
Now suppose they are a lower-ranked player. Lower-ranked players currently have a reliable way to avoid strong upper-tier forces. They buy the worlds of players who exited. That lets them survive. It might even buy them enough time during the collision phase to restore their civilization, or let them jump all the way into the middle tier or higher.
And if they are a true bottom-tier player exiting at this stage, then their civilization probably met another civilization and ended up in a state of near-mutual destruction or outright collapse, forcing them to leave.
In other words, every world exiting at this stage will be miserable and low-scoring. Which means the players in the upper middle tier and above will only see worlds that are not very attractive.
And if civilizations have mutually destroyed or devastated one another, that necessarily means predator fought predator until their forces were drained dry.
So if I do not bother with the world auction right now, what kind of player do you think will be the most numerous in the game? Think logically.
“Cooperation-type players who did not invest much in military?”
Correct.
So I refine the Dessert Legion and strike those awkward upper-middle-to-upper-tier forces.
“And what if you run into a top-tier force strong enough to kill even Yogur-tosoth?”
In other words, what if I meet the asteroid.
In that case, I threaten them.
There may be forces I cannot defeat, but there is no force I cannot damage.
Let us see whether some civilization can really refuse negotiation against a Dessert Legion backed by Yogur-tosoth, which could cut a civilization’s score in half all by itself.
“I will say this much: in your analogy, you are the asteroid that fell on the dinosaurs who had built a good strategy and were working hard to survive.”
Then from now on, call me the lord of mass extinction.
“...”