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Ah, wait a tick.

Feldeaths! Of course. He was recalling now. How could he have forgotten?

That was why he’d decided to head for Karugetti’s workshop.

Because there was a feldeath there. Guarding it. And that was also why he’d never gotten around to putting a new fusion forge in there. Because that particular feldath was a real son of a bitch, even when compared against others of its kind.

His long study of feldeaths might not have been nearly as fruitful as he would’ve preferred, but one thing he’d been able to learn quite clearly was that not all feldeaths were created equal. Far from it, in fact. He’d even begun work on a rigorous classification system for them.

It was far from exhaustive, though. The bastards never made it easy to measure their strength. And the true depths of their power might’ve simply been impossible to discover without first giving oneself over to certain death.

Mad as he supposedly was, even Morgunov was only willing to go so far for his work.

The naming scheme had taken him a while to nail down. On the one hand, he didn’t want it to be all generic and boring, like with hurricanes, for example. But on the other hand, a good classification system needed to be largely intuitive to understand. So naming one of them Category Pickle Sandwich or Tier Snot Bubble was out of the question, unfortunately.

In the end, he’d decided that animals would be the best of both worlds. They could be both non-generic and also intuitive, as long as he picked the right animals for each tier.

Thus far, he’d created five categories, though he hoped to one day codify a sixth or even seventh. That would just depend on whether or not he could ever find any more distinguishing characteristics that corresponded with their varying degrees of power.

From least to most dangerous, they were Mouse, Rabbit, Swan, Hippo, and Moth.

That last one, admittedly, had been a bit of a rule break. He had to do it. Even if moths were supposed to be harmless, there was just something about them that he didn’t trust. And besides, that tier was still a work-in-progress. He’d only ever encountered a single Category Moth, anyway, and he’d pretty much just run away from it the whole time. So it hardly mattered, right now. He could always rename it later, if he thought of something better.