Mantis Warbreed

Like the far-scouts, a warbreed is an ordinary mantis warrior deliberately transformed. It resembles a mantis warrior or noble but stands up to 10 feet tall and 13 feet long, with lengthened claws and a shell studded with spikes and knobs. Most are yellow, made from the largest mantis warrior breed; some are black and a few red or green, with traits of their parent breed. They can speak but seldom do, and nothing distracts them from an assigned task.

Its makers, a kindred mantis species, mentally program each warbreed for a purpose, and it follows orders to the letter: guard, kill mammals, or kill everything in sight. It gives no quarter and retreats only when told to.

By default it opens at range, hurling spined war-boomerangs (1d8+2, plus +6 for Strength) from a stock of 2d8, and about half use psionic ranged attacks too, most as 9th-level psychokineticists with psychometabolism secondary. Then it charges in leaps of 40 feet up or 90 feet forward, never backward, with normal charge adjustments. The leap counts as an attack, its spikes dealing 2d4 to man-sized or smaller targets and 1d6+1 to bigger ones.

It uses no melee weapons. Up close it strikes each round with four blade-limbs grafted in place of claws and a bite from reinforced mandibles. Anyone bitten must save vs. poison or take 20 damage from nervous shock and be paralyzed 2d6 rounds; mantis folk are immune. On 11+ on 1d20 it dodges a physical missile (magical bonuses modify the roll), though not magical effects. It resists magical and psionic interrogation.

Warbreeds form no community; they live at the edges of mantis noble society, go wherever their makers send them, identify those makers by pheromone and obey nobody else, enforcing the policy of the mantis empire. They call themselves mantis nobles. Their name means 'near-person, altered for combat,' and the process erases personality and belief, leaving them almost zombie-like, though cold, controlled and cunning. They are sterile.

Deadly hunters, warbreeds were once normal mantis folk, and the change is believed irreversible.