As Regina lost altitude and frantically tried to beat her wings, she spent a moment cursing herself for her carelessness. She shouldn’t have lost sight of her surroundings, no matter how hard it was to properly manage the input from the psychic link coming from many drones, if she had to go out here herself in the first place.

Regina twisted her hands and tried to use her claws to slash apart the net tangling her up, but it resisted her attempts. She could sense mana from it, and suspected that it wasn’t really physically present, but more of a mana construct. So she sucked in some of her mana and expelled it out of her skin, in a move that vaguely resembled the Spark Spell but was more uncontrolled.

That actually seemed to work and withered the net somewhat. Regina put more force into her movements and managed to dislodge it well enough that she could at least get some control of her trajectory back. She twisted in the air and stretched her wings, flapping them carefully, just enough to get herself turning and level out her descent.

All of that had only taken a few seconds at most, but she didn’t have any time to spare. She’d only just started to get control when she dove into the crowns of the trees. Branches whipped at her face and body, and she instinctively curled in her wings. Burning pain spread through her left wing where something thorny ripped the delicate limb.

At least her descent was slowed. Regina tried to grab for a hanging vine and missed, but she still managed to push off a tree trunk and go diagonally through the top part of a bush, slowing down her momentum even further. Then she crashed into the ground.

Regina groaned softly. She needed a few seconds before she could roll over. As she did, she sank down a few centimeters and realized she was lying above a bush or something. Her whole body hurt like hell. She gritted her teeth and staggered to her feet, grateful once more for her Con stat and shell.

She froze for a moment and listened. Luckily, with her impromptu course adjustment, she hadn’t gone down right over the enemy’s position. But they’d surely heard her and would be on the way now. So, she turned and staggered off, resisting the urge to close her eyes as she focused on her mana. It was hard to muster the necessary concentration and willpower, but she scraped it together and forced her mana into a familiar pattern. The burning pain decreased as the Spell got to work. Regina breathed out and cast Basic Heal again. She was able to walk more surely now, bones that might have been cracked mending and her right ankle supporting her full weight again.

Regina rolled her shoulder and winced. She clearly wasn’t entirely healed. She had dispersed her mana and used a rather general Spell. But Regina didn’t have the time to assess her status in depth and fix it. She started running, trying to keep quiet enough to listen for pursuers.

Her sense of smell turned out to be more help. While the various scents of the forest blanketed her surroundings and made it hard to pick up anything too far away, they didn’t cancel other scents out too much. Regina tried to steer away from monsters and animals - not always an easy distinction to make just based on scent - and keep moving away from where she knew humans had gone. She dipped into the minds of Dark and a few drones briefly, enough to get an idea of their own positions and where they saw humans. But she was too far away from them to join the drones easily, not without running right into human squads between them.

Then Regina froze when she finally picked up footsteps. In the sudden (relative) silence, she could hear them coming closer, trampling the underbrush of the forest. Several people, at least one of them probably in heavy armor.

Can you try to fly towards them and see what’s going on? she told Dark. Carefully.

The little bird vanished from sight, judging by the edges of his flapping wings in his vision, and quietly flew towards her location. Or slightly off, actually. To where he’d find the human soldiers. He had a good sense of direction.

Regina started walking again, as quietly as she could. She tried to head away from her pursuers, but unfortunately, that meant she tended to get farther away from her hive. She cursed silently and decided to adjust her path to curve to the right. At least this way, she’d get to the edge of the forest eventually, and she hoped to meet Anuis and the others coming from the village. Her shoulder still hurt, a low throbbing, but she decided to conserve her mana, and besides, for all she knew, they had a mage or someone who could sense Spells being cast. At least she could walk and run.

She didn’t want to waste time arguing with her drones, but Regina still contacted Zac, Max, Tim and Janis and told them what was happening.

You’re alone and surrounded by enemies? Max sounded panicked and she could faintly feel his heartrate and breathing speed up. I’m coming! You shouldn’t have flown out yourself. Just run, we’ll be there as soon as we can!

No, you’ll stay in the village! Regina snapped. Stay there and guard the others. You’re not fast enough and I don’t want drones wandering in the forest that they can just pick off. She cut the connection and jumped over an exposed root. She didn’t have time to argue.

Ironically, Janis was the one who reacted the best, or at least most calmly. I’ll let the others know. Stay safe, Regina. I think I’ve almost got Haste figured out. I’ll do my best to help.

She kept an eye on the group pursuing her through Dark, but she was caught off guard when a shift in the wind carried the smell of humans from another direction. She strained her ears and tried as hard as she could to listen for it, moving more slowly and silently, but she couldn’t pick up any sound from them. Probably a stealth Skill of some kind. Trying to see them through the green thicket of the trees and bushes would be pointless. Regina took a deep breath, steadying her nerves, and continued on. After a moment of thought, she nudged Dark to change course.

Regina tried to keep going and stick to the course she’d previously planned, but she could tell the humans were getting closer. They weren’t moving quite as quickly as they had before, maybe out of caution or maybe because they needed to track her, but they were still faster than her.

She grimaced to herself. She found it hard to estimate how far away she still was from Zac and the others. She’d moved away from them, running after the crash, and trying to circle back around now was risky. But if she remained alone, they’d just run her down, eventually.

Regina slowed down and tried to adjust her wings, as well as she could given the trees around her. It would be a challenge to take to the air again. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure she could do that even in perfect conditions. One of her wings still hurt, and she saw that the gash in it looked like it had only been sparsely patched over. She wasn’t familiar enough with how wings worked to give it a good assessment, or maybe even to properly heal it.

She contacted Zac again, taking a moment to see through his eyes. It was disorienting, since he was running through a small thicket of trees at the moment, branches slapping his torso and face. He was gasping for air. She heard a whistling sound behind him, and he ducked his head.

Regina cursed silently and switched her focus to the Winged Drones. Many of them were still in the air, or had even taken flight again. She quickly took stock of how many of the grenades they still had. There wasn’t much left, unfortunately. She gave the order for some of them to pick up whatever else they found that they could use as a projectile.

Then she dipped into Zac’s mind again, and cursed. One of the other drones with him, Ted, was obviously limping, and had fallen back. Zac was slowing as well, concern dominating his mind.

Regina abruptly stopped and turned. This wasn’t working. She debated silently for a moment, then slipped to the side and started going towards the direction where she smelled humans. She still had her magic, and if she managed to take them by surprise, she might break through. Besides, it would probably focus their attention on her, perhaps allowing her drones and allies an advantage. The latter were coming pretty close to Zac’s group now.

Regina saw the squad of humans on her trail before they saw her. It looked like a pretty standard party, actually, with three men and one woman. She breathed out silently, then pushed the mana she was gathering into a shape.

A small container slowly formed in her hand. Its sides were quite thin, barely more cardboard than paper. She focused again, filling it, then threw it.

The enemy fighters were still reacting to the thrown projectile, shouting and turning, weapons raised, when the Fireball shot towards them.

Regina threw herself to the ground and listened to the sounds of branches swaying and crackling in the wind caused by the explosion. She then jumped back up and looked at the group of humans. None of them were still on their feet. A few Magic Missiles took care of them. The forest had not fared well, though. She could see at least two bushes on fire, and the flames were already spreading.

Great, but that wasn’t going to help her much right now. Regina glanced around and quickly realized that one of the humans was unaccounted for. He’d probably fled. The other three were on the ground, but they might have sent a message. She didn’t waste time, but immediately started jogging away again.

Over the next few minutes, as Regina made her way further inside the enemy’s positions, she tried to use her Winged Drones and occasional glimpses from other drones to spot where they were. She didn’t need them to know that the humans behind her were coming closer, though. Their scent alone said enough.

And more of them were coming. She got enough bits of information to guess that several squads, or whatever units they used, were swinging around towards her. She was getting encircled again. And there were a lot of humans in her way.

Regina took a deep breath, then spared a moment to look at her drones again. They actually seemed to be getting pressed less strongly. Regina hesitated, then continued on her course. She knew she could probably get them to stage a diversion or something. Try to buy herself better odds with their lives. Well, key word is try, it might not work either way. But she wasn’t going to do that. Sure, she was the centerpiece of the hive, and, theoretically, even if every drone died, she could still rebuild it. But it wouldn’t be the same. The hive is the people in it. She suppressed a snort. She wasn’t keen on doing some grand self-sacrificing gesture, but she refused to throw her people away, not matter how much her instincts might want to treat them as expendable.

When she encountered another human soldier again, she could tell there were a lot more of them around now. She didn’t have the advantage of surprise this time. In fact, she barely realized there was an arrow coming for her fast enough to duck.

A moment later, a Winged Drone dove from the sky, bowling over the man in leather armor who’d taken cover behind a tree. Regina jumped to the side, then threw a Firebolt.

He rolled away just in time, still trying to wrestle the drone’s claws off him and mostly succeeding. At least the tree didn’t catch fire.

Regina decided to take what she could get and ran to the side, ducking behind another tree, then a wide bush. She glanced up to check the position of further Winged Drones. Unfortunately, it was hard to tell where exactly many of them were in relation to her, and she didn’t have the time for a detailed dive into their minds to figure it out. Most of them were gone from the sky, too. Either killed, injured, fighting in the forest or otherwise grounded.

She was getting driven further from her allies again, she realized. Regina slowed and looked around. She only just caught the swaying of some leaves, more than the breeze would explain. On instinct, she threw herself down again, hearing another arrow whoosh over her head.

Regina rolled to the side and back to her feet, ignoring the stab of pain that went through her wings. She froze for a moment as she took in the scene in front of her. There were already about half a dozen people nearby, and she could smell and hear more of them approaching.

She dodged another arrow that suddenly split into three just a few meters away, hissing as one of them scraped barely past her left arm.

“There she is!” someone called from further up. She didn’t recognize the voice.

Regina took a deep breath and slowly backed away to the thickest patch of ground she could find. She still had some mana left, but not enough. And she needed time to use it optimally, which she wasn’t going to get.

She had to find whatever advantage she could. Regina dove deeper into her mana pool, searching. Time almost seemed to slow down as her focus narrowed down on it. Anuis said Alianais marked me.

And there was something, she could tell. Maybe it was the situation, the razor edge the danger lent to her awareness, or maybe it was just easier to find now. Her Class didn’t give her any ability with divine magic, but she could still feel that she had more than just her own mana, or the psychic connection to her hive.

A knife hit her chest, but it clattered off her shell without even leaving a scratch. There was a small pop. Max’s shield must have run out.

She didn’t really know what she was doing, but Regina tried to grab onto the sensation and pull.

“Alianais, I invoke you!” She’d meant to only think them, but she found herself calling the words out loud.

And then, suddenly, her shell started lighting up with light, like someone had shoved a high-powered LED mesh into her body and turned her shell transparent. Regina felt a swelling in her mana pool, accompanied by a burning sensation that left her gasping. She blinked, her vision swimming for a fraction of a second before it stabilized, but she could tell her attackers were too shocked to react, or maybe too slow.

“It took you long enough, little Hive Queen.”

Judging by the way one of the enemies she could see flinched, the soft but somehow thundering voice was audible to everyone. They seemed to be wary about attacking a champion of a goddess, she noted in the back of her mind. But she couldn’t focus on it.

“Please help me!” Regina cried after a moment. She didn’t want to get skewered by more arrows or knives, everything else could wait.

“I already am helping you. But if you insist on a show of power …”

Suddenly, the light around her pulsed and a wave of it spread out. It was like a shockwave, except that it didn’t disturb the trees around her and the accompanying low thunder seemed more like a sound effect tacked onto it. But light flashed when it hit soldiers - even those she shouldn’t actually see behind more trees - and it hurled them to the ground.

Regina blinked. Then she realized she was wasting valuable time and called on her mana at once. It reacted more quickly than ever before, and in just a few seconds, she was holding several more fragmentation grenades.

People were already picking themselves up from the ground by then, so she didn’t waste any time in throwing them. She went to her knees, covering her head against the explosions shaking the clearing. She could tell the light around her was fading.

Regina clenched her hands. “Wait, Alianais. You owe me an answer.” Wait, maybe I shouldn’t talk that way to a goddess. But she doesn’t strike me as the type to insist on deference.

There was silence for a moment, then she spoke again. “I owe you several, in fact. You will get your answers.”

Regina shook her head and levered herself to her feet. Her light was still dying, now almost completely gone. She glanced up, but, of course, she couldn’t see anything different.

Then a groan pulled her attention back to her surroundings. Her mana was completely full right now, somehow. Regina quickly cast more Magic Missiles, sending them to everywhere she could see, hear or smell humans.

She waited for a few seconds, but everything was silent. The smell of burnt flesh pervaded the forest, and no birds sang anywhere in the vicinity. Regina sighed and glanced at the System notification.

Regina found it hard to muster a smile at the level-up. Instead, she turned her attention to looking for her drones and allies. At least this little incident should have provided a good distraction, and it had taken care of a big chunk of the enemy’s forces. She could probably be most helpful coordinating everyone.