Cheep!?

Chapter 101

After cracking through chitin with his beak, Niko found himself drenched, once more, in ichor and, once more, in need of thorough cleaning. That particular reality was, of course, entirely secondary to the fact that he was wading into the midst of a concussed horde of hornets.

‘Yup, totally secondary,’ Niko dodgily admitted to himself, ‘Not like cleaning my feathers is a big deal at all, no siireeee!’ 

A blind swipe of a hornet’s mandibles missed Niko by several hand spans, and he punished the attempt by cracking into its head with a Sharp Strike. He’d lost track of how many he’d slain at that point, but they swarmed over their own with a tenacity that Niko couldn’t help but marvel at. 

Before he could get concerned that he’d be overrun in the press of bodies and limbs, though, assistance came through in the form of a pale white barrier of essence and the powerful swings of Ronald’s glaive. The other Wyldwalkers dropped into the fray behind the pair, clearing the area further.

“Damn, that’s a lot of bugs!” Dachna shouted out, before striking out with a short sword and dagger, ducking into range and darting backwards just as quickly. Skye wordlessly activated her Wyldform–as Niko felt that name was all too appropriate–wreathing herself in bark and thorns up her arms and over critical parts of her body. A moment later, she and Dachna worked in tandem to keep Mithel clear.

“Acid out!” Mithel shouted over the din, barely audible with the ferocious buzzing of the hornets. Niko backed up, guessing that she was going to hit his area with a flask first. A moment later, he was proven right, a flask of orange liquid sailed over his head just barely before exploding outwards and in front of him. Niko was narrowly out of range, but the hornets were not so fortunate, pressurized acid hit them, pockmarking their armor and melting through tissue rapidly. 

Then, just before Niko reengaged, he heard a shrill keening sound, so off pitch from the sounds he’d heard previously that he couldn’t help but pause. He wasn’t the only one, though, the hornets all around, even those damaged, all froze up in that moment. ‘What the cluck is that?’ Niko looked around for the source of the sound in a frenzy, before realizing it was below where the hornets had been.

In a sudden flurry of motion, the hornets began to swarm anew, but this time not towards Niko and the other Wyldwalkers. Niko hesitated for a moment, before preparing to step in and begin the melee once more.

“Hold on,” Ronald said, drawing Niko’s attention.

Perplexed, the Phorus asked, “Why?” 

“Just… Just watch.” Ronald gestured at the hornets, “I just have a feeling.”

No less confused, Niko waited, watching the hornets carefully for any sign of aggression towards them. They threw bodies of their fallen out of the way, almost manic in their urgency. Niko’s expression only further morphed into confusion as they uncovered hexagons built into the floor, much like what they’d seen a few floors above. Only, here, Niko could see pale squirming larva within, one fat grub in each cell. 

‘That’s why they freaked out… wait, were they just defending the hatchery? Ah, cluck… no, wait, I shouldn’t feel guilty about this, right?’ Niko shook his head, ‘Surely not, they’re trying to eat us. I shouldn’t feel—hungry!?’ All forward thought halted as a new bout of confusion mingled with an unusual hunger in his gut. Niko frowned, looking at the grub while feeling a sudden need to eat it.

His stomach growled loudly then, and even in spite of the screeching noises, Niko thought the hornets tending the grubs might have paused for just a second, before moving just that much more quickly.

“Uhh… Niko, was that you?” Skye asked, her voice carrying a careful amount of neutrality that Niko knew as a mildly judging tone.

“H-hey, it’s not like I can help it! It just… looks delicious, that’s all! I mean, no, I just–” Niko turned his head, finding Sasha looking at the hornets, “Help me out here?” 

The sabre-cat turned its eyes to him in confusion, before looking between him and the larva, “I… must admit I don’t see the appeal.” 

Niko opened his beak to say anything to defend himself, but found nothing. “Look, let’s just… Move on?” 

Mithel politely cleared her throat, “Well, they’re not attacking us anymore. They are moving the larva, though. Should we, I dunno, stop that?” 

“What if we just…” Ronald began, before stepping forward slowly, leading with his glaive wardingly. The hornets nearest him posed wide on their legs, mandibles wider still in threat. Niko noted that these hornets were more lithe, with longer mandbiles that seemed more suited to grasping than combat. Instead of attacking, though, they only reared up, and Ronald, to Niko’s shock, simply pointed the glaive below them at the hexagonal pods they guarded. Slowly and out of their easy reach, Ronald began to extend the length of his glaive with essence, a construct of pale white that menacingly stretched closer and closer to the larva that was hidden within the floor.

The hornets chattered madly, but instead of attacking Ronald, they instead turned downwards, grabbing at the larva beneath them and hoisting the fat, delicious, juicy grubs–

‘Alright, I have problems.’ Niko flatly stared after the scene, unable to deny that the grubs looked delicious, and packed with essence. That must be why he liked them, definitely.

Ronald interrupted Niko’s inner monologue with, “They care more about the larva than they do us, so if we just threaten them, they’ll let us keep moving. I think.” 

The Wyldwalkers around Ronald stared at the scene blankly, before Mithel let out in a low voice, “Well, that’s certainly better than trying to fight through them all, I think.”

Mithel stepped forward then, and the hornets became more agitated, flicking their narrow, glass-like wings, filling the space with a low humming. She paused, and no one moved for the several seconds it took for them to calm down. Dachna stepped forward then, to a markedly tamer response, followed by Skye stepping forwards, to much the same. After a few seconds of moving forwards, the hornets began to slowly pull back, until Mithel began to move forwards once more. Again, they vibrated their wings threateningly.

“Oookay, well, they definitely don’t like me.” Quipped Mithel, though the quaver in her tone told Niko that she was just as nervous as the rest of them. Ronald grunted, before being more forceful and physically jabbing the corner of one of the cells for the grubs. The adjoining hornet darted forward at Ronald, only for him to kick it in the head, hard enough to push it side long into its neighbors. Niko tensed as the hornets clacked their mandibles at him, but before they could step towards him at all, he’d already ducked forward and shoved a gauntleted fist into the hexagonal cell.

Ronald pulled the grub up by the head, then slung it under his arm like a carry-on bag. It screed in a high pitch and wriggled about, pale flesh glistening in the lightstone illumination, but the hornets around all froze. For a heart wracking second, Niko thought they’d dogpile the big man, but when they continued to stare in frozen shock, Niko couldn’t help but shout, “You absolute plucking madman!”

“Ronald,” Dachna began carefully, “I’m liking this go-getter energy, but is that a good idea?”

Skye answered shortly and tensely, “It’s working, isn’t it?” 

“We aren’t leaving Mithel behind,” Ronald stated, “So, we take leverage. Besides, I think they’re only wary of our ability to hit the larva in a crossfire.”

Mithel glanced down at her bag, and then back up at the waiting horde of seemingly confused and hapless tenders, “Well, in that case…” She began, before withdrawing a pair of identical potions to her first, “May as well keep up the threat.”

The hornets hissed and clacked their mandibles, but quieted immediately as Ronald squeezed the grub, followed by a round of discomfited hissing and screeching coming from the pitiful thing. Niko saw Ronald’s expression tighten and darken, but the man didn’t release the squiggly thing. The hornets, though, immediately backed away, rapidly taking more and more of the grubs up from the path.

“Tell the other groups how to do this,” Skye said, before coming up beside Ronald and taking the grub in her bark-covered arms, “We need to move quickly. I don’t know how long this is going to work for.”

Ronald nodded to her as she stepped forward, flanking Niko as they moved at a steady pace forwards. Unlike before, the hornets wasted no time in clearing the area of larva. As they went, Mithel laid glowing potions behind them, little more than temporary and small light sources, but the hornets stayed well away from them, just in case. 

In spite of the wide berth the hornets gave the Wyldwalkers, Niko couldn’t help but nervously look around them at the sheer number of young-tenders around them. Sasha prowled softly, doing her best to navigate on all fours the complex ground. No one spoke any more than necessary, and aside from the angry buzzing of the hornets and the occasional confused screech from the grub in Skye’s arms, no other sounds came from the group. The only other sound that reached them came from the shaking, jarring noise of impacts and buzzing from high overhead, though only distantly audible this deep in the hive. Niko imagined that Orson and the others had their hands full with the Queen.

A minute later, Skye paused, and then turned to the right sharply, “This way, I think I saw something.” 

Eagerly Niko followed along, trying to remain as close as possible to her in case the hornets tried anything. A few times, he thought they moved forward fractionally, trying to inch closer, but thus far he’d warbled dangerously at them everytime they did so. He had no doubt that they were less afraid of him than they were for the grub's life, but nevertheless it had the effect he desired. 

“I see them,” Skye said quickly, “I see people ahead.” 

“Are they alive?” Dachna asked grimly.

Skye shook her head, “I can’t tell. There’s some movement, but…”

Fearing the worst, the group pushed on just a little faster, and this time the hornets almost seemed to be happy to have them going a little bit farther from the nursery. Just like on the upper level, another terraced pool came into view, but much, much larger. When he saw what was in it, Niko felt his breathing quicken. Bodies lay strewn all around, but before he could fear the worst, he realized that several of them were moving, groggily and with some measure of difficulty, but they were alive.

“Skye and Niko, stay up here,” Ronald called out, “I’m going to let the other teams know we found a lot of people that we’re going to need help extracting.”

Niko nodded while surveying the other side of the liquid-less pool, over a hundred meters away. “There’s gotta be thousands of people here… Do you think there’s another storage area?”

“So far, nobody reported seeing anything, but we’ll keep them looking.” Ronald said with a clipped tone before hopping over the edge and into the construction, “They’re all probably dosed with paralytic venom. Mithel, do we have enough antivenom for everyone?”

“No chance,” Mithel answered gravely, “We’ll have to pick people who have enough essence or strength to carry others out of here. At most I have enough for maybe fifty people.”

“The other teams might have some more stuff,” Dachna offered, “But, probably better to assume we’re doing this the hard way.”

Niko looked around more, trying to find anything that they might be able to use to their advantage. It was then that he realized that there was a sizable amount of debris still in the pit, just like the one above. Wood, slabs of bark, and other materials lay beneath and around bodies, and Niko guessed that the hornets would chew the materials up for building the hive. 

But, it gave him another idea. “Put together a bunch of bark and branches with whatever rope we have left. I’ll pull as many as I can back through the path we came.”

Ronald paused, before nodding, “I’ll get other rescuers to come help. We’ll have to hand-off survivors to the next levels, but it’s probably a good idea to keep the number of people down here to a minimum.”

Niko shared a wary glance at the glaring, glistening multifaceted-eyes all around them. “I think that’s fair, yeah.” 

In quick succession, Mithel administered her antivenom to people she identified with a guild or guard’s badge, before bringing them up to speed on what was going on. She stressed very heavily they were not to initiate hostilities with the hornets. They only needed to take one look around to know why, so that much was easy.

Niko and Sasha both pulled several strung together sleds, joined in short order by others of the rescue effort in escort. A handful of times, the hornets moved towards them aggressively, but Niko and Sasha doggedly ignored them. The hornets never closed the gap any further, but Niko could see that the hatchery was still being emptied behind the hornets lines. 

‘We need to pick up the pace.’ Niko thought with dread, ‘When there aren’t any other larva left down here, are they going to still care about one grub?’ 

Back and forth, he moved, until even the escorts were pulling sleds with them. A gathering at the base of the pillar moved people up and out of the hive, assumedly where there was some kind of defensible position. Niko didn’t know, and he did his best to just do his part as quickly as he could.

After almost an hour of feverish work by an increasing number of people, Niko had begun to feel the hive shaking even more violently above them.

But it didn’t matter, because as Niko returned to the pool, he was greeted with the sight of a nearly empty terrace. Only a handful of rescuers were left, already leaving, and Ronald, sweating and exhausted, but with a broad smile on his face, said, “We’re done here, everyone. It’s time to retreat.”

No one cheered, but there was a palpable hope among them, suppressed only by the still watching hornets all around. Skye stepped in close to Niko then, looking down at the grub with a look of tenderness that surprised him.

When she noticed his questioning gaze, she answered quietly, “It’s kind of cute, if you look at it right.”

Mithel turned her head at that, frowning before opening her mouth in what resembled an aghast expression, “It looks disgusting, Skye.”

A hint of redness hit Skye’s cheeks as she defended, “I’m not saying they’re pretty, Mithel, they’re just a… little cute.”

Niko looked down at the grub, but couldn’t manage to remove the idea of it being food from his mind. “Everyone’s got their thing, Skye. It looks like dinner to me.” 

“You are just–” Skye started, flummoxed, before saying “–No, you’re not eating her.”

“What are we doing with it?” Dachna frowned, before looking all around, “I… err, I mean, we’re supposed to be wiping them out, right?”

He pulled out the flask that was in his pocket, and Niko immediately recognized the swirling light of electricity barely contained within. Even without knowing what it contained, just looking at it had a certain promise of wanton destruction, of a storm released from its confinement. Niko knew what he was asking even without him saying it, and he looked around at the nursery. For as many people had been down here, there were far more grubs still in their cells. If they uncorked the storm down here, along with a few other potions…

Ronald’s eyes affixed to the potion, before drifting off into the darkness at the many waiting eyes. On happenstance, Niko saw the flicker of a pained expression on Skye’s face, before she forcibly smoothed it over.

“No,” Ronald stated outright, “That’s not our job. Our job was to get people out, and we’ve done that. In the first place… I don’t think I’d be comfortable making that call after all of this.”

Skye chewed over the answer while staring at the grub, before sighing, “She… They are Massacre Hornets. They’re hostile to everything, but they’re just barely not monsters.” She looked up at Ronald with a determination in her eyes that Niko found impressive, “I’m alright with just leaving.”

Niko looked over at Dachna and Mithel, the first of whom only shrugged, with Mithel giving a small nod, “We did what we came here for. I don’t like bugs, especially these ones, but they’re backing off for their young. I guess that counts for something? Maybe?”

Dachna put the potion away, “Who can say? All I know is that I’m alright with getting the hells out of here and never seeing another hornet again in my life.”

Ronald  nodded to the man before addressing the group, “It’s not the logical choice, but I hope it’s the right one.”

Sasha chuffed in confusion and anxiousness as she looked around, at the Wyldwalkers “You’re not seriously letting them live?” 

Niko translated, and Ronald answered sternly, “In the first place, that isn’t why we're here.”

“They would have killed your people. They still may,” Sasha pointed out, “Greenleaf is aflame because of them.” 

“It is, and that’s life. If they come to us again, we’ll fight them again,” Ronald stated, “They may still be culled, but it won’t be us that does it.”

Sasha stared hard at Ronald and then the others, before shaking her head tiredly, “I do not understand your ways. But, I doubt all of you will need to do anything at all. Your Guild head does not seem to share your sensibilities. I hope.”

As if on cue, the hive shook above them, more violently than before, and the buzzing of the hornets grew more agitated by the moment. Instead of looking worried, Ronald only smiled, “Maybe not. Someday we’ll need to make the hard choices, but that’s not today.”

Sasha blinked at that, seemingly answering with her silence then. Niko stared after her, feeling a touch of vitriol for the cat, but decided against saying anything. In the first place, he didn’t think she had any room to talk, but he had no desire to escalate the situation. 

Seemingly eager to change the topic, Dachna clapped his hands together softly before pointing them both theatrically at the grub in Skye’s arms. “Now, what do we do with that one?” Queried the dirty-blonde haired man, “Because we definitely can’t take her with us.”

Skye scoffed amusedly while Niko’s gaze wandered over to the grub once more. Idly, he noticed that it had a strange tint of gold instead of red like he’d seen on other grubs, but before he could spy over it any more, Skye set it on the ground gently. 

Immediately, the hornets moved in closer to the group. Instead of posturing at the hornets, the Wyldwalkers only moved defensively towards Skye. Niko said aloud with a note of urgency, “Uhh, Skye? What are you doing?”

 “I’m giving them a gesture of goodwill.” Skye answered calmly, “My teacher always said that bugs were a lot smarter than people gave them credit for.”

Niko warily watched the horde close in around them, but they began to slow as Skye stepped away from the larva. It wriggled furiously for a few moments, before seeming to realize that it was free and unharmed. A single hornet came forward, antennae dancing in the air and tapping at the larva probingly. The Wyldwalkers watched with bated breath as the hornet tickled the grub, letting the pale-fleshed thing wiggle fiercely for a few seconds more before picking it up gently in her mandibles. The hornet retreated behind a wall of comrades, and for a second, Niko feared hostilities would open anew. 

Instead, to his shock, they moved away from them. The path they’d previously traversed was opened up once more, and this time the hornets made almost no noise. Their mandibles remained open, but their postures were lowered, not upraised in the aggressive poses they’d had before. 

“That was tense,” Ronald said in a low voice, “It’s time to leave. Everyone get in line behind me, Niko, can you take up the rear?”

“Done.” Niko answered, confirming internally that he was still experiencing a world he knew so very little about…