Chapter 443: The reason to fight
Now it was only a matter of time until the hornet scouts discovered the bee bastions and alerted the rest of their kin about them with their pheromones.
Together with bringing this news, Chief Commando Flightsight made a suggestion to Malevolence:
“We can kill the scouts, Grand Commander. Quickly. Quietly. They won’t tell the rest about us.”
Malevolence shook her head. She knew well that this wasn’t as simple as Flightsight described. Commando Bees carried rifles as part of their kit, and many of them were great shooters. But killing a moving hornet with just a few bullets—a squad of Commandos won’t be able to shoot more than twenty or thirty before the hornet would be upon them—was still extremely hard.
And Beehounds weren’t invulnerable like Beemarines—being noticed by a hornet meant certain death. By Beehounds’ own reports, the evolved hornets could fly just as fast as morphotyped bees with ‘Flight V’.
“This is too risky. Keep watching the enemy! And, either way—we hadn’t gone on the defensive to save our lives. We went on the defensive to lure the enemy into the trap!”
Malevolence knew from Father that the invisible hand of god-creatures was likely directing the hornets, and that the god-creatures knew all the bees’ plans. But in her mind, this didn’t mean that any attempt to ambush hornets would most likely fail.
No, it meant that any attempts to do anything against them might or might not fail. But Malevolence was intent on trying.
“We wait. Wait, prepare, and make sure our rifles are ready to shoot!”
It wasn’t long until Malevolence got reports from other forts reporting that the first hornets began entering the defended human houses. Somewhere, they entered through holes that humans missed. Somewhere, they chewed and cut their own holes in the living stone walls.
The humans weren’t the hornets’ targets, and the insects only aimed for the houses inside which stood bee forts. The humans inside these houses tried to attack the entering insects with flat pieces of living stone or just rolls of fabric, but the evolved hornets were incredibly agile.
They easily avoided all blows made by humans and went toward the bee forts. Humans didn’t dare to attack the hornets sitting on those, being too afraid to harm the fort or any bees.
Malevolence wished that she could be at the forefront of the fighting again, but this time her position saw the least amount of hornets. Since she had destroyed the closest large group of them, she had nowhere else to fight now.
But this meant that she could sit in a command room, lay out a crude map of the region, and focus herself fully on coordinating other forts through her signaler.
‘The standard tactic of murder hornets is to probe the defenses of a hive with small numbers; then, when enough hornets arrive, they all attack together in a frenzy,’ Malevolence reminded the fort leaders. ‘Our task is to lure them in, but not to let them start a mass attack like that. Shoot hornets when new ones arrive or when they get too insistent on trying to get in!’
At that moment, she got a message from one of her Agents.
‘Grand Commander, Blood Brothers from the houses without forts want to leave their positions to help with the defense of the bees. They believe they can at least scare them with the heat of their torches and disperse their swarms so that they will be easier to destroy by the bee army. What would you make them do?’
This made Malevolence scowl and slam her palms on the map, making her signaler jolt a little, even though she was the one who had just passed the message.
‘Tell them all to sit tight! Even those who are in the same houses as the forts should crawl in a corner, cover themselves with something and hope that the hornets don’t spot them. They are giant lumbering piles of meat for hornets to eat, and a valuable resource that we were instructed to keep alive!’
‘Thought so, Grand Commander! I will tell them—not in those words, of course,’ after passing the Agent’s reply, the signaler added aloud, “She sounded cheekier than I could transfer, Grand Commander.”
“What, even *more* cheeky?” Malevolence said, scowling.
The Agents were so frivolous sometimes…
The attacks continued. The humans hid as they were told to, and the bees reported shooting a few hornets here and there. However, more of them were sighted near the forts every minute.
The more of them appeared, the stronger the scent of their pheromones became, and from farther away other hornets flew to the forts.
It also became easier for them to enter the houses, because previous hornets had already made extra holes into which they could crawl.
But when they got too close to the bee forts, their defenders would meet them with a barrage of bullets!
Like before, each hornet could survive a dozen or a hundred before a lucky bullet would hit her in the eye or another vulnerable spot. Although sometimes hornets needed two bullets in their eyes before they finally died.
This was not the most effective way of killing hornets compared to immobilizing them first, but it was safer. Not a single bee has been killed so far.
“Grand Commander, I’m getting reports from forts 1, 2, 4, 15 and 18 that the hornets are slowly overwhelming their defenses. They can’t shoot them as fast as they appear. There’s already half a dozen of them near the entrance, and each time they successfully kill one, another takes her place. They have started to cut their way through the living stone to widen the entrances,” Malevolence signaler reported with slight alarm. “It’s the same in all five forts. Should I repeat their messages?”
“No. Tell all forts to check that they have a squad with bolas and hammers ready to smash any hornets that successfully enter. And tell them they are fighting not just for Father and the Empire… but so that nobody ever has to see those ugly hornet-monsters again!”